La Bene Vita

Author Marketing

When Storm Machine struggled with nomenclature for her current project  , I bombarded her with thoughts about nomenclature in our own lives: How humans define things, how other races on Earth define things (e.g., canines define things by smell rather than words), and how it's possible that the "sixth" sense is really six hundred various senses that we humans don't understand. Alien races could have completely different biology and sense their surroundings in ways we haven't considered. And the more I rambled, the more I recognized scope creep. While this might all be great fodder for the imagination, she just needs names for her races and nations.

Scope creep versus boundaries.
I create scope creep for myself, constantly, and not just in writing. I create it in my jobs, which are theoretically clearly defined, as least in comparison to my "job" as a writer. My job at church? Lead music at worship. Nobody said I have to have x number of instruments or choirs or sing x number of songs. My job at Patron? Sing for two hours. Could I sing the same exact two-hour setlist every week? Of course. Do I? Not a chance. I kill myself trying to learn new releases and listener requests. My job at MTMS  ? - I'm making a bit of money as a business owner, and it's technically enough to live on. Do I just collect a paycheck and let the place run itself? No, I'm looking at how to open 2-5 more campuses. Why? Because I'm a glutton for scope-creep punishment. I set no boundaries.

This is my struggle as a writer.
I need to focus and eliminate the scope creep. Andromeda Sings was a cool idea, and she was sort of begging to be created. A lot of my shorts are just writing exercises that resulted from contest prompts. I need to make like Butcher (and Rowling and Meyer and Brooks and Salvatore etc. etc. etc.) and stick to my story. That's how I can get back into writing. Scope creep spirals out of control, and I lose the reins. Then I don't want to ride anymore, and I take a year-long hiatus from anything so much as a Textbroker article or blog post. It's just too intimidating, because it's too MUCH. So I should focus. Create my world. Everything I do lives in my world. All my characters are tied to the same story. They all have their own stories, of course, but they're linked. I need connections. That's how I can focus.

Whew. I guess I just identified my NaNo project for this year: "Poor Witch"  [E] sequel. I'm also going to think through how I can completely rewrite Andromeda to move her to my world. It's highly possible. Mildred's world is parallel to the world we know, and she visits our world, so why couldn't Andromeda move across worlds too? She could.

Author marketing and what I learned from Jim Butcher.
Here's something I've learned from Butcher: He's so freaking addictive because it never goes the way you want it to. In his prefaces in Side Jobs, more than once he referred to rubbing his hands together and cackling with glee when he got Harry into more messes. I need that attitude. I need to do that to my characters. That's the point , isn't it? I'm too easy on my characters. I like for things to work out for them, so I make things work out for them, because I'm the author and I can do what I want with my characters. Why not rescue them?

Because it's boring.

So here's the choice I make: do I want my characters rescued, or do I want readers? Because it turns out (and even though I knew this all along, somehow I've come to the sobering realization that I'm horribly guilty of ignoring the fact) you can't have both.

Suddenly, all the experts who claim that authors should pick a niche and stick to it have convinced me. I buy it. I buy it, and I plan to live it.

Focus.
My New Year's Resolution for 2012 was to create balance between work, family, church, health, and writing. I've done a good job with the first three, but I've sadly neglected the health and writing categories, because I just can't get to them. So I'm adding a new word to live by, and that word is FOCUS. I plan to set boundaries in the categories of my life, including writing. I plan to add "health" and "writing" back into the equation. And I will be successful, because I won't waste my time on things that fall outside the boundaries I've defined for myself, my jobs, my business, my endeavors.

I don't know where I've been for the last six months, but I'm back, Baby. Initiate productivity sequence: GO!