July results & August writing goals

[osprey_archer]

Oh hey! It’s August! Where did July go? It all got swallowed up by Honeytrap, that’s what. One of my writing goals for the month was “start work on Honeytrap,” and that succeeded swimmingly: I didn’t so much start work as blaze through a large proportion of the first draft, although there are still parts that need to be revised and parts that need to be written for the first time and so forth and so on.

Still, I probably wrote... 70,000 words? Some of them ended up getting cut so I don’t have an exact word count.

The other part of my Honeytrap goal was to post snippets on Tumblr with a link to my Ko-Fi page, which hasn’t been super successful either in terms of money or engagement… but I figure I’ll keep it up for now, and once I’ve finished Honeytrap I’ll look at the numbers and reassess. Maybe it would be a better idea to post the snippets here on DW, and simply post links on Tumblr? Certainly DW is a far more comment-friendly platform than Tumblr. (If you check the honeytrap tag, there are links here to everything that has been posted online.)

Even though it’s not a big money spinner (yet! she says optimistically), I like Ko-Fi, largely because it requires so little work from me: it just sits there and occasionally money magically appears, like fairy dust. No hassle! No guilt!

Because I was so focused on Honeytrap, I did diddlysquat on my other goal, the revision for the Goblin Market retelling, “Goblin Woods.” (I suspect that I’m going to open the document and shout “What was I thinking, this is terrible??”, a suspicion which has certainly encouraged procrastination.)

But I do have two possible titles for it, both quotations from Goblin Market: “Goblin Pulp and Goblin Dew” (possibly the pulp bit makes it sound more violent than I want) or “Come and Kiss Me.”

For August!

More Honeytrap, naturally. I’m not quite sure how long it’s going to be, so it may be premature to make “finish a complete draft of Honeytrap” my goal… but I would like to knock out a far amount of Honeytrap. (It has also occurred to me that “honey trap” is usually two words and maybe I should start writing it that way.)

I’d also like to come up with a title for the Little Red Riding Hood retelling in pre-Revolutionary Russia and then France, because I have the perfect picture for the cover and it would be nice to have the cover ahead of time for once in my life. But unfortunately The Girl and the Wolf is off the table, as that’s already the title of a Caldecott Award-winning picture book, so I’ll have to come up with something else.

Comments

[kore]

I am not In Step with the Youth of Today, but ko-fi seems kind of lower profile than Patreon? Then again most people on Tumblr seem to have a ko-fi link, so what do I know. But from my consumer viewpoint, ko-fi to me is more 'one and done' -- I'll do it if reminded, but it's not a regular setup, whereas Patreon sends me an email and I go 'oh yeah stuff to read!' if that helps any.

[rmc28]

Yeah ko-fi is more like a tip jar and Patreon is an ongoing commitment. (I have a Patreon budget and it's split among a lot of creatives - unfortunately that means I am now in a zero-sum place if I want to support a new person, and I may have to cut the budget further thanks to my country's Glorious Political Leadership tanking the exchange rate even further.)

[osprey_archer]

I did have a Patreon at one point, but the monthly deadline stressed me out - I felt guilty if I wasn't getting much written, like my Patreon subscribers were going to be Very Disappointed if their monthly update was "Still working on the stuff I was working on last month! No releases on the horizon! All is drear."

Of course it might work better on a Honeytrap model of "weekly (or monthly, or twice monthly, or whatever) update with an excerpt from whatever I'm working on," but I can't count on writing at the current pace forever.

[kore]

Yeah, I do know some people who have set up their Patreon more as "donate five bucks and you get my everlasting gratitude," or they do flashfic every month or show outlines or drafts or playlists or whatever. But even that requires a certain amount of planning. Some people find livestreams or chats easier, but for me personally that would be even more work!

[kore]

Like okay, I find Amanda Palmer personally irritating, but she's made a huge success of Kickstarter and Patreon and she not only has a really specific pricing tier, she doesn't undersell herself. I see that a lot on Patreon -- people promising a piece of long nonfiction/fiction every month, or regular excerpts from a project, and they burn out or just can't keep up the pace. I mean, at $75/month she's still doing stuff like postcards and "guest list at my shows." And some past tier rewards are "deep dive into the process of working on patreon," or access to podcasts or "this is a song" and then "this is the video for that song" and "this is a documentary about the making of the song." IDK what I am trying to get at exactly. More like, she's letting people inside her process, instead of presenting them with finished projects all the time that take a lot of effort and polish? And I think she has a lot of $1 people, on her principle of "if you have 1,000 people willing to give you a buck," and limits the upper tiers both so they have more value to people and so she doesn't think "oh god these few people are giving so much money...." But she's a performer, so it's different from writer types in that she's used to having a direct connection with her audiences and having a public persona for that.


https://www.patreon.com/amandapalmer

http://amandapalmer.net/patreon-things/

[skygiants]

70,000 words in a month is EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE. :O

[osprey_archer]

It's a lot of words! I don't usually write that many words.

[boxofdelights]

A Wolf and Her Girl ?

[osprey_archer]

This is giving me serious The Horse and His Boy vibes and I'm not sure that's exactly what I'm going for. I will keep thinking.

[rmc28]

Purely selfishly I'd love it if you posted snippets here as I don't have a tumblr and while I can follow links etc I'm more likely to comment on the same tab :-)

[osprey_archer]

I think I may try this when next Tuesday rolls around. I get more comments here than Tumblr anyway, so there's nothing to lose by giving it a go.

Or I suppose I could post the snippets both places but that sounds wicked and licentious.

[rmc28]

Both works too.

(I literally just paraphased my latest dreamwidth entry into a series of tweets because my spouse suggested it, and am engaged in two parallel conversations as a result so you know, whatever works.)