May is Here to Stay

It's May and the checkered flags are everywhere--no, seriously. It's Indiana. They are EVERYWHERE. So I guess that means I need to bring something to the finish line by the end of the month.

A new/old project is the perfect thing. I'm going to dig through the archives and find the most promising unfinished work and get it all polished up like a gleaming trophy. More about what I chose and just how far that finish line will be next week.

For me and quite a lot of others out there, I think that April was a huge success. Whether you were participating in National Poetry Month (my contribution can be found on my Patreon page) or whether you were successful in promotion with the Twitter Writing Community's newly minted #IndieApril campaign, I think we can agree we all did something to better a writer's life last month.

Speaking of the found poetry I posted last month, I have an idea to turn it into something more than just boring words on paper. I haven't worked it all out yet, but once I do, I'll let everyone know what it's going to morph into. 

In other writing news, I'm finding it harder to build a list of potential journals to submit to. It's not that there aren't plenty out there, it's just that they are all starting to charge reading fees, regardless of whether they are a paying publication. I always add to my list at the end of the month, and when I tackled this task last week, there was nothing to add. Zero. Everything had a $3 reading fee, which must be what it takes to cover the cost of Submittable on the publication end. I'm not worried--I have plenty still on my list, but if this is going to change, writers need to stop paying reading fees for exposure. Exposure doesn't pay the bills. If you pay in exposure, that's fine, but don't charge for it.

What are your writing goals for the month? What do you plan on reading?

So Close, Yet...

This has been one of those weeks where nothing seems to be getting done. The thing is, I also cannot pinpoint what is keeping me away from the things I thought I would have checked off my list. I haven't worked on my Camp NaNo project in a week. I'm not really feeling bad about that. I still won't be ready to buy my script coverage on May 1st, so I still have time to finish--though being three pages away from the end should bother me a bit more.

I don't like excuses, but I'll go ahead and blame it on the nice weather at the beginning of the week and that I may have reinstalled SimCity 3000 on my computer over the weekend. Oops.

My focus must be sharp from now on. Let's get Camp NaNo finished. Let's take a deep-dive into the stack of magazines for more found poetry. Let's get those submissions back out into circulation. And let's pick a new project for May. Maybe I'll actually get something new published. I still stand at 1/4 for the year, so I need to get on that. I guess I could find the key to the universe in an Easter egg this weekend, but it'll probably just be candy.

Celebrations and Steady Work

Camp NaNo is going well. I'm not hitting my 60 minutes per day target, but it's looking like I won't have to, at least not for the first draft. I'm 112 minutes into working on the pilot script, and I'm 17 pages in. It's a sitcom so I'm aiming between 30-40 pages total, giving the first draft room for cutting if necessary. Of course if I could sell it to a streaming service, I could stay on the higher end of that page count. Pipe dream, but a fun one.

This is also National Poetry Month. I'm posting a found poetry piece on Twitter each Monday and one every day on Patreon, which is my way of celebrating this year. There's also a new thing that has popped up on Twitter -- #IndieApril. It is a push to not only celebrate indie authors, but to also encourage purchasing their work. I don't know how well that's working out for everyone.

When I saw an early post, I decided to reply. Most of the posts tell other users to add their links in a reply, then the original post creator will pick a couple of titles to buy. Over just a day or two, these posts have morphed a bit. Some don't promise a purchase, but do promise a retweet or like. Others are doing more to promote their own book under the guise of promoting others. I only participated in the first tweet I saw with this hashtag, then one other. The first one yielded little--not even as many impressions as it would had it been a tweet of my own. The second one was a success, but it was specifically for a retweet/like combo only.

That's all I'm doing. I can't go around chasing all of these tweets, and if they pop up hours after the original post, there's little chance my reply will be seen anyway. The other issue is that the people seeing these posts are overwhelmingly other authors. I like supporting indie authors, but I also know the tight budgets of most indie authors -- there aren't going to be a lot of copies sold, even with hundreds of retweets and thousands of impressions. The promises already made may never be fulfilled. I'm just being realistic with it. It's a great idea, just not a practical execution. Someone needs to get started on a full-scale website for #IndieApril2020.

Scattered Thoughts

My thoughts are scattered everywhere, and it made coming up with a new blog post this week that much harder. I thought I would take off from writing about writing and address a couple of things that were in the news. I thought I could write about the rage in the news about rich kids buying their way into college. But are we really all enraged about it? Did we not know that this has been going on since the day these institutions opened their doors? I did write a piece about it, but it won't see the light of day because as a public school kid from Kindergarten to bachelor's degree, I don't really have any special insight on the topic aside from rolling my eyes at every mention of these privileged nobodies living off their parents' success.

I was also contemplating writing another piece last weekend about separating the art from the artist, and how its mostly others in creative fields that can attempt to see the actions of the villain in the artist without obscuring the exceptional in the art. Erasing the art/music/movies/TV shows is not the answer. My opinion on this is not the most popular one, but I also know that Pete Davidson did a way more entertaining job of explaining it than I could have. So I didn't write it. But I did buy Moonwalker so that I could watch it at least one more time in my life in case it ever gets pulled. I won't apologize for the fact that watching this was a happy childhood memory for me, and it certainly isn't an endorsement for anything outside of its entertainment value.

When it comes to my main projects for the month, I'm trying to work hard on short stories and In Another Life, but I keep getting pulled back into poetry. I took some time to indulge in found poetry yesterday, not because the urge was irresistible, but because the magazines are starting to pile up, and if I don't get to them I may have to toss them before I can find those new pieces. I did, however, manage to finish a short story outline this morning with the wonders of a morning shower and a writer's mind--that's all I need sometimes because it is the one place I seem to run into the least distractions. These stories are important because I need to come up with something good to get back on the submission train. Hopefully by Monday I will have a polished piece to start sending out.