Serial Writer

My Fiver beta reader gave me her report yesterday. The stuff she had concerns about was stuff I already had my eye on. But some of the other stuff I was concerned about didn't seem to bother her, and she didn't raise any red flags, expected or unexpected.

Totally worth the bucks I spent (I'm coming back to that point in a moment). 

I've already translated her general notes into several specific rewrites. More will come after I've completed the draft and can see what didn't need to be there at all, or would fit better in a different place. Or needs better explanation than it has.

***

I wish I hadn't started off this run with a series. I don't want to look back; I want to take the lessons I learn and apply them to the next book. Despite there being fixes I could be making to the first book. (The second book, I haven't improved enough to be able to improve it. Not yet.)

But that does mean that the reader who is coming to this as a series has to wade through writing that, to paraphrase Howard Taylor,  moves from "bad to marginally less bad."

***

And the new job is a bit of a wash. I think I got the most done when I was at an hourly job on a short week. Back when I started this blog I was freelancing as a theatrical designer and technician, and that was a combination of scrambling from one crisis to the next, living hand-to-mouth, and expending a lot of creative energy during the day.

Or, it might be better to say, putting my urge to create into either the show I was working, or other (often related) projects.

An hourly position has given me schedule and financial stability. When I started it was a shorter week and I think that was the most productive time for me. Since we came back from COVID I've been on full-time. My income has basically doubled, my savings and retirement are leaping up, but my creative time feels impacted. 

Worse, we aren't getting outside the building like we used to, and I think meeting people and going out for installations and meeting vendors and so on was helping me with new ideas. I mean, seriously, it was an install in Burbank that made me pick that as Penny's birthplace, and my impressions of the place gave me directions for her character I think helped a lot.

But the upshot of it all is; right now, I have money but no time. This is why I'm looking so hard at Fiver and Reedsy and so forth. I want to hire people to do editing, formatting, cover art, interior art, marketing research, etc.

When you get right down to it, it becomes the familiar theater situation; you end up with other creatives with their own visions, that may support your vision or may clash with it. The thing is, large parts of the creative support structure is out there to, well, get you to pay them to be able to do their own thing. All the cover artists want a chance to paint something they like. Understanding your book is secondary.

At the lower levels of the price game this isn't even an option. Many cover artists have stock covers. Want to get a cover for a couple hundred? Look here; "grizzled guy with explosion in background" -- I'm sure that will work just great once we slap your title and name on it.

So not quite so bad, but I had two artists draw me two "inari" fox statues each and none of them are quite right (the last one may be close enough).

The aim of getting someone to do it, after all, is to SAVE TIME. If I have to spend that time wrestling with an artist over revisions, or worse yet fighting with them over a difference in artistic opinion, that's not saving time.

And even editing isn't a panacea. Because you get back a marked-up text that you have to personally go through and weed out which are good catches, which are grammatical mistakes you didn't understand and have to go and read up on before you can safely commit the change, and which are the peculiar biases of that editor and need to be ignored. And, seriously, that's a lot of work! The only reason to do it this way over software is that software is dumb and misses a lot.

But it still takes time. The money -- sure, at this point, I'm taking a loss anyhow and I'd gladly throw money at it. But time? That's what I can't figure out how to save.