Writing about not writing

I'm still too disheartened to write, and either that or the slump of cold season and a week off work has kept me from wanting to create anything. Dabble, yes. Think about stuff, yes. But I don't feel like writing novel or recording instruments or even painting some of my 3D prints.

The KDP news is bad. I ended my advertising campaigns with no unit sales to show for it. Not a single copy. I did get over a thousand Kindle Unlimited page reads but it cost me over two hundred in advertising to do it.

Amazon is a numbers game. The more sales, the higher you list in the rankings, and the better you look to customers. Even better looking to customers is a high number of reviews. Even if they aren't all five star, as long as they aren't mostly negative it gives the reader confidence that other people thought it was worth picking up.

And I am suspicious. I haven't had a single unasked review myself. That is, they are either from people I know, or people I essentially traded reviews for (just done in a way that remains legal -- at the moment.) There are other sites and venues where you can grow visibility, including (shudder) Facebook (or whatever they are calling it these days). It just seems so much work and also seems very mercenary. But basically when I see a book which really isn't that great with a ton of reviews I suspect someone was out working Goodreads or something and begging reviews.

So with all that said:

I'm trying to reduce what is in the Paris book. This would be a great place to talk about colonialism and exoticism in art. But I'm not going to. There are some very strong economic and ethnic undercurrents, lots of intriguing subculture stuff, but I'm not going to go there. I really do aim to stay within the tourist-safe areas, sit at cafes and talk about Art; classical art, Academy art, not so much street art or outsider art or appropriated art.

I'm also going to largely skip the down-and-out. This is going to be budget travel, but middle class budget travel, slumming. As much as Penny can talk about having to watch her last euro, she comes from a comfortable middle-class background and she hasn't had to and never is going to have to live for years in a state of grinding poverty.

Things I'm not sure I can keep; Fantomas and the early generation of superheroes and villains in fancy-dress. The off-Broadway (or whatever stands in for Broadway there) theatre scene, cafe theatre and street theatre.

I'm not even sure I can do the Dan Brown clue hunt properly. I have mostly decided that although I love a good Dan Shea-complicated Illuminati conspiracy, I just can't indulge it properly in this book.

My cavalry officer and his adventures in the Great War...possibly the actual War Horse story. And for that matter, Colette, the Moulin Rouge, 1907 and the Rêve d'Égypte. That sexy mummy dance, and Colette herself, might be at the heart of the story. Or might not...I need to take more time to really sort out the pieces so I have a novel that can come in under 70K and not require massive re-writes to make all the mismatched parts fit.

It's not like I don't have time.