Argh! The guilt!

Not writing. Not a word in weeks. It is not writer's block. It is just not writing.

A good friend of mine is an author. When I spoke with him about how I longed for solid periods of writing time he laughed. "You have to make time to write. And you have to write every spare chance you get. Even if it is just twenty minutes."

I know he is right, but it is so hard to do. A spare twenty minutes is so easily filled with some (any) other activity than writing.

Writing a novel means climbing a mountain of 100,000 words. When I wrote Eternal Knight I climbed that mountain at a pace of several thousand words per day. In fact, I climbed up and down every crag of that mountain multiple times and ended up with 250,000 words. Too much climbing!

A while back I wrote a post about writing 1,000 words a day. The mountain of my next novel would be climbed in 100 writing days (plus editing and revising time, of course). That didn't seem so bad. But I couldn't hit 1,000 words. I couldn't hit 500. And the mountain kept getting taller.

It isn't that the book is getting longer... I still have it planned for 100,000 words. It is just that the fewer the words I write per day, the longer it will take to hit 100,000. And the longer the final goal is from being achieved, the harder it is to motivate myself to write.

I must break this cycle. The book will not get done at all if I don't put pen on paper. My life is different from when I wrote Eternal Knight. I need to accept that fact, adjust, and get to work.

October Numbers

The real world has been occupying a lot of my time recently. With the end of the first quarter I found myself with a ton of grading and lesson planning needing to be done.

I'm just popping by to report my October Numbers:

October (September, August, July, June, May)
6 (5, 12, 38, 60, 125) Paperbacks sold in person. 
3 (3, 5, 12, 6, 28) Paperbacks sold on Amazon
47 (16, 8, 3, 5, 15) Kindle ebooks
1 (1, 0, 0, 0, 1) Smashwords ebooks
1 (0, 0, 1, 0, 4) Apple ebooks
0 (0, 0, 2, 5, 2) Nook ebooks

Total October Sales: 58

Total sales since release: 415

When I published Eternal Knight six months ago a friend asked me how many books I hoped to sell. 

"A gazillion," I replied. "But five hundred would be cool."

It looks like I'll hit that five hundred mark sometime around the turn of the year. Two things really have me feeling good: 1) the continued positive feedback I am getting from readers. I cannot say enough how rewarding it is to hear nice things said about your book. 2) $.99 ebooks are the way to go. You don't make much money, but it sure gets the book into a lot of hands. The new price definitely caused the Kindle numbers to pop.

Have a good one. I'm going to go grade some tests. And then mow the lawn/leaves. (Mowing leaves sure beats raking them.)

Hey! I'm on TV

This year the Wissahickon High School TV Club started a new project. They created a book chat TV program. And I'm the host!

Each episode is half an hour long and consists of three segments. It shows on our local access cable channel on a rotating basis. So far we have filmed three episodes, and will probably do ten total for the year. Jessica Brasch, the TV Club sponsor has some contacts in the publishing world and is using them to bring in authors.

My job is the fun part. I get to interview the authors on camera. Let me make this perfectly clear to you, I am totally unqualified for the job. I have no on-camera experience at all. The interviewing part is no problem... it is the teleprompters and the switching back and forth from camera to camera to guest that is the tough part.

After three interviews I am getting more comfortable, but I am definitely still a rookie. I ended the second episode (ridiculously) abruptly. Ugh. I don't know what kind of editing magic will fix it.

Here is the first episode. I can't tell you if it is any good because I haven't watched it. If I watch it I will just beat myself up over ever mistake I made. And I'm sure there are many. In the fist episode Shelleah Jackson and I interview each other. Shelleah Jackson is a student-author in our school. Enjoy! (I hope)

WissLit Episode One