Well, That Was Entertaining
Just had a seriously nasty thunderstorm with high winds pass over Casa Cameron that kicked off with one hell of a powerful updraft. It literally had the house shaking and the J Crew freaking out while I ran around closing windows and eyeing our tornado hideout under the stairs. The sirens sounded pretty much continuously for about fifteen minutes but we didn’t get any hail and no local tornadoes, touch wood. Can’t check for roof or fence damage until tomorrow but I’m hoping we’re all good and I am sincerely grateful that we still have power (a lot of local friends don’t).
Of course, my UPS’s battery picked tonight to die on me. Ramón was able to dig out a massive surge suppressor for me and I have everything on my writing desk plugged into that for now (I’m more concerned about everything being on a surge suppressor than a UPS. If the desktop shuts down over night, oh well). There are a couple of places in the area where I can pick up a replacement battery so I’ll see about doing that over the weekend.
There’s Writing, And Then There’s Real Life
Didn’t get a lot of work done today, unfortunately, because I spent a fair amount of the day playing hospice nurse to J.J. (aka The Elderly Gentleman) He’s been a bit weak and out of it for the last few days, so after tending to his morning care (changing out soiled bedding, giving him a sponge bath, and trying to convince him to eat some Lick ‘N’ Lap) I decided to head over to the vet’s for a banana bag (lactated Ringer’s solution—very good for dehydrated or ill cats). Luckily they know me well over there and were happy to provide me with the bag and a new IV line.
After watching a YT video to refresh myself on how to prep a banana bag and insert the IV needle, I gave J.J. his first bolus about an hour ago. He perked up pretty much immediately so he’ll be getting a bolus every other day or so. Luckily I did this with Jordan ten years ago so we have a setup next to the fireplace where I can hang the bag and sit with J.J. in my lap while the drip does its job.
Of course, J.J. wasn’t impressed with getting to sprawl in Momma’s lap and be petted while getting his sub-Q fluids. He pretty much sat there like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Let me know when I can go back to my bed.” He’s never been a lap cat and being old and infirm hasn’t really changed his opinion.
I’m also aware that this is pretty much palliative care at this point. He’s twenty-one and is going to pass at some point (I hesitate to say that he’s definitely on his way out because he’s gone through patches like this before and bounced back. That cat has a will of vibranium and will leave when he decides to and not before). At the moment he’s still eating, drinking, pooping, and peeing on his own. If he starts refusing food and water, then we’ll have the vet take steps but so far he’s hanging in there. And as long as he wants to do that I’ll keep him clean, dry, comfortable, and hydrated.
Goodbye February
Welp, I didn’t make quite what I’d hoped to from Amazon this month but I did make three figures so that’s something. As I release the ECS omnibus wide and promote that and To My Muse on FB (althought I intend to take the course I bought on FB ads first—no point in throwing good money away on badly formatted ads) it’ll be interesting to see if sales pick up.
And of course once the ECS omnibus is out that should start making money from the readers who refuse to start a series until it’s completed. This doesn’t make sense to me considering how many series get abandoned because they don’t make enough money, but it’s their money and their choice.
And I’m sure there are some people who are looking at my income and thinking, “But romance is supposed to be a gold mine—why aren’t you raking it in?” Because the romance market is hypersaturated, to be honest, and people who are raking it in either are a name, have a rabid fan base, or have so many books out that they can make decent money from just a few KU pages reads on each title. I’m working on creating the rabid fan base and having a buttload of books available, myself, but that takes time.
Then again, I already have sixteen full-length titles out there and will be released at least another four this year, so I’ve got momentum on my side.
I May Have Scared Ramón
So I was checking my KDP dashboard this morning, as you do, and went to make sure that Shifter Woods: Growl was out of KU (today was the last day of its current cycle) and ready to be included in the ECS omnibus.
A horrified shriek rang through the house as I saw that the KU period had been renewed as of today and Growl wouldn’t be out of KU jail until May. See, I’m an idiot and didn’t uncheck the “automatically renew in KU” checkbox like I did with the other titles I’m putting wide because if you do that Amazon won’t promote the titles anymore in KU and I was hoping to get a few more page reads out of Growl before I set it wide. With visions of the omnibus being put off to May swirling in my head, I unchecked the box and closed the little pop-up, cursing to myself.
And then I thought, “Well, wait a minute. Today is the last day of the current cycle and I’ve opted out of the renewal. Check it again.” So I did and mirable dictu, it was no longer enrolled in KU.
I need a drink. And maybe a nap. And poor Ramón is still recovering from hearing me shriek. Bad Nicola, no new laptop.
My SF Writing Brain Is Making Itself Known
As you know, Bob, I use any sort of crafting as part of my writing process and work on plot points or full stories while I’m sewing/knitting/crocheting/whatever. And I’ve used that to great effect in the last two months while I’ve been finishing projects from my office closet.
Except. While I was working on the Skulls and Roses swing dress I started thinking about a SF story. Not a romance—a straight-up SF thriller sort of idea about a cruise-type spaceship inbound from a colony around Jupiter coming down with some exotic alien disease and people scrambling on Earth to determine whether or not the passengers can be allowed to disembark. Why you do this to me, Muse?
No, I’m not going to work on it, at least not right now. I have the Paladins of Crystal and Olympic Cove series to finish first, plus the other books that I want to get out this year. The SF story can keep percolating in the back of my brain for now. But it’s like, “Really? Really, you do this to me now? Don’t I already have enough to write?”
Maybe I should try dictating again. Lord, if I could make that work I could churn out everything I’ve ever wanted to write.
Editing, Editing, Editing
Normally I like to take weekends off and give myself the chance to catch up on paperwork, clean the house, and sometimes just, you know, relax, but I’d really like to get Shifter Woods: Claw out so I’m working on the edits this weekend. So far things seem pretty clean—I have a tendency to repeat words and luckily T is good at catching those, and she hasn’t pointed out any gaping plot holes or logic gaps so that’s always reassuring, especially since I’d changed a lot of things about Angela’s background and motivations during the writing and I can never be sure that I caught everything. That’s why editors and beta readers are godsends.
I’m also getting more comfortable with Vellum—I still wish there was a way to stop certain pages from being including during a compile like with Scrivener so that I could keep all the platform editions in one file, and I really wish there was a way to center the Table of Contents, but the formatting is really nice and I like being able to have fancy scene break icons and big initials at the beginning of a chapter.
In other news I’m continuing Operation: Finish All The Craft Projects 2023 by going through my office closet, pulling out all of the half-finished craft projects I’ve stuck in there over the years, and actually finishing them. As of today I’ve finished two baby quilts, three quilt tops, a wall hanging, two dresses, two jackets, and quilted covers for the stand mixer and food processor, which is pretty damned good considering that I’ve been doing all that in the evenings and weekends.
At right is my latest finished project, my Skulls and Roses swing dress. Now, I love swing dresses. They look great on me and I have three of them from Torrid, so when I found this awesome fabric I knew I wanted to make a swing dress out of it. I found one of those “designed to be adjustable” patterns that give you more than enough seam allowance so that you can baste the dress together and fit it to yourself before actually sewing everything, and I must have cut the actual pieces out three or four years ago.
So I started putting it together today. To my surprise the dress fit almost perfectly except around the waist, so I let that out a bit and tried it back on. Et voila, I had an awesome new dress that Ramón pronounced, “So you.” I have two more batches of fabric (black swirls on black and a cream, lavender, and light blue with handwriting on it) that I want to turn into dresses sometime in April or May.
And To My Muse is Wide. Again.
Following recommendations from some of the best minds in the indie publishing sphere, I’ve decided to start moving my standalone titles back to wide. KU is great if you have a lot of series (and I do), but it’s kind of hard to make money on standalones purely from KU reads.
So I’ve finished formatting To My Muse in Vellum, made three different versions for Amazon, Smashwords, and Google Play, and uploaded the files. Amazon’s file is already live, Smashwords’ file is live on their site and is in review for release to Kobo, Apple, B&N, etc, and I’m still waiting for the painfully slow Google Play engine to process its file.
In Vellum’s defense they do have a mechanism in place for adding platform-specific links to a platform-specific edition, so if I wanted to generate a Google Play edition it would contain only the links to my other books in Google Play. But that still doesn’t change the problem with the different copyright page required by Smashwords (unless they decide to change the rules now that they’ve merged with Draft2Digital) so for now it’s easier for me to maintain three separate Vellum files for each book. I was doing that anyway in Calibre so no biggie.
Next on the work bench—finishing up the edits for Shifter Woods: Claw. I’m not even going to predict when it’ll be released—when it’s available I’ll let everyone know.
The AI As Writer
I had my writing group Zoom meeting Tuesday night and since the bulk of them are SF or fantasy writers we were discussing the closure of Clarkesworld to submissions because they’ve gotten absolutely hosed with AI-written subs in the last two months. Apparently other magazines are following suit until they can figure out how to handle this sudden surge of stories, or whether they should go invitation-only (which is problematic because slush, while a pain in the ass to go through, is also the best way to discover amazing new writers).
Me being me, I couldn’t understand why someone would go to these lengths because it seems obvious that swamping a magazine with AI-written stories of dubious worth would just backfire on them. J explained that a lot of these “writers” think that the only important part of a story is the idea, and the actual creation on the story was scutwork that can be turned over to an AI.
Yeah, no. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Any writer gets tons of ideas during the day. The real job is figuring out which ideas would actually support a plot, and then creating a gripping, well-written story based on that plot. And so far, that can’t be done by AIs.
J went on to say that apparently some of these “writers” are using ChatGPT and other AI language engines to create a side hustle; one even told an editor, “I’m doing this because I need money.” That hollow laughter you hear is from all the writers throughout history who know that selling your work in trad publishing, even if it’s the best damn story or novel of the year, is a crapshoot, and even if you do sell it you won’t make a lot of money off it unless you’re a big name. But there’s still this popular concept that all writers make tons of cash so they’re probably thinking, “I came up with a great idea—I’ll have ChatGPT write a bunch of different stories for me based on that idea, send all of them off, and the money will come rolling in.”
Once again, yeah, no. The only way I can see that as maybe working is if these “writers” put their AI-created works into KU with the hope that enough people will be intrigued to at least read a few pages. But that also assumes that the work has a genre-appropriate cover and attention-getting blurb, and even then it might not get them a lot of traction because KU was bursting at the seams with titles even before these yahoos thought they could game the system and build publishing empires for themselves based on AI writing.
Now, is there a place for AI in writing? Sure—my friend Jerry uses image AI to come up with inspiration for locations and characters, and he’s been very happy with using some AI text engines to do research. But he doesn’t use the AI images on his cover, and he still has to sit down and do the actual writing himself.
Another actual, award-winning writer suggested that some of these people may be the type who simply want to watch the world burn. They cant believe that any creative work is good, so they churn out this machine-assisted drivel to prove it and smile as it causes magazines to close submissions and editors to scramble for a way to handle the avalanche. And I do suspect that those people’s work are included in said avalanche, but I think the bulk of AI-written works are just someone trying to game the system and make a quick buck.
This will shake out over time and hopefully magazines and other publishers will develop a way to shunt the mechanical dross off to one side before their slush readers are driven to despair and tequila. But in the meantime it’s going to cause a lot of issues on both sides of the publishing divide so trad publisher writers had better buckle up, because this is going to be one bumpy ride.
Well, That Was Fun
The plan for today was to get To My Muse fully formatted and uploaded to Smashwords and Google Play, then work on editing Shifter Woods: Claw.
Ha. Hahahahahahahahaha.
I was in the middle of breakfast when I was reminded that T-Mobile was pinging Ramón and asking where the payment was so I sat down and paid all the bills. Then J.J. started yowling at me so I stripped out his bedding, put fresh on, put the soiled bedding in the wash and started that, gave him fresh water and treats on the table next to his bed, and cuddled him for awhile because I think he was as achy as I was with the incoming weather change.
At which point Jasmine climbed onto my table in the library and puked from a height on the rug, as she does. So I cleaned that up.
Then I remembered that I wanted to wash our bedding as well (and this has to be done during the day because it involves three comforters, a microfiber blanket, a body pillow cover, and a knee pillow cover. Ramón calls me the Greater American Nesting Female for a very good reason). So I grabbed the basket of clean laundry and washed sheets, went upstairs and stripped off all of our bedding, then remembered that I wanted to take pictures of the three quilt tops I’ve finished in the last months and a stripped mattress was the best way to photograph them.
So I spread the tops across the mattress and photographed them.
By that point it was now early afternoon and I needed something to eat so I polished off the last of the Italian wedding soup from a few nights ago. Moved the now-washed cat bedding from the washer into the dryer, loaded one comforter into the washer, started to head back upstairs … and Ramón wanted to discuss his plan of how we’re going to install a hatch in the fence behind our pool pump (because it’s caged with PVC piping and needs to be taken out and have various things cleaned/replaced). So we hashed out a plan of how to do that in two weeks when we have nice weather for the weekend.
Then J.J. started yowling again. I changed his bedding again, topped up his water and treats, stroked his head, and went upstairs only to realize that I needed to post my social media stuff, including making some TikTok videos. Worked on that and remembered that I had deal with the bedding being washed so I went back downstairs, moved the now-dry cat bedding into its storage area, moved the wet comforter into the dryer, loaded the second comforter into the washer and got that going.
Looked out the window and saw that the weather was sunny and perfect, ideal for cutting down all the frozen lantana in our back yard and hopefully clearing way for some new growth. Since we’re going to have cold and rainy weather for at least a week I decided to get it done now. Grabbed some secateurs, my gardening gloves, and a couple of garden trash bags from the garage and cleared out two beds’ worth of dead lantana branches and leaves, which left my arms itchy as all hell.
I then remembered that I still needed to make up the bed so I went back upstairs (why, yes, I climb a lot of stairs every day, thank you), put fresh sheets and pillowcases on the bed, put away the clothing that I had brought up, and went back into my office to format and edit.
At 4:00 PM. Spent two hours working on all that, then realized I felt like absolute crap from allergies and the oncoming weather change and asked Ramón to go out and bring some cooked chicken in for dinner. Which he did, bless him, and I spent the rest of the evening picking at To My Muse and monitoring our bedding and bringing pieces upstairs once they were dry (which requires two dryer cycles per comforter and I have to turn the comforter over so that the inner damp side gets hit by the hot air, which is why this needs to get started early in the day), reading news about Clarkesworld closing its submissions due to AI-written slush (more on that later), and finally taking a much-needed shower.
So if you ever wonder why I don’t publish as often as other writers, well, now you know.
Back to Reality
The goals for this week include the following:
- Get To My Muse reformatted and out to Smashwords and Google Play, hopefully to earn me some money because Mama needs some new things for her business
- Finish editing Shifter Woods: Claw and publish it (whether I stick with only Amazon/Not KU or set it wide will depend on whether Shifter Woods: Growl is out of KU by the time I’m ready to launch)
- Throw my hands in the air and put together the omnibus edition for Esposito County Shifters in Vellum, then get it ready to launch as soon as Growl is out of KU
- Continue working on Crystal Blade
- Start writing the Patreon short story for March (and prep everything I would need to launch my Patreon next week)
I also have to pay bills, cancel the cable, talk to T-Mobile and get our two cell phone accounts combined into one for their 55+ discount, and do a number of things around the house, but that’s a completely different blog post. One of these days I’m gonna make enough to be able to hire a virtual PA and oh, the hosannas will ring across the land then.
Nicola Cameron Writes 