It’s been a busy week for me and, while I’d normally prep the week’s blog post by Sunday at the latest, here I am at the time I’d normally post having written and erased three different posts. I think I’m tired – it was fire drill week at my job and I’ve not quite recovered. It’s amazing how quickly life can disrupt your plans for productivity. So, rather than doing any of the posts I had planned, this is a rambling catch-up.
Shifting Sands is really starting to take its shape. I came up with a plan for how we’re going to move through the waves! For anyone confused by that statement, I’m planning for Shifting Sands to have chapters that trade in and out. If you have perspective chapters from Nahlena, for example, you won’t get perspective chapters from Aamarin until a new wave comes and they trade places. I’ll announce the coming wave through social media and then update the e-book accordingly. I’ve been editing in two extreme halves and quite enjoy seeing how each character’s story melds with the whole. I’ll need to try shuffling them again for the next edit though! My supervisor currently has a copy of both halves and I get to find out his thoughts on Friday. Naturally this means that my mood flips from terror at someone new reading my work (and not my academic writing!) to “well, as long as it does what it needs to”.
I looked through the list of things an author should do last week. It was created analysing the content of an insane number of advice articles for self-publishing authors, most of which echoed the same sort of thing. Use social media to promote yourself, engage with established communities, have a nice book cover, etc. I’m making good progress with the top of the list, but probably have to firmly decide where I stop. That’s the only problem with doing this as a research project – I have to have a clear reason why I’m stopping somewhere above “I don’t want to do that”. So I may have to dive into some very rusty skills to make a book trailer soon!
That’s one of the interesting things about this project. My inner perfectionist wants everything to be the best it can be – I want readers to enjoy what I’ve written, to be immersed in the world, to be interested in me as an author – but the research side of me has different priorities. Every so often, the stressed perfectionist hits a wall and I enter the zen-like space where I remember that this is a research project. My goal is to do this well enough that I get to be Dr Kate at the end. I love Shifting Sands and I’m really quite proud of it, but it being actually good to other people would just be a bonus. I’m starting to think that I’ll have to devote a chapter to the battle between the author self and the research self because of this internal conflict. The fact that I’m not depending on this as my possible big break or full representation of all I can do probably means that my experience of authorship through this project will always be different than other self-publishing authors.
I guess that, on the whole, things are going pretty well. Shifting Sands is shaping up and I feel pretty good about it, the author performance side is progressing but I may have to do more things that feel a bit out of my skillset, and I’m definitely building some interesting thoughts for the critical side. According to the latest timeline I’ve given myself, Shifting Sands will come out next month, I’ll continue to be my author self, but I’ll be moving a lot of my focus onto critical. And, while this is going to make me sound like a massive nerd, I am so excited about it!
So, how is everyone else doing? Are you making progress on your goals? I’d love to hear what everyone is up to!
