I haven’t blogged here in a long time. Writing (including revising) my fiction comes first—after the day job and a bit of moonlighting—and I’ve been struggling to find time for it, let alone my other writing.
Writer Things
I have a folder in my electronic to-do list called “Writer Things,” and I’ve been rather busy with those. These things are not writing or revising fiction or even writing about writing, but a lot of them are fun. They include teaching at conferences, board work for the League of Utah Writers, my Writer of the Year adventures (wasn’t expecting those), and a host of other writing-adjacent tasks, including a lot of what I’m doing this weekend.
. . . And a lot of what I did last week, in the evenings. Tuesday evening, for example, I drove to Brigham City to teach a group of writers there. They offered me a few dates, and I took the September one, so there would be fresh peaches in the peach shakes at Peach City, and there were.
(By the way, if you ever wonder where I’ll show up next, I keep the list of appearances at 60eastpress.com pretty current.)
Anyway, besides that one category for writer things, my electronic to-do list has five categories for actual writing. It would be great if that ratio were always true of my time too—if I spent five hours writing for every hour I spend on writer things—from which you may safely deduce that I don’t.
But here I am now, writing about being a writer. Close enough.
First the Inside
I spent Friday evening and part of Saturday updating the front matter and back matter in my two self-published collections of short fiction, to take advantage of some nice awards and some quotable things people have said about them since I published them on September 2023.
(I published the two collections together so they could encourage each other, and that’s not a joke. Ask me to explain sometime.)
I also added a page to the back matter promoting my first novel, which is due out in November.
I pondered tweaking the title page in a time-consuming way, but . . . nah. I’m on a clock with this one, as I’ll mention in a moment.
Then the Outside
I spent a few hours of Sunday updating the covers of my collections, again to take advantage of some awards and quotable words. Here are the new versions. You’ll have to imagine the bar codes.
I’m Cautiously Optimistic (Please, Mr. Bezos?)
I immediately uploaded the new covers and interior files to Amazon, to update what was there, because time is of the essence. I want to have copies with the new covers to put in the conference bookstore at Colorado Gold in late September.
In the wee hours I got the e-mails announcing the changes were approved, so I could order “author copies.” Those are salable copies of the book, not for proof, shipped to the author for the cost of printing plus shipping. I ordered them without delay.
The jury’s still out on whether I finished this writer thing soon enough. Amazon gave me a range of about five days when I should expect delivery, and the last day is too late; I’ll already have left on my two-conference swing.
I’ll start with a digital marketing conference in San Diego, Hero Conf (I think the f is silent), for professional reasons, then the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Colorado Gold Writers Conference in Denver (technically Aurora) on the way home.
Magic Needed
Writing is real work. Being a writer is real work. My full-time job is real work. Moonlighting for a handful of marketing clients is real work. Finding enough hours for all of this is . . . well, something like magic, I suppose, because at my age I have to sleep enough, or work doesn’t go well.
Speaking of that very magic, you might think a writer of contemporary realism, who tries to tease the magic out of ordinary days in the lives of ordinary people in the ordinary world, would have mastered the real world’s magic system.
Yeah, don’t think that.
That very effort, conceived in those words (look-ahead pun not intended, in case you know the book) did inspire me to buy Ann Howard Creel’s The Magic of Ordinary Days on Audible a few years ago, within about two minutes of seeing the title and reading the blurb. I haven’t seen the movie, but I did revisit the book this summer specifically, when I was in a Colorado mood.
This happens. I was born in Boulder and lived there until I was ten. I’m planning a trip to Colorado. I have family there. And I’d lately picked up my copy of Ralph Moody’s Little Britches, a Colorado gem, and read a couple of chapters, thinking I might use a bit of dialogue for a presentation.
But I digress. It’s Labor Day morning, and after the dentist, I have writing to do, by which I mean revising, in this case. There will be a good break later to grill some burgers.
See you soon.
Pencil drawing by ChatGPT.
