IWSG July: Plugging Away

Another month, another update. How are we doing?

I think I've returned to the "insecure" part of the group's title.

Sales of my first book Ten Thousand Days tanked after the first month. I ran out of friends, family members and acquaintances to convince to buy it, and after a half-dozen guest blogs and interviews, my marketing campaign kind of fizzled out as I didn't have the time to keep on the hustle every day. I would rather spend what available time I do have working on the next book.

I haven't completely given up on Days, though. I'm in the middle of a promotion right now for Canada Day (and the Fourth of July): To help stock up on your summer reading, Ten Thousand Days is on sale for just $0.99. It's actually less than 99 cents on Amazon.com - the Canadian prince is $0.99 so they adjusted it accordingly. I actually even put a few bucks in Facebook marketing to see if it helps get the word out there. So far the ad hasn't generated any sales, but it has reached thousands of new eyes that wouldn't have seen it previously. I will give a full breakdown and detail on how the promotion went after it's done, for those who are interested.

Here's the link to the ad, by the way. Like my Facebook page while you're over there. ;-)

The real insecurity (discouragement?) this month has been my new book, my WIP that I have been dutifully plugging away at these last few months. I've set certain targets and goals for myself of when I wanted to have each step of writing completed, but at the rate I'm going there's no way I'm going to hit any of my deadlines.

I mentioned before that I wrote the first draft entirely long hand whilst riding on the bus. Now I'm trying to type up and revise that draft, also on the bus, and it's not going well for a number of reasons:

1. I'm writing on a fucking bus.

2. For various perfectly reasonable reasons beyond my control, I haven't been taking the bus every day. Usually that's a good thing, but when my commute is my only writing time, not commuting = not writing.

3. It's a different kind of story that I'm not used to writing, so I'm having trouble keeping everything together. As I revise and change/add things, it's messing up other things and the whole manuscript just feels wonky and sloppy right now. When I do finish this draft it's going to take a major, major revision to put everything back in order, whereas I was hoping that this second draft was going to at least be at a point that I could hand it to a few people to get their feedback.

If I handed you a copy of my manuscript right now, it would basically read like this.

I had set myself a deadline of today to have finished this draft (or at least been within spitting distance) and I'm only about 2/3 of the way through (not including the inevitable 3rd draft to fix all the issues I created by revising the 2nd draft). Today is also the start of my vacation, so while I will enjoy my week off to spend with my family, I won't get any writing done.

So yeah, it's disappointing that I'm not where I wanted to be with my current manuscript, and that it's also not coming out quite the way I wanted it to. I'm not quite at the "am I wasting my time?" point yet, but I fear that day may be coming. I've never had this much trouble putting a book together before. I don't know if that means it will ultimately be a more satisfying experience, or I will eventually give up and just throw the whole thing in the trash. We'll see how it goes.

I'll let you know again how it's going in a month. Maybe I'll have a writing surge sometime in July and come back rejuvenated and excited.

I'm keeping my expectations low, though, just in case.

-CDGK