It took me 18 months to read a 35 page 10k word story

No, it didn’t truthfully.

But I had a theory: if I mark something as ‘currently reading’ on Goodreads then I will be reminded it’s there and eventually read it… yeah… nah.

It didn’t work.

Stupid ADHD brain. You really think I’d know how to live with it by now.

Here’s another example: I made a jar to put a stone in for each 500 words I wrote that day. It’s cute and arty. I made labels with hand-drawn fonts and tied it all up in shiny bronze ribbon. The idea was that each day I’d add pebbles and that they’d make a satisfying sound and be a physical reminder (as the jar filled) of the words and the work I had already done.

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And then I broke the Scrivener word counter. I reset my daily word count on my Scrivener doc and it helpfully said my word count was NEGATIVE 3,825. No, I hadn’t deleted anything and I can’t work out why it’s done this.

Kid Extra is my tech kid. He shakes his head at me probably once a week because I have managed to kill or break something techy in an unexpected way. It’s my gift.

But this threw me out of my writing habit. Why? I don’t know.

Logically I just need to write 3,825 words and it’ll go to zero.

So I do that. I paste in some parts more than once until I get it into positive and then reset the daily count.

Nope.

Still NEGATIVE 3,825

Bugger.

Annoyed, I delete the words and NOW it resets to negative 7,650. What? No!

*headdesk*

Why me?

I know! I’ll turn it off and turn it on again… ha! It worked. Why didn’t you think of that earlier? Dammit brain.

Inner critic

I follow story coach and writer Jennifer Louden. She’s one of those people who always comes across as enthusiastic and energetic. She’s so positive, you know?

One of her emails this month said she had decided, after four years of effort, to scrap her current memoir.

Four years.

One hundred and twenty thousand words.

She confessed that it was not salvageable.

And I hurt for her. I know how that feels.

Today she had a soundcloud link to her talk about hiding. If I was her, after making that announcement, I’d be hiding. I probably wouldn’t have got out of bed, but here she is still working, still talking, still being positive and still trying to help others.

She asked listeners to write down their responses to their inner critic. She calls it the itty bitty shitty committee. The voice in your head that tells you you’re going to fail. You know the one.

Write down what you should say about yourself in response. So I write: I’m smart, I have three degrees, I’ve done amazing things, I’ve turned unplanned jobs into successes, I made more money for ANZA charity in Jakarta than anyone ever had before, I made speeches, I met ambassadors and world leaders. I’m the #8 reviewer on Goodreads. I have written and posted 78 stories on fanfiction. I have published seven short works that have been downloaded a few times. *runs off to look up stats on Smashwords – 9,130 times. [cool!]*

I write stories that people tell me they like. I have… *runs off to look up ffn stats*

Wait…

WHAT?

I have a total of 12,001,668 hits on ffn.

*jaw drops*

Twelve million?

I should be proud of myself. I AM proud of myself. So why does my inner voice tell me I can’t do this? I already am.

Dammit brain.

Links:

Home

https://www.fanfiction.net/u/2154210/Mrstrentreznor

Boxed sets

Hi, my name is AMG and I’m addicted to boxed sets.

Hi, AMG. *bored AA response voice*

I adore a bargain.

My brain sees a box of books as a better deal than a single title. I think… maybe they could be good? Honestly, I don’t get how my own brain works some days.

I’ve bought box sets for one title. Or one author. Or just because they seem like a good deal.

So, my kindle is full of them. I’ll admit there are some dodgy ones. Bad writing, bad formatting, bad covers… no hot linked table of contents. Believe me, that is a sin of the first order.

They aren’t easy things to organise as an author in the Amazon world. The reader might pay 99cents for their six, eight, ten books but Amazon cannot credit multiple authors separately for their share of that 99cents.

So, one author has to take responsibility for the payment and the distribution of that royalty earning and that has historically not gone well.

It can get ugly fast. There have been disastrous boxed sets that kept breaking the Amazon 5,000 page limit. There have been attempts to milk the Kindle Unlimited page read count with overlarge titles. And there have been copyright issues once a box is published with another author’s name on it.

But for me, the ugliest thing has been my inability to know what I own. I kept buying books I already owned. This is the opposite of a bargain.

So, I ‘tidied’ up my Scrivener Goodreads file. I made a folder for boxed sets and I added in every single boxed set I owned; with a separate scrivener link to the actual review when I read each title. I review each title separately. [Why should a good book get sucked down for being in a bad boxed set?]

They are metadata marked as amazon, kobo, audible, library and so on… it’s super easy to search scrivener; easier than the kindle app. And I counted how many in each set I had read, and marked the completed sets as ‘read’.

Bless me, I got ORGANISED.

It took me days.

You want to know how many… right?

238 boxed sets.

*face plants into keyboard*

It’ll take me years to read ‘em.

YEARS.

*stares straight into the camera*

Bring it.