In theory, I’m busy working on Part 4 of the Mythical Menagerie series. In practice… erm, not so much. It’s been a really bad writing month for me. I plotted out this next installment, jumped into the first draft guns blazing… and then, about 1000 words in, I stopped.
I hit a difficult scene that stumped me, and then my situation at work changed, which meant my whole routine was suddenly thrown out of whack, and then the scene became a mountain which I am yet to scale. In between, I’m also trying to organise new passports for my husband and son, both of whom have dual citizenship (which just means double the trouble, if you ask me), since we’re going on an epic holiday later this year. Plus, my son also turned three years old (cutie pie!) this past weekend and I spent all my free time planning and organising his first ever birthday party.
All of this combined to leave me with almost no writing done this month. I at least managed to complete the short flash fiction piece that goes out monthly to my newsletter subscribers, but other than that, the only words I’ve written have been emails and technical specification documents that even had me nodding off!
I also made a huge mistake that left me feeling like a fool for a few days. I finally had the opportunity to take Beginner’s Luck, Part 1 of the Mythical Menagerie series, out of Kindle Unlimited and made it available wide, for free. In a fit of misplaced optimism, I assumed that Amazon would immediately price match and make the novelette available for free there too. So I let all my subscribers know, and then watched in horror as the emails arrived one after the other to tell me that it’s not free on Amazon. I asked my writing group and they said that it could take Amazon anything from two weeks to a month to update the listed price. You could hear me facepalm all across the plains of Africa.
Needless to say, I then had to send out another email to everyone to apologise and enlist their help in reporting the novelette as free elsewhere to Amazon. The friendly support staff at KDP then sent me an email to let me know that they acknowledge the price change and they will get back to me by 28 Feb. Here’s hoping. Live and learn, I guess.
While I haven’t done anything concrete yet, listening to Joanna Penn’s mini-podcast about narrating your own book has reminded me that I still want to get more active on YouTube. For now, all I want to do is narrate one of my flash fiction stories to see if I can actually do audio and to see how people respond to my weird accent, which is a Frankenstein’s monster that is unsure whether it should be English with an Afrikaans South African, American or Welsh twang to it. Really, my husband giggled when I recorded a sentence the other day, so I’m not sure what listeners will think. But I’m interested to find out 🙂
And that’s all my news for now. Fingers crossed that March will be a more productive month. I have a deadline to hit, after all, and I am by nature a deadline-driven person, so sometime soon that compulsion to get cracking will kick in and I’ll tackle that scene that’s stopped everything in its tracks. Any day now…
What do you do to get your creative productivity back on track again?
