Hello friends and the occasional relative! (FatoR™, for future reference.)

Yes, I know, this is crazy, how many weeks in a row has it been now? Five? Motivation, deadlines, and the very act of doing this update and not wanting to miss my weekly target is keeping me gloriously focused. I am aware this could easily get very dull for you, my FatoR™, but heck, this is frankly mostly for me as a progress marker in its own right. You’ll know I’m getting really out there when I actually update my totally moribund facebook author page. My GAF there is almost completely absent, unfortunately. Marketing is for another phase of my writing life. This phase is for writing.

Having said that, I will be doing some weekly sales of my two books soon—just so I don’t forget to take advantage of the KDP function. I really should do more amazon ads, so the KDP sales have some up to date and engaging copy to work with, but see above with regards to my level of effort when it comes to marketing. There will come a day when I shall be a marketing genius, engaging with the digital sales-space, but today is not that day, and I’m not currently sad about it. But it will be one day, I promise, but not in a procedural cop promising to catch the killer way I talked about last week. Or maybe. Whatevs.

So I completed another two very hard chapters this weekend. I have no idea how they will stand up to scrutiny upon review, though I have reviewed the first of them twice already, but I mean with time/distance, and seeing how they fit into the whole. We’re approaching the end, so the tension and stakes are ramping way up, and that goes for the writing as well! (It shouldn’t obviously, the goal is for excellence from the first word, but if the writer doesn’t get caught up in their own dramatic creation, how dramatic can it be? I think there’s a Robert Frost quote along those lines somewhere. Found it.) It is very exciting, I must say, and I am expletive loving this right now. And I’ve only had two half-caff coffees this morning, so caffeine based exuberance is not talking here, I think. Just creative juices flowing with almost reckless abandon. It is so much fun, and feels physically very gratifying, apart from a slight ache in the buttocks—I need to get up and walk, do laundry, go shopping—but apart from that, this is part of why I write: the head rush of elation when you are going well, mingled with the more solid gut-based satisfaction of knowing the work is coming together as intended, and a great finish is on its expletive way, batman!

I genuinely do a get a physical high from writing, when it is like this. I’m not sure I’d write if I didn’t know such personal pay-offs were coming. Why do a 50000 plus piece jigsaw puzzle if you don’t get a rush when you know you’re going to complete it? Later comes the deep satisfaction from placing the last piece just so and knowing you’re done, but before then comes the moment when you know you’ve cracked it, and victory is inevitable. I think this is like that, but on steroids. Puzzlers—let me know if I’m wrong there.  

So I’m excited, I guess you can say/see.

The non-existent progress bar is now set at 78.78% of completion of my sort of edited-as-I-go and therefore not going to take three years to edit once completed manuscript. (Digital edition).

I cannot wait to be done (but am not going to force it, and write myself out, as EH might say), as I am now seeing how to make the earlier sections better, so everything hangs together more solidly, the opening feeding the finish with better ammo with which to blow away my readers. Maybe not the best metaphor. Hey ho. See you next week, FatoR™!  

This week’s blog brought to you by the sounds of deep sith meditation. Stellardrone for writing tends to lead into these choices for ambient after a while—I don’t notice the change over when I’m in the zone…