misc scrawlings

No, being easily distracted by phones and media isn't fucking ADHD, do you know what the FUCK it is?

- living your whole life feeling like you're defective and broken

- feeling like a failure even if you try BEYOND your hardest and burn yourself out bc it's not enough to keep up with the Neurotypical pace of the world

- hating yourself for being literally, PHYSICALLY unable to do things - even things that you love! (*the last 20 minutes of one of my favourite movies glare at me in absolute fury from the corner*)

- being called a liar by your loved ones bc you didn't do something or forgot something or messed up anywho - "just do it, what's the problem! Just don't forget!"

- getting so angry about the dumbest thing you feel like you're physically about to explode, yet being unable to even express that anger bc you'll be yelled at or punished for it

- in regards of the previous point, also having the emotional regulation ability of a fucking cabbage

- having your abilities to function so inconsistent you don't fucking trust yourself anymore

- having to fight 25 bajillion mental barriers every day to do the SIMPLEST FUCKING ACTIONS

- getting SO STUCK in a deep hyperfocus on what the fuck ever which isn't what you have to do and panicking w each moment you cannot rip yourself out of it and do a productive thing

- not having a sense of time and either being late all the time or being WAY too early everywhere bc you got so fucked by your time blindness you're now getting everywhere way before you have to

- having ZERO self esteem. Fucking zero.

- being told to "suck it up" or "it's not that bad stop whining" when sensory stuff bother you, sometimes to the extent of being gaslit

- just fucking hating yourself for existing

-oh also being bullied and hated for your "weird obsessions" and having to hear stuff like "stop talking about [hyperfixation] no one cares!"

And the list go on and fucking on, I could keep it going forever. I'm so pissed off at this shit, and do NOT get me started on how poorly this fucking condition is named, 'attention deficit' is our smallest fucking problem

The intention:

The thing I think is maybe happening which I have no idea how to check or prevent:

It takes effort.  It takes time.  It takes strength.  It requires you to spend days thinking, planning, organizing, crafting, and building.  Agonizing over every detail, smoothing out every rough patch, fixing the holes that most won’t even realize are there.

Destruction is easy.

It takes a fraction of the effort.  It takes a fraction of the time.  It takes no strength at all.  That sketch you started would take seconds to rip to pieces.  That novel you’ve been working on would take two clicks to delete.  To press “end.”  To wash your hands of it.  Hours of effort just washed away.

So why do it?  Why take hours to create something that could be destroyed in seconds?  Why take days to create something that could be consumed in minutes?

Because, in the end, you lit a fire in a world of darkness.  And eventually, the fire dies, but the ashes remain, and we always remember what it felt like.  The warmth on our skin, the glow it provided for us, the world set alight.

This sounds like drama, but it's not.

Not only is it well documented that pirating contributes to publishers not buying more manuscripts from an author (Maggie Stiefvater's experiment being the most famous), now we have evidence that Amazon's Kindle Unlimited algorithm is registering pirated copies of books online as the book being "offered" somewhere else, and punishing the authors for it.

And I don't know how much you know about Kindle Unlimited, but the thing is, if your book is in KU, you have to check a little box that says you're not offering the book anywhere else for sale. At all. So when the algorithm is finding the pirated copies, it's pinging it as, Oh! The author lied! The author misrepresented their sales strategy! ACCOUNT DELETION FOR AUTHOR. NO ROYALTIES FOR ONE THOUSAND YEARS.

Miette jokes aside, that's actually what's happening to very popular self-pub authors. Ruby Dixon just had her account deleted, her 15+ volume popular KU series taken down, and Amazon fighting her over the KU Pages royalties she'd already earned on those books. Now, Ruby's got her account back because she's popular enough that people shouted at Kindle executives very, very loudly, but what about other authors? This could ruin someone's career.

Well, why not publish wide, I hear you saying. Why stick to Kindle Unlimited? After all, Amazon sucks.

Here's the thing. Whether we like it or not, Amazon has a massive corner market on books, and for authors who are self-publishing, it is by far the most accessible and cost-effective method, PLUS, it's a great way to be discovered by new readers.

Because readers don't have to pay for individual titles under KU (they pay for a subscription, and then Amazon pays out authors based on how many pages of the book someone read), they can give new authors a try. They can take a chance on a book they're not sure they'll like. And Amazon tends to promote KU titles more aggressively because it's good for their business.

My little $0.99 short story, Swelter, is on Kindle Unlimited, and I can tell you that a good 85% of my royalties from it come from KU pages, not from people buying it. And that's for a story that costs less than a dollar and is not a big investment and has pretty good word-of-mouth in the f/f reading community.

Self-publishing is expensive, and time consuming. I'm getting away with it pretty cheaply right now because I am also a professional editor, and I have friends in the business who are willing to trade in kind rather than be paid. I have a really wonderful friend who is doing my ebook formatting for free because I beta read and do proofing for her. But if I were paying for all the services that I'm trading for, as most authors have to do? I'd be well over $1500 sunk into this little ebook coming out in a week that is going to cost $3.99 and be free to read on Kindle Unlimited. And that's not counting marketing. Because yeah, you have to pay for marketing. Hell, I had to pay $35 upfront to a popular site to be considered for their marketing campaign, and would've paid another $65 if they'd accepted me. (They did not, so I'm out that $35 without even a marketing campaign to show for it.)

And the thing is, I'm currently gainfully employed. I'm salaried. My spouse is also salaried, so I have enough disposable income to spend what I've spent on this ebook (which is still about $600, even with all the things I'm trading for). Most authors? Especially most self-publishing authors? Don't have that.

So Kindle Unlimited, for all its flaws, is a way to get more diverse voices in the business because you don't even have to buy an ISBN. Amazon assigns you an Amazon Sales Index Number (ASIN) and you're good to go, as long as you're not listing it on any other sites. Hell, they even have tools for you to make your own cover art if you don't want to pay someone to make it for you. They do a lot of their own internal promotion on Kindle. Readers can try you out for little-to-no personal investment on their part and maybe discover that they love your writing, and you've gained a whole audience. It's a great return-on-investment for self-published authors.

So that's why a lot of self-pub authors choose Kindle Unlimited. And a lot of authors will do a limited run on KU in order to get some early word-of-mouth and discovery readers, and then publish wide later. (That's my current strategy with Welcome to the Show, if it does well. If it's not doing well, I probably won't sink the money and time into expanding its availability.) But if this happens, if Amazon shuts down their account over "KU membership misrepresentation," then even if the book has been published wide and is available on other platforms by then, Amazon is going to dispute their KU Pages royalties and try to take them back.

So by pirating books, not only are authors losing "potential" sales (I know, there's a whole argument there), they could be losing real, actual sales that they've already sold.

In conclusion:

1. Don't pirate books.

2. If you see someone requesting where they can read a book "for free", speak up.

3. If you see someone providing links where people can read a book "for free" (if it is not provided by the author for free), speak up.

Clear prose is everything. It’s step one. If you’re not writing sentences people can understand, that then becomes paragraphs people understand etc, you’re not getting anywhere. In fact, you’re failing in one of the few ways a writer can actually fail. But that’s okay, because conveying ideas clearly is a challenge we take for granted. We like to hop right to the complicated stuff and want to skim past the fundamentals as fast as we can. Guitarists have a similar problem–proper strumming technique and chord changes are sped through to get to the shredding part asap.

It’s not sexy, but if I was gonna tell absolute beginner writers anything it would be: forget that big, complicated world you’ve been daydreaming about, forget that huge cast of deeply developed characters you’ve been building, forget all the long, glorious, complicated, poetical sentences you’ve aspired to write. Forget all of that for now. 

Write something that makes sense on the sentence level. Work on communicating images and actions clearly. Work on basic cause and effect. Character A moves, Character B reacts to the movement. (Tons of new writers reverse the causal order more often than you think.) Clear motions, clear reactions, clear motivations, clear emotions, clear development.