Hi Confused Readers! (I greet you thusly, because I know you must be confused - I sure as hell am!)
It's been a wild year, huh? It's been a particular tailspin
for me, both personally and as a writer.
In February I decided that I would try publishing everything
but my novels on Medium.com. And it was going along perfectly – I had over
three hundred of my non-fiction pieces up there in all my niches: Scared
Healthy, Disability Challenges, Poetry, Personal Experience Essays, Op-Eds –
You name it, I had it up there. I was even starting to put up my kidlit and horror stories. I
should have known it was too good to be true.
In August Medium had to drop a bomb and rock everyone's world:
They changed their user agreement, and certainly not to the benefit of the
writers. Also, during that same time, Medium writers became aware that the entire
Medium site had been cloned. Aah yes, my
friends: The fuckening. Actually, two fuckenings. At the same time.
I pulled all my material from Medium right then and there.
And as I did, I got to thinking about Medium. Good writers
draw subscribers to the site. Medium is making a fortune, but the writers get
dribbles, drooling over follows and claps. I wrote one article the last month I
was there that garnered $12 – little by little all during the month of
September. Last month that article (the
only one on my Medium page now) garnered 26 cents. The highest MONTHLY before that was $16. With
over 300 articles, poems, and essays up there.
I decided Medium is bullshit.
So, where to go, I wondered. I landed on Patreon. I started putting up stories (including
fiction and a re-release of Owl's Eye View Magazine individual issues) on my
Patreon page.
In three months I had 2 patrons, and one was my husband. While
I am grateful that I had interest shown in my work, I was spending all my time
publishing stuff that I'd had up on Medium, and I was so busy trying to
cultivate the Patreon page that I had no time to write the novel I'd planned
for NaNoWriMo this month.
The Patreon experiment was not a complete failure. I may, at
the start of 2021 do a series of writing articles and create a page on Patreon
to have a way to connect with my readers on a weekly basis. We'll see.
All of this was of course happening during Trump's reign of
terror, which had filled me with such outrage and fury over the past four years
that I couldn't keep up with the writing about it. I still have a couple of
essays to write about issues that I hope won't be forgotten once President
Biden moves into the freshly fumigated White House in January.
Politics has rarely caught my attention in the past. Rarely.
And it's certainly never distracted me from my writing projects. This past four
years has been a horrific nightmare, and the bitter dregs of the Trump
administration will be giving me indigestion and sleepless nights right up
until Biden's inauguration, when the America I know and love will rise from the
ashes and flourish once again. Is my country perfect? Nope. It's a work in progress
and always has been. And the only people who can do the work to bring about the
progress are Americans. We do that work best when we aren't abused on an hourly
basis by a colossal orange asshat.
And of course COVID has not helped. I thought being cooped
up at home would mean tons of writing time, and I did get some serious work
done, but I also spent a shitload of time reorganizing and transferring projects
to Medium, then to Patreon, and now, again, I will be working, probably until
the end of this year, to get everything up as ebooks.
I took down all my Owl's Eye View Magazine bundles to
publish on Patreon. There were pros and cons to that. The pros were that I
would put back together OEV issues from the first 5 years, re-edit them and
publish them one at a time on Patreon.
Each issue would be published separately, no dates, just an issue number.
There are 104 issues of OEV and they contain some damn fine stories, if I say
so myself. The cons were that the formatting on Patreon is more like a blog
page. It doesn't carry Word formatting. It's block formatting that spaces after
each paragraph. It wrecks the look and layout of my magazine, and totally
screws up poetry. OEV no longer looked
like a dark fiction magazine. It just
looked like a blog. I hate it.
So one major project for the remainder of 2020 is to re-edit
and re-release each issue of OEV Magazine as eBooks. All 104 issues, and when
they are all ready I will also pull them together in a box-set so ooky aficionados
have a choice.. I'm hoping to prep two
issues a day.
Another project is to publish my lengthier short stories as
singles on Amazon. Blazing Owl Short Horror will be popping up on Amazon.
My shorter stories will probably be worked into OEV Magazine
issues as bonus stories. Or maybe a
couple of collections…not sure yet. Or I may do Blazing Owl Short Horror
two-fers. Hmmm. Excuse me while I jot that down…heh, heh,
heh.
I'm shelving my non-fiction projects for the time-being.
Come January 2021 I will have my homeless stuff all tucked into it's new
habitat, and then I'll be ready to start fresh projects. There are three main ones: 1) Broken Old Broad Inside Out – A book of
personal essays and poems. 2) Broken Old Broad Outside In – A book of
essays about the world around me. 3) A so far untitled dark fiction novel in
the brainstorming stages that I will probably do for NaNoWriMo in November of
2021.
So there it is. My next 14 months all laid out.
Time to get busy because you all need stuff to read, right?
Thank you guys for sticking with me during this multiple transitional
year! Good stuff is coming!
Ter
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