balance

I'm using this blog to write about my experiences and feelings about becoming a writer. I've become somewhat obsessive about it, but frankly, I'm doing much more marketing, and much less writing. It could be that I need to muse about the way things are going in order to deal with it effectively.

In marketing, I've chosen to go with the read-for-reads method for several reasons. I read entire books in order to get other people to read mine, and I can see visually when they have and haven't. One at a time I gain readers and a reputation; in other words, now when I lay out a short-story book, people will read it, because they've already read a few of them. This makes it easier - I don't always set them out for days at a time, and when I want something I get it - and it also keeps my kindle rating generally, or at least occasionally, below a million. I have limited success, in other words - I have a good reputation among a single group of people, writers who are desperate like me - but it comes at a cost.

The cost is, briefly, time. I love reading what I'm reading, even when it's fantasy or a genre I'm not particularly interested in. The reading itself is relaxing and profitable. But I spent the entire morning catching up - briefly, I've taken on three or four books in my quest to keep my ratings good - and sometimes there's no way out of it besides sitting down and just plowing through them. But what isn't getting done is the research and the harder parts of writing my own book. My own book is a little bogged down at the quotes I have to copy over into it, and just simply not knowing enough about several eras that it passes through.

But more than that, my imagination has dampened a little bit, partly in response to grappling with others' imaginations. I don't get to night time wanting to push out a creative story, but rather get to night time totally exhausted and falling asleep while reading someone else's fantasy.

How to balance? It occurs to me to simply put down the reading for longer spells, or at least in the morning. Don't lay out so much of it that I have to finish by some deadline. Do my creative stuff in the morning, while I'm still up for it. I'm not sure how this is going to work out.

One problem is that night is when I get really uninterrupted time. Now, in the days, I'm in good shape, but all kinds of things are demanding my attention - dogs, cats, laundry, kids, whatever. Even this - keeping the blogs going - is a kind of marketing, and I'm trying to not let them slip. I have about thirty, but some, like Tall Corn State, need attention urgently. This one, I'm just musing. You the reader are watching me wade through the stream of life as a writer, and find the way that will get me where I'm going.