addiction and writing

I actually ridicule myself for my own addictive behavior, hanging onto the page-read counting page, in anguish when it dies out altogether. The last couple days, kind of low, less than the hundred I'd like. Today, 89, but all in India, where the whole thing is worth less than a dime. But it is a friend of mine, whom I regard highly, and I'm hoping she's enjoying my work. I don't begrudge India page reads - for one thing, it helps me break in to the market, as I have so few Indian readers. But also, on an absolute scale, a page read is a page read - if someone is enjoying something I wrote, that's much better than it used to be, and, it's that much more likely that someone will read what I write in the future.

On the general topic of curtailing addictive behavior, the problem as I see it is that I'm reading some absolute crap, that makes me bored with every page, and which, upon reaching the top of a new page, is enough to make me want to do anything else. So, being on my fast and tiny computer, clicking the page-read counter is about the easiest thing to do. But maybe a better thing to do would be to have something substantial that I'm working on, something that makes me sit for a couple of hours concentrating and making it as good as possible, so that by the time I get back to the page-read counter a couple of hours have flown by.

A discussion of "what's in it for us" was rather interesting as some writers are quite frank about reading a wide variety of work and some, it's clear to me, look upon mine much the same as I am looking upon others. Sometimes it is merely a question of genre. Or they don't really care for the traditional fare that mine reflects - a little stilted, old language, square kind of looking at the world. For these people, if there's no fantasy in it, there's nothing, it's empty, or at the very least quite boring. Why would they want to read about reality, when they have plenty of reality in their own lives? And the reality, as they know it, is bad enough to drive them to books?

I am actually finding a rich vein of life in the read-marketing world, where basically I get to surreptitiously evaluate each writer's act, based on what they have, what's presented to the world, how are the ratings, what's happening to the ratings in terms of daily ups and downs, how they present their blurbs and their author-abouts. It's like seeing someone at a party and getting some insight into why they act the way they do, learning snippets of their life one or two at a time until you see what makes them tick. We all have different motivations for writing and then, given the talent or ability, different and varying ways of getting it on the paper. There's enough here to make a collection of short stories based on the different lives of the ones I've met. Or even, based on the addictive nature of caring about such things as page-reads.

I suspect more than one of these writers is into the cups, i.e. the true addiction, alcohol, or more specifically, wine, since we are not really in the beer crowd, although some probably are that too. It reminds me of my favorite book, one which got me started, The Day on Fire (1958), about the life of famous poet Rimbaud, who fell in with the debauchery of writers in Paris but then, angry, set off to isolate himself, traveling extensively in Europe and mostly Africa, where he just hid for many years. Hid. I have no idea if he even wrote during that time; I've kind of forgotten the details of the book. It was good in that as a biography, it was true to fact and knowledge, and at the same time gave some idea of the passion of the guy's life. I admired that in the writing - if you can make history passionate, you've done something, in my book. I'm thinking of the same kind of thing with the Black Hawk War.

Enough of that for now. Back to slogging, and checking the page-read counter every few minutes.

Tonight I'm going to write about the downside of addictive checking of one's pagereads, addictive noticing of one's ratings, etc. I have to at some point admit to my addiction and deal with it. I've become addicted through a combination of circumstances: some extra time, due to retirement; writer's block (I should be creating/producing but am not); lack of control of more meaningful things in raising children/living life, etc. So I sit by the computer reading other authors' work (see my various writing on what I call read marketing, which works to a limited degree; and while I'm there, I check my page-reads. Sometimes several times an hour. Sometimes several times in ten minutes.

Tonight they slowed down; I'd got 52 during the day, and I simply didn't get any more. So here's the downside: there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. If nobody is reading any of your books anywhere, you can't make them. You might be able to call someone up and say, "read a page now!" but if nobody's reading now, nobody's reading now. That 52 will stay 52 until someone picks up one of your books.

Now it so happens that the other night, I experienced the opposite: absolute nirvana, as two people appeared to be reading a single book, the McDonald's book, at the same time. On that night I opened up my page-read count and noticed that it went up about five pages every time I opened it, faster than a person could even read, and all the pages were going under the McDonald's book column. Five or ten pages every two or three minutes. I was overjoyed! I had to go to bed, but I almost sat still, eyes glued to screen, just to watch the little numbers pile up. That night I got almost three hundred total. I try to get sixty minimum and lately I've gotten a hundred; in fact, I have roughly a hundred a day for the entire month of November and today's 52 weakened it a little but I'm ok; I still have over 1500 for the month. It's a good month for page reads. But because I'm obsessive about it, having it go up to 52 and then just stop there is like torture. It's not giving me what I really really want.

Keep in mind that we're actually talking peanuts here. 1500 pages, my entire month's haul so far, only amounts to about five or six dollars. That's nothing. When I see my page reads go up to 52 for a day, I haven't even made 18 cents. I have kids who spend a hundred times that on a single door dash. So I recognize the absurdity of noticing as fractions of a penny come crawling in and then slow down to a trickle or die out altogether. And, I'm actually lucky that someone read 52 pages of my book as that's quite a bit for a single day, assuming it was all one person who was just flying through it. Some of these books they read a story at a time, or they start and just lose interest halfway through, or maybe they get busy and distracted by something more urgent. I know that because I too read to get reads and I sometimes have more than one book on my plate. Tonight I read maybe 90 or 100 pages of one book, but only about 20 of another, and about 30 of yet a third; it was a good day for reading but on the other end only "good" for a single one of those authors. I try to remember, if I want to be assured of getting 60-100 each day, I should be willing to read 60-100 each day myself, and some days are harder than others to crank them out; also, excessive exclusionary reading (at the expense of writing, of course), is simply not possible as a practical reality. So, as there's a limit to what I can read, that's the same limit to what I can expect in terms of page-reads coming in, even though they come in unevenly, a few hundred on some days, barely making 52 on others.

Several people have stiffed me; I'm sure of it; I even know who they are. One guy apologized and went and read my book; he's back in my good graces again. I didn't want to hang around being mad at him so I just spoke to him directly and it worked, surprisingly enough. Now I like him and will recommend his book(s). It's like I know all these authors personally and I like dealing with some of them, and others, I'm tired of their deceptive dealing. They're not willing to pay a read to receive a read sometimes, so they stiff you.

In any case, there I am, by the page-count dashboard, watching as each one comes in. It's like being a stockbroker, watching the ticker as stocks either go up or down. One has to obsess about something, yes?

more-a-yer blues

Things are looking grim, as people who promised to read my work basically aren't doing it, or are doing it away from the counter, where the zon would pick up on it and deliver it unto me. There are perhaps four or five out there, who by posting on the trains, pledged to read mine, and are not delivering. Some may read tonight, as there's no real time limit saying they have to read it in the day, and that I can only hope for. I'm grateful that their downloading and reading maybe two or three pages has at least triggerred the ratings bump that I was looking for. But I'm disheartened that, bottom line, I was just looking for readers. These folks aren't reading.

I wrote to one and said, hey, you've stiffed me again. He was about eight days into it, and he had stiffed me before. Last time, he just apologized and read it. This time, I'm not sure what he's thinking. He posts on these trains all the time. What does he do, just stiff everyone he can? I find it hard to believe that you can just space out a responsibility.

Of course I have three possible recourses. One would be to complain to authorities, which I hate to do. The other is to download one of his books surreptitiously and give him a 1, or worse yet a 2. This also doesn't sit well with me and I will probably not do it, since I believe that a rating should at least generally be related to the quality of the work. Finally, there's ragging him but, if he really doesn't want to read it, what does that say? It's depressing. And it could be true for the other three as well.

There is one kind of recourse that feels better to me. That is to just wait until he posts again on one train or another, and post under him. He would need a lot of nerve to complain if I were slow here, since I think deep down he knows that he's over a month slow, owes me a read, that kind of thing. In a sense I just get paid back this way. I'm off the hook, reading his, knowing that now we're even.

I don't like this either, bottom line. Why are authors such dishonest bargainers? It seems like I'm hanging around the wrong crowd. If they think so highly of themselves, and have so little respect for a guy who's basically coming up from the bottom, what does that say for the kind of environment I'm in? When I get where I'm going, why should I even look back?

Before I go any further I should say that the vast majority have not been like this. I seem to have run across a nasty spell here, with one person who gave me a review after only reading ten pages. You think I didn't notice? Somewhere there are readers who want to read my work, and I'll find them. I'm working on a Kindle Vella project now; maybe that will go somewhere.

train yard blues

My chronic checking on certain Facebook sites has become comical, or at least I see some irony in it, as I've checked my favorite one maybe three times in the last half hour, and it's stuck at two books (How to Control your Alcohol Consumption and I'll Need You Forever) which I've already read.

Aware that what this means is that I need a new obsession, or at least something to get my mind off this what-we-call loop. I think I found it - Amazon ads. I'm getting a little better at doing them but what I really need is just the confidence to blow some real money getting people to click on my books. No money, no clicks, no clicks, back to the train sites.

On the train sites, I'm not totally confident that I've found every train on every site. It may be that I should cast a wider net, find a few more trains, and visit those more regularly. As it is, there are about eight that I visit every few hours; eight fill up my search window when I open it, so I see all eight, and if I just keep clicking on them in turn, I visit each one obsessively and believe me, mostly they aren't going anywhere. I'm just clicking away touring a dead situation. It makes me want to start my own site.

I've found the (Read Only) site the most fun, if only because it gets lively and when it gets going it really gets going. It's good to have a train carefully controlled too (thanks to the Mod here), and know that you can complain to someone if you don't get what you came for. I got stiffed by this one guy - I know him, yet he still failed to read my book - and I live in aggravation when I feel like I've paid for it with my blood and haven't got anything in return. Now sometimes, my book is read at an off time or a different one is read than I bargained for. OK. I should be able to handle a little uncertainty. But overall I want to feel like I got what I paid for.

Back to the grind, to the mill. I must say, my pagereads have gone up a little, and that's good. At the miserly rate they pay us for, it doesn't amount to much, but it's something, and I'll take it. Chou, and good day.

I signed up on this one writer's site and they asked me point blank if I hired an editor. No I don't hire an editor. I taught ESL for 30 years and did professional proofreading, and I know a comma from a semi-colon. In fact, maybe I know it too well. I find it difficult to tolerate these people (see the best of indie site who can't use a plural apostrophe or don't know from present tense. But all I could do was answer the question. I reflect on the matter and can't blame them for drawing the line somewhere, and saying, I'm not going to just let any old "self-publisher" in.

On the other hand, I sit here trying to market my book, and find that my best choice in actually getting it out into the public is to read this one, about three hundred pages, where the writer is so garbled in her expression that I can already tell it will be a three-hundred-page slog. Surely there is a better way. It is read only; all I have to do is read it, not give a good review or say something I might regret. I find that complimenting bad writing is especially tiresome but I have found ways of saying it that are at least truthful and hopefully will be taken seriously by the writer.

It is a tough uphill battle gathering an audience and I might take my own advice, which is to not let moss gather on a rolling stone, keep moving, keep trying things that work, keep going no matter what. Perseverence is the key. I have twenty-seven books and have barely started getting them out there where people can see them. We are coming into the season when maybe somebody will buy them. One can only hope.

I should tell about the three books I have on my docket at the moment. One, I just finished; it was an excellent book. I do come across these every once in a while. It was a romance of sorts but not all full of the intimate details that the others get carried away with. A woman is digging into her past, gets obsessed with it, and finds way more than she is able to handld. Just an excellent book.

Another one is written by a friend of mine, and is really quite good too, though I'm not that far into it. His books are full of modern British young folks who keep up a lively patter as they go about their lives, and they seem to have the luxury of thinking about sex a lot and expressing it freely, while not worrying too much about the rigors of simply surviving in modern Britain. There's a ball in their future, a bizarre kind of dance, and they are all preparing for it in their own way. But my point is that in stepping into their world, I become part of this extended conversation which, though it has good elements of humor, is kind of endlessly intense. It's well written but I almost have to put it aside for evenings when I have more undivided time.

And the last one is a kind of fantasy where I see words that frankly I don't know, and wonder if maybe I should have read an earlier book, or maybe the author simply lives in her own world and only chooses to share the meaning of such things once in a while, or if you ask her. These guys are living in this fantasy kind of world, with swords and shields and the expectation of using them, and yet these words are being flung around as if we are all supposed to be sharing a mutual knowledge of what this world entails. And then, lo and behold, the poor main character steps through a time warp apparently onto earth. Maybe it's a space warp or some other kind of warp but in any case he encounters a beautiful young damsel and there you go. I am not actually following this particular story very well and it's similar to the others in that I might have to wait until late night to have some free time to actually understand it.

And then I may add this other one onto the mix.