19 ♾️ | Fraser Sherman's Blog

Tag Archives: 19 ♾️

March 3, 2023 · 4:16 pm

March came in like a … well, it came in like March, I guess.

Which is to say this was not a spectacular week, but it was a solid, productive one. Well, if you discount Monday.

Sunday night it was Plushie’s turn to get diarrhea and need to go out every two hours or so. As my boss is much more understanding than TYG’s, I volunteered to take point. I spent most of Monday in a daze, without the presence of mind to do more than blog posts (here’s one on superhero teams and another on the debut of Poison Ivy). After that, things picked up.And hey, he’s cute enough to be worth a little sacrifice. Though the strange squirting sound he made when he pooped was gross.

I got a lot of prep work done on marketing for 19 ♾️. Things like local bookstores that might host a signing, book events in the area, book bloggers who might be up for reviews, etc. Of course this will be no use unless I forge ahead and contact the bookstores, which I never did with Questionable Minds. This time I must not fail!

I wrote about 1,600 words on Let No Man Put Asunder. I stopped right before the next big fight because I’ve painted Paul and Mandy into a corner and I’ve no idea how to extract them successfully. Hopefully I’ll find the solution next week.

I submitted two short stories to various markets and applied for several freelance job openings. And I began rereading Impossible Takes a Little Longer to see how well it works and what I need to fix next go-round.

Last weekend we stopped by PetSmart to shop for pet toys and found an adoption event in progress. Didn’t adopt — we have enough — but I did get to see my first polydactyl cat.#SFWApro.

An unprofitable but productive week

“Unprofitable” in the literal sense: my writing cash flow is the lowest it’s been in a couple of years. One rejection today from a good-paying market. A possible client who said they’d be in touch has ghosted so I’m guessing they found a writer they liked better. But one of my rules is to keep writing even if the cash flow is low. I managed that.

I completed another chapter of Let No Man Put Asunder which puts it over the 10,000 words I wanted to finish this month. I do think I’ll have to go back and rewrite a couple of fight scenes — I was reading up on fight-scene construction today — but overall I’m very pleased.

Last week I mentioned I had problems with the mystery plot of Mage’s Masquerade and the villain’s motive for using a rather clumsy plan. Much to my surprise, when I sat down this week the solution came fairly quickly (I’ll blog about it soon). I think the story’s looking much better.

Plus I put in a lot of work on The History Arcane, including changing the title. I have enough 20th century works that I can make a slightly smaller anthology purely drawn from that era; I think that gives it a stronger feel so I’m going with it. The title is therefore changed to 19 ♾️, which one of my writing friends suggested (I forgot whom, alas). I also put in a lot of time with initial editing and straightening up the manuscript; some of the stories date back to when I’d use underlining to indicate italics rather than just italics (that’s how it used to be done). I’m also going to try for a bigger publicity push and see if I can sell more books. Though I did sell another digital copy of Questionable Minds this week — thank you, whoever you were!That’s pretty much it, but it’s a satisfactory work week. Two months into 2023 and it seems I still have game.