Of Rainy Days and Mondays ...

Seriously. Who ordered all this gloomy weather? It’s been like a week since I’ve seen the sun and my solar batteries were depleted about three days ago. There’s a rumour that we might get some sunshine tomorrow and maybe the next day, but I’ll believe it when I have to put my sun glasses on.

Or even be able to read a book without turning on the lights.

Not much to report for the wordage report. I had a kind of vague idea for last week’s prompt from Brazen Snake Books, but didn’t do anything with it. Which actually turned out for the best because it was very similar to the story Beware the Tiny Doors/ Alex Westhaven did, and she did a much better job. :-D

I got all excited when I found an envelope from Amazon in my mail box on Friday, but it was just my account statement for tax purposes, not the letter I need from them to go along with my ITIN application. Guess I’m going to jog their memory that I’m still waiting for it. *sigh*

If the weather isn’t enough to depress a person, my account statement sure was. It made me start to question what I’m doing here. Of course I haven’t exactly been promoting myself so if I’m not selling I’ve only myself to blame. And I’ve been using my lack of an ITIN as an excuse not to promote myself or expand my selling base. What’s the point if I’m not going to get the royalties I’m entitled to?

I think we all go through these periods once in a while, where we question ourselves and what we’re doing. A time of reflection, I guess you could say. And while I figured out a long time ago I wasn’t in this for the money, it would still be nice to know that someone out there is reading and (hopefully) enjoying my work.

But the thing is, it’s not enough to self-publish a book, you’ve got to be willing to put the time and effort into promoting it, and yourself. So like much like my friend Jamie takes a night off of writing to work on the business side of things, I’m going to have to designate a chunk of time to work on self-promotion. It’s not going to be easy, I’d rather wade through a leech infested swamp than put myself out there, but it’s got to be done.

On the weekend I read a few interesting articles to get me in the proper mindset. One of them I posted on my Facebook page (you can find a link for it in the bar on the right) and the other one was found HERE. I found this article in particular helpful because I suffer from a lot of self-doubt and negative thinking.

One of my big problems is putting things off until the weekend. My free time during the week is kind of broken up - an hour here, a couple of hours there, 45 minutes here - so it always seems logical when I want to work out something complicated to wait until the weekend when theoretically I have big chunks of time. Only something always comes up, or I get distracted, or I’m just too darned lazy.

So maybe I won’t just have one day/time to devote to the nuts and bolts of the writing business, maybe I might take a couple days . Self-promotion will be a big part of this, for sure, but I also want to start researching markets for my poetry and short stories. And submitting them. I’ve been writing more short fiction than long so far this year, and some of it’s pretty good. Maybe it’s time to start doing something with them.