Aside: The Kickstarter for the 10th Anniversary Edition of my dark, epic fantasy series Saga of the God-Touched Mage is fully alive now. I’ll comment on it a bit below. If you’re interested, you can find it here:
In Andy Weir’s bestselling SF book, The Martian, we follow an astronaut who is presented with a singular problem. Stay alive on Mars for long enough to get rescued. This, of course, is going to be a very long time. The story is completely focused on solving problems as they come up, and of course, the problems come in an unrelenting stream. Every task Mark Watney faces is “simple” and gets answered with a combination of inventiveness and technology (and, of course, maybe a little Hollywood magic, but we’ll not go completely there). The book is a fantastic piece of work. Between fixing problems, Watney is also constantly scrambling to put together infrastructure that will make his life better.
I’m thinking about that, though, because there’s a lot of that feeling in being a 1-person Indie author. We’re not faced with certain death if something goes wrong, of course, but sometimes it can feel like our business is facing such a thing, and it always feels like there are more Things To Do (amid the Problems To Solve) than there is time in the day.
Yes, in some ways, writing is supposed to be easy and fun, but when the business side of the levee collapses, the writing can get swamped in the flood that follows. At these times, the writing is not easy and is not fun. When things are going well, however, at these moments writing can be a respite from the confusion. Personally, I don’t mind a bit of uncertainty in my life. I am a lifelong project manager. I already know I’m on a tightrope much of the time, but I also know that a lot of people around me don’t see that. To them, things are just flowing for me. And that’s fine. As long as the uncertainty that comes with workload and problems isn’t too far overboard, that little tension can drive me forward.
The problem (for me, anyway) is that—since every project I take is ALWAYS more complicated than I plan—I need to be very careful in how I decide to arrange my projects. Like most writers, my idea machine is much more prolific than the machine inside me that creates stories. Go figure, right? Turns out that it is always faster to think about a story than it is to write it. I know, I know. Woah, right? But the magic for me is then to limit my time and focus on no more than two (or three, if I’m adventurous) things at a time, with only one being the Big Dog at any one time.
This Kickstarter I’m running has been a good example.
Earlier this spring, I was still recovering from a difficult life issue and was really struggling to get going. Totally bogged down. I had a list of at least five major projects I wanted to have finished (not that wording). So my brain tried to split its attention into those five, and if I’m being honest, it was more like eight. These were more than “just” writing. I had website issues I needed to fix, and a store to focus on. I needed to launch a series to all my wide sources (or, really, I needed to get the Skyfox store going, then launch wide), and add more infrastructure to the series Brigid and I worked on. As well as write all those creative projects. All right, the fact is I probably had ten projects for my brain to focus on, and so my brain did, indeed, try to do that.
You can guess the result.
One broken brain, and a lot of nothing else accomplished.
Because 100% of the tasks on my list were more complicated than I expected them to be, and that means that partial attention meant I just couldn’t get my feet to the pedal. My brain just couldn’t get itself wrapped around things. Both the writing and the infrastructure work I wanted to have accomplished were just too hard.
At the right moment, complexity and complication with the writing can be a lot of fun. I mean, that’s the place my brain wants to live in, and solving those problems is always delightful (at the end of them, anyway). But complexity on the business side of things, even if the problems are interesting, has a tendency to feel like work. And this is made worse because sometimes I don’t know how to do something, and that means the work takes longer, and then also I start to worry it might not work, but time is going onward, and things are getting tense and oh no my entire business is going to go to crap if I don’t get this thing done, and now I hate it, and this is all because I’m just too stupid to make it work, and wouldn’t it just be easier to can it right now…
Next thing you know, any joy in writing is just unable to overcome the weight of fatigue that the business side is pushing. Therein lies the problem with being an independently published writer, especially if your revenue stream is not large enough to hire other people. It’s just me in here, so I have to keep myself stable enough to do the whole job.
And like for Mark Watney on Mars, problems just pile up.
This is where I was in the early days of this spring.
Also like Watney, though, I realized that the key for me was to triage everything into priority. What has to come first? Focus on that thing, get it done, then move on. The advantage an astronaut on Mars has (har!) is that the world tells him the priority. At each stage of The Martian, the astronaut either solves the problem or dies. I did not have that luxury. Meaning I had to go ahead and decide what to do when. Which project gets my time first? Which is second on the list?
Who’s on third?
(Yes, it’s baseball’s All-Star week, I had to throw that in there)
Maybe three months ago, my brain eventually gave up, and it became obvious to me that I needed that one Big Dog.
I realized that I needed to get my business chops flowing again. Yes, the writing will always be important, and I have still progressed on my top writing project, but at this specific point in my astronaut/writer’s life, the infrastructure has truly become more important to me, simply because that infrastructure represents my purpose.
And I need to have that purpose sitting stable below my metaphorical feet.
So, the past few months, Project Alpha has been the Kickstarter for Saga of the God-Touched Mage. Second in the shoot has been cleaning up a few bits on the website (specifically connecting to old blog posts, which is a project of the heart, and properly segmenting out pages for books). Third was pushing the writing forward, and finally (yes, I slipped in a #4, kind of), I have been planning/prioritizing for the rest of the year.
Once I did this, things got easier.
Each day, I did three things.
Focus on the Kickstarter, Focus on the Kickstarter, and Focus on the Kickstarter.
If I had free time that day, I’d do something with the website.
And then I’d get some words in.
Suddenly, the flock of problems started flying in proper formation. Things started getting done. And, of course, the creativity associated with running the business came to the forefront, too. Because that’s the beautiful thing about running the business side of an independently published writer—presenting the cool things you’re doing to the public can be very creative. Everything from creating the Kickstarter story to deciding the reward tiers and determining how to get books to people around the globe can be a focus for creative approaches. And when I get my brain into that mindset, it makes that work fun in its own way.
One problem at a time, Ron.
One problem at a time.
And all those other projects? Well, once the Kickstarter is finished, I’ll need a new Big Dog.
So their time will come.
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