It’s been one of those weeks, squiders. Where you can’t find any time to do anything around everything else you need to do, and then, when you do manage to find time, it turns out that something is either missing or wrong.
(I’m talking about the week ending today, not the week that started Sunday or Monday. For clarification.)
First, there was Nano, when I came to the realization that people where having planning parties and whatnot, and I hadn’t even come up with what I was writing yet. (The beginning of September seems like forever away from November, and then all of a sudden it’s not.)
We talked about that last week. But what I didn’t tell you guys was that it took me FOREVER to find that first chapter. I knew I’d written it, there were even excerpts on one of my writing forums, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find it. I knew it wouldn’t be on my desktop or laptop as neither have been in use long enough (the desktop is about three years old, after the last one ate it, and the laptop I stole from my husband about two years ago after my own laptop’s battery could no longer hold a charge at all), but it wasn’t on my back-up hard drive. And it wasn’t on my old laptop after I dug it out and got it operational. And it wasn’t in my Google Drive, and…
I eventually found it on an SD card I used to use both for back-up and to easily move stories between desktop/laptop. My current desktop doesn’t have an SD card slot (still annoyed about that) so I stopped using it.
(And yes, I have backed it up now.)
Then there’s the nonfiction stuff. I’ve been working both on a new SkillShare class and the books, with the goal of having both published by the end of the month. They’re related, with the book being about finding story ideas and the class being about setting up an idea storage system.
On the book front, I need to make covers for the workbooks, and, as they need to be paperbacks, I need to make wraparound covers. So I went in to get templates only to find that the pocket idea book I made is smaller than KDP will print a book. And I used Canva to make said idea book, and I can’t resize it unless I upgrade to Premium.
(There is a 30-day trial, so I may just go ahead with that and make sure I get all the covers for the entire series done in those 30 days.)
I’d also like to make a printable PDF version of the workbooks that people who buy the paperbacks can download and use, or possibly provide an ebook version with the printable PDFs somewhere, but I’m not 100% sure how to do that without making Amazon grumpy.
On the class front, I’m having the worst time with filming. I did most of the PowerPoint voiceovers, only to find that because I was congested you can occasionally hear me breathing. (I might be able to cover that with background music, but I can’t decide if that would be weird to have or not.) And I filmed one of the talking head segments (in two pieces, because one is of my face, and the other is a demo section down on my desk) and they’re both weirdly corrupted. They both have a half second where half the video goes all colored and pixelated. And of course they’re in the middle of a sentence, making it hard to cut or fix.
Not sure how to deal with that. I don’t particularly want to re-film those segments (because they’re long), and I have no guarantee that it won’t happen again, potentially worse. My camera is probably dying and will need to be replaced. Hooray.
And then there’s costume issues, notably that I need to cut a section off the glasses and haven’t managed it. (What the heck are these things made of?)
But I did sit down this morning and pound out a complete, workable plot for the City of Hope and Ruin sequel (which, no, you haven’t heard about lately, because Siri and I have been having the worst time and frankly took the summer off). It took me about three hours to go through everything and organize it, but it happened, and I am cautiously optimistic that Siri will also like it and then we can get this dang book written.
So maybe things are turning around.
How are your projects going, squiders? Thoughts on video editing and/or background music?
