This week has been difficult for me. I've got lots of stress. The money situation isn't hot. It's also been a relief. The better candidates won in my local election. For the most part, the elections that we saw this year have had a vibe to the winners. We're still in the midst of a shutdown, impacting not only government workers but people who rely on government services. A combination of extreme short-term thinking and grift in the tech sector mean that jobs are hard to come by and extremely unstable.
I don't really want to focus that much on politics here but politics have real world impacts and I'm a part of that real world impact.
October has been a challenging month for me. I have experience doing audio recording — quite a bit — but none of it is recent. Voice acting is also different than narrating books. The total length of book one is also a new challenge. I've never produced a single audio work that was longer than a half hour.
I've learned a lot.
And, of course, I'm nervous too. “What if everyone hates it?” “What if the distributors want changes to the audio files that would require me to re-record the whole thing?” “What if ...” a bunch of other things I don't want to get into.
It's an exciting moment too but, at this exact moment, it's mostly nerve-racking.
Next steps:
Making accounts with the ebook distributors I'm doing manual releases with
Making the audiobook distributor accounts
Next month
Best case scenario will see me spending at least two days dealing with creation of the various accounts I need to release book one. Another day for actually publishing the audio and the ebook.
Book two is already written. I'll probably try to get it recorded and produced in November but let's call that a stretch goal.
At the moment, my writing plan for the month is to work on my first full length novel. Not really my first, just the first I'm planning to publish. I started work on it last November and had to cool my heels in March. I've got about 30K written on it and expect to hit 60-70K in total.
That one's going to have a bunch of special stuff in the interior of the ebook and print book too ... assuming I'm up to doing a print book. I also plan to make that an audiobook.
It would be wonderful to have that out by end of December. I don't even have a complete first draft yet. So that's almost certainly not happening. 😹