Laughter Through Tears

The thing that I did for myself recently is that I unsubscribed from a feed that I wasn't really reading, uncluttered my reading list, and rendered it usable again.

Chrome went and did the thing where whenever you log onto Gmail through Chrome, it automatically logs you into the browser as well. Even though I have sync turned off (quite deliberately) this is still a problem for me. I figure it's a matter of time before they start harvesting, storing and selling even more data, and there's a reason I use DDG.

So, I am regretfully switching back to Firefox, and now I have to re-setup everything for my convenience.

But not right now, because my back is all crunched and I have Pilates in six minutes.

Talking about writing, worldbuilding and names in public makes me want to break everything.

I might have sworn, up until yesterday, that I had a GitHub account. Yeah. But I checked both of my Gmail accounts, both by searching for a registration email and by trying to activate a lost password. And nada. Huh.

I guess now is as good a time as any to register.

I've been writing for over fifteen years. I think I mentioned that. It was only this year (last month, actually) that I finally decided to commit to a career as a professional writer.

There are a lot of questions that come along with such a dramatic change. I've grappled with some of these questions for years. Do I have the discipline to write every single day, and the work ethic to keep plugging at it, even when I reach the less pleasant stages of writing? Can I generate an idea compelling enough to draw an audience of readers? Can I create the type of work that can be sold for cash on a professional venue, like a short fiction magazine or an anthology?

Today, the questions I'm dwelling on are less abstract, but no less difficult for me to answer. I'm debating issues of my online presence. Crowdfunding is becoming an increasingly attractive option for writers, especially short fiction writers like myself. One of the options I'm considering is opening a Patreon account. Clearly, the critical aspect of crowdfunding is creating an audience, and the only way to create an audience is to publish. So, the main step of creating a successful Patreon presence is still the #1 answer to any writing-related question: write.

In the meantime, I'd like to have somewhere to point people at, in case someone should ask me how they can support my writing career. Patreon seems like a viable option for that, if only in a long-term view. It would also make a handy place to compile links and create a writing portfolio of sorts. Less formal than an official website, which I am also considering creating, but it does create a necessary one-stop destination.

One of the advantages of the social media era of writing is that I feel I have less to worry about the informal nature of some of my writing. This blog, for example, not to mention my Tumblr and Twitter accounts. When I look at the online presence of some contemporary genre writers ('my peers', as I practice saying) I feel there's more latitude given, a less strict standard of what counts as on-topic for a writer's blog. I can imagine someone looking at this blog, or my Tumblr, and not immediately thinking, 'this person is clearly not a professional writer'.

I still have open questions. Should I create a website? Should I include a more restrained author blog, and mirror only the substantial content from my current blog? Should I create a separate Tumblr to include only content relevant to Collar of the Damned and my other original writing? For now, I'm plugging away at my actual writing, and of course this blog as well.

1. I'm kicking this flu's ass.
2. I did not realize how behind I was on my DW reading list.

My new hobby is going through my never-properly-cleaned Hotmail inbox, where I get all my notifications sent. Aside from some receipts and terms updates, it's mostly stuff from Twitter, Tumblr and Dreamwidth. And AO3 notifications. I like reading through them and remembering how many cool people I know.

Just as I was saying to myself, "You know, it's time to get off Tumblr and get some work done. Well, maybe a couple more minutes..." my productivity extension kicked in and blocked the whole site. Just as planned.

It will remain blocked until 5 PM. Now I just have to... actually... study.

These days I go by Hazel most of the time.

( About me )

When I post something long, or something that I think most people won't want to read, I courtesy-cut it. This is Law in my journal, because I post about such eclectic subjects.

( About fandoms and tags )

( Links for me )

Just cleansed a huge batch of random copy/pasted spam comments and reported every single one. There's some weird spambot that sends these things out in waves.

I did some writing recently, just sat down and wrote without editing almost at all. But, it's been a while since I made progress on my important WIP projects. I need to buckle down, I was doing so well.

Last night I finished Dragon Age II.

Next week I'm going to the sleep clinic, I'm a little nervous because of how nocturnal my schedule has been skewing. I should do something about that. Like cut out caffeine for a couple of weeks.