The Many Ramblings of K. A. Webb

This year the raffle will be running bimonthly – this one will end on the 29th of April, as I’m running a day late, and the next will be in June. My aim this month is for five entrants and if I reach this number I’ll give away a rental or adoption for free; at ten I’ll give away two rentals or adoptions; and if I reach as many as twenty then I’ll give away four free rentals or adoptions.

I’ll be announcing the winner of the February raffle later today.

Enter this raffle in one of three ways: comment on any piece of fiction, no matter when it was published, and honestly going back to stories that were posted years ago is a good thing because it makes me go back to them; link to any story, no matter when they were published (this includes Twitter retweets, Facebook shares, and reblogging on Tumblr); or use credits – 2 credits = 1 entry. There no limit on the number of times any one person can enter, so feel free to enter as many times as you like.

The base prize is 5000 words. For every comment I’ll add 100 words; for every link I’ll add 250 words, and if they happen to be Twitter retweets, Facebook shares, or reblogs on Tumblr, I’ll add another 50 words, because I’d love some more of them (although I have a feeling I might be missing them, so you’ll have to let me know if you do this, let me know in the comments for the raffle); and for every entry purchased with credits I’ll add 500 words.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

I was working on the wiki yesterday, because I realised quite how bad I was at describing characters and I wanted to give myself some time to think about that. My problem is that I don’t see characters in my head. They talk to me, but I don’t have an image of them that I can put into words, and when I do I find it one of the most difficult things for me to do is actual find the right words to describe them. Often I’ll find that a celebrity of some form will stand out to me as the character, which can make things simpler when it comes to actually knowing what they look like, but I still find putting those descriptions into words the hardest part of actually understanding the characters, so I’m not certain what my next step for that is going to be.

While I was working on the wiki I managed to create pages for all of the Gaeloms and the sentient worlds as characters, rather than just as worlds, but it showed me how much work I have to do for that collection, and the others, in order for me to have even a basic understanding of them. I always seem to start with a character, who comes to tell me their story, and then go from there, which then leads to me having to do a lot of learning about the worlds that those characters live on from there. Some of it those characters don’t know everything that I may need to know, so I have to go further back, which often leads to other characters asking me to tell their stories, and then I find that I need to go further back. It’s like with the World Walkers. I started that about Lucille. At that time I had no idea I’d have sentient worlds to deal with or that Gaelom was going to turn out to be an experiment that Athare and Emrys had put together just in case something happened to the Web. Even though I love finding these things out it does add to my workload. Of course then we also have the Fae World, which grew when I found out quite how connected it was to the World Walkers and how much happened on Kalinia that I don’t even know about yet. That’s something I want to explore.

Or someone else can. I have updated the fanfiction page to say that I am happy for other crowdfunders to crowdfund any stories/poems/artwork they create in my collections as long as they follow my rules. These rules are: let me know what you’re doing, let me at least link to the story or artwork once they’re done/sponsored or they can be posted here if that works better, and don’t charge less than me. Obviously this isn’t an issue with the art as I don’t do any of my own. Sadly that is not one of my skills. Unfortunately I haven’t yet got around to writing the trade page, but that’ll be completed by the end of the month.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

For the next month all three and six month setting rentals and character adoptions are half price. Anyone who purchases a rental or adoption during this time will get another half price at the end of this period. This is something I do during all sales and there are no limits, so you can buy during this sale and get the following rental or adoption half price, and then do the same during the next one.

Story bundles are also half price, so if you were interested in one of these now would be the time to buy.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

Well, thankfully, that is the issue with LiveJournal sorted. Apparently my account was flagged as a potential spam account, probably from where I was updating my posts to put the stories into their series and they kept, for some reason, showing as new posts. I don’t know why it does that, but it’s not something I can change, and that’s why I’m glad that this shouldn’t happen again. For the next few days I will be keeping an eye on things though, to see if I’m still having a problem with crossposting, before making my decision as to whether I am keeping the LiveJournal mirror.

I’ve gone back to seriesing my post and so far I’ve got all the stories from the Afterlife, Aurora’s World, The Brotherhood, and Kim’s Earth into order. The Donor House and the World Walkers are also in order, but I stopped a while ago because they weren’t showing in order. What I’ll do is go back to them later on, once I’ve done all of the other collections, which I’ll be trying to do as soon as possible, to make my fiction easy to read. Unfortunately that isn’t something I can do on either of the mirror sites and that means that you’re probably better off reading my work at the website.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

Having the basic series plugin means that I can only put each post into one series. This may be something I change in the future, but for now I was wondering what would work best for certain collections. Some are relatively simple, as they’re set on one world, and any AUs or crossovers I can make a separate series, because I think this makes more sense that having them all the same. Others are more difficult, like the World Walkers and Fae World, as they’re set on a number of different worlds that all have their own timeline, which means I have a couple of options.

The World Walkers I can split into worlds or I leave it as it is and have all of the stories in one collection, although I will still have different ones for each AU I chose to write. Really I’m not certain this is as much a problem as the Fae World is, because each of the worlds do have a different timelines, while with the World Walkers they follow one, although events happen in each world at the same time.  Finally I might, when I get around to writing the stories, to have the different Donor Houses are separate series, but this is something that I’m using to make site navigation easier for my readers, so input would be really helpful.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

It’s nearly the end of January and I can’t quite believe that the first month of 2014 is really coming to a close, although I apparently still think it’s 2013. Next month is is James’ 26th birthday and our anniversary – we’ll have been together 8 years on the 26th of February. Some of the couples we knew in college, and people who got together once it was over, are married now, even though they hadn’t been together anywhere near as long as we had, which is strange to think about. At the moment we don’t plan on getting married as we had parents who went through messy divorces and have been children stuck in the middle of that, so I’m not sure that it will ever happen, but that isn’t something I’m really that bothered about. We’re not in a position where it is something that might be a problem in the future, either, and our focus, unsurprisingly, is on how we can make things easier for him.

Even though things at work do seem to be okay, as he’s only had one day shift and that problem appears to have faded, he still wants to find a different job. He never wanted to work in retail in the first place, but at the time he had very little choice and with everything that’s happened he feels trapped. We do have rent to pay, groceries to buy, and a car to keep running, so he needs to be working, and it is now easier for me to help. That just doesn’t stop him from worrying, normally about things had can’t change or won’t be able to if they do happen, and his ongoing medical issue isn’t helping. Especially not with the job hunt. This morning he looked really uncomfortable, so I’ll be reminding him later that he really should be filling his most recent prescription to see if what’s on there might help. He might also be trying out some herbal remedies, because we need something to work, something that makes his life easier, especially after what he said a couple of days ago.

As I’ve mentioned before this is an issue that even makes sitting down uncomfortable and that is beginning to affect him more than it had been before. Sadly there’s really not much I can do to help, except for get things for him if he’s having a bad day, and I hate that. The worst part is not having the problem myself, because it’s stupidly easy for me to forget that I can’t do certain things any more as I’m not suffering personally. I always try to think and stop myself before I do anything that might hurt him, but I actually have to remind myself that he does have a problem. That is one of the hardest parts of it all and another is never knowing when he’s going to be having a bad day. Some days he’s pretty normal. On other days everything affects him and I can say something I’d say on another day that he’ll react to in an entirely different way. I don’t blame him, I really don’t, but that doesn’t make things any easier to deal with, unfortunately.

His bad days can affect my days too, especially as we seem to bounce our emotions off each other, so it isn’t unusual for one of his bad days to turn into one of our bad days, no matter how hard I try to stop that from happening. Although he hasn’t been having days, really, recently, due to his body needing much more sleep than before, and being with the dogs does make getting him up more difficult, although getting him up is never an easy job. Even before he was ill he had trouble with getting out of bed and it’s getting worse, annoyingly, which just makes everything more difficult for both of us. To be honest all we both want is for him to spontaneously get better, but the likelihood of that happening with me somehow actually using some of the magic I love to write about is slightly higher than nil. Maybe sort of 0.003%.

I will be buying James’ birthday presents on the 1st as his birthday is on the 4th and I still have no idea what to get for Nan (the 5th) which isn’t unusual. He will be getting coffee, because that is his drink of choice, a thermos mug, in the hope that he might some day be able to drink a mug of coffee that hasn’t gone through the microwave several times before he finishes it, and a thermos, so he can take good coffee to work with him, as he really doesn’t like instant. Any donations in the next few days will be going towards that as I have some spare cash in my purse that I was going to be using that can instead be used for the rent. Last month I paid my half and, hopefully, I should be able to do the same this month.

With this aim in mind I’ve been advertising my ghost writing services on other sites, and I even got a nibble, although what she seemed to want didn’t really meet my definition of ghost writing, so I ended up turning it down. I’ve edited the sponsor a collection page to make the first option cost around $5, to make things easier for my American readers, while 2000 words costs about $10. These words will be posted online, so if anyone is interested then click the button, and I’ve added a text box named collection that you can, of course, add more information to in order to let me know exactly what you want. Give me a collection and a setting, a collection and a character, a collection and a story, or even give me an AU or crossover.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

I have a list beside me of all the work I need to get done by the end of the month and for the first time in a long time I’m actually not that worried about it. Even though we’re still not in as good a position as I’d like to be (James is still in pretty much continuous discomfort and, unsurprisingly, it’s still making him depressed) I’m writing more than I was before the new year and I’m enjoying the stories that I’m working on, which makes things easier. Most of the time I’m writing between 1,500 and 2,000 words an hour, depending on the story, so when James goes to his nan’s to work on the car at the end of the week – we have the MOT coming up the middle of February and there are some things James thinks it will fail on – I’m going to be seeing how much I can write in a day if there aren’t any distractions. At the moment I’m writing between 4,000 and 6,000 words a day, 5 days a week, depending on exactly what I’m doing. I should be able to write about 9,000 comfortably, as long as I’m working on something I enjoy, and that is my aim.

The more I write the more I realise how much I like writing. I’m not going to say there aren’t days when it’s hard, because there are, and on those days being able to get the stories I have in my head onto paper are impossible, but fortunately I have enough stories that I can bounce from one collection to another to find something I can write. Occasionally that doesn’t work, so those are the days when I should be doing admin work or something else useful, yet I often find them to be just generally unproductive low spoon days when I get very little done at all – sometimes I even struggle with dinner. Before James got ill he used to help me on those days, although they were rarer then, but now my only choice is to keep going, because he needs me (even though he says he doesn’t when he’s in his worst moods).

Having a list helps to remind me what I should be doing, what stories I should be working on and what posts I want to be writing, otherwise I have a tendency now to forget. There is so much to be done and sometimes it feels like I’m never going to have enough time to do it all. I know that I do. I have more than enough time – the one thing I’ve learnt is that five minutes is actually plenty of time to do something in and that is what I’m trying to get James to understand. He often looks at the clock and tells me that he can’t get anything done in two hours, but then we do work very differently. I am an insomnia and he’s a hypersomniac. Both are hard to deal with – his can be impossible on days when he ends up sleeping for twelve hours because his body just doesn’t want to work. Nothing I can do helps then, sadly, but we keep trying to find something that might get him up. His brain takes a while to wake up, while I can easily start writing within about fifteen minutes, even though I might well be shattered. Right now I have dry eye from not sleeping very well last night and being up at stupid o’clock to make James’ coffee.

So, the reason I started this post was to get some input and let you know some of my plans for the rest of the year.

The raffles will be happening, but they’ll be bimonthly. Each one will run for two weeks, at different times of the month to see what works best, and they’ll be pretty much the same as they were last year. 2014′s first raffle will be next month and I’ll be posting them on the schedule as soon as I have them all planned out. I will also be posting a complete list of all the winners from last year, including the unannounced November winners, in the next couple of days.

When I get a chance I’m going to go through Case and note down all of the other Webs that have been mentioned, as I think they’re going to be interesting to explore, and if you already have any stories you would like to see then let me know. It’s good to have a list of options to explore when I’m having a day when I feel like writing something new and interesting, although I do have some new stories to get started and some prompts still to work on. For those who’re interested they’re in my working on folder and I go back to them every so often, because I am going to write a story to every prompt I get, eventually. They just sometimes take more time if I can’t find the right story.

I’m also going to be working on other maps for the Web, to show some of the natural doors and where they lead to, as well as maps for each of the worlds. Even though I have ideas for most of them when I haven’t got round to working on them yet and that is something I really do want to get done, especially as they’ll be really useful when I’m working on the Introductory ebooks, which are something I’ve been thinking about recently, because I’m wondering what would be best for the collections that are set on more than one world. Should I do an ebook for each of them and then gather them together in an omnibus later on? It might work better that way, for people who are interested more in different worlds, and it would mean that I could work on each world separately, which might be easier. The collections I’m thinking of are the Fae World and World Walkers’ collections. As each of the worlds is very different I’m certain there are going to be people who read one but not another and they probably have no interest in learning about certain worlds. Input would be gratefully received.

Another thing I want to get sorted is a trades page. I know there are people who would help me financially if they could and would rather like to purchase more words from me without collecting credits, so I’m planning on making it obvious that I am also open to trades – words in return for something I need or want. This will include things like plotting stories for me as well as books and other items. So if you’re interested in this let me know, even before I’ve finished the page, because it would be good to have some idea of whether this will work in advance.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

Yesterday was not a good day, due to lack of sleep, so instead of trying to do my normal first of the month posts I left it to today. I’m glad I did. Even though I’m still tired I’m feeling much more with it, so I’ve been making plans for the rest of the year. I’ll be honest – I still can’t quite believe it’s 2014, but it is…

2013 was not an easy year. We were hoping for some much and instead James spent eight months in pain, spending time in appointments with doctors and specialists, having scans that didn’t help us to understand why this has happened, and, of course, on the day that he was told that it was possible he might never get better we lost our best friend, Lenny (a staffordshire bull terrier, who had accepted us as his secondary humans, and loved to give James a cuddle on the bed). I got lucky, really, as I started helping Teresa with doggy day care, which means I am able to help James out more financially now and I get to spend my days with dogs I fall in love with faster than I should. Just before we lost Lenny we gained Tilly (a rottweiler terrier cross) and then Bobby (a chocolate labrador) came to live with us, so it hasn’t all be bad, although I know we all still miss Lenny. He was a very special boy, in more ways than one.

The new year isn’t going to change all that much, although it does mean remembering that it isn’t 2013 any more, and hoping I don’t accidentally write the wrong year on things – which is something I always end up doing, no matter how hard I try not to. Nothing is going to magically get better, unfortunately, even though I wish it would, because I hate James being in discomfort all the time (although he doesn’t show it as much any more I know he feels it). I don’t know exactly what steps we’re going to be taking to make things easier for him, but we do have some plans for, hopefully, increasing his weight, because being on antibiotics for six months destroyed his appetite. He’s down to weighing 10 stone and he looks skinny.

For me things aren’t going to change much. Day care is getting steadily busier, as word about us spreads, and I can only see that as a good thing, even though I do spend more of my time that I should crawling around the floor to get lost balls. (Baxter, our regular boxer puppy, is one of the worst for that, and then he looks all sad, so I find myself getting his ball for him even though I told him last time that I wasn’t going to get it if he lost it again.) I’m still going to be writing, because I can’t give it up, although there were times last year when I found myself wondering if all the hard work was worth it, when I’m getting so little in return. However, when I was writing my list of posted 2013 fiction, I realised that there is so much on there that I enjoy writing that I can’t simply give it up, even though I may feel disappointed that things aren’t working out the way I hoped they would. So, the plan for the year is to post 10,000 words a week (not including Case updates), starting from Saturday the 4th, with my aim being to complete some of the many stories I’ve started, as well as start some of the ones I haven’t got round to writing yet. I have so many ideas and it feels like I’m never going to have enough time to get them all down on paper. I want to start earning some income from the site, with my aim being £100 a month (which, I worked out, will make me £2.50 per 1000 words if I manage to reach my goal word count every week).

I’ve update some pages to show my price increase. All sponsorable stories that are currently on the list will stay at their current price, but new ones will be £3.00 (approximately $5.00) per 1000 words. Until I see how things work out I can’t see myself changing this for at least a year, especially as I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of charging much more.

One thing I really want to get done, that I wanted to do last year, is get the ebooks sorted. I hope, if I get them published as soon as possible, I might see some more readers, as I know not everyone is comfortable reading online. The Case of the Counterfeit Enchantments is first on the list, followed by the advent stories, and then everything else. I’ll also be working on the introductory ebooks, starting with some of the worlds I know most about and then going from there. Would there be more interest in the ones for the World Walkers and Fae World collections being all in one, by world, or have them by world first and then gather them together? Both of them will take more work than a lot of the others, as I don’t know as much about some of the worlds as I’d like to, but I want that to change.

Is there anyone who might be interested in some email exchanges? I have some ideas, but I’m not entirely sure how to get them all down on paper, so being able to talk about them helps.

Another thing I want to work out is how to make some of my worlds shared worlds, because I would love other people to work in them too, but I’m not entirely sure how to go about it (especially as I want them to be able to crowdfund if that’s of interest to them), and input is always appreciated. That’s one of the reasons I really want to be working on the introductory ebooks – to give any other interested writers an easy way of finding out how things work in my worlds, although I know with some of them it’s not going to be easy. I find things out as I write stories, so right now I don’t have enough stories written for some worlds to be able to know everything as well as I’d like to.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.