The Many Ramblings of K. A. Webb

For some reason I have absolutely no concentration span whatsoever. It's annoying. I'm flitting between working and not doing anything useful, so I thought my uselessness could become a blog post, especially as I've been working things out in my head I probably should write down somewhere.

There is a chance I might be renting a desk/office. At the Bognor Campus of Chi Uni they have a system set up for that, so I'm going to be having a lot on the 4th of June, because working from home is not working as well as I need it to. James, and the dogs, and everything, are incredibly distracting, so being able to go somewhere a couple of days a week would be very helpful. Plus, if I'm out on days when James is day sleeping, there is less of this expectation I'm going to be here when he wants to be getting up, which means he's going to have to sort himself out. Of course this is going to lead to whining and complaints for a while, but being the main earner means I need to be able to focus on what I'm working on and that means he can lump it. As much as I love him I need to think of myself sometimes. I'm not very good at it, but this is a step in the right direction. Having a place purely for work is going to change things for me.

I'm still waiting on Patreon to get back to me. This is irritating, but not a surprise. I want to know what the problem is and if they can fix if. If they can't I need to be thinking about what else I can do to crowdfund. (Once again I'm damning the people who came with EU VAT - mostly because they thought a law created in 2008 or whenever it was would work in 2015. Head, meet desk.) However this does mean I have been thinking of ideas for the Monthly Membership. For the collections that have the most characters/worlds/stories I'm going to be splitting them up. So, for example, I'm going to be splitting the Donor House into characters. This will be in timeline order, so I'll have all the stories from Alice's POV, and Nick, and Lewis, and whoever else I've written more than one story for. For Aurora's World I think it's going to be by kingdom, at least to begin with, and then I'll go from there. For the Brotherhood it will be by House. By doing this I can see what I have and what I don't have, which is important.

Then I need to make a decision about the novellas. Do I put them separate to the Monthly Membership and a part of it as well? I think I will. Separating them means buyers can purchase something as a one off and then make a decision as to whether they want to be a part of the Monthly Membership. It's not much more work, either. Putting them up as two things is relatively simple on Gumroad, which is why the Collection Ebooks are up separately.

Now that I've mentioned the Collection Ebooks I need to go into more detail about what I'm doing about them. They have been changed from the Collection One Ebooks to the Collection Ebooks for a reason. Instead of creating something new every time I update the ebooks I'm just going to update them there. This means you won't be buying the same stories more than once. You'll simply be able to download the new version and see what I've updated. I might have a page at the front talking about what I've done, to make it easier for readers. Obviously I will always have the tipjars up at the website, so if you do want to toss some pennies in after you've downloaded the new versions I won't complain, but I also don't mind at all if you don't. Doing this is all about making things the best value I can.

I've also got some new shortcodes at the website, for my series plug-in, that are going to make life much easier for me - because it means I don't have to post links for all the stories I write. I can just add a shortcode and like magic there's the whole list. I'm very happy with this. The easier I can make my life the better everything is. Now all I need to do is update the Donor House, Fae World, and World Walkers collections there, and then the website is tidy. I like tidy. Once I have tidy I can hopefully go back to working on stories. Writing is the most important thing in the world to me - but then I have an income to earn. If they both meshed the way I want them to life would be a lot easier.

Oh, and I can hardly let a post go by without asking for some signal boosting help. Any signal boost is great. A short one, a long one, one included in a load of other things... every boost is a chance of earning a little more income. More income means less stressed writer. Less stressed writer, I hope, means less flitting about, because it's driving me mental. What I want boosted, for the foreseeable future, is my Monthly Membership and the Collection Ebooks, or for simpleness send them to my profile. I know it's annoying having to create a new logon, but I'm not going to be leaving Gumroad any time soon (as far as I can tell, anyway, because the EU doesn't think short term - it only thinks long term).

I'm going to have a sale that I'm only posting on my personal account, now that I've completed all of the in depth descriptions of each of my collections, as I hope they've got some people here interested in reading more about them. Obviously I have stories at my website and I should be making a start on the first ebooks in the next few days, so they'll be available to purchase, but what I want to try to do now is build up my buffer a little more than I already have. Even though I'm normally very good at being the optimist in my relationship that doesn't mean I don't think about what might happen in the future. I'm just not the sort of person to let those worries get to me too much - I live more in the present than I do in the future and yet... well, I'm not sure who heard, but Peaches Geldof died yesterday at 25 (she was about seven months younger than me) and when those sorts of things are in the news it makes me think more about the future than I normally would. It happens whoever it is, it doesn't matter to me if they're famous or not, but as I was stupid enough to watch the BBC News channel after I found out, first thinking it must be some sort of hoax, it was something I went to sleep thinking about.

James and I haven't had easy lives. This is something I've talked about before. We had a couple of good days on Saturday and Sunday, but James had a bad day yesterday that affected him more than I thought it would. It knocked him right down again, so I'm more worried about him than I was before. Sadly, after everything he's been through, it's much easier than it was before for him to hit rock bottom and when that happens there's very little I can do to help, even though I try my best to, because he is much more of a pessimist than me. He keeps saying that his life has always been crap so it's always going to be crap, which really irritates me, as I feel that if he keeps thinking like that he will be right. The way you think can affect your life. Unfortunately he doesn't agree with me. Like when I tried to tell him that I thought it was possible his medical problems might have started in his mind, due to the stress he was under when he was younger, and now that he's not quite as stressed it's manifested itself as a physical issue. Instead of listening to what I was saying he just got angry with me, because he's been told before that other medical issues were psychosomatic and seemed to think that's what I believe, even though I believe that living with stress for an extended period of time might, in the future, affect you in physical ways. Of course it was just a theory, but it's not as though it doesn't happen to me - I've had more panic attacks in the last couple of years than I ever had in the past and if I get particularly stressed out I suffer with the most annoying side pains, although they normally fade pretty quickly.

I might just have picked a bad time. It was about 2am and he was really down, but whenever he gets like that he doesn't listen to me or accept that I'm listening to him, because I disagree with him. Something I've been trying to get through to him is that me disagreeing with him doesn't mean I'm not listening - it means I have listened and I disagree. There are times when I don't listen, that I accept, but that's normally when I'm in the middle of something and he doesn't bother to get my attention before he starts talking. Obviously I'm not going to be listening then because I don't realise he's talking to me until part way through what he's saying. There are other times when I have to get him to repeat things, because my brain doesn't translate it correctly, and normally, when he's not stressed, he's fine with that, because he sometimes has the same problem. Unfortunately it's mainly a problem when I disagree with whatever he's said or if I interrupt him. He really doesn't like being interrupted. I try not to, but sometimes I do, as I'm not great at knowing if he's finished something he's saying or not, in the same way that he sometimes thinks I'm finished when I'm not. It's not something to argue over and yet we often end up arguing anyway, when he's at his worst, and when that happens the ways he's acting makes me wish that I didn't have to deal with him.

Originally this post was going to purely be about the sale, but obviously I'm good at rambling. :D

Available for £90 ($150) I have 5 six 10,000 word story bundles. These stories will be written and sent to you via email in the format of your choice and then, after them being exclusively yours for a month, I'll post them at my website for everyone to see. I'll also be putting them into the collection ebooks and the end of year ebooks. Obviously this also includes donor perks and can be paid for in three installments of £30, which means you will get three months of perks and will add this amount to the site perks as well, so 5,000 extra words will be posted to the site for those three months.

Available for £180 ($300) I have 5 twelve 10,000 word story bundles. These stories will be written and sent to you via email in the format of your choice and then, after them being exclusively yours for a month, I'll post them at my website for everyone to see. I'll also be putting them into the collection ebooks and the end of year ebooks. Obviously this also includes donor perks and can be paid for in three installments of £60, which means you will get three months of perks and will add this amount to the site perks as well, so 15,000 extra words will be posted to the site for those three months or six installments of £30 which means you will get six months of perks and will add this amount to the site perks as well, so 5,000 extra words will be posted to the site for those six months.

Available for £270 ($451) I have 5 eighteen 10,000 word story bundles. These stories will be written and sent to you via email in the format of your choice and then, after them being exclusively yours for a month, I'll post them at my website for everyone to see. I'll also be putting them into the collection ebooks and the end of year ebooks. Obviously this also includes donor perks and can be paid for in three installments of £90, which means you will get three months of perks and will add this amount to the site perks as well, so 20,000 extra words will be posted to the site for those three months or six installments of £45 which means you will get six months of perks and will add this amount to the site perks as well, so 10,000 extra words will be posted to the site for those six months or nine installments of £30 which means you will get nine months of perks and will add this amount to the site perks as well, so 5,000 extra words will be posted to the site for those nine months.

I'd really like to sell at least three of these bundles, so if you know anyone who might be interested please let them know about this. Getting £30 a month means I'll have the majority of my half of the groceries (as I'm paying half the rent we now split groceries) and any extra means we'll be able to get some nice treats - I want to buy some fresh fish for James, because he loves fish, and I have no idea what I'd buy for myself, because I'm useless at buying myself food treats. I might use it for a couple of books instead, as I'm really behind on some of my series.

Right when we don't need any more expenditures I break James' mug. I have, hopefully, already found a replacement, because it was originally a birthday gift and quickly became James' favourite mug due to both size and shape.

James got signed off for two weeks on Tuesday, as he's in massive amounts of pain, given a new course of antibiotics (that aren't working), and had blood tests, which have all, so far, not shown anything. The doctor's going to refer him to a urologist, so we have no idea how long he's going to be off. Not knowing what's wrong really is the hardest part of this all, so I hope everything happens quickly.

So I'm trying to get some more income via the website. At the moment, if James stays off, he's only going to get Statutory Sick Pay and that isn't going to cover the rent. If anyone enjoys original fantasy fiction (and a small amount of pagan fiction) then please check out www.kajoneswriting.co.uk and any spare monies would be much appreciated. All income will be going towards groceries and rent.

After two beautiful weeks of freedom Mum and Aaron got back Sunday morning. :( Now Aaron is sitting in the lounge because for some unknown reason he's not working. It's not fun. Once again I'm back to sitting in my room, hungry, and I am not happy about it. It doesn't help that the ever wonderful James gave me a damned cold, so I'm sniffing and sneezing all the time. Thankfully it's not one of those colds that stops you from breathing at all, but that doesn't make me any happier about being ill. Right now all I really want to do is move out, which just isn't possible right now, even though Mum keeps going on about how much better it would be for me. Talk about stating the obvious, Sherlock. I wish I could just not worry about money and leave, but unfortunately there's this thing called logic that stops me. I know that James and I can't afford to move out right now and neither of us really like the idea of being in debt. (Mum seems to not care about debt - we found a credit card statement from 2009 that said they'd somehow managed to run up an £11,000 bill.) Of course during the time that they were in Cyprus Mum had to borrow yet another £400 from me, so that's £2000 they owe me now and I have no idea how much they owe Nan. It's depressing and annoying, because those are my savings and I have no idea if I'm ever going to see them again. The amount has been increasing since 2009 and I haven't yet had a penny back. I don't want to give them 'housekeeping' (Nan calls it that) when I haven't had any of my loans back and the amount keeps going up. I know exactly where the money's going to go as well. Alcohol. They went to the pub 9 hours after they arrived home from Cyprus.

Anyway, the two weeks were good... apart from the alternator dying in the first week and James ending up on antibiotics because his wisdom teeth are impacted and need to come out. I spent time cooking, which was fun. It's made me want to move out even more as I want to have my own kitchen, my own freezer and a gas oven rather than the stupid circotherm thing that we have. James liked my quick cooking a lot - I made him a sort of fake carbonara with cream cheese and cream that he loved. He's a weird person. However I did a lot less writing that I should have done, which is annoying. I don't know if it's because I was doing everything else or just because I was feeling lazy. I did have more time when I could write but I didn't feel like it. Hopefully having more people getting involved will help, thanks to the now permanent credit system. :) It means that you can get stories without needing money because you can earn credits. There are things that will cost money however, as money is going to help me move out - and buy Christmas presents. I'm not looking forward to December, February and March, because they are the most expensive months in my year. December, obviously, is Christmas; then in February I've got Nan's birthday, James' birthday and our anniversary (6 years next year); and then in March I have Mum's birthday and usually Mother's Day, which is usually very annoying because Mum's birthday can be the same day as Mother's Day. Once that's over I don't have to buy anything until next December.