The Many Ramblings of K. A. Webb

I keep doing it. Every time I look at the stories I want to be writing I get all excited and I want to be able to focus all my energy on that again, but I can't at the moment. Instead I have to ghostwrite stories for other people, because that's how I earn the majority of my money, and if we want to pay the rent I have to earn the money we need to be able to. Sometimes, though, I think I'm the only person who is excited by my worlds, which is disappointing. That's not going to stop me. I'm stubborn, so I'm going to keep going, and believe that, one day in the future, I'm going to be earning all my income from my orginal writing. $1500 isn't an impossible target. $15 a month from 100 people. $5 a month from 300 people. Can I get 300 people interested in what I do? Yes, I can. 300 people is nothing in the grand scheme of things and I'm certain I know people on here who have 20 friends who might like my writing. 20 friends from 10 people is 200 people. I suddenly realise now why signal boosting can be so effective.

Do I know 10 people who are willing to signal boost me? I believe I do, so I'm going to share with you the new product I have on Gumroad. (I think I might have been calling the site Gumtree before, because I am a ditz, but I am on Gumroad.) Yes, I realise this means creating yet another account on another site - but as I've said before I do have limited options, thanks to the EU. This is the Collection One Ebooks. This is a good starting point for all the collections and I will be updating it with all the others, with the only exception being the Inquisition collection, as I don't feel I've written anywhere near enough for it to put the time into creating the ebook. They are also available with the Monthly Membership, but I thought it was a good idea to put them up separately as a one off purchase to give people a chance to get to know what I write and my style, as I know from experience that can put people off.

Obviously there is also the website. A lot of what's in the Collection One Ebooks can be found there, but not everything. The ebooks do have extra stories in, for those who want to read everything, and once I'm all sorted I'm going to be working on finishing things, which will then be uploaded as ebooks for the people who have Monthly Memberships. Anything outside the worlds will, at least to begin with, be sold separately. There is a chance I'll also add them to the ebooks available to those with Monthly Memberships.

For those of you who are interested I decided on doing it this way because I know there are people who are going to want ebook versions of what I've written and I thought this was the best value, especially with the way I write. So for that £5 you're going to end up getting a lot - and I don't doubt I'll be updating the ebooks as I go, as I think that's the best way of doing this, meaning there will be 5,000 more words of story within it, rather than there being another something to download.

February is going to be the first month this year where I focus on posting bonus material, because working on the World Walkers collection last year has made me realise exactly how much there is still to work on. I have fourteen different collections (which may go down to thirteen with what I now know about the ‘Astral’ World) and every one of them seems to keep growing. With every story I write, with every piece of bonus material, I learn something new about my collections, something new about the worlds I write about, and it feels like it’s a job that will never end. It’s something that is both wonderful and terrifying at the same time, because I want to write for the rest of my life so knowing how large the job I’ve set myself is makes me happy but at the same time it can feel like I’ll never get eveything done.

Even with all the work I did on the World Walkers there’s still much more to do. I have the worlds, but I have very little else, so I know that the next thing on the list is naming continents, cities, towns, rivers, and who knows what else. This isn’t something I only have to do for the World Walkers collection either. Every single one of the collections needs more fleshing out, because even though I thought of all these things before I started I didn’t do as much work as I probably should have done, but then I made my decision based on the feeling that I either needed to do something with my writing or find something else. At that point I knew I wanted people to read what I was writing, although I never honestly thought I was a good enough writer to have people actually want to read my fiction. So I jumped in at the deep end with some basic ideas and started going. There are things I wrote based on ideas that changed very quickly as I started exploring my worlds.

The Donor House was, when I started writing, going to have been open for decades when Morgan entered, but then things changed when I wrote the ‘Beginning of the House’. Everything I’ve done has ended up being an exploration of worlds I began with maybe one idea that probably came to me in a dream. One of the early ideas I had, because I wanted to be able to combine all the ideas I had at the time, was of someone who got trapped in their dreams and travelled through a number of different places within their dreams. There’s every possibility I might even start that at some point. I still have other stories that I want to start and post, but I know I need to focus on what I’m doing right now.

One of the advantages I’ve found with writing in so many different collections is how easy it can be to work on them. I don’t have a problem with writer’s block now, because I can leave one collection behind to work on another one if I’m having trouble, and then I often find it easy to go back to what I was doing before.

I enjoy writing the bonus material. I enjoy exploring the worlds I’ve created. Something I have been thinking about is writing a travel guide to each of my collections, because I think it would be interesting, but I need to know more about the worlds first. There are some that are simpler than others, like the world of the Donor House, but the entire world was changed when people realised there were vampires and I need to work out exactly how that happened.

I do have some lists of bonus material I want to write and other people want me to write, but I’m open to ideas at all times. Have a question about why or how something happened? Prompt me. Want me to write about a specific world, or setting, or learn more about the races of any world? Let me know. I try to write what people want to see when I can, so ask away.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

This is my most intricate collection, and the one that I still have a lot more work to do on, because of the number of worlds, the number of races, and the characters that keep popping into my head. There are stories I need to write and post; more bonus material than I will be able to complete in a month (as I now realise); and magics I need to understand. At the moment I am working with a limited number of worlds and there is still so much more work to do on them, let alone moving onto other worlds, and the strange thing is that I love it. Not always knowing where things are going is kind of fun, although it can also be irritating when things don’t seem to work together (the wonders of working with characters who lie and scheme and hide little pieces of themselves). Of course I’m almost certain, after writing stories for several worlds, that there are different layers to each of them… which probably doesn’t make sense.

The magic used to create the web was new and most of what the fae did was experimentation, with no idea what was going to happen. Choices were made quickly due to fear. Now there are a collection of magical worlds that never existed before and each one, to me, seems a little like an onion. We talk of parallel universes where there may be another one of us who has made different decisions and lives an entirely different life. Now, I don’t think that every decision affects the magic, but there are those that do, and their parallel universes are parts of the same world, leading to layers of world, making them rather like an onion.

History is a big interest of mine. I read a lot about the Plantagenets and the Tudors, and I’ve never been able to stop myself thinking about what would have happened if… and there are more ifs that I can contemplate. When I create my own histories there are ifs. What if some of the fae, the Gold family, stayed on the fae’s old world? Would they have changed things if they had gone back in time? What if Raenarin’s Witch Queen had never been assassinated? How would that have changed the world? I want to write some of them, some of the layers of world, because I care about the ifs.

The problem is knowing that there are so many more posts I want to write about this collection. When I look at the my other collections there are posts I want to write about them too, and it feels like there isn’t enough time to write the posts, write the stories, and do everything I want to do. It’s possible I may end up having to work instead of being able to focus on my writing, but if I don’t have enough time now then… I don’t know what will end up happening. Having my website is wonderful. I’ve earned a little money this week. Things seem to be getting better. I just need to know that I can make money through this, even if it is just enough to buy food every week, because I don’t want to have to cut down the work I do.

Posting almost every day has made me happy. Having a focus has worked wonders, although my brain is still plot bunnying. Now I just need to work out how I can keep doing this and make money, so ideas would be great. Writing is what I want to be doing, so ghostwriting may work for me, and there are a couple of things I want to try out, but nothing is definite right now. Is there anything I can do here that people would pay money for? Ebooks are something I’m going to work on and I plan on doing bundles (mobi, epub and PDF together), but that will take time, so I need something faster. Yes, I realise I’ve been posting rather a lot about money recently, but having to move out, when we weren’t ready, has changed things and I need to earn. As soon as I possibly can.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

Lucille stared down at the envelope. She knew what it held, which was why she couldn’t bring herself to open it. Becoming a world walker was the only thing she’d ever wanted to do and she had spent nearly nine years studying each of the thirty-four worlds it was possible for a walker to visit. The exams were there to test a potential walker on their knowledge of all the worlds they wished to travel to, so most would study only the worlds they were most interested in.

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Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

I have closed the prompts post today. I still have one story to write and post, which will hopefully be up tomorrow or Thursday. Then I'll do a proper update. I am still waiting for four people who linked this prompt session to get back to me about which story they would like me to write another 500 words for, so if you could do that asap that would be great.

At some point today I should have one of my random stories up. This will probably become part of a collection, but I'm still working out all the details, because it will mean that I have to change a couple of other things. I think I'm early enough into this that I can change the things that need to be changed easily. If I do decide to make it a new collection then it will be the World Walkers collection - and this is a collection that will have a number of sub-collections. This is something I have wanted to write for a long time and it means that some of the other ideas that I've had will work well in this collection (which is why there will be sub-collections).

One thing I have noticed - and I'm not very happy about - is the way that LJ doesn't automatically change the date for posts that have the date changed. Everything that got posted on the 1st of November was prewritten because it is much easier to do things that way but LJ didn't update it to show that it was posted publicly on the 1st. The round-up for October, November's free story, the collection spotlight and character spotlight were all posted then.

Want to know more on who you can name, what you can name, and what you can prompt for?

( Read more... )

Today has been a good day for working out magics. There are still some parts that need to be worked out, but I have posted my third bit of bonus material for this month so all is good. I love different magics, which is why I write so much fantasy, and I have some other ideas for magics that I want to write up soon. Once I've done that I can post them up at random points as well as focus on my collections because that's why I wanted to have a writing account. I wanted to be able to make everything I write available to everyone. Even though I don't write for an audience, I write for myself, I still want people to be able to read what I've written and tell me if they liked what I wrote, give me ideas, and that sort of thing. It's never been about making money, although I would like to be able to earn something, but about the writing.

I've been thinking about ebooks recently. I know that reading stories on a journal isn't always easy so I do want to make what I write available in an ebook, but I don't know how I want to do it. There are a couple of possibilties that would work now, while my readership is small, but I doubt would work in the future. One idea was to set up a system where people could pick a selection of stories to have in their ebook and then I would email it to them once it was ready. Some would have been posted while others aren't. Or it could simply be buying the stories as they are, but lots of things are in parts and I don't know if that would work. The original idea was to release an ebook every time I made £75 which would be free to download, which may still work but I worry about undercharging and overcharging and things would be so much easier if I didn't live in the UK.

Exchange rates are a pain. I hate them. Creating a system of credits on the Internet, where 1 credit is equal to £1 if I bought it and a $1 if an American did, would make my life so much easier, even though I think it would probably be awful for the economy. Then I wouldn't have to worry about my £75 being about $95.91 because I could charge 75 credits which would be $75 for an American and £75 for a Brit. I understand why exchange rates exist and why they are a good thing, but most of my audience is in the US at the moment and I just wish things were simpler.