The Daily Grind

Wow, hard to believe that it's been almost a month and a half since I posted here. Just goes to show how much mental effort goes into the daily postings over at Hero Go Home.

The daily Run, Digger, Run! serial experiment is not going as well as hoped. I have a couple of daily readers, but there has been no build. What's more, it's a lot more work than I anticipated.

Because it's a lot more than just writing 500 words a day. I have to write the daily episode (and because I set myself the challenge of making each episode 500 words, no more and no less, I have to massage the episode until the length is right). Then I post it, write intros and outros and add the social icons and Twitter feed. Then I add the image header, which changes every day (and manually change the size in HTML); I make up the set once a week, using Inkscape and GIMP. And now I'm having to remember to pull out a small quote for emphasis, as well.

Then I have to open up the previous entry to pull the first episode link to paste in the current episode. After I publish the episode, I copy the link address and put in a "continue to next episode" link in the previous entry. And after all that, I have to change the slideshow on the main page. It's a long process for what ends up being a couple minutes' worth of reading for two people.

But I press on. And I'm trying to come up with more ways to make money. I'm putting together a new, better (I hope) cover for Death Wave to put on the paperback edition (with perhaps a special bonus story for added value). And I have some other projects in the works as well, but with all the work I've committed to on Run, Digger, Run!, everything else is moving very slowly.