Wednesday, March 20, 2013

What I'm Doing During the Long Silence

I really should be going to bed right now, but I've been meaning to post something here for a week or more and never getting around to it, so here I am, getting around.

I'm trying to decide what to do with Hero Go Home, the website. I've committed to keeping it up for the rest of the year, but then, I'm not sure what I'll do with it. I've been trying to find a way to make money off of it, but it hasn't really been working. And when I look at it with both eyes open, I don't really see how it ever will work.

Which isn't to say that there's no way to make money on the Internet, or that I have no other ideas I'd like to try. But seriously, I'm having trouble translating ideas into action.

A big problem is that I do everything myself. I generate the written content, the graphic design, the illustrations. I format the ebooks and the print books, choose the fonts, design the covers and do the artwork. I produce the annual radio show: write the scripts, do some of the voices, do the sound effects and mixing. I produce the videos. I'm my own webmaster.

And the problems is not just that it takes a lot of time. I technically have "time" to do a lot more than I'm doing. What I'm lacking are the mental and emotional resources. It's hard to shift gears from movie reviewer to graphic designer to novelist over and over every day. And when I think about incorporating something new that has a learning curve, the amount of mental horsepower I have left for everything else nosedives.

Which brings me to my current situation. I have not written a word of fiction in about six months. One of the eventual goals for the site was to make more money off of a smaller audience by getting revenue streams from multiple books, and I figured I was good for one or two books a year. But it's like I broke something inside myself with the Run Digger Run experiment. I have several novel ideas that are kind of half-baked, but nothing I'm close to being able to write yet.

And the longer I go without writing, the more anxious I get about the moment I actually do start again. I'm not sure to break out of that right now.