Progress Post: Week 51

So I realized on Friday that… I had some scenes of Alien Captain that I hadn’t uploaded to Ream yet… like 3 of them. I thought I was getting behind again, but no, no I wasn’t.

Anyway, my last progress post was on Tuesday. Since then, I finished a new story hop story, uploaded episode 12 of Fated Mates to YouTube, uploaded episode 17 of Fated Mates to Ream, wrote and scheduled an email to my mailing list subscribers, and did a Sims livestream that went not exactly to plan (my sim still isn’t pregnant by alien abduction… but her hubby is.).

Some minor successes last week: I was frequently writing on my lunch breaks at work. I haven’t done that in ages. I also was working on my YouTube video after work several days last week, which meant that in spite of feeling completely overwhelmed last week, I did get all the big stuff done (I forgot to do a community post on Friday to Ream but it was just announcing a story that they probably got an announcement for automatically from Ream so…).

I also finally started working on improvements to my mailing list welcome sequence. I’ve been meaning to work on this for months but keep procrastinating it. I want to change the tone and offer more while asking for less. I also want to make it a bit more conversational and encourage engagement during that initial series of emails. Hopefully, it will improve things. We’ll see.

I also stopped the FB ad I’d started. It spent over $8 but I couldn’t figure out what conversion events it was actually optimizing for. I don’t mind spending more money than I make initially as it optimizes, but getting no conversions? On a conversion ad? I’m going to start from scratch and see how it goes. It still might not work to plan but we’ll see. As they say, an author’s biggest enemy is obscurity, right?

I have been struggling lately with motivation. Today, I just didn’t want to get started and doing this post was about all the motivation I had (which is at least earlier than I’ve done these posts in weeks, I believe). I had other plans, but all in all, I haven’t done much productive work since Friday. In spite of all that, I have been fairly productive overall. It’s just ending up being in confined bursts of productivity rather than more balanced/less panicked work sessions. I suspect it might be just the cold weather and time change, which keeps me indoors more than I would like and negatively impacts my preferred modes of exercise.

Still haven’t finished that book I was reading (I’m maybe halfway). I also picked up some books (1 fiction, 2 non-fiction) from the book exchange at work, which is now making me feel like I need to get on that. But I also bought Baldur’s Gate 3 on Saturday, so I’ve spent 8.4 hours on that since getting it (my sleep is even more out of wack than it was before…). Ah, the fun of video games.