Inconvenience Breeds Innovation
Today was an irritating day.
I’d planned to work on the much rumoured and anticipated Vault today. I’d uploaded a lesson last night after I finished the blog post for the day, and everything was working fine.
This morning, I log in, go to see what the next content that needed editing and uploading was, and I get a dreaded error.
“Welcome Jamie. This content is members only. Please login or register to see the content.”
I do a bit of a double-take, because not only am I the OG, original and currently only member of the Vault, but I’m also the Supreme Leader and Keeper of the Keys as well. It’s a bit like the Butler telling the King, “sorry sir, but these chambers are royals only!”
Naturally, I play around for a bit. Maybe I’m an administrator and not a member. So, I add myself to the member’s list even though it’s worked just fine every other day I’ve been working on it, and I’ve done nothing since last night.
That doesn’t work.
So, I go and make sure everything’s updated – and it turns out the membership plugin I use updated overnight to version new-point-new-number and that’s probably the reason. Following that, I put in a support ticket, and wait for someone from the Indian Subcontinent to send me a “support email” that asks me if I’ve read the FAQs and tied my shoelaces this morning.
Affirming that I can in fact brush my own teeth, I send an email and then sometime later get a template “we’re not going to admit it’s our fault but don’t be surprised if there’s another update tomorrow and everything magically works again” ticket reply.
Fine.
In the meantime, I look and see that apparently, the WordPress theme builder I use now has native ability to deal with membership sites, so I put that on the “to research” list and maybe save myself £200 a year on a membership plugin and redundancy.
So Inconvenience Breeds Innovation. Because failing that, I realise that SubStack premium publishers don’t have to deal with this sort of nonsense, and maybe I just go with the flow and do something over there instead, for once making my life easier.
But the Vault lives on for now.
In the Meantime
In the interim period since the blog went down a few years ago, I started writing fiction under a number of pen names.
Because I couldn’t work on the Vault project today like I intended, I decided to tackle another Frankenstein Monster of my own creation: my fiction publishing business.
At the moment, I have a number of pen names. They work as intended, making passive income. However, I’m very close to being able to cover all my bills, business expenses and savings goals with said “passive income” if I write some more books and optimise the whole thing. So that’s goal one.
Secondly, I can’t manage to write the longer, more lucrative works with my current output – not the less with the increase in output I’ll need to maintain this blog and accompanying Vault, my pulp publishing business, and the planned fiction under my own name which I’ve been threatening to start.
I could go on, but the point is; this afternoon, I’ve been figuring out the ways to optimise, systematise and otherwise improve my output while improving the quality of my output.
This involves learning how to write words better on the one hand, and building and deploying my own robot minion army in my own publishing business.
And really, there are tons of things you can do just on your desktop to make your life as a pulp publishing mogul a lot easier with simple code and systems.
And all of this comes about mostly because I couldn’t log in properly because a plugin update caused an error that I didn’t anticipate.
Inconvenience Breeds Innovation.