Quick One Today
Yesterday, I wrote about toying with the 20 Books to $50k Challenge, and said I’d take a couple of days to think about it and write some stuff down.
Unfortunately, I have the most splitting headache I’ve had in years, which started last night. So a bigger update will have to wait until that’s cleared.
(And, honestly, the value of a daily blog if nothing else is that it’s brought to light my repeated posts where I draw attention to myself needing to fix sleep, headaches and other health aspects.)
That said, today I’ve been working on the Kindle Scribe, (It’s a lot easier than working on a computer screen – real no go apart from the five minutes I’ll take to write this blog post,) and it’s amazing how sometimes limitations drastically help you become more productive.
Two months into the daily blog project, and it’s been an on-off struggle with what do I write about?
Which, when you consider the scope of the blog, there should be something for every day. Right?
Instead, crickets.
Yesterday, however; “We’re going to write about how to quickly get yourself to the point where you’re a professional fictional author with a catalogue of twenty books plus whatever else comes out of that project. Everything else can wait until after we’ve achieved that project.”
And because of that limitation, the floodgates open. Because in just the planning, there are easily hundreds of topics just on this project. I remember back in the day when I did the Niche Site Project that is was the same. The limitations force you to focus, but they also open doors and in a lot of cases remind yourself of stuff you’d never think about but know.
Something like, for instance, book design. I’ve designed hundreds of covers at this point. Fonts, choosing backing images, typography, layout, etc. Paperbacks, hardbacks, ebooks, formatting. Backmatter, frontmatter.
All of those things potentially shift the needle a little bit, and all of the provide an opportunity for teaching and learning.
All come from that single constraint; “Write solely about one thing until you’ve achieved the project goal.”
And with that said, that’s enough for tonight. Hopefully we’ll be back at it tomorrow.
The blood vessels in my head might be straining, but the spirit is stronger. Ha!