The Fussy Librarian campaign for The Last Midnight resulted in over a thousand downloads. My goal was 900, so I’m satisfied, but the thought of that many eyes on my new words makes me want to hide behind a curtain.

Still, I hope a large number of those who downloaded will read the book, like it, and then decide to utilize the free download link to The Scribbled Victims that follows the end of the story, which will introduce more readers to Orly and sign them up for my mailing list. This reader magnet/book funnel strategy is something I learned from an indie author course I paid for. I hope it works.

Today, I didn’t write, but instead spent hours learning about keywords and book categories and incorporating the things I learned into my current Amazon listings. This I hope will get more visibility for my books which will hopefully result in more readers.

But even if none of the above works, I still feel good right now because a reader posted a review saying The Last Midnight is beautiful, and my most important goal as a writer is to write something beautiful. It’s more important to me than having a large audience or enough royalties to quit my day job. Don’t get me wrong, I want those things too, but creating something beautiful has always come first, since that night I stayed up in bed reading The Dead when I was sixteen and was awed by its beauty and its perfection.

Sometimes I think some of my sentences are beautiful. Sometimes I think elements of my stories are beautiful. And those sometimes feel like the reward of writing. But invariably, self-doubt will make those feelings recede. Sure they come back, like the tide, when I reread or daydream about what I’ve written, but hearing it from a reader means a lot because their belief in me gives me reason to question the self-doubt that obscures the beauty I sometimes get a glimpse of in my own work.

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Back in July I wrote a post about how I was writing with pen and paper while building the story for the final book of the Black Wax Vampire Trilogy. I mentioned that this method changes my mood and mentality versus when I’m typing on a computer. Creatively, I think this has been very helpful, but as I continue to build this story, my handwritten pages have become difficult to manage and keep organized. To remedy this, I decided to purchase a reMarkable tablet, which allows me to continue writing by hand, but since it’s digital, I can organize all my notes into folders so I can find them more quickly. Another advantage I’ve found is that I can add to notes I had previously written. Often this wasn’t possible when writing on paper because I had already used up the entire sheet, and the next page in my notebook was on a different subject altogether.

Yesterday, I spent hours in the library, going through my paper notes, and taking the segments that are still relevant to my new book and rewriting them into the reMarkable tablet. Today, I’m using it to free write, with the aim of going deeper into what is so far a very simple story.

The reason I chose the reMarkable tablet instead of just getting an iPad was because it feels more like writing on paper rather than writing on glass, but more importantly, because it has no access to emails or social media. I block my access to those things when I write on computer, and so it was nice to be able to stay away from them when writing by hand.

The tablet cost $500 (and the felt case was another $100…$100 for felt? WTF?), but I’m hoping it will help keep my daydreaming organized so that maybe I can become more prolific. With this book in particular, I’m hoping it will help me finish it in under the two plus years each of the first two books took to write.

We shall see.

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