I did not manage my 300 words of fiction yesterday. I did, though, go to yoga & out to lunch, found a new book distribution site (Tomely) and registered for it, exchanged emails with a Portuguese translator who is going to translate Ghosts into Portuguese for the Brazilian Amazon store via Babelcube, and did some reading about book advertising sites, adding a few names to my list to check out. Also grilled tilapia for the first time with a marinade that I more or less made up that was delicious. For a day with no actual writing in it, it felt as if I accomplished a lot.

I suspect that’s the problem with the indie publisher lifestyle–too many days feel productive without writing, but if I’m not writing, fundamentally, I’m not producing. Today I’m meeting with my marketing intern and maybe–if the temperature is bearable–starting to produce the audiobook version of A Gift of Ghosts in my closet. I’m set up to go with a new microphone, appropriate sound muffling, a carefully-placed chair, some free audio software that I’ve figured out how to use–now I just need to get the dogs to not bark for about ten hours in a row. Ha. (That won’t happen.)

In totally unrelated news, I gave Bartelby a sugar snap pea a minute ago and he wound up getting the peas out. Now he’s tossing one into the air, dropping it, then tossing it again, as if he’s playing with it. I think he keeps wanting it to be food, tasting it, thinking ‘ick’ and then a second later forgetting that he just determined that it was ‘ick’ and trying again, but it is seriously funny. Zelda took one sniff of the sugar snap pea and gave me the most plaintive, ‘why must you eat this crap?’ look and wandered away.

Ahem, focus, self, focus. This is the writing blog, so I should be writing about writing (or the lack thereof.) I’ve got a little bit more CBCA to write about, but not enough time this morning to write a full blog post on the next few criteria. There’re good criteria so they deserve at least an hour or. But not today.

Goals for today: write some–ANY–fiction. I don’t care which story, I don’t care whether it’s ever publishable, but I need to get my fingers back in the habit, sooner, rather than later. And start work on the audio version of Ghosts. I was worried that my voice wouldn’t be good for narration but there are so many filters that do different things, I suspect I can make myself sound like a baritoned guy if I wanted to. I wouldn’t, since that would be silly for Ghosts, but I’m hoping I can pull off a reasonably professionally sounding work on my own. We’ll see.