less than this

By this time tomorrow I should be home from work, in my bedroom, working on my Single-Sitting-Book. I do plan to stop at a grocery store on the way home to be sure I have enough of everything I need, but then it's home and not out again until the book is done. With any luck, the 'first draft' will be complete before breakfast time, Sunday morning. Not in the least because I have to work on Monday.

Looking at the voting results and donation levels, it looks like only a few people have voted, and none have donated. At this point, I don't actually expect any donations. I donated 25 cents myself, to be sure everything was working right, and two people have said they'd give me $5 in person if they see me, and one good friend even said he'd give me the $30 (him I trust), but in all reality, donations won't even reach the cost of a dinner for two. But come on! Voting is easy and free, and you can vote as many times as you like! Take a minute or ten, read the descriptions, or don't read them, and vote, if only to vote against the ones you'd never want to see the light of day!

Tell your friends! Link your neighbors! Make fun of the crazy person for your own enjoyment!

Heck, I'll tell you what: To generate more of an incentive for you to vote, I'll put the rough draft online for free for everyone who wants it as soon as it's done, and leave it up until I have the (edited, et cetera) paperback version available for sale. Vote, vote, vote, then come back here Monday or Tuesday or whatever and read the book for free.

Donate a quarter or more, and I'll give you free copies of Book One and Book Two of the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction. In fact, I'll go put those PDFs in there right now, so you can get 'em as soon as you donate. How's that sound?

yes, I burn white hot, but someday I'll find someone who can burn white hot IN love with me and not burn out, someone who can accept love that exists in a vacuum, someone who's already burned...

blerg

(someone emailed me about my last post, saying such things as "You sound rather petulant! Did you consider that perhaps your readers do not want to sign up for bitpass, or that they are broke, or perhaps they do not want to encourage such an unhealthy endeavor? I would donate a couple dollars, and I'd like to vote and get a free copy, but I don't want to go through bitpass." The following is my email response to her.)

Oh, come on. I post on this subject not less than three or four times a year, and I'm pretty sure I posted almost the same thought within the last month. Thousands of people visit my site every day, an average of between 50k and 70k visitors every month (putting Modern Evil and lessthanthis together), and before commenting appears to have broken (around June), lessthanthis only had 57 comments. Over 325,000 visitors, viewing an average of over four pages per visit, but only 57 comments, from only 10 people, in six months. The only book I ever sold 'online' was when you pre-ordered Lost and Not Found. I've never sold a book through CafePress. The idea that even though people come to the site, it doesn't have a 'community' or any 'support' is not a new one, and not REALLY a shock to me. Just a disappointment.

Also, I have no idea why anyone, anywhere, has a problem with paying for things via BitPass. If one planned to donate $3 or more, it's just like paying with Paypal or credit card, with one extra step - you wouldn't have to put more value into your BitPass account than you planned to spend, except that the minimum buy-in is $3. They're secure, they're stable (for an internet company; I've been doing business with them for literally years), and they offer a money-back guarantee.

As far as 'why' or 'if' ... part of it has to do with time perception. If I work off and on, or even steadily, over weeks and months to write a first draft, versus if I whipped out a first draft in a single weekend, there is a different sense of time investment. I know, because I can be obsessive and I obsessively tracked it on two of the four novels I've completed, that the number of hours actually spent writing (considering time setting up and breaking down at cafes, time chit-chatting, ordering drinks, going to and coming back from libraries and cafes and wherever else subtracted in a reasonable fashion) over the course of several months (or weeks; one I wrote for NaNoWriMo, the other I wrote over about 3 months, off and on) is actually quite the same. So if it takes me about 60 hours of work to get a first draft done, I could theoretically do an hour a day for two months (though I have trouble being that dedicated and consistent to something that isn't accountable to anyone other than myself) or an hour or two three or four days a week for two or three months, or two hours a day for a month (as I did that November I wrote Dragons' Truth, pretty well), or ten hours a day two days a week for three weeks (giving up entire weekends), or in three intense twenty hour stretches (giving up only one very long day of each weekend, for less than a month), or ... or just one really long stretch, one really long weekend. And it's all the same to my brain, as far as the creating goes, I think... Though I'll know better in a little over a week.

(more...)

According to my server, not fewer than 1,046 people, and perhaps as many as 8,600+ people, have viewed this site (on lessthanthis.com, no idea how many saw the equivalent page on my LiveJournal) since I put up my request for support of my Single-Sitting-Book, less than two weeks ago. With the entry remaining on the main page of the site and two links to it appearing on every page of the site, including the archives, links to the donation page and the description page have been seen at least twenty thousand times since I posted them, all told. And the response so far has been simply unbelievable!

That is, I simply don't believe it.

A grand total of Zero people, donating the shocking total sum of Zero dollars and Zero cents, have shown their support. In addition to that, an unheard-of Zero people have emailed me or called me or commented in other ways about the project, counting all positive and negative communications together.

I just don't know what to say.

Thank you all, for showing me exactly how much you care. I'd suspected it, but this shows it concretely - the seventeen to twenty-five thousand visitors to lessthanthis.com every month are not shy about showing what this site means to them.