In Today’s Journal
* About Your Morning Serial (Grrr!)
* A Short Take
* From Dave Chesson
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
About Your Morning Serial (Grrr!)
Welp, I tried to send installments of Nightfall only twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday. But that left a 4-day gap before the next installment the following Monday. That gap was too long.
Even I had trouble finding my place and keeping up with the story, and I wrote the stupid thing.
So yesterday morning, after the installment containing Chapters 14 and 15 posted, I opened Your Morning Serial to reschedule the remaining posts.
Only while I was rescheduling the penultimate installment, Chapters 35-36, I clicked the Send to Everyone Now link instead of the Send to Everyone in (however many) Days link.
Grrr! I pride myself on being efficient, I HATE shoddy, sloppy work, and that’s about the shoddiest and sloppiest.
But what was done was done and you can’t unsend a sent post, so I wrote another quick post to apologize and recommend the recipients delete the post containing Chapters 35 and 36. Readers will see it again in the proper sequence later in October.
So far, so good. But then….
I somehow managed to hit the stupid Send to Paid Members Now link instead of scrolling up and clicking Send to Everyone.
So then I copied that post, added another line or two explaining my second screw-up of the morning, and finally sent the post out to ALL subscribers.
At that point, I stopped and came here to write this. I only hope the rest of yesterday went better.
If anyone from Substack is looking in, you guys could make the process MUCH easier if you’d enable a way to reschedule posts without going through the clunky machinations of unscheduling and then rescheduling posts from scratch.
Update
Nope, yesterday didn’t get any better, except that I did finally hear from a dear friend whom I’ve been (as it turns out, overly) concerned about. So I haven’t slept well for a couple of weeks.
But I’m all better now. No writing yesterday, but I’m looking forward to getting back to the novel once I send out this issue of TNDJ.
A Short Take
for the old fogies out there: Per the (politically unbiased) 1440 Daily Digest,
AOL ends its dial-up service today after more than 35 years. The decision, announced last month, marks the end of a service once synonymous with accessing the internet.
From Dave Chesson (the Kindlepreneur)
I received the following offer in an email from Dave. If you’re interested, here you go:
The Story Grid is a book written by Shawn Coyne, a veteran editor with over 30 years in publishing. He’s helped launch New York Times and international bestsellers, and he created Story Grid to give writers a clear, repeatable way to craft compelling, publishable fiction.
[This is] not your run-of-the-mill writing guide. Plenty of books promise to teach writing. This one shows you why your story works, and what to do when it doesn’t.
Shawn covers:
- The Five Commandments of Storytelling
- The real meaning of genre and why it matters
- A step-by-step process for diagnosing and repairing broken manuscripts
- Tools thousands of writers have used to finally finish and publish books that connect with readers
All you have to do is
- Click the link above
- Enter your email address on the page you’re taken to
- Tap the “Confirm your free subscription” button
- And then check your inbox for an email from Tim Grahl (Story Grid’s CEO). He will give you the link where you can download the book.
Note: After you’ve signed up for the book, the system will take you to a screen that presents other possible email lists to subscribe to. You don’t need to do that. I got confused, too, when I saw that.
If you’ve ever had a draft stall out (or felt like something’s just not clicking), that’s exactly the problem this book helps you fix.
Thanks, Dave.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
The Non-Player Characters Among Us (Video) “Some portion of the population lacks an inner monologue. Several people share how they experience the world with a totally clear mind, and the existential questions they deal with.”
What you’d receive if the world’s top billionaires redistributed their $1.8T
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 710
Writing of Blackwell Ops 48: Razor Sharpe
Day 1…… 2213 words. To date…… 2213
Day 2…… 1210 words. To date…… 3423
Day 3…… 1318 words. To date…… 4741
Day 4…… 2481 words. To date…… 7222
Day 5…… 1588 words. To date…… 8810
Day 6…… 2215 words. To date…… 11025
Fiction for September……………… 40266
Fiction for 2025…………………….. 574415
Nonfiction for September.………… 23860
Nonfiction for 2025………………… 210110
2025 consumable words………….. 776911
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 14
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 32
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 118
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 302
Short story collections……………………. 29