L.J. McLean

Hello all. Been a while since I spoke. Still the usual sparse moments when I do blog about anything. So let’s get right to it.

Life Itself

Summer is still my least favorite season. Productivity drops, no interest to hike at the park (not early in the morning at least). The floor fan blows on my face, day and night. The only time I can exercise is Friday night at the yoga studio.

The weather is changing finally. Hiking at the park will happen soon, and I’m making enough cash for a monthly yoga studio subscription.

But the whole summer, I’ve been experimenting with intermittent fasting. I’ve dot it down to making 18:6 a daily lifestyle… most of the time. Eating between 10 AM and 4 PM is my sweet spot since it works with my work schedule. Since last May, I’ve lost 12lbs (5.44kg), but have been plateaued at 256lbs(116.12kg), my life-long weight since I was a child. Pretty much the stall was the result of the stress of moving to a new apartment.

My brother and his fiancé needed their own place to live, meaning stay at his condo, along with his dog and her two cats. I had no objection to it. So it turned into living with the fiancé’s sister a few blocks south of the condo. Within two days I had to pack everything, haul three loads in my Prius to the apartment, have movers deal with the rest, sweat my nards off in 90-degree heat, then have time to shower and have a beer at the bar. The bookshelf stacking was finished a week later.

And in a month or so, my brother gets married. Now the realization is hitting me.

Now for the real news.

Patreon

So yeah, I reopened my Patreon page.

I had one a long time ago, but I didn’t do much with it. Amongst my work life and personal life inhibiting my writing life so much, I felt lost of what to do with it. Sometimes, feeling guilty. I closed it after a year without producing anything.

And now, after some consideration, it’s back.

My major roadblock with the Patreon page was money and audience. So many times, I ruminated on pointless questions. Do I immediately set all exclusive content upper tier only for a week (even though the stories or chapters had multiple edit runs or a physical book isn’t being made) and possibly scare off potential patrons (or, irrationally, offend them for any reason), or leave just a tip jar and release all content for free and never see any grown reader wise? Is there a barrier of entry that would impede my audience’s reach? Can I get a margin of success with my limited marketing skills? What other marketing jargon do I research to justify my procrastination? Or god forbid, any worst-case scenario I ruminated become true? Or what if…

(I stepped away to breathe)

It took me months to slowly limit that thinking and just do it. For now, the page is up, the $1 tip jar is available. There’s nothing ready yet to publish but it’s coming soon… maybe late November. If you like to support me, I won’t hold you back. No pressure (gulp).

I do want to address a problem: DeviantART. Since Eclipse was released—forced really—my literature reading experience dropped. I liked the old theme’s search functions and the clean text posts with settings to add indents and font size changes. Now it feels clunky, static, like the infant stages of an expensive WordPress theme. I can’t search by category anymore. It’s more for art and the stories to me.

It’s tough to say this, but DeviantART has outgrown me. It doesn’t feel right to publish anything there. I’m not deleting my account yet, but I will make a journal post and slowly migrate my viable work.

Methods change, and this is one of them.

Freelance Editing

The last piece of news is I’m closing all my editing slots for the remainder of the year. I just finished an editing project so I’ll need the break. Now I have time to do some copyediting studies and work on Ghost Factor. So for those looking for dev edit work, it has to wait until January, or February, for slots to open back up.

Until then, become a patron and follow this blog and Twitter for updates.

Ghost Factor is finally coming out of production hell.

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