Writing Musings - A Look Behind the Scenes (December '24)

So, lots of things happening behind the scenes this month; nothing that I can really speak about, or nothing with any proper certainty. Some of it is because I'm in negotiations, some of it because there are no public announcements made, some just because it's not that useful.

An example - we're working on special editions of A Thousand Li and the System Apocalypse. All of those things are really expensive, there's a lot of co-ordination on things like maps, art, design, etc. but all of it is rather dead boring and more to the point, revealing the art that we have just isn't that great till it's time.

Same with things like the art pieces for the next Climbing the Ranks book or areas like that. In the end, there's a lotof things that go on behind the scenes, of running the business that don't look much like, well, writing.

I recently had a strange experience though, where it highlighted a lot of the work that we do and how it surprised people. I was speaking with someone about my various series, talking numbers and translations and the like and one thing that kept creeping up was my ability to say 'Oh, right. Give me a second - here's the exact number and details'. 

It was a little amusing to watch this very experienced industry professional be startled that I knew not only my numbers off the top of my head, but that I could pull those numbers with barely any work or hesitation. And all that is because of my PAs and the work we've done keeping track of all this.

Bureacracy - I hate it, but I make it part of our internal structure. We keep track of a LOT of data, more than most companies do. Part of that is because I'm a data wonk - when I want to know something, I want to know now. So collecting the data, making sure it's ready and it's all available is an on-going task.

It's a costly task. It takes at least 4-6 hours a week every week to do that. Now, that's partly because of how big we are (negative of writing so fast!) but also, because of how much we want to keep. Most of the time, we don't need that information...

Until we do. And then, that's when it becomes really, really important. Not doing the basic work beforhand would have meant I spent hours - a LOT of hours - trying to work out the answers to the questions thrown at me. It would have meant delays and also, twisted the perception.

When I talk business stuff, I know my numbers because we track them. So many others don't. 

Most cases, it doesn't matter.

However, the few times when it does, it can really matter.

This isn't the sexy stuff (hah! If you think sitting around in my sweatpants in my lazyboy writing is sexy, well... okay. We don't kink shame here. ;) ) but it is the important bits. The things that we end up doing because we need to do so, to keep the business ticking over.

I could just keep my head down, write. I don't write as much as I could, in some ways. 3k words at roughly 1000 words an hour is only 3 hours of actual fingers to keyboard writing, supposedly.

But getting the brain and the words to write those 1000 words are tough, at least for me. It's not something I can consistently do, so a lot of the time, I fill my hours working on other stuff like this or reading. A lot of reading sometimes, especially when I'm burnt out or stressed.

Anyway, I was told from your polls you wanted to know the backend. 

Here's one part - admin and bureacracy and tracking of information. Lots of it, including putting together processes, sales, what books were written, when they were updated, who our artists or editors were, what we think of htem, their rates, etc.

Giants globs of information, which when needed, I can pull out what we want and show it off.