Where am I going with all of this?

It's after 3:30 am, so I can tell you where I should be going, and that's to bed. Sleep isn't coming easily, though, I have a little cat friend curled up close to me, and I said in the beginning that I would likely use this blog to talk through things for myself more than anything else. Welcome to Me Talking to Myself! 

I started Our Year of Dumpster Fire 2025 determined to finally make good on a promise I made to myself many years ago when I was in elementary school. Become an author! Which, okay...I guess I had already done that. I've written a lot of things over the years. But I meant an author who has books available for people to buy! The problem at the beginning of the year was that I was scared. Information about Amazon seemed overwhelming. Everything else looked even more overwhelming. There were a few options I read information about and didn't understand enough of it to know if I thought it would be overwhelming or not. 

Let's not forget my dear friend who has been with me every step of the way for as long as I can remember - Self Doubt! What? I'm supposed to pretend I've always felt confident and been sure everything will be easy? That would be fiction, and you'd need to pay me for writing it. No, I can be really pleased with a story - certain that it's the best thing I've ever written - and then ask myself, "But is anybody else going to want to read it?" If I could figure out how to turn my written into ebooks and make them available to buy, would it be worth the work? Would anyone buy them? When it came to the options that were easiest to find information about, what if it all looking so overwhelming meant I would seriously screw something up?

Then I found out about Itch.io, and it only took a few days to learn enough to feel like I could really handle putting my work out there. It didn't take long before I set up ko-fi as another option. Have I made a lot of sales? That depends on what you mean by "a lot". I'm not on anybody's Best Seller List (yet), but it's been more sales than I expected in just a few months. Enough to make me remind myself that I don't have to kick myself for having not done this sooner, just keep doing it now! 

The first four were easy because two of them - Roll for Divination! and Forest Tales - were mostly written. I had a lot of editing and rewriting to do, but I wasn't starting from nothing. Little Things came from something I was doing for myself, just writing little poems here and there. Putting them together in a collection was the part that was actually work. It was Art Grimoire that needed to be developed, have the mechanics of the game worked out and tested, make sure I was writing instructions that would be clear to people who do not live in my brain, and so on. It still went a lot faster than I expected. I was pretty excited about it once the details were worked out, so I didn't do much other than write for several days.

Where am I going with all of this? The answers depend on what the question is about.

Where am I going with all this rambling? I don't know. I'll find out where I end up. I don't make plans for being awake in the middle of the night and talking myself through things.

Where am I going with what I'm writing? What started as a Lovecraftian Mythos short story is definitely not going to be a short story. I shouldn't be surprised. It's taken decades for information and experiences to come together and reshape into that story. It was foolish of me to think I could tell it in 5,000 or 6,000 words. Is it going to be a novel? I'm still not sure, but I think that's just because I'm afraid of saying that's what I'm working on and then ending up with a novella after all the editing and rewriting. I'm good with a novella if that's what it is, but not if I already promised a full novel. Whatever it's going to be, I've got a strong start and am committed to staying with it as my Big Project for next year.

Where am I going with selling my work? Well, I've learned enough this year that Amazon doesn't look as overwhelming now. Certain options would be more than I really feel like I could handle, by which I mean I could do it, but I'd end up dreading doing it again and again. It's not a good idea to do something that would likely lead to not writing. I'll just stay away from those options for now. There are enough benefits to some of what putting my work on Kindle could do, though, that I'm ready to do it. Anxious, but ready. 

I know a lot of people are choosing not to buy from Amazon. I understand why, and I'll still have my work available in other places. Boycotting Amazon isn't as simple as some people think, though. When it comes to selling books, it's really the best option for a lot of indie authors. When it comes to buying anything, it can be about accessibility even more than convenience. That can be about types of disability and the support that's available, living in rural areas, living in an area where local stores tell you, "We don't carry that, but I know you can get it on Amazon!" 

Amazon could stop selling things today, and I don't know enough to say whether or not Jeff Bezos would feel the pain in his bank accounts, but I do know he wouldn't lose enough for it to really matter. Besides all of his other investments, Amazon would exist. It's more than just online buying and selling.  I think being mindful about how we spend money is a better way to do things. Looking at books, ask yourself if the author you want to support has their work available in other places. If they don't, then you can choose to buy their books on Amazon without ordering things that you can get somewhere else. 

You can take that a little farther. Let's say you're not getting a book from Amazon because you can get it at stores in your town. Maybe there's no reason to avoid any of those stores, but only one of them is a small locally owned store. You can make the choice to spend your money with a local business instead of a big chain. I'm not saying boycotting does no good - we have seen otherwise - but sometimes looking at why you spend your money where you do works better when boycotting might not be possible, or might do harm to people you want to support.

I might come back to that subject at some point. Or I might decide a lot of other people have been saying that better than I am, including giving plenty of tips on how to best do it, and there's no need for me to speak over them.

So, again, where am I going with all of this? I'm going to keep writing. That's the most important part of my plans. 

And I'm going to bed.