Do you ever feel like you spend too much time waiting around?
Maybe you’re waiting at the doctor’s office, waiting in line at the grocery store, waiting in a virtual queue, waiting for something to download, waiting to turn twenty-one, waiting to graduate, or waiting for my next book. Perhaps we are all waiting all the time. April was a month like that for me.
When you’re writing a book, there’s of work for you to do, but there’s also a lot of waiting to do. I gave my beta readers about a month to give feedback on my upcoming novel, which they finished up mid-March. Then my proofreader had about a month to comb through it, which he finished up mid-April. During these times, it’s not a good idea to continue changing the manuscript, because that makes it makes future changes more difficult to make.
This is where I mention I hate waiting. It makes me feel like I’m flushing time down the toilet. Of course, there are plenty of times, such as at the doctor’s office, I just have to fold my arms and accept the time that slips away. But not this April. While She’s Going to Kill You was being proofread, I accomplished quite a lot.
For one, I’ve learned to work on two projects at the same time. So on April 19, 2024, The Veiled Maze Anniversary Edition released. I used some of my time in waiting to switch focus onto a different project.
Another side project was checked off: ZanderverZ now has an official discord. Somehow, I remained ignorant of Discord’s uses until about a year ago. Now I’m a huge fan of it. Setting up a community on the platform was challenging. A lot of time went into watching tutorials and figuring out how things work. I encourage you to join the ZanderverZ Discord. There’s not much going on at the moment, but it will be a substantial source of ZanderverZ content, moving forward.
Some other smaller project got knocked out. I got caught up on my Self Publishing Formula training videos. If you haven’t heard of them, it’s a great place to learn about self-publishing. They do a highly educational podcast and have some fairly expensive training videos you can get for learning how to advertise. It’s helped me grow my mailing list and make some sales. I also believe I’ve set up a TikTok shop. It’s hard to tell because the process was a wild ride. The application got rejected multiple times, and I made minor changes to it each time. When I say minor changes, I mean punctuation and middle initial kind of stuff. I almost feel like the process is random. Either way, I’ll find out eventually when I go to add items to the shop.
Alternatively, I could have just rested during April, and I did some, but I’ve got goals I want to achieve and probably not enough time to check them all off. So I push forward persistently. One day I'll tell you about my productivity spreadsheet. Ha.
If you’ve got some helpful tips on how to stay productive while waiting on other things, shoot me a message on my contact form. I’d love to hear about it.
CURRENTLY LISTENING:
An ol' nostalgic Final Fantasy 7 song: Secret of the Deep Sea. I'm not sure when it happened, but over the years of my youth, I developed a love for videogame underwater themes. This one sits pretty high on the list.