All that Glitters: Spinning Ink into Gold pt. 2

Welcome to my online home! As part of your October Frights Blog Hop tour, let’s talk more about getting real value out of your work. Yesterday I talked about why (contrary to logic) you might want to give your work away for free. Bare with me, I promise I have a point.

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Creating for Fun and Value

If you chose writer as a path to some fast, easy cash… you may want to reevaluate some life choices. If you chose writer because you love writing you are in the right place. Note: Please don’t go around accusing me of saying writers can’t or shouldn’t get paid. We should. What I am saying is when we all we see are dollar signs, we can miss the real value.

Take yesterday’s example of me contributing my story “Just Us League” in Giving the Devil His Due [available here]. At pro rates I might have made a few hundred dollars from that story. Instead I traded it to support a cause I believe in, got to meet and chat with Linda D. Addison and Paul Tremblay, got to have my story read by the incredible Kate Forbes… not to mention all the incredible promotion The Pixel Project [thepixelproject.net] has provided me with. Honestly? I should pay them for the privilege.

On a side note, Giving the Devil His Due was a Shirley Jackson Nominee, 2023 Audie Award Nominee, and it won the Audiophile’s Earphones Award. #worthit.

I do give my work away for free, and I have since the beginning of my fiction career. It has opened a lot of doors for me including winning me a Bram Stoker Award for “Horror Writers: Architects of Hope” published (for free) in Siren’s Call eZine Issue #55 – Halloween 2021. This is also available to read for free at Siren’s Call Publications [sirenscallpublications.com/ezine].

If you want me to bore you with more examples from my personal life we can meet up at a convention sometime. Before the rest of you unsubscribe… here are some actionable ways to get more value out of your writing, whether it earns you actual dollars or not.

Easy, Effective, Economical and Ethical

Now for my confession. My biggest shortcoming is I want to do everything, always and at that minute. What I have found out as a grow older is that I just can’t. It’s an unfortunate side effect of mortality I’m working on. Until I figure it out, I try to make everything I do fit a set of rules I call my E⁴ criteria: if I’m going to do something, I want it to be easy, effective, economical and ethical.

Easy. Whatever this is, be it dinner, a pass out, my wardrobe, a child… I try to make the process as easy as possible. Nothing complicated, no ironing, and no fuss. Life is too short for frustration.
Effective. Easy doesn’t mean sloppy. If whatever I’m doing doesn’t achieve what I need it to, it’s not effective. The only exception are people. We are all works in process. You do you at your own pace.
Economical. As a lifelong creative, great wealth has so far eluded me. I have learned to do everything on a budget. I have fine tuned the art of how not to be a starving artist.
Ethical. I’m no pillar of morality, but if what I’m doing needlessly causes harm to anyone or thing, I try to avoid it. Operative word is try.

I probably use this too much because it’s how I do most things from choosing a wardrobe (I know, it explains a lot) to publishing. But enough for today. Tomorrow I’ll continue with some hands on instructions with things you can do now, with accessible tools almost anyone has easily available. For now, I need to get going to this panel.

Also part of the October Frights Blog Hop, I’m joining AF Stewart, Lucienne Lebauu, Nikki Nelson-Hicks and Nina D’Arcangela for a discussion on breaking out of the vampire-werewolf rut. Not to dismiss the long standing traditions that have brought us where we are now, but there are more ways to monster than this.