When I finished Guild of Magic in the spring, I imagined all of the free time that I would have over the summer.
I was going to finish my first comic.
I was going to write the first third of book 3.
I was going to write a fun in-between story that would be part of my next Kickstarter campaign in the fall.
It was going to be the Summer of Geor … err … Jon!
But then boxes of Kickstarter books started arriving at my apartment, leaving my evenings spent packing orders.
And then I replaced my normal morning writing time with runs in Central Park.
And gave myself a crash course in YouTube.
And got stuck plot-wise on a particularly annoying chapter.
And traveled a bunch.
Now my summer wasn’t a total loss, creative-wise, by any stretch.
I finished the first draft of the first issue of Project Plato (yes, my comic project now has a super-cool code name).
And I finally sent out the last batch of Kickstarter books this morning.
But I still was frustrated that my carefully fine-tuned writing system fell apart and that I wasn’t able to create a replacement system so I could get words down on the page.
Now that the summer is drawing to a close and my kids are back in school, I’ll have a better sense of my schedule and am figuring out a new writing routine that fits around it. And I’ll be experimenting with switching between projects (perhaps on a weekly basis or maybe a daily rotation).
Guild of Magic super-discount: this weekend only!
As a thank you for sticking with me during this hiatus, I’m discounting Guild of Magic at my online store for this weekend only.
Use coupon code “summer” (no quotes) at checkout and get book 2 in the NYC Questing Guild series for only $1! But only through this Sunday.
If you want to continue reading on here for free, that’s totally fine too! A new chapter will be released next Friday.
And for my paid subscribers, I’ve extended your subscriptions by an extra two months to make up for the lack of new Guild of Relics chapters.
Did you know I quit my job to become a full-time YouTuber?
Well, not really. I just used that as a clickbait headline and had a few people fooled.
What I am actually doing is putting all of the NYC Questing Guild audiobooks on my YouTube channel for free.
“Jon, why are you giving away your audiobooks for? Are you insane?” you may be asking yourself.
No, I’m not crazy, I’m just trying something new.
You might have noticed that the Guild of Magic Kickstarter did not include an audiobook version.
That’s because Kickstarter tends to favor physical rewards and the audiobook-focused campaigns that I have seen have not done nearly as well as book-focused campaigns.
So it was a choice between sprucing up the books and giving everyone awesome swag, or producing the second audiobook, which only a handful of backers would want.
But I really want to continue the series on audio and have been searching for a better way to make that happen other than actually making hundreds of Kinder egg-opening videos.
Enter YouTube.
As my channel subscribers and view hours increase, I’ll be able to get ad revenue from the ads shown during the audiobook playbacks.
And I’ll use that revenue to fund the second book's production and future audiobooks in the series.
One easy thing you can do right now (that won’t cost you anything except 5 seconds of your time) is to subscribe to my YouTube channel by hitting the button below.
Fiction Friday - Where we left off
Comics!
If you’re a comics reader, you saw that I didn’t take the summer off from my Amazing Journey column. Here are some highlights from last month:
Question of the week
If you’re a fellow creative (or super-focused on productivity in your day job), how do you effectively switch between projects?