Happy Saturday. 🙂 I started the day with exercise, after a good night’s sleep, and it really is amazing how much more able to cope I feel! 30 minutes on the treadmill, just walking at 3.0, and then I had my weekly appt. (started up again last week after a six-month hiatus) with trainer Liz at the Y. Feel good! Feel strong!
Heading into a weekend of intense work, as we are now only six days out from Feast launch, and there is SO MUCH TO DO. But I’m trying to stay balanced with the rest of my life too, which is, um, interesting.
I’m constantly trying to remind myself that publicity is like parenting and teaching — there’s always more you *could* do, but if you try to do it all, you’ll only exhaust yourself and make everyone around you miserable.
The trickiest part for me with publicity are the little repeated things, like posting a reminder about the giveaway every day — that’s surprisingly hard for my ADD brain. Much like exercise. Part of why I ADORE my current trainer is that she never has me do sets of reps — we do 8 of an exercise, then 8 of a different exercise, etc., and I almost never repeat an exercise session to session either. She has me work the same muscles, but in new ways all the time, which is SO much easier for me to cope with. I’d love to see her writing a column about that approach to exercise; going to try to talk her into it.
My daily publicity goal is generally either a) do one impactful thing, or b) do one hour of little things. I think that’s reasonable, and over time, it should add up in good ways. (Much like parenting. And teaching. 🙂 )
A Google Alert just popped up that NewCity listed our upcoming Deep Dish (with a book launch for Feast) in their Lit Top 5 (link in comments), which is very lovely, and a sign that yes, if you tell people about your thing, they may think it’s worth spreading the word.
Angelique Manchanda-Peres has also had a FB thread going on her wall, where she’s so kindly gushing about the copy of Feast that she ordered and which has just arrived, and has gotten a whole host of her (mostly Toronto, I think) friends super-excited about the book.
That’s that fabulous word-of-mouth that we all long for when we’re trying to get the word out, and if you see an indie project you like, please know that that spread the word like that is INVALUABLE. We can’t afford the publicity budgets of big publishers, so we really rely on hoping people like what we do, and that they tell other people about it.
Heather Rainwater Campbell arrived from Ann Arbor yesterday; she’s my remote staffer whom we decided to have come in one weekend a month, which I think is really helpful in various ways for both of us.
Yesterday afternoon, I got back from teaching, said hi to her, and then we settled in to a work session in the dining room. I wrote up (very quickly) the grant application for the Sustainable Arts Foundation and sent it off. I always waffle about which project to say I’m going to work on, but I went with the nonfiction work this time around, as that’s what I’ve been spending more time on. After that I….I’m not sure what I worked on. More time-sensitive e-mails, I think? There are a lot of them right now, trying to crank them out.
We ordered masses of Thai & Japanese food for dinner, really, for the weekend, so we can concentrate on getting a lot of work done and I don’t have to worry about feeding her or the family. We’ll also lay in some chips and make a big bowl of pasta for board games later tonight — a few friends are stopping by. (If you’d like to be on the board game party list, but aren’t, drop me a line.)
There are some things before that though! Heather and Kavi and I spent about an hour and a half on the basement storage space re-org project last night, and we made very good progress — I’ll give you a tour when it’s all done. But now the serveware for events is in one place, for example, and the disposables (compostable!) and the books, etc.
It should make it much easier for me to say, come home from teaching, take 30 minutes to pack up some bins and bags, and go do a Feast event in the evening. Esp. if I put everything BACK in the right places the next day. (The night of, I will probably be too tired. That’s okay.)
We were all really tired by 8:30, so gave up on work for the day and crashed. Today, I’m taking a break from Feast to work on other projects (though I may answer a Feast e-mail here and there). Right now, I have Heather familiarizing herself with Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Dream Apart RPG system; she’s going to do a play-through of a Jump Space RPG with me and some hardy volunteers @ 2 p.m. today.
I’m envisioning it as a 3-6 person game that will take 3-4 hours to play through, so the sort of thing you can walk into at a convention, with no prior knowledge. I’m not sure what the process will be for bringing it out eventually — do we do it ourselves through Serendib Press? Do we partner with an established game company? But we’re a very long way from that now — right now, what I need to do is write up the actual rules so we can do our play-through. Planning to work on that from 9:30 – 10:30 or so today, using Ben’s game as a model.
Then I switch to the Creative Capital grant, which is also due today. I haven’t written anything yet, but I’ve been talking it through with Kevin and Stephanie and Heather, thinking about what this project will look like. Well, I’m not actually quite positive WHICH project I’ll be applying for — but I think it’s the hybrid one where I am doing more editing than writing. Well, we’ll think about that in a few hours and make a decision.
And then 2-5, RPG-ing, which will probably be a mess this first time through, but I will learn a lot from the workshopping process, and hopefully the players will manage to have fun. I will feed them well, which should help. And then 5-midnight, break and board game.
Sunday morning, Stephanie is going to come over, and we’re going to go back to Feast work with Heather, specifically putting together an updated press kit, and starting to send it out to the PR list we purchased from a publicist. At 1, I go over to Forest Park to show some of the local makerspace team a possibility for a makerspace location. And then 2-5, relax. Anand wants to go swimming, so perhaps the YMCA again. Then Sunday dinner, and snuggles with the kids.
A busy weekend, fairly intense, but hopefully a good one. 🙂
#serendibkitchen
#serendibpress
#serendibgames
