State of the Novel Update:

This week I finally changed the title from Cate the Curst to Cate the Cursed. I revised episodes 1 and 2 into a pretty strong (I think) Chapter One for the book’s second draft, and posted the first half as a new episode 1 on Vella. I also re-edited the Vella cover image to make the image of the face more saturated, with higher contrast. Then I messed around with the tags.

Results? I’m already moved up to the first or second pages for most of my tags (still on page four for “magic,” “suspense” and “mystery,” but those are pretty full categories). So far no bump in reads, although I did get a nice jump for a few days last week… before I changed anything. So probably the result of something Amazon did (like opening Vella to android users).

Revising is slow, but steady. I finally feel like I can look at my work from a distance and see the biggest mistakes. (The littlest mistakes can get fixed later. Much, much later...) Making the changes is like solving a puzzle. I’m moving things around, cutting and pasting, adding things, taking things out. I did separate my original draft from the work-in-progress… just in case something gets deleted that I want back later. I’m writing in Google Docs, so it will be there in the history, but I don’t want to have to back through days or weeks of changes to find anything.

I’m still struggling with consistency on my many ventures, but it’s probably because I’m “doing too much” as the kids say (do they still say that? Out of the classroom for two years, and I’m completely out of touch). That’s what the cards seem to say this week, anyway. (Check @JennLessmannAuthor on Instagram if you don’t believe me.)

Luckily, everyday is a new chance to try again, hopefully learn something from what didn’t work this time. So, I’ll see you tomorrow (probably).