Wednesday, December 12, 2007

What Do I Want To Do?

Written by Kodi Wolf at 2:51 AM

I'm trying to decide what I want to do with my website. I started out with the idea of making my site a subscription site in order to get a little protection under the law for my original stories (which was prompted by my work being plagiarized). Then I realized I've been paying this whole time for people to read my stories for free and I decided I'd like to actually make a little money to cover my expenses. Then I got caught up in how to make the site a subscription site (learning the new Mambo CMS, designing a business model, researching costs of services like PayPal, etc.) and got a little overwhelmed about turning my writing into a business (I'd love to get paid for what I love to do, but what if I can't deliver?).

Now, I'm feeling the crunch of my self-imposed deadline to have the site up and running by February 29th, 2008 (Leap Day to commemorate when I first opened my site on Leap Day in 2000). It might seem like a ways off, but time seems to move faster when I have a deadline. For example, a few days after my last post, I came down with a really bad sinus infection, and between being sick and the drugs I'm having to take to feel better, I've basically been comatose for the past week (the antibiotics made me nauseous, so I had to take Phenergan, which knocks me out). I'm still pretty wiped and I have two more days of the antibiotics before I'll be done, but all I can think is, "There's another week and a half wasted."

So anyway, I'm still trying to decide if I really want to offer my stories online or pull them down and focus my efforts on finishing them, so I can publish the damn things. My ultimate goal is to publish my stories in paperback format, but I also know there's a market for selling my stories online, whether as part of a website subscription format or as e-books (or both). I really just want to write and I feel like it's been forever since I've really just written. I jot notes down all the time, I write snippets of scenes and dialogue, and I'm constantly researching various subjects for my stories, but it's been months since I sat at the computer and actually wrote full-length scenes and completed chapters over the course of several days.

You know what? Fuck it. I'm just not going to think about this right now. I'm going to work on a story and deal with everything else later. I just want to do what I love.