Still Sucking

I'm off prednisone but the asthma is still being difficult. It's mild-ish. I am hoping I can just live on albuterol until it goes back into its hole.

The asthma is mostly marked by coughing until I puke*. Or pee my pants.

So I now have a UTI.

Thanks, universe. How did you know I wanted to spend a month dealing with the fall out from the flu?

At least my abs and postural muscles are ripped.

My kiddo started back sliding tonight. So I'm watching her with an eagle eye. Hopefully it's just a minor setback triggered by too much activity.

My latest book is flopping hard. It's tough to pin point a root cause because objective metrics like sales rank and sales volume were very competitive with top performers in my genre. At the same time, the book doesn't seem to be growing legs and has almost no natural buoyancy.

I have a brand problem I think. At least that's one potential issue. I write too slow and thus release too slow to sustain fan volume. While I've tried (and tried and cried and read all the craft books) to write faster, I haven't had much luck speeding up my writing process. Partly because my plots tend to be complex and original--the idea being to compete on quality not volume, which is not working out for me so well right now--and partly because my brain refuses to outline or schedule plot points or generally cooperate in any way.

I actually wrote a 3000 word outline for my last book and then didn't follow it one whit.

I dunno. I spent today marketing my ass off. Markets where I have weak sales volume and the most room to grow, I offered readers a BOGO deal. Buy one, send me the receipt, get one. I'm on Facebook like ham in spam--ads, giveaways, snippets etc...  Readers do like the book, it's not like the fan base hates it--they either love it or have gone stale and disengaged from my brand. But for whatever reason, it's just not finding new readers.

We'll see. Not all of my marketing has hit yet so the end of the month may tell a better story.

*And for the know-it-all that invariably shows up on these posts and tries to tell me it's not asthma...guess what Einstein? The cough totally responded to albuterol, but outpaced the dosing schedule so I still coughed until I puked. So stick that up your ass and get it stuck in your colon.