We Are Halfway Through The First Month!

Good Morning All,

Welcome back to the Dark Nursery Diaries!  At this point we are halfway through the first month of the promotional campaign, and I have received some feedback here and there from a couple of the First Readers.  One person mentioned in a conversation recently mentioned that there were some issues with dialogue that wouldn’t happen in a normal conversation, so I plan to edit those out. In the same conversation, however, they mentioned that my dialogue was actually my strong suit in the story and it flowed well.  They also mentioned wanting to see more of a particular character by 100 pages into, but I responded to them to just keep going, that character will have their moments to shine.  I hate to play favorites but the character they happened to mention is one that I’ve been sort of obsessing over recently, so it was funny that they would mention this particular character.  Other than that my readers have been pretty radio silent other than the occasional text I will receive from one of them exclaiming how much they love it so far.  They did mix up both the title of the book and the title of my blog to become Dark Ribbon which I thought was hilarious at the time and thought to myself, “Maybe I’ll use that one day.”  I actually loved the mix up that much.

Other than those little snippets into my First Readers, it’s been a quiet but also challenging month.  The person who is doing the graphic design work on my promotional launch is also designing the book cover at the moment and we had to model some still life objects (I won’t say what) using a makeshift “stage” of chairs, pillows, and sheets.  The item we were modeling was very small and so finicky to deal with that it took us two photographing sessions and a lot of adjustments to get it all right.  It was a little daunting to figure out that happy medium of doing a nice design with the object and a design that was easy to photoshop as well when using the clipping tool but we managed to figure it out with some fun.

I also realized around the same time I started doing paid ads that my account got hacked, at least I think it did.  So, I had to address that before it caused me any issues.  In that same instance, I also discovered that the accommodated budget for paying for ads is not an exact cut off for the number of people reached based on your goals, so I still need to figure that out, so I don’t go over my personal budge for paid ads over the course of the promotional campaign.  I received an email of a First Reader dropping out from my launch team due to time conflicts and I mistakenly included someone who wasn’t going to be able to do it, so my team went from 12 readers to 10 readers.  It’s a little disheartening, but I’m still getting the number of people I initially wanted to begin with.

Then there has been the time management part of this campaign in accordance with my general life.  I am so grateful to have had the foresight to prewrite the majority of my blog posts and social media posts ahead of time so I had less to deal with on a week by week basis.  Somehow, I had found myself with free time and impulsively scheduled three Dungeons & Dragons campaign sessions for this month, not thinking about the time it would take to prepare for that as well.  Thankfully, there’s only so much that can be covered in a three-hour session so as long as I actually sit down to start working on it, I can pump out a few weeks’ worth of content for my players to go through in a matter of hours.  Again, that’s if I commit to sitting down and actually doing the prep work.  The sitting down part is what comes hardest for me.  Between my day job, being a parent, the promotional launch, and maintaining a household, by the time I have a moment to do my own thing, all I want to do is either veg or sleep or veg until I sleep.  I enjoy having my days as full as they are on a daily basis, but that doesn’t make them any less exhausting.

Just the other day I was up early as normal for a Tuesday, I got up and started laundry after moving my mattress out of my room.  While I waited for the shipping company to come deliver my new bedframe and put it together, I did some work from home, caught up on work emails and conducted a remote interview for a position I’m hiring for.  I also finally repotted a plant my boss gave me for Mother’s Day and actually watered it!  Amazing!  I tried writing this post and doing some D&D work but was too distracted by the shipping company in my house.  Once they left, I began reconstructing my bed set up as well.  Surprisingly, that took over an hour to do between placing the slats myself, moving my king size mattress by myself (do not recommend), moving all the stuff that belongs under the bed back to their rightful spots, and putting the bedding back on.  By the time I finished it was already 2pm and I ended up vegging out to Attack on Titan.  4pm came around and I started some chicken in the crock pot because during the summer if I can avoid turning on my stove, I will.  I basically had dinner ready with the table set ten minutes before my son and his mother got to the house.  The plan was to have dinner together and watch Bridgerton S3 after our son went to bed, I think we got to episode 3 when I called it quits because I could feel myself falling asleep.  And alas, there’s no rest for the wicked, the minute I got into bed, I received a phone call from work over some technical issues they were having.  I was on the phone for almost twenty-five minutes, definitely fighting the urge to fall asleep on the phone.  So even when I take a “sick day” off from work, I’m still working.

I think between working on the launch campaign and keeping myself on strict deadlines, it has helped me stay sane and happier than if I were to be doing less.  I’ve always noticed about myself that the more that I do, and the more productive I am, the happier in life I am.  If I feel like I accomplished something in a day, then it was  a good day for me.  Today, typing this post and scheduling it to go live tomorrow at 10am on my website is my goal, so as long as I meet that tonight, Alls Wells That Ends Wells.

You can look forward to another post next week at 10AM EST on my website, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Dark Nursery Diaries Newsletter for updates!

Thank you for reading,

T.J. Vasquez