Linkfest of the Plague God

You know what's not sexy? Snot monsters. *sniff* Not sexy at all.

*searches for Nurgle rule 34* I stand corrected.

I've been working on typing up a story between plagues, and some background efforts, which hasn't left much time for blogging. So instead of a treatise on the finer points of vampire hygiene, help yourself to a list of some quality reads I've been looking at lately.

Books

The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson: I've been rereading this to prepare for The Monster Baru Cormorant, which I'm now super late on starting, so hopefully I can finish this first book up soon. Still a very good fantasy story, with what remains a unique take on war, governance, and the evils of colonization.

I also flipped through How to Best Optimize Blog Posts for SEO, by Rachel Thompson. It's full of tips that look like they'd be a big help on the blog - I just have to find time to try them!

Blog Posts

Taco from Trello shared quite a few good reads in this week's newsletter. There's one that explains why you need to say 'no' at work sometimes, another that offers advice on why we keep switching productivity methods (guilty!), and a post about 'mental load', the scourge of assumed responsibilities.

News

*tosses holy water everywhere* *then gasoline* *lights a match*

Although it is worth noting we now have a Congressman who's into Bigfoot erotica. If you're reading this, Representative Riggleman, welcome! I'm sure I'll get to him eventually.

That's all for now. If you want more to read, check out my author page, and help me fight the menace of Amazon deleting reviews for no good reason.

See you next week!

-Lea

Project Management for Smut Writers, Part 4: Process Groups and Knowledge Areas

Today we're going to talk about the sexiest areas in project management: Process Groups (mmm), and Knowledge Areas (ahh!). These are two overlapping ways of grouping and categorizing processes within a project.

What's a process? Glad you asked! A process is a project management activity that takes one or more inputs and, using appropriate project management tools and techniques, produces one or more outputs. An input can be pretty much anything: an idea, a JPEG, a pile of unedited copy. An output, on the other hand, should either be a deliverable or an outcome, which is helpfully defined as the end result of a process.

Think of it this way: you need to make a cover. Your input will be a cover image, a font, a title, and your pen name. (If you're making a physical book add a couple of blurbs and a description of what the book is about.) Your desired output will be a cover for your book. And the process will vary, but it will probably include opening a book on color theory, firing up GIMP (or Photoshop if you're feeling nasty), scaling, typing, adjusting, swearing, etc. Easy peasy!

So now that you know what a process is, let's talk about Process Groups. A Process Group is "a logical grouping of project management processes to achieve specific project objectives".¹ It's basically a way to organize a bunch of similar processes in a way that makes sense across different projects. The PMBOK (remember the PMBOK?), defines five Process Groups:

Initiating Process Group: Processes "performed to define a new project or a new phase of an existing project by obtaining authorization to start the project or phase".² For a new or self-publishing author, this can be as simple as having an idea and deciding to write it! For more established authors, this might involve a phone call from an editor who wants to commission a work-for-hire book or an article.

Planning Process Group: Processes which establish a project's scope, refine its objectives, and/or determine what needs to be done to attain a project's objectives. This is going to include outlining, character sketches, and world building, but it will also involve stuff like researching a genre and its conventions, pitching (if you're not self-publishing and you don't need a completed manuscript first), scoping out the book's costs (if you are self-publishing), and similar activities. You can certainly write a book without doing any of this stuff, but if you want to sell it then guess what? You get to do it all afterwards!

Executing Process Group: Processes related to doing the damn work, or per the PMBOK Guide, "processes performed to complete the work defined in the project management plan to satisfy the project requirements".³ This includes your first draft, your final draft, and all your edits, including the stuff you get from your editor. For self-publishers this also means writing your blurb, picking keywords and genres, assembling a cover, book formatting, and the other fun details.

Monitoring and Controlling Process Group: Processes "required to track, review, and regulate the progress and performance of the project".⁴ This includes identifying any places where the project plan needs to be changed, and initiating those changes. This is all the behind-the-scenes work your reader is never going to see: tracking your daily word count (if that's your thing), meeting deadlines, delivering chapter samples if you're working with a publisher or editor who requires it. Edits sorta-kinda fit here, in part: finding a point where a major revision to your plot is needed, and determining what needs to change, fits here, especially if it changes an agreed-upon word count, but actually making the edits goes right back into Executing.

And, lastly:

Closing Process Group: Processes "performed to formally complete or close the project, phase, or contract".⁵ The End, but not the end of your manuscript. This is delivering your final draft to your editor/publishing and having them accept it, making sure you get paid your full advance, and actually seeing your book on the bookshelf. It can also mean kicking off the grand follow-on project called Marketing, but that's really Initiating for a separate project, odd as that might seem.

So that's the official Process Groups. Can you stick with me for Knowledge Areas? It'll be a while before I get back to this, and I wouldn't want to leave you hanging.

A Knowledge Area is "an identified area of project management defined by its knowledge requirements and described in terms of its component processes, practices, inputs, outputs, tools, and techniques".⁶ In other words, it's another way of categorizing project processes, this time by the skill set that's needed to complete them.

There are ten - ten! - Knowledge Areas, so I'll keep this brief:

Project Integration Management: identifying and coordinating processes and project management activities. Basically, managing the project.

Project Scope Management: making sure a project includes all the work required to complete the project successfully, and doesn't include any additional work that's not needed. If you've ever had a short story threaten to turn into an epic fantasy trilogy, you know why this is needed.

Project Schedule Management: everything you need to do to hit your deadlines.

Project Cost Management: keeping your project under budget, and also getting the money to fund your project. You'll be amazed what costs can crop up when you're writing a book, and this Knowledge Area is all about keeping them under control.

Project Quality Management: includes "the processes for incorporating the organization's quality policy regarding planning, managing, and controlling project and product quality requirements, in order to meet stakeholders' expectations".⁷ You're thinking editing, right? I know you're thinking editing! It's not just that, though, it's also about making sure you can read that scribbled note from 11:30pm you wrote before bed, and checking to make sure your eBook looks good on a phone and a Kindle and a PC.

Project Resource Management: determining what resources you'll need to complete a project, and then getting them and managing them. By the way, when you see "resources" think "stuff and people". As a writer, unless you're well down the career track, it'll mostly mean "stuff".

Project Communications Management: includes "the processes required to ensure timely and appropriate planning, collection, creation, distribution, storage, retrieval, management, control, monitoring, and ultimate disposition of project information".⁸ Which is a lot, even if you're not working with anybody!

Project Risk Management: planning for any risks (backup your work), planning your response (download your backup), and monitoring risk (how likely is Dropbox to go out of business?).

Project Procurement Management: determining what needs to be done to purchase or acquire products, services, or results from outside the project team. Hiring a cover artist, an editor, or a website designer are three pretty big examples.

Project Stakeholder Management: this is identifying who has an interest in a project, for example you, your editor, your agent, and your publisher; figuring out what their expectations and impact on the project are; and developing strategies to engage with them effectively. If you're in a position where you have to do this, then it's probably one of the most important things you have to do. (And by the way, your readers? Not stakeholders. Not unless they commissioned the work directly.)

Phew! That's a lot for one post, but I wanted to get it all out of the way.

Hopefully that will tide you little project managing authors over for a bit, because next month will be all monster smut, all the time. To tide you over until then, feel free to check out my author page. Just about everything is free to read with Kindle Unlimited, and reviews are always appreciated!

What's Elvira's line again? "Pleasant screams..."

-Lea

1. A Guide To The Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), Sixth Edition. (Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute, 2017), 23.
2. PMBOK Guide, 23.
3. PMBOK Guide, 23.
4. PMBOK Guide, 23.
5. PMBOK Guide, 23.
6. PMBOK Guide, 23.
7. PMBOK Guide, 24.
8. PMBOK Guide, 24.

Project Management For Smut Writers, Part 3: Basic Project Management Concepts

I'm going to switch gears for this post and talk about some actual project management concepts and how they pertain to writers. I know you're all super hyped to hear more about how I'm micromanaging Trello, right? Well, sorry, I've got some knowledge to unpack for y'all.

First off, what is a project? It's one of those terms that seems obvious until you start thinking about it, right?

A project is defined as "a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result".¹

The key words there are "temporary" and "unique". A project does one thing, it has a specific beginning, and it has a specific end. So, publishing a book, writing a blog post, or doing a podcast episode are all forms of projects. For that matter, so are getting set up on Amazon to publish, migrating your blog to a new web host, and trying to figure out why the audio was so screwed up on your last podcast. All projects! Even if they're simple enough that you don't think of them that way.

Every project is aimed at fulfilling a specific objective by producing one or more deliverables. An objective is defined as "an outcome toward which work is to be directed, a strategic position to be attained, a purpose to be achieved, a result to be obtained, a product to be produced, or a service to be performed"². A deliverable is defined as "any unique and verifiable product, result, or capability to perform a service that is required to be produced to complete a process, phase, or project"³.

You just skimmed that, so here's an example: a project to publish a book (the objective) will result in  a finished manuscript, a cover, and a set of keywords (the deliverables). Deliverables can, obviously, last beyond the scope of a project: your book doesn't just vanish because you succeeded in publishing it (although it might feel like that sometimes).

From the capitalist busy business standpoint, projects drive change and enable business value creation. Each project moves a business from one state to another. If you publish a book, you now have an additional book on the market that requires care and feeding (marketing). If you fix the audio problems on your podcast, your next podcast maybe won't sound so bad. And, each project returns some benefit to its stakeholders (usually you), in the form of time, money, or goods. So that book on Amazon generates revenue, or your improved audio quality might convince a new sponsor to advertise on your podcast.

Obviously you're not going to just stop at one project, unless it's like a miracle unicorn project that meets all your life goals in one fell swoop. (If it does, share.) That's where programs and portfolios come in.

A program is "a group of related projects, subsidiary programs, and program activities managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually."⁴ For example, if you're writing a series, each book in that series is a project, and the marketing for that series is a project, but the work for the series as a whole could be considered a program.

A portfolio, on the other hand, is "projects, programs, subsidiary portfolios, and operations managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives."⁵ In other words, your entire writing business could probably be considered a portfolio, encompassing all your published work, your blog, your podcast, what have you. If an editor at a big publishing house talks about her portfolio, she probably means the set of authors that she's working with.

The benefit of understanding these concepts is to change the way you think about your writing. Every book is a unique crystal formed under titanic pressures no one else could conceive of, but it's also a project you'll be working on for a fixed amount of time. And if every book is a project, you can start to develop ways to plan for them that you can reuse from one book to the next. That's time saved, and time saved is more time to write in.

Thinking about your portfolio isn't a bad idea, either. If you consider everything you do as part of an overall strategy to earn you fame/money/your great-aunt's love, you can consider how each part is working to benefit that strategy, and ultimately you. It may not mean you change what you write, but it might affect how you present yourself and your writing. Or, it might actually change what you write. You do you.

That's just an introduction to a wide range of concepts that are all contained within The Project Management Body Of Knowledge, or PMBOK. Years ago, project managers being the sort of people project managers are, a bunch of them decided to form a collection of standard terms, concepts, recommendations, and rules that would guide the field of project management, forever and ever, amen. If you've ever heard of the PMP, which stands for Project Management Professional, then understand it's a certification for people who understand the PMBOK, put it into practice, and contribute to building the lore.

Anyway, I think we'll stop here for now. Let me know if you like this sort of thing, because I'm happy to keep going. And don't forget to check out my books!

-Lea

1. A Guide To The Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), Sixth Edition. (Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute, 2017), 4.
2. PMBOK Guide, 4.
3. PMBOK Guide, 4.
4. PMBOK Guide, 11.
5. PMBOK Guide, 11.

Project Management for Smut Writers, Part 2

Welcome back, all! Last time I was here I talked about project management. I've been modifying my writing process to optimize it a bit more than not at all, using Trello to keep myself organized. Since then I've refined things quite a bit, so I figured I'd give you an update.

First of all, I've created a dedicated Writing board to track my different projects. Previously I had them listed in a list on my personal To-Do board, but that wasn't cutting it for me. Now I have things broken out into books in progress and ideas I haven't started yet. I also have a list of published books, which includes Amazon links for each book so I can do my advertising posts quickly. And I have a list of reference links in case I get time to, y'know, improve my craft.

The in progress entries are important, because that's how I'm tracking my work. Any time I manage to get some writing done or any other work, I just throw down a comment listing what I did. Easy!

So that's my writing board. I'm also still maintaining boards for each project I'm actively working on.

Disclaimer: 19+ year old farm boy.

Here I keep track of what tasks I need to do, but I also generate what is basically a scene block-out. Each card is a scene, and I write down what I want to happen in the details for each one. I'm still massaging this a bit - I can probably move to labeling scenes instead of moving them between lists. Also, I was tracking my work here, but it was too much trouble to break up my word counts between scenes, so I moved that to the Writing board.

So far I'm okay with this setup. I am getting a bit frustrated with Trello's interface - it's not as responsive as I'd like and the click-through to do what I want is a bit high. Still better than Project! (Ask me about my Project 2016 license if we ever meet in a bar. Then duck.) Once I get my system stabilized I might go looking for another solution, but for now I'm staying with it.

For the record I've completed a full 7,000 word short story draft since I got going with this system two weeks ago, and have written about 2,000 words on my next project. Some of you might think that's slow, but not me! Seriously, this is pretty speedy for me. Stop... stop laughing.

Ahem. Aside from writing I've been taking a PMP class - think I mentioned that - and it turned out to be an exam cram - didn't mention that - so basically worthless in terms of mastering the project management craft. But I am learning of a lot of things and I hope to share more with you all as I go.

Oh and once the Amazon Prime Day strike is over, remember to check out my smut. I'm hoping to get my harpy story out by the end of the month and then I've got a really steamy contemporary story in the works. Ciao!

-Lea

Project Management for Smut Writers, Part 1

Hey, check out the new author picture! I commissioned it from @monidraws on Twitter and she did a swell job on it. :-)

I'm done being on break after finishing off the Temple of the Seducer books, so I'm taking a couple of days to try and get my writing process in order before I move on to the next round of books. My process up until now has been:

1. Pick something to write.

2. Jot down notes on what I need to do.

3. Faff about.

4. It's been a month.

5. Panic, go to 3.

6. How did this story get done?

7. Wait a few more months.

8. Edit.

It's... it's not a great process. -_-"

I managed to get my butt in gear for the Seducer books (woo *confetti* woo), but now that I'm done with them I'm falling back into old bad habits I need to break.

The biggest one is that I'm super bad at making myself write when I've only got a few minutes to work in. I tend to write only after giving my brain a solid 30 minutes to an hour to sink into what I call... nothing... the point is I dawdle and then I don't get anything written.

So I'm going to follow some excellent advice I've read repeatedly and never quite properly followed! And that's to get everything down that I need to do, in advance, so when I have time to do it I can jump write in without sitting in the grip of a paralyzing fear of whitespace for two hours. And then maybe I can start setting up some deadlines and stick to them. Miracles happen!

Enter the PMP class I'm taking later this month...

If you've never dealt with Microsoft Project it's a God-awful piece of shit software program you should avoid at all costs unless someone's paying you to use it, in which case it's the super-useful industry standard. (Damn it Microsoft.) My day job is paying me to take a class on project management so I'm familiar with the basics, but I wouldn't dare use Project to try and manage my writing.

I decided to give Trello a try because it's free and it works on all my bits and bobs. I started off by making some to-do lists, found the interface acceptable, and started loading up book projects.

First step was to make a template project I could copy easily for new books. Trello sorts itself into "boards", so each project (book) is a board. Here's a screen cap of my first attempt:

Seems pretty reasonable at first glance (the color looks better live, I promise), so I copied the board and entered the info I had already for my "next" project ("next" implying I don't randomly shift focus):

Already I can see some problems. I'm going to need a reference list to keep track of any info I need that isn't tied to a scene or a task. Also I should have somewhere to put tasks I'm done with. But that ends up being a lot of lists, so I decide to use Trello's label feature to mark the difference between scenes and tasks so I can pick them out at a glance.

Now the project template looks like this:

Better! Now I don't have to break my neck browsing lists, and I can move the cards around to sort stuff that's important to the top. I'm keeping the drafted list because otherwise I'm going to have a lot of stuff lingering in to-do, but I might change that to labels a la Scrivener.

(Why am I not working in Scrivener? Because I've tried that repeatedly and it always goes fiddly on me and ends in tears. I'm resolved this time to keep the writing bit separate from the project management bit, and see if I have better luck. But for what it's worth, Scrivener does support the gist of what I'm doing natively so you're welcome to try it there.)

Now my next step is going to be getting all my current book projects listed out, then make boards for the ones I'm planning to work on, get the steps together... and get writing! As long as I can get an hour to work on it tomorrow I think I'll be fine. Plan on seeing an update by Friday this week.

-Lea