I got sidetracked. Again.

This newsletter was supposed to arrive yesterday. Thursday.

Treasure Trove is allegedly a Thursday newsletter, although recent evidence suggests Thursday is less a publication date and more a philosophical position.

I had every intention. Then I got sidetracked. Not doing nothing, mind you. That's the aggravating part. I was working.

I've been testing advertising for my books. Learning things. Watching numbers. Making notes. Changing things. Watching more numbers. Discovering, somewhat to my surprise, that ads featuring my own ugly mug are beating several considerably more attractive objects.

Apparently I am clickbait.

This is not how I expected my literary career to develop.

I've also been working through the pieces of The Unbecoming Remains, my forthcoming zombie novel. Thanks to brilliant editing, Brandy, and to insightful beta readers, one and all.

And writing poems.

And poking at old books.

And thinking about new books.

And studying how readers find writers, and how writers find readers, and how one gets the two groups into the same room without standing on a street corner shouting: WOULD ANYBODY LIKE A NOVEL?

Somewhere in there, Thursday got lost in the shuffle. :)

THE TROUBLE WITH INTERESTING THINGS

I am beginning to suspect productivity advice was invented for people who aren't interested in quite so many things.

I can sit down intending to accomplish Item A.

Item A produces Question B.

Question B introduces Possibility C.

Possibility C opens seventeen browser tabs.

Three hours later I have learned something genuinely useful about a subject I hadn't planned to investigate until 2028.

This is not entirely procrastination, and that's what makes it dangerous: sometimes the rabbit hole actually has rabbits in it.

I'm retired now from the career I had for roughly forty years. For the first time since I was a kid, nobody is handing me a schedule and saying: Be here. Do this. Finish that.

I wanted that freedom. I still want it.

But freedom turns out to require its own kind of discipline. Nobody blows the whistle. Nobody rings the bell.

Nobody notices whether I wrote 2,000 words or spent ninety minutes discovering the history of Ben Day dots in comic books (fascinating stuff, btw).

Except me.

And possibly my dog, Gato.

What? Work?

The Unbecoming Remains continues marching toward publication.

If you haven't heard me describe it before, the novel follows Dr. Ambrose Brooks, who has one rather serious professional and personal problem: He's dead. Mostly. Well...undead, for whatever that's worth.

Ambrose is a thinking, observing, increasingly decomposed member of the zombie population trying to understand what happened to him—and what is happening to everyone else.

The book has plenty of what you'd expect from zombies. Blood. Bad decisions. People being eaten. But the thing that kept me writing it wasn't really the gore.

It was Ambrose.

What happens when a man begins losing the things that made him human but remains human enough to notice? He tries, for example, to go Vegan. He gives whistling a go. He carries memories on micro cassette tapes for prescribed 'narrative therapy.'

That's the book I accidentally found inside the zombie book.

More soon.

What Else?

I've been starting my mornings with a poem. Not Great Literature. Not necessarily publication material. Some of them are strange. Some are funny. Some become much more serious than I intended. The point was simply to begin the day making something before I started managing something. Here's one from this week.

Make Something.

That distinction has become important to me. There is an astonishing amount of management involved in being a writer.

• websites
• advertising
• email
• formatting
• sales pages
• analytics
• metadata (wha?)
• distribution
• social media
• software to make all the above easier

It's all necessary for a truly independent (and impoverished) indie author, but none of it is the reason I became a writer.

So the poem is my little daily declaration: Make something first.

Before the dashboards and software and zombies get me.

TODAY'S QUESTION

I'm curious about something. When you have unscheduled time—an empty Saturday, a vacation day, an afternoon with nowhere you have to be—what happens?

A. Immediately know what you want to do

B. Become gloriously lazy

C. Start twelve things

D. Somehow spend four hours doing something you never intended to do

E. Possess a mysterious adult skill I have not listed here

Hit reply and tell me.

I read these.

And lately I'm increasingly convinced that the replies are one of the best parts of sending this thing.

So yes.

Treasure Trove is a day late.

Again.

But I wrote a poem. Worked on a zombie cover. Learned some things about selling books. Went down several rabbit holes. Came back out...mostly. (Recent rabbit holes: backmasking, is it still a thing? making cardboard furniture; dandelion heads last x long, Brown Recluse Spider Bites; can fish swim backwards?)

I'll take it.

See you another Thursday.*

— Mark

*Definition of Thursday subject to ongoing scientific investigation.

My website is getting a major overhaul. Spy it while it's frumpy, one more time. MarkLandonJarvis.com