Zero productivity

I've been back in an office for weeks now, and it's pretty clear that writing isn't happening. Everything else has slowed to a crawl as well. Edits I would have turned around in a couple days now take weeks. I'm doing a bit of research (aka, reading on my commute), but otherwise not a great deal is happening towards getting something finished. Wrapping those two short stories by month end didn't happen; the "easy victory" doctrine has failed in that regard - instead of scoring an easy victory as a morale booster, I got myself mired in research and rewriting.

I'm hoping I'll finish them this month, then produce them during September.

Meanwhile, my intrepid layouter is working on the print version of Return on Investment, so that should get published this month. I'm also toying with the idea of translations and an audio version, depending on sales/profits. That's the nice thing about self-publishing - I can push for my own translations/print versions/audios instead of hoping that some publisher is willing to burn money for the benefit of a midlister.

If the translation stuff works out, I'll be pushing to get my translation rights for my whole backlist over time, but that's going to take many, many years. The big challenge is low sales - paying somebody a decent amount of money for the translation and the edits of that translation costs about as much as I'd expect a book to make in a year. So I'm starting very small.