You may remember I toyed with the idea of doing a monthly magazine earlier in the year, in a format that looks remarkably similar to the chapbook I put up for patron’s yesterday. The Hotel Trio chapbook bears much the same content load of the original idea — 10,000 words of fiction, using a blend of stories and vignettes — but its decidedly not branded as a magazine with the implication of next issues.
Instead, it’s an ooch in the general direction. Because, god help me, I love an ooch.
Ooching is a concept I first came across in Chip and Dan Heath’s Decisive, a book about decision making and why humanity, as a species, is quite bad at it. They claim the term has its origins in the American south, although they can’t quite track its etymology, but the general gist of the thing is simple: rather than falling back on all or nothing thinking, do a little something as a practical test of your ideas.
The ooch is a chance to dip a toe in and see how things play out in practice, rather than getting caught up in the theory and the expanding changes of possible consequences.
My work life’s been sufficiently chaotic that I don’t feel comfortable with the commitment of a magazine. I tend to do work in big, furious lumps of productivity, then lose three weeks to a shitton of overtime (or, more recently, an unwell spouse and comfort viewing all 19 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy). So rather than comit to a big project, I’m doing a series of little ones that mimic the format: there’s a few more 10k chapbooks coming that collect stories and vignettes written for the Patreon, and they may well follow a monthly schedule.
In doing so, the myraid possible things begin to narrow down to the probably consquences of trying to follow the schedule. It brings the focus to the here and now, instead of projecting forward to a far-off state of catastrophy, and delers real-time data on the time needed to create each issue rather than a theorical guess (I’ve also updated my RescueTime tracking for more nuanced data, so I can break down how long I’m spending on various projects and figure just what these chapbooks require each month, on average).
And, of course, there’s the other advantage: if the chapbooks prove to be a hideous failure that nobody downloads or buys (when they eventually go on sale to the public), then they’ll quietly go away while I switch focus to somewhere else, or emerge at a slower pace while interspersed with other projects.
