I miss my blog. I miss writing about Pin Loom Weaving here.
Full to bursting—my box of PLW patterns
Over the past few weeks I’ve invented a large number of pin loom weaving patterns and I can’t show anyone other than my husband who, though a gentleman, is not especially interested in weaving and—like someone who hasn’t “been there, done that”—can’t fully appreciate the aggravation and mental-and-emotional-wear-and-tear devising patterns can have on one.
The new box for new patterns. How long will it take to fill?
Back when I was writing fiction I was also living it—I mean, in the way you get caught up in a really engrossing TV series (like Victoria on Masterpiece). You can’t wait for the next episode to come out. You dream about your book, you write notes about it everywhere-all-the-time and can’t wait to start writing each day. You are in LOVELOVELOVE with your work. It makes you laugh; it makes you cry. You don’t care if you never get paid and while it would be nice if other people read it and enjoyed it too, it doesn’t really matter if they don’t because it’s so personally fulfilling.
Writing a book about pin loom weaving is not like writing fiction. But that’s not the worst of it. Writing a book about PLW is NOTHING like doing PLW. I just realized this today. Writing a blog about PLW is pretty close to doing it, but writing a book about it is not.
Writing about pin loom weaving is not the same as doing the weaving
Here’s what it is: Technicalities. Typos. Bolding R1: but not the rest of the instructions in the row. Making everything consistent. It’s typing, Typing, TYPING all the most boring keystrokes on the keyboard. And, it feels endless. Quality photos, straightening them, cropping, keeping them in order, captions. I really can’t sum up the tedious, mundane, awfulness of it.
My husband (the gentleman) said, “It sounds like Work.” By Work, he means the thing he does every day so we can have a place to sleep, food to eat, clothes to wear, and computers to type on.
I felt chagrin.
For a moment.
Then I realized that he’s getting PAID REALLY GOOD MONEY for his Work. I have the promise of maybe 98 cents per copy sold at MSRP. That’s not really good money when at best we can hope to sell 7000 copies.
If I wanted to Work, I think I’d get a better job than this. The publisher isn’t promising to pay me money to pin loom weave. They’re actually paying me (a pittance) not to. I could make better money working at McDonald’s and I think the work would be more enjoyable—not without its downside, but still more socially enjoyable. (I’m probably wrong about this opinion, just as I was wrong about the prospect of writing a PLW book. We won’t be testing it to find out.)
I realize I’m ranting, but if anyone is reading this post, I want them to know why I probably won’t ever publish a book on PLW. But IF I do . . .
I can’t finish that sentence.
A clean, well-lighted place for pin loom weaving
If not a book, how about putting them for sale on Ravelry? I, for one, would be most interested in seeing them.
Well, maybe. I’m not necessarily anxious to try to make money off them. I think a book would be useful for those who prefer to look at and make notes on a printed page, so I might print up books later on. For now I just had to relieve the pressure and say, “No book.”
Some of them are available here on the blog, scattered about.
Is there any chance you could self-publish and retain all the profit yourself? 98 cents on a hoped for 7000 books published hardly seems worth it. Based on what I’ve seen on your blog, I can safely say I would pay the full price you were asking for, even if it were an ebook publication only.
I know, right? I’d be doing WAAAAAAAAY more than $7000 of work. All I’d have to do is sell 700 for $10 to make the same amount (or 70 at $100, but that might be stretching it!). I may go the self-publishing route. I have a good idea of what I want to do with the look of the book. I don’t know how to set up an ebook (yet), but that’s certainly a consideration.
Maybe your Facebook group could advise you if you floated the idea. I hear it’s a very popular Facebook page. Just be sure to let the rest of us know on this site if you ever do publish so we don’t miss out.
Yes, lots of advice from the FB Group. And I’ll be visiting my blog quite frequently.
Right now I’m busy entering the patterns and info on my private blog. I’m thinking about self publishing.