Stuck.

I'm at work and totally stuck.

The same, annoying problem has been the subject of my work for a week now. And to make things worse, it's the last tiny detail. Everything else is great (for a given value of great), but it needs just one element before the client will buy it...and I can't get it.

Just. So. Stuck.

Meh. I've already given up on the "write a novel in a month" thing. When you miss a couple of days and you're 3500 words behind, it gets kind of daunting. Especially as I usually (usually!) do about 500-750 words a day when I'm seriously writing. My other excuse is that I am a pro writer, and much like any other hobby that becomes work: at the end of the day the last thing I really want to do spend another hour and a half writing.

There's another bump in the road in the whole "write a novel" quest - it doesn't seem to be worth the effort. Turns out that the publishing industry is totally mordibund. Unless you already have a fan base, you're unlikely to sell any books for one nasty reason. The publishers don't sell the books to book readers, the sell to book shops - and book sellers have no interest in buying a book they know nothing about. So they'll only take the books which the publishers market.

And they're not going to be marketing you. The (granted, US) figure is that about 2% of all books sold more than 5000 copies in 2004. If you're earning about a dollar a book (probably less), that ain't good.

There was the other statistical novelty from a couple of years back. 10% of books sold in the UK are sci-fi/fantasy. 10% of them are Pratchetts. Which sounds cool, except when you're suddenly looking at being the competition.

The horrible truth is that a best seller used to be in the 100 000 copies region, now it's 10 000.

So I had better write a bloody good crap fantasy book if I'm going to retire a quaint little English hut.