Insanity Roundup

Or, "What happened with Weeks 7 and 8?"

Let me explain something to you about procrastination: When you put off a project until the very last minute, that last minute gets jammed full of scrambling to do four weeks’ worth of work in two weeks’ time. I thought about writing a progress report for Week 7, but figured I could catch up in Week 8’s report. By the time Week 8 rolled around and I still hadn’t finished writing Bad Influences—much less editing, formatting, and finding a suitable cover—progress reports were the furthest thing from my mind.

So, without further ado: the Insanity Roundup.

The Workout (Month Two)

I’ll level with you guys—I gave up on the Max Interval workouts sometime near the beginning of Week 8 and went back to the shorter circuits. It’s not that I got bored, exactly, but…yeah, I got bored. Emily put it pretty well when she said, “I’d rather go twice as hard for 30 minutes than half as hard for 60.” So, if you want to get technical, Insanity: The Workout failed.

The Writing (Month Two)

If you’ve been following along from the beginning, you know that my goal was to write and publish one work in the time it took me to do Insanity (two months + 1 recovery week). I started on July 22^nd, and that made my deadline September 22^nd—this past Sunday.

But it turned out that Bad Decisions was the first in a series of short stories. I published the first on August 18^th, under my action/adventure-writing pen name E.M. Smith. With a month left before the Insanity: The Writing experiment ended, I set a new goal to publish the second story in the series (working-titled Bad Coffee at first, changed to Bad Dreams, and finally titled Bad Influences, a combo of the two working-title storylines) before September 22^nd.

God smiled on me, got my parents to take Oak and Bear for the weekend, and helped me cram a week’s worth of writing, revising, and formatting into Saturday. Sunday morning before church, I hit the “Save & Publish” button. Bad Influences and Bad Decisions are now both available in the Kindle Store for $0.99.

So, if you want to get technical, Insanity: The Writing was a success times two.

Rounding Up

So far, I’ve sold 15 Bad Decisions and gave away 496 copies during my free promotion days. I’m offering Bad Influences for free next Monday-Friday (to see whether day of the week affects the number of downloads). Much like Decisions, I don’t expect Influences to sell much until after the giveaway.

I don’t really feel like writing the touchy-feely post about the ups and downs of self-publishing, self-imposed deadlines, and whipping oneself into shape today, but I will include the much-hyped Excel charts. I know they’re what we were all waiting for, anyway.

Insanity Fit Test Excel Chart

Insanity Word Count Excel Chart