Hey Elon, here’s my master plan.

My plan for the 10x10 Challenge, what I've learnt and what I'm going to do differently.

Zane Dickens

Nov 01, 2022

ray of light near body of water — Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

I may not get humanity to Mars, but I’ll:

Take my best ideas and make them bigger
Invent a world and build a community
Help writers go from hobbyist to authorprenuer
Transform my own career

And I’ll learn from every mistake I make. Because they’ll happen.

I’m planning on them happening, but to also just keep swimming.

My plan has four parts.

This is the writer’s side of the reader’s journey.

Psychology
Production
Presentation
Promotion

Psychology: My Mindset

Growth and adventure, within a community of like-minded writers.

I’m grateful for being invited to the Medium Illuminati by Bradan and Jann.

It’s early days but it made such a difference to have a sounding board. Creative isolation can be so dangerous for writers. It lets Doubt creep in.

Step one: the right mindset in order

I’m a subscription-based author writing serial fiction daily. Learning from the journey and sharing what I learn.

Writing challenges help me get into the right mindset, they set a public target and add an element of friendly competition (or co-opetition actually, because we’re really all working together).

Here’s my target: Ten stories released off Medium by 31st October 2023.

Production: Daily Writing Habits

I’ll write daily, build a habit of 1500-2000 words.

And I will learn from doing, not planning, not overthinking, but doing.

Making your own mistakes is important but avoiding them is even better.
So, I’ll interview writers that have done it before and learn from them.

The plan here is simple, outline and write in the morning using Cold Turkey Writer. Leverage Nanowrimo to build up the habit and keep it going.

I’ve done Nano six times before, and I know how it goes for me. A flying start and then a big dip followed by a mad rush at the end producing a word-vomit mountain.

So I’m going to cheat. I’ll start now, build up words and get ahead.

Because that’s a habit and a professional mindset I want to firmly embed in my monkey mind. Start early, finish early. Get ahead.

I want to break the habit of last minute rushing and the burnout it creates.

I want to build a professional mindset.

Because this year I go from hobbyist to authorprenuer.

Presentation: Professional Products

I asked writers online what they needed help with, and they said:

Formatting ebooks
Designing covers
Find and using beta readers
Building a subscription business.

I’m using the 10x10 Challenge to bust me out of my flash fiction comfort zone.
To get me out of my Production rut.

Then I’ll need to learn all of the above Presentation skills and to develop a streamlined process I can do along side a job and young family.

Everything I learn I’ll distill for future me and the Reader Experience community.

As a designer, I’ve learnt there’s usually an 80/20 process to get you most of the results a customer will notice. So I’ll focus like a lazer on those.

Promotion: Helping Readers Discover My Work

I’ll be building in public and targeting my ideal reader using:

Weekly Twitter threads to share my lessons from doing the above.
Reader platforms (Royal Road and Wattpad) to gather an audience
Subscription platforms (Patreon) to build a fan-centric community

And I’m hesitant to use ads. I don’t like pay-to-win on platforms with conflicting interests, like Amazon. So I’m going the subscription business route, building a direct relationship with my audience.

I’ll write to market and inviting readers to co-create with me, a merger of the writer and designer in me.

I’m an artist, but I want my art to sell. I can’t get away from that, because I won’t write in the dark and let my stories gather dust.

I’ll also experiment here with piracy. Because I’m curious. 🏴‍☠️

How I chose my stories

My stories mostly came from the 100 Story Challenge.

I used this method to collect them and added them all to a list.
I captured them into my Notion Story Library with all reader data to highlight the best and how to improve them.

I’m focusing on Escape Town

My cyberpunk reimagining of my home city. I’m tying it in strongly with my in-world Patreon. I want fans to feel like they’re part of the story.

An underground crowd-funding of the hero of my story world, Omni. Who’s a third-world Tony Stark uplifting her community from slum into a version of Wakanda.

If you’re a fan of cyberpunk with a non-western setting, exploring techno inequality and an ai-driven magic system.

Follow on Medium or join the revolution here.

My ten stories

These will become multipart serials, tested on Medium and re-released on Royal Road or Wattpad with early access to chapters and ebooks on Patreon.

Murph’s Legacy, exploring how Murph lost his jinn and how it broke him.
Using the Top 4 Villains as fodder to explore the power of AI jinns.
Ada's Heist, I love heist movies with training montages and a rescue story all in one. This continues off from Voice in the Darkness.
Silence in the Corridors of Power, May’s daughter is murdered as part of a cover up. This will dig into that mystery and how it leads to the next story.
Metaversal Kraken of the Heart, with this one I get to explore using the Verse for good, and surreal magic of shaping a world with our minds.
Cyberpunk’d Collection, [Peter] Pan and Alice [in Wonderland] in a love triangle with Hook battle in Never, an inner-city underworld merged with the Verse.
The City is Everywhere, a one shot short retold by a Teller in Era 2, that wraps the cyberpunk present into an oral history told by wondering storytellers after the Collapse.

There’s no complicated plan pasted to my wall with red string of how all these threads work together. I’m going to write them and see how I can weave them together.

Share The Reader Experience

Reworked into the Escape Town universe

I’ll explore retro-fitting these stories into the Escape Town universe.

Read / Write / Run

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