[I wrote This in July 2018 and didn’t publish it so first paragraph might not make sense unless you read this past post Fractal Writing. ]

I think I lied when I said I wasn’t entirely sure why I was fascinated by fractals. On reflection, I do have an inkling of an idea why I find them so intriguing. Their visual patterns displaying their mathematical beauty, their power in scalability both in the microscopic sense and into the macroscopic proportions, and the potential to use them as templates, all fascinate and inspire something in me.

Mapping a fractal template into my own behaviour is good fun too as I enjoy exploring this theoretically and it actually helps me make sense of the world and even adapt to it. I’ll explore those ideas in another post.

So again what has all this to do with Fractal Authors? Sounds rather painful, doesn’t it.

Well, early last month, I attended an intense Writers Workshop, curated by Sarah Odedina, and one of the many talented speakers that were invited included Malorie Blackman. My aim, like probably everyone else attending, was to listen, learn and admire.

The aim of learning from a highly successful author is to hope that somehow it rubs off on us. But it doesn’t work like that. Self-similar behaviour is what I was looking out for and what a delight it was to learn that Malorie Blackman has a STEM past and specifically worked as a programmer. She described to us a very specific method, inspired by her own background, of valuing her writing. And I immediately hooked onto it.

It’s very easy to write without valuing our own time but Malorie Blackman taught me a lesson in valuing that writing before starting a project. And yes, each book we aim to write is a project. So the first point is to plan a valuation exercise beforehand.

Simply put: it’s a linear valuation. And I’ve taken liberty to interpret it as follows:

Estimate word count: 10-25k

40 hours per week over 10 weeks = 400 hours

From here you can value your time to the value you sell to a publisher.

This is a very precise business minded approach that runs through every layer of Malorie’s methods.

It allowed her to create multiple projects which she sold to multiple publishers. She didn’t wait for one publisher to get back to her but continued with the selling of new stories. She valued her time on offset. At one point she had 8 editors because her methodical way had no room waiting on the first publisher to decide on her books. This attitude is powerful and something I am certain helps give her the status of not just being a highly acclaimed author but a prolific one too.