Camy's Writing Diary

My IBS is very bad today, and since the last time I tried working through it, I ended up being distracted and unfocused, I’m just going to call in a sick day today. I took some notes from a marketing book I read and I should go through those, plus I need to clean up after my first BookFunnel promotion ended yesterday (change prices, readjust book descriptions). *** Ugh I ended up staying up way too late! I didn’t have any house chores to do, nor did I have to cook, so I sort of worked all day and didn’t take much of a break. But I got a lot of work done on writing-related things like making up my BookFunnel landing page, and creating different MailChimp landing pages, and then updating my self-published ebooks on all the ebook distributors with the new newsletter signup links. I also wrote the rough drafts for my two newsletters going out in August, and created and tested a new reader poll I’m going to send to my newsletter subscribers. I’m glad I didn’t do any creative work, be

I’m feeling better today, so I’ll start work and see if the discomfort comes back or not. I’m working on the spiritual and romantic arcs for the serial novel. *** I got two more characters done today! And they were the two main ones. Now I have only two more characters’ spiritual and romantic arcs to do, and they’re minor-ish characters, so hopefully they won’t take too long. I want to keep working, but it’s getting late and I want to make sure I do some reading before bed, so I’ll stop here. It seems like a good stopping point. Time spent writing: 5 hours, 28 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 2 minutes

I’m starting to feel like a complete loser because I keep cutting short my work time because of health issues. But my IBS is still bad today, and I’ve been noticing that I keep stopping work every 15-20 minutes because I’m distracted. The discomfort is probably what’s making it hard for me to focus. I got a little more done on the spiritual and romantic arc of one of the six characters in my serial novel, but I’m still far from done. I’m stopping here and will go to bed early. Time spent writing: 2 hours, 9 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: I forgot to start my Toggl timer when checking email and social media today. My takeaway for today: The next time I have health issues (which might be tomorrow) I should just take a sick day and maybe do other writing-related things.

I wanted to see how long it’s been taking me to brainstorm and plot this series. I went back through my Toggl time entries, which are not entirely accurate because sometimes I was too lazy to record when I was working on my projects. I started working on the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series in mid-2016, and from there until the end of May 2020, I added everything up to 634 hours. This is only a minimum estimate of the time I took to brainstorm and do characterization for the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series, which includes a little bit of characterization for the serial novel. I also had changed my mind about the series format in early 2019, turning it into its current 10-volume non-stand-alone format around April or May of 2019, so some of the plot ideas I had before that ended up being scrapped, but the general ideas about the characters remained the same. Also, there are lots of gaps of time in those 4 years because I suffered from several bouts of writer’s block during those years, an

I stayed up late last night doing some category and keyword research for my series. It might seem early to be doing this, but it’s on my marketing To Do list, and doing it now will enable me to tag my current blog posts about my book, as well as saving me the time doing it later. But I only got 6 hours of sleep, and it’s taken me a while to get to work today. I’m starting on the spiritual and romantic arcs of my characters in the serial novel. *** After talking about my increased writing stamina yesterday, today I have egg on my face because I’m stopping work early. I gave in to temptation and ate some things that set off my IBS, so now I’m feeling too uncomfortable to concentrate. Time spent writing: 2 hours, 42 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 39 minutes My takeaway for today: For all my improved discipline in my writing, I still can’t keep myself from eating crap. *** Soooooo okay maybe I gave up too easily. After about half an hour, my IBS got b

I can’t believe it’s been almost two months! Since this is the last Sunday in July, I’ll write my evaluation today. Here it is in no particular order. Increasing my writing stamina: I mentioned this on Day 54, but I’m starting to see that I’m able to increase the number of minutes I’m working each day as the months progress. This is only during the plotting phase of my writing, so I’ll have to see if this continues throughout the writing and editing phases, too. I think part of the reason I’m able to focus for longer hours is because I’m making more of an effort to refill the creative well (although I still need to work on this), which makes me less distracted. Also, the act of writing down the number of minutes worked each day on this blog has been motivating me to work for longer hours. I’ve also been smarter about my breaks, which I realized can mess up my work momentum. I’ve been working for longer periods of time before taking a break, so I take less breaks during the da

Once again, I got a slow start to my Saturday. I really don’t understand why it’s harder to get into my work on Saturdays. I’m excited to continue working on Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) for the serial novel because I’m almost done! After I finish Snowflake step 6, I’ll do the spiritual and romantic arcs for the main characters of the serial, and then I’ll be ready to start writing the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series again! *** I’m done with Snowflake step 6!!!!! Good grief, the serial novel ended up with 294 mini-scenes!!! But if each mini-scene is only about 500 words, then that’s only about 150k words for the entire serial novel, which makes it only 1.5 books. I still have to do the spiritual and romantic arcs, but some of that was already done when I did Snowflake step 6. Hopefully it won’t take too long. I’ll try to finish it all on Monday. Mini-scenes plotted total: 294 Time spent writing: 4 hours, 45 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 40 mi

I took a look at my writing stats a bit last night. When I take the average number of minutes I write each day, my monthly average for June was 281 minutes, but my monthly average for July so far is 303 minutes. The averages include even the days when my daily minute count was low because I had health issues. So I’m steadily starting to increase the number of minutes I write each day. I guess that means I’m improving my writing stamina! I hope I can continue to improve even when I move from the plotting portion to the writing portion. I think that’ll be the real test. I’m continuing working on Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) for the serial novel. I got a lot done yesterday, so I hope I can get a lot done today, too! Speaking of the serial novel, I had no idea it was going to be quite this long. I knew it would have a lot of mini-scenes, but I had assumed it would make the serial novel about the same length as one of the volumes in the regular series. However, now it’s looki

My head always feels a little fragile after I’ve had a migraine, but today I don’t feel as bad as I usually do. I was surprised I got as much work done yesterday as I did even though I lost a little less than half a day to my headache. I had house chores to do this morning, which didn’t take all that long, but I also ended up checking email and social media instead of starting my writing work right away. This is my normal routine, so I’ll see how productive I am. Today I’m continuing Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) for the serial novel. *** I remembered a tip I had read a while ago (but I forgot where I read it) for coming up with ideas. You make a list of ideas, no matter how ridiculous, and just keep listing everything you can think of until you find something that seems to click. The process of making a list is apparently a different part of the brain (from what I can’t remember), and it can lead to more and more ideas. So I tried that today every time I got stuck o

I had previously found that “clearing the decks” before working was the best way to clear my mind to write, but since I was so distracted yesterday (and I procrastinated quite a bit), I decided to try to shake things up by writing before I did my writing-related work (like checking email and social media). I was afraid I’d be distracted by thoughts of stuff I would have to do in my email (which is what had happened to me before), but today I was able to focus on my writing relatively well. I was a little distracted, but not very much. So the “shake things up” experiment seemed to work well. I’ll try it again tomorrow. *** My creativity tanked after about 3.5 hours—I’ve spent the last hour struggling over the same plot problem. I don’t know if this is my natural rhythm or if it’s because my back started bothering me about an hour ago. Regardless, I think it’s time to take a longer break. *** My upper back issue is feeling like it’s going to turn into a full-blown migraine,

I chose a new blog template today! And … it took up about 15-20 minutes, so it was pure procrastination. These bouts of procrastination just sneak up on me at random times. I guess that means I’m not really focusing hard enough on the task at hand, if I can be distracted by thoughts about my blog template. I also wrote some blog posts today, so it seems like I spent a lot of time on marketing work as opposed to my novel. I’m not sure what to do about that since my blog is part of my marketing strategy and so I need to spend time on it, but I also don’t want it to cut too much into my fiction writing time. My house chores today also took longer than usual, not because I had a lot to do, but just because I was moving slowly this morning. So I’m starting a little later than I wanted to, but I’m continuing Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) for the serial novel. *** It seems like a lot of my posts recently have been about my health derailing me, and today was no exception. I

Wow! 50 days! This morning I implemented my new schedule of doing a little bit of chores every day, and it didn’t take too long. Now that it’s out of the way (and won’t nag me while I’m working), I’ll continue working on Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) for the serial novel. *** I got some good progress done, but I’m finding myself fighting to keep focus because I’m just not as comfortable at my desk. My ankles got swollen yesterday from standing too much at my standing desk, so I’m writing seated at my kotatsu desk today, but when I sit for long hours, it’s not as comfortable for my back and neck as my standing desk. Even though I’m walking around every hour, my body is starting to ache. I could work another hour or so, but I think I’ll stop for today because I’m just too uncomfortable, and my work is suffering. I’ve been stuck on a particular plot point for about 20 minutes now and I find my mind wandering. I’ll go to bed early and pick up again tomorrow. Since my seri

I had been so proud of myself that I decided to shunt all my non-writing work to Sundays so that I’d have more time to write during the week. Well, all that non-writing work makes Sundays suck! I have literally spent all day doing all the chores and non-writing stuff I’d put off. I took off maybe 30 minutes to cook dinner and another 45 minutes to eat it. And I didn’t even get everything done! I decided to go back to doing a little bit of house chores every day. This time, I split the chores up a bit differently and spread them out more so there’s a little less to do each day. Hopefully the chores won’t take up too much time and I’ll still be able to get a good chunk of writing done each day. I’m still aiming to get 8-9 hours of writing work done each day if possible. I guess I’m still experimenting in tweaking my schedule so I’ll be more efficient and productive in my writing.

I procrastinated with retail procrastination when I really should stop spending money. I only lost time and not my money, but I suppose in the writing business, time is money. Back to work, continuing Snowflake step 4 (one-page synopsis) for the serial novel. *** I realize that I tend to waste more time on Saturdays than on the weekdays, maybe because Captain Caffeine is playing his PS4 and so I feel a bit more lazy. I did some knitting rather than diving right into writing (despite writing the above about starting work) and now it’s an hour and a half later. Ugh! Okay, I’m really starting writing now! *** Woot! I finished Snowflake step 4! Now I’ll work on Snowflake step 6 for the serial novel. From Snowflake step 4, it’s obvious this is actually going to be pretty long, so this might take longer than it did when I did Snowflake step 6 for the volumes in the main series. *** I got some progress on Snowflake step 6, but it’s going to take a long time to finish this one

I knew I couldn’t keep up my uber-disciplined sleep schedule for long! I stayed up late last night working (doing some characterization research) so I woke up late today. I also spent some time reading a marketing book that was really interesting, but essentially it was procrastination of starting my writing work today. So I’m starting my plotting work late today. Still working on Snowflake step 4 (one-page synopsis) for the serial novel. *** While I was out walking, I did some brainstorming as to my funnel book and my Reader Magnet , and got some great ideas for both! The reader magnet especially has an impact on the plotline for volume 1, but it also fixes a problem I didn’t realize I had when I wrote volume 1. All I can say is, thank You God that I decided to plot the entire series before releasing any of the books, because several things I already wrote in volume 1 need to be revised before I can release it now. I know that especially in the world of self-publishing, books

Thanks to my friend Linore Burkard , I found out that the newsletter signup widgets on my websites ( Camy Tang and Camille Elliot ) weren’t working. UGH! It’s been one of those days. I’ve spent a couple hours fixing them. Actually, it ended up being a good thing I had to fix them, because instead of an embedded html widget, I changed it to a link to my newsletter signup landing pages. Not only can I tag each subscriber so that I know they signed up via my website, but if I ever want to change my signup text, I only have to do it on the landing page as opposed to every widget on my website. So now I’m only just starting work in the afternoon. It doesn’t help that I have a slight headache, maybe because of my allergies. I’ll see how far I can get today. I’m so close to finishing my plotting so I can start writing! I really want to start writing! Today I’m working on Snowflake step 4 (one-page synopsis) for the serial novel. I say “one page,” but since the serial novel is looking li

I finished the characterization (most of it, I think) for the serial novel, and then started on Snowflake step 2 (1-paragraph summary). I got it done CRAZY fast, I think because I’d done so much work on the characterization. Woot! Now I’m on to Snowflake step 4 (one-page synopsis). It’s looking pretty long, maybe because this is a serial novel. It also seems like it’s going to have more (and shorter) scenes than my other books, so this might take a little longer. *** I only got partway through Snowflake step 4. I have a few hours after dinner, but instead I’m going to focus on improving the back cover blurb for The Spinster’s Christmas , since I have a promotion starting on July 25th. *** Time spent writing: 3 hours, 13 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 5 hours, 9 minutes My takeaway for today: Spending time to fill in most of the details of my characterization notes helps me go through the plotting much faster.

I spent a lot of time today signing up for BookFunnel and setting things up in order to be able to participate in a Christmas in July promotional sale with other Christian and sweet romance authors. I had to learn how to use the site, which isn’t difficult, but I had to read a lot of informational pages to be able to understand how to set up landing pages and the like. So, I got a little more work done on characterization for my serial novel, but not as much as I would have wanted since I spent so much time doing the BookFunnel setup. I also wanted to set up a segregated mailing list for my landing page, so I spent some time in Mailchimp monkeying around. (Haha) I think it was in either Prosperous Creation or Get Your Book Selling , the author talks about how marketing can be a full-time job but you can’t let it become like that. I have to remember that and try to make work more of a priority tomorrow. Time spent writing: 2 hours, 20 minutes Time spent doing other writing-relat

I’m back at work writing today. I feel mentally better after the two days off, although since I did marketing research, it wasn’t entirely non-writing. I got a new mat yesterday, Genius Mat by Sky Mats : The rollerball was the first thing I tried out, and it’s been super nice so far. I’m continuing working on the characterization for my Regency serial novel. I think I only have one major character to do characterization work on, and then the rest are minor characters. *** Stomach suddenly really upset, so I’m going to stop today. Time spent writing: 4 hours, 55 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 2 hours, 48 minutes

I spent yesterday and today reading marketing books, taking notes, and then doing the homework and coming up with a sales funnel. Before reading Prosperous Creation: Make Art and Make Money at the Same Time I didn’t even know what a sales funnel was, but the book did a good job explaining the basics of general marketing to a complete newbie. I also learned a lot from Get Your Book Selling: Jumpstart Your Sales With a Simple Plan That Just Works (Growth Hacking For Storytellers 7) by the same author (update: it’s no longer available). She talked about what a marketing strategy is, lists 15 different ones and explains how to use each one, and then gives guidance about how to choose one (or two) for creating your sales funnel. (While I would assume she’d mention marketing strategies in one of her other books that replaced this one, I don’t know which one it is.) She then also goes more in depth into the 10 Stages of Audience, which she had mentioned briefly in Prosperous Creation .

I’m taking a personal day today, which is actually a “stress” day because of the personal stuff that happened yesterday. I already know from those several bouts of writer’s block over the past couple years that when I have personal stress, it bugs me and distracts me while I’m writing and I end up not writing at all, or very little. I need some time to process the stress, and when I’m back in a calmer place, I can go back to my writing and be more efficient. I know this sounds very woo-woo and weird, but I’ve discovered that it’s the way my brain works, and rather than trying to struggle and write when I’m stressed and distracted, it’s much more efficient for me to take a personal day. But I won’t be doing non-writing work today—I’ll be rereading some of the marketing books I bought and taking notes and formulating a marketing strategy, and putting some tactics in place. I would normally save all this stuff to do on Sunday, since it’s non-creative work, but it might end up being a

I was sidelined by some personal stuff today, and the stress has made it hard to write. I spent a lot of time working, but haven’t made much progress—I’m still working on the characterization for the last major characters for my serial novel. I think I should just quit here—I’m not getting much done no matter how many hours I try to work. Hopefully I’ll wake up early with a refreshed brain so I can get more progress done. Time spent writing: 4 hours, 53 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 2 hours, 8 minutes My takeaway for today: Personal stress REALLY derails me.

I spent some time this morning thinking about marketing and social media. I’m not entirely sure that social media actually helps people find out about my books, but I know my readers are on social media because they’ve reached out to me with Facebook comments and Twitter replies. I absolutely don’t want to be an author who only tweets “Buy my book!” but I also don’t want to be an author who posts random things about their day. I don’t have time to do that anyway—I spend long hours writing, which is incredibly BORING and unTwitter-worthy, and I (usually) don’t stop to post or interact on Facebook and Twitter because that messes up my writing focus. But in the past few months, I’ve been enjoying the devotional app YouVersion Bible app by Life.Church , which has thousands of quick daily devotional plans and Bible versions to read. You can also create Bible images of verses using their backgrounds or your own photos, and I started using the photos of my Dad’s hibiscus flowers. I would

I was pretty distracted today, but it was because the house was soooooo hot. I kept going to get more iced water and try to cool down, and sometimes I felt like I was in a sauna while standing in front of my computer. But I don’t want to be the kind of writer who needs conditions to be perfect to write! That’s only a recipe for disaster! I have friends who write on their cell phones when they’re waiting in line, surely I can write when I’m at my ergonomic desk with tasty snacks! Speaking of ergonomics, since I’m at my standing desk I haven’t had too many back problems, but then the other day I noticed a bit of tingling in my upper back. It’s an old problem that I went to a chiropractor for a few years ago, and it’s basically because I slouch too much. So I started doing my exercises again and I also ordered a posture brace to remind me to keep better posture while I’m standing. It arrived yesterday and it’s been working great! It even makes my back feel better when I’m sitting at

Today I’m still working on the characterization for my serial novel. I got some work done earlier this morning, but then I started feeling overwhelmed and stressed about the thought of all the advance marketing I will need to start doing. Luckily, I had arranged to call an author friend of mine, MaryLu Tyndall , in order to ask some advice about target audience. She heard all my fears and stressing about marketing and talked me down from the rafters. She reminded me that God is in control of my marketing and book sales, and I should pray and do only the marketing I feel God telling me to do. It was such a balm to my spirit to hear her say that. The purpose God gave to me was to write these books so He could draw people closer to Jesus, and He wouldn’t want me being distracted by marketing efforts I don’t necessarily need to do. So now I’m back at work, feeling calmer and more able to focus. I’m really glad I called her. Otherwise, I think I’d be too stressed and distracted to get

I’m getting a late start today because I decided to give Facebook another try, thanks to the marketing books I read yesterday. I really disliked Facebook for a while because the newsfeed was very overwhelming with posts from people I hardly interacted with as opposed to people whose posts I regularly liked, and sometimes from days or weeks earlier rather than the latest posts. Also, I was friends with not only my readers, but also with people from church and my relatives, and I thought that it was not very responsible of me to have strangers on my friends list who would have access to the profiles of the teenagers from my church (not that I expected strangers on my friends list to look at their profiles, but the option was there). So I unfriended everyone except people who had physically met my husband or my parents. I tried interacting with readers through my Author Page on Facebook, but then Facebook changed their algorithms (again) and suddenly I got no traffic because posts from

I spent most of today doing non-time-sensitive chores I had put off for Sunday so I’d have more time to focus on writing fiction during the week. Some of it was writing-related business—filing and recording receipts, writing blog posts and newsletters I plan to release this coming month, updating my website. I also switched my Story Sensei worksheets over to Kindle Unlimited, but they’re DRM-free so anyone should be able to download a copy from Amazon onto their computer and then load it onto their iPad/iPhone, Kobo, or Nook. Right now, when people buy my worksheets, they can also download them in PDF, .epub, .mobi, and .docx on a special section of my website, but that requires them to join my website, and I have to manually add them to the download page. So I’m considering a website like BookFunnel, which will enable me to email people directly with other file formats of the worksheets they’ve bought. Also, if I have time this coming Sunday, I’m going to go through the worksheets

Like yesterday, I got up early today, but despite the fact I was bone-tired, I didn’t sleep very well last night. I’m pretty frustrated—what’s the point of trying to get up early when I’m not going to have a good night’s sleep? Anyway, I’m STILL working to finish Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) on volume 10 of my series. *** WOW I finished Snowflake step 6! It gave me so many problems and took so long! There was one plot point that gave me the most problems, and I only was able to figure out a solution after I’d also tweaked the spiritual conflict in the scene to reflect the gospel message a bit more. So maybe God wasn’t letting me move forward because He wanted me to fix that spiritual conflict. The rest of the plot points also took time to solve, but nowhere near as much time as that first one. Now I’ll try to do the spiritual and romantic arcs for the volume. I already did some of it, but now I’ll go through and make sure they’re all completed. *** My brain is

I didn’t sleep all that deeply, but I woke up early, so one out of two isn’t bad. I don’t usually work well if I haven’t slept well, but I also don’t want to be the kind of writer who can’t work unless everything is absolutely perfect. So I’ll do my best today! I’m still working to finish Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) on volume 10 of my series. *** I realized I need to do taxes today, and originally I was going to finish Snowflake step 6 on volume 10, then work on my taxes. But as I’m trying to finish Snowflake step 6, I realized that I was too distracted thinking about my taxes. I mentioned before that I need to clear the decks before I start work so that I don’t have any unfinished chores nagging at me, and apparently taxes fall into that, even though they’ll probably take a huge chunk out of my day. Sigh. So my writing is on hold while I do our taxes. *** WOW doing taxes took only 3.5 hours this year! That’s got to be a record! Well, that doesn’t include hubby c

Yesterday was almost a complete wash in terms of productivity because I was so distracted and couldn’t come up with good story ideas, so today I’m going to read fiction books to refill the creative well and also some writing books for a change of pace. Hopefully I’ll be back tomorrow with more ideas and better focus.

Wow I just realized I’m almost done plotting my series! Volume 10 is the last planned volume. However, I do have a side-story serial novel I want to plan out, which I had always intended to write. It’ll be an in-between volume, and I intend to post it on my blog as I write it. The events do impact the main storyline, but the main characters of the serial novel are not in my main series volumes. So after I finish plotting volume 10, I’ll also plot this serial novel out. The serial novel will be quality content that will hopefully be entertaining to my blog readers and give new readers a taste of my writing style. When I was thinking about future marketing for this series, I realized that my strengths are not things like social media, but instead in writing content. I especially enjoy blogging. So I thought I’d write a serial novel as a marketing tool instead of making half-hearted efforts at marketing outlets that I don’t enjoy. I spent some extra time with my husband over dinner.