Camy's Writing Diary

I mentioned yesterday about using the website/game 4thewords.com to gamify my writing, and today I had a great writing day! I got a little under 5000 words done, and while it took me longer than it would have by dictation, they’re very clean, so I won’t need to spend much time editing them later. I’m not sure why, but I really love doing the quests in the game and figuring out how to fulfill the different quests and craft different weapons and armor. I’ve basically been doing lots of sprints throughout the day and the words kept piling up. My words per hour rate isn’t very high—between 1300 and 1500 words per hour. It’s nice that the words are clean and don’t need much editing, but I would really like to increase that to 2000 or 2500 words per hour. Part of the reason my writing is a little slow is that I haven’t been spending much time doing blocking for the scenes before I write them. I’m wondering if maybe I should take the time to do the blocking, even though a part of me fe...

Even though I was taking a few days off because of my health issues, I ended up doing some work after all, and also came up with some new ideas. But first, let me summarize the past month. Outlining my series Something which I thought was interesting was looking at the raw numbers of how long it took me to outline my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. It had a rough start, especially because I changed my mind about it several times and had some bouts of writer’s block, but things picked up this year especially when I wrote down my writer’s process and began systematically doing the Snowflake method on each of the volumes in the series. I finished outlining all the books in the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series on August 1st! Yay! This included the serial novel. Unfortunately those numbers were not included in the above post on my raw numbers, but I will eventually do a follow-up post and also list how many hours it took me to write and edit the volumes in the series. Hopefully it will take...

Thanks to some food poisoning early Sunday morning, I’ve had a terrible two days. It’s compounded by the fact I have a sinus headache from my allergies, probably because of the California wildfire smoke in the air. I’ve been trying to write today, but just feel too crappy to want to do much of anything. It made me realize that maybe it would be best to take a few days off while my stomach/intestines calm down, and maybe by then the fires will be more under control and the air won’t be so smoky. Also, removing the stress of trying to write might help my intestines heal a little faster. Jill Kemerer and also some other friends I have online mentioned gearing up more in Fall when school starts, and backing off on the writing during the summer months. I wonder if I need to do that, too, and ramp up more in a few weeks? The heat certainly isn’t helping my motivation. I don’t know. All I know is that today I feel awful. I’ll see you guys in a few days.

I didn’t post yesterday since I would only be saying I was taking a personal day. However, today was kind of a slog. As I mentioned the day before yesterday, an article mentioned not reading until after you do your writing work for the day because reading before writing might drain your creative energy. Since a lot of my reading is in the form of audiobooks while I’m walking, I decided to try walking in the afternoon instead of the morning, and to do my work in the morning. I’d forgotten that when I wake up, I’m kind of brain-dead and don’t really wake up for about 2-3 hours. Today I went to my computer to write and just kind of stared at the screen, trying to remember what I was supposed to be doing. The brain fog didn’t clear until almost lunchtime. When I was doing biology work, I would always prepare my morning work the day before, and it was always mindless kinds of tasks like feeding cells or doing an assay I was used to doing. I couldn’t do things like calculations or stat...

I was thinking today and trying to figure out why my writing productivity has been in the toilet. Yes, I had some health problems, but I’m also feeling excessively unmotivated. Some of that might be spiritual—and I really do need to remember to pray more during the day for God’s help—but I also need to try to see if there’s anything I can do to make it easier for me to Just Do It. I read this article about distractions today, and while some things weren’t particularly new, there were a few things that seemed to hit me. I am guilty of consuming content before working. I will listen to podcasts or audiobooks while walking, and sometimes I’ll read a book while eating breakfast or lunch. When I’m feeling particularly antsy, I’ll listen to an audiobook to help calm my mind and get me into a writerly mindset. But maybe I should instead switch my walking to the afternoon so that my creative well-refilling happens after I do my work. In the past year or two, using an audiobook to help c...

I had no idea the wildfires were so bad—or so close—until I woke up this morning and the world was orange like a sunset and smelled like a hundred barbecue grills. I also woke up with a headache from the smoke in the air that wouldn’t go away despite the Advil and allergy medicine I took. I transcribed yesterday’s dictation by playing the poor quality recording on my phone into my earbuds, then dictating it into my Zoom H1n Portable Recorder —man I really love that recorder. The sound quality is fantastic, as good as my podcast mic hooked up to my computer. Then I used Dragon to transcribe the new recording since it hadn’t been able to transcribe the bad recording from yesterday. By then my headache was getting worse so I rested my eyesight a bit and took a little more Advil, but my headache didn’t start to go away until late in the afternoon. I intended to go back to work at that point, but then I got distracted by a book I was reading during my late-afternoon snack ( Not If I Sav...

I tried doing the idea I had yesterday of clearing my mind before writing, and it worked to an extent—I was able to get about an hour’s worth of dictation done. However, my writing momentum all went to compost when I took a break after writing and had a hard time refocusing. I couldn’t quite clear or calm my mind enough again to do a second session of dictation. I’m pretty disappointed in myself, because I want to be able to write for longer hours each day. I will have to think about this to try to diagnose why I couldn’t refocus and figure out a solution. A part of me thinks I’m just being lazy, but while I can berate myself with that, it doesn’t solve anything. Also I had no problems working for longer hours when I was outlining the novels, but now I’m suddenly having difficulties focusing for the writing. There has to be a reason, and I just have to find it. I also had technical difficulties, or maybe I should admit they were more human difficulties. I think my microphone sett...

I spent most of yesterday just reading to refill the creative well, so I didn’t post. Today the weather was awful again, but we set up a portable air conditioning unit in the bedroom and I got some work done. Unfortunately, I had some technical difficulties with my Zoom H1n Portable Recorder , although I shouldn’t say it was the recorder’s fault—I had put some rechargeable batteries in it, which I thought were fully charged, but apparently they weren’t because they died at some point while I was dictating (and I was too into the dictating to even notice) so I lost about 20-30 minutes of work. Talk about frustrating! After I finished re-doing the entire scene I’d lost, I stopped work for the day to start cooking dinner. But I managed to get over 4000 words per hour, which is great! I probably won’t keep all of what I dictated because it’s really terrible, but it’s rather a relief to at least get the rough ideas down so that I can edit it later. Not all my writing time was spent ...

I admit I chickened out today. I knew it was going to be a scorcher like yesterday, so I did a little bit of blocking for volume 2, but then I gave up and instead did marketing work that wouldn’t require so much focus. I did some blogging, then researched marketing ideas (although I didn’t start my Toggl timer for the research part). Time spent writing: 52 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 6 hours, 26 minutes My takeaway for today: Sometimes the weather just wins.

Woke up with another low-grade headache. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME???? I hope it’s just allergies or the hot weather that is making me feel so crappy lately. Although when I think about it, several months ago I had been battling headaches like this all the time. Then they stopped and I had just gotten used to not having them. So maybe it’s just allergies popping up again. When I was living in Hawaii, my allergies would come and go throughout the year, too, but when I moved to California, my allergies went away until a few years ago, when they came back again. *** Headache finally went away so I’ll start writing. I’ll do the dictation exercises today since I’m feeling better. *** The dictation exercises were good, but at the same time they take up a lot of time and I find myself wanting a break after the exercises, which kind of defeats the purpose. I had a hard time focusing today on my writing, which might be because of the terribly hot weather (it’s 96 degrees in the house sinc...

Yesterday, my cover designer, Dineen Miller , gave me some mockups of the new cover for my romantic suspense novella, Necessary Proof , and they looked fabulous! She really understands my tastes, and her work is incredibly professional since she worked for years for an advertising company. It was so exciting to see the new author branding she’s working on for my romantic suspense books. We had discussed the looks of both my Sonoma series and also the Hawaii series I intend to write after I finish my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. I woke up with a low grade headache today, but I’ve been trying to work despite it by popping Advil (which sometimes affects my stomach). I just feel antsy since I haven’t gotten a lot of work done in the past week because of my health. I did some editing on the ebook formatting of Necessary Proof in anticipation of the new cover, since I hope to be able to participate in a BookFunnel promo later in August if the cover is done in time. I also had to fix s...

I felt better today but I also had a lot of home chores to catch up on so I didn’t get much writing done. I finished editing what little I’d written in volume 2, and then I did some work on Snowflake step 8 (scene spreadsheet), adding a few more rows in the spreadsheet for the next several scenes. I should have dived right into writing after that, and I did some dictation exercises, but I had a hard time focusing. This might be because I was still doing home chores like laundry and watering the yard, so I kept having to interrupt my work to go outside to hang the laundry or move the watering hose. I should know better than to try to do work in the midst of home chores, but I wanted to get some work done and yet I still had a lot of other non-writing stuff to do. So, since I couldn’t focus enough to do writing, I decided to do some writing-related stuff instead, which I could get done even though I kept needing to interrupt myself. I just got Publisher Rocket, so I watched videos...

Since the only thing I would have posted yesterday was that it was a sick day, I didn’t post. But today looks like it will also be a wash because I suddenly developed a bad migraine in the early hours of the morning and it’s only now starting to get better. However, I might have figured out what caused the migraine (the shower spray my husband has been using), which might also explain some of my other migraines the past several months. Hopefully eliminating the spray will also eliminate future migraines. However, I’m feeling rather fragile right now with a low grade headache and my eyesight still blurry, so I think I won’t even try to get some work done. I hope tomorrow I’ll feel better.

I usually don’t write on Sundays, so instead I read a book, then listened to some marketing podcasts and took notes. Surprisingly, it was in one of the (secular) podcasts that I realized I feel guilt and shame in not being able to work because of my health. I don’t need to feel that—I need to take care of myself. And these feelings may also be spiritual warfare. Tomorrow is a new day, and I can start work again because Aunt Flo left today. I’ll focus on doing my best with what I’ve got, and not feeling like it’s somehow my fault that my body has problems that are out of my control.

Continuing the trend, today is (mostly) another sick day. I’m feeling particularly cranky because my IBS is compounded by the unpleasant fact that I get multiple symptoms when Aunt Flo comes to call. I was wondering if God wants me to learn how to work through the pain. I’ll have to pray about that. I did manage to get a little bit of work done earlier today. I had wanted to do some writing of new stuff, but I realized I had to make a decision to either completely trash what I wrote earlier this year on volume 2, or edit it and see if anything was worth keeping. I decided to read through it first and saw that some of that mess wasn’t so bad, so I started editing it. I managed to write some transitions between the cut portions and finished a credible version of chapter one. But a sinus headache and back ache drove me away from the computer again after a little while. I hope I can get more work done on Monday. Time spent writing: 2 hours, 29 minutes Time spent doing other writin...

I feel completely lame but today’s another sick day, although this one is semi-scheduled, since I usually take off at least one day, sometimes two each month for my Aunt Flo. Just as Aunt Flo was arriving, I did feel well enough to get some characterization work done that I had been putting off. Basically after I finished plotting the serial novel and was about to start writing volume 2, I realized that I’d forgotten to finish my Hero and Heroine’s Journey spreadsheets for the series. (I have since adjusted my book creation process blog post to include this step.) I almost always do this spreadsheet, which is an overview of the events for each stage of the journeys, with one column for each main protagonist. (My Hero’s Journey is more of a hybrid of the external events and the hero’s internal journey.) Usually this is only for one book, but this time, I plan to do one column for each protagonist for the entire series. This is to make sure each protagonist’s spiritual journey has a...

I had an appointment to chat with my cover designer today, and we had a great talk about the visual author branding for both my Regency and my contemporary romantic suspense series. I wanted a consistent look across all the books in each series that would be appropriate for my genres, but would also help my series be recognizable even when the covers were only small thumbnails. The cover she had designed for my first Lady Wynwood’s Spies volume is absolutely beautiful, but after we discussed my author branding, we decided to tweak it a little bit and she’ll also eventually change the cover for The Spinster’s Christmas to match the adjusted look. We also discussed the cover for my Regency serial novel, which will be a side novel for the main series. I wasn’t certain yet how long it was going to be and if it ended up being as long as I fear, it might be two or three volumes. So we talked about how to make the three (or however many) volumes for that novel to be different from the ma...

I got up super early (as in, it’s the middle of the night) and felt better so I decided to do a few exercises in the Fool Proof Dictation book with my manuscript. The results will be messy and in extreme need of editing, but at least it will be forward momentum on writing my book, which is better than nothing. *** I decided to skip exercise #5 in the dictation book because honestly, I don’t see the point of it. The author also never mentions why this exercise is important or what it does to help you. Surprisingly, exercise #8 was the most fun and most nerve-wracking, and I’m sure my prose was by far the worst, but it was really good to make me try thinking ahead of my dictation. Exercises #9 and #10 made me realize the value of being able to dictate a scene more than once. It also made me realize that I need at least one pass through the scene to dictate the highlights of it so that I myself know where to go. My problem is my terrible memory, so I might dictate directly into D...

I had to write an email to my graphic designer who’s doing the repackaging for my romantic suspense novellas. After listening to some podcasts yesterday, I have a different idea of what I want my covers to look like, so I emailed her with more detail about what I wanted and asking for some suggestions and ideas from her. I feel bad because she had emailed me this morning with a cover mock up which now won’t work well, but I at least was able to more clearly tell her what I wanted the covers to accomplish. I’ll trust in her design sense to come up with some things that might work. As for writing, I think today is another wash. I’ve been feeling sick since I woke up, and now that it’s later in the day, I just don’t think I’ll be able to do much. I did fiddle around with my scene spreadsheet for volume 2, and I figured out how to reorganize the scene—which, quite frankly, was all over the place. That’s what I get for writing a scene without plotting it out better. But my IBS is both...

After getting all psyched up to do dictation today, I woke up with really bad IBS cramps and spent much of the first half of the day struggling with the pain on and off. I’m feeling better now but not great. However, even though earlier I found it best not to work if I’m not feeling well, I’m just too antsy about writing my manuscript and I think I’ll at least do the exercises in Fool Proof Dictation , which I had blogged about yesterday . If I’m feeling well enough, I’ll start work dictating the manuscript. *** I did the reading warmup, which was actually very helpful to get my head in the Regency era of my story. I tend to read too fast—rather than the 5000 words per hour that the book recommends, I read at about 6500 words per hour. I feel like my reading is super slow, but I apparently need to slow down even more. I also did Exercise #1, and I used the first scene of my Regency serial novel for the exercise rather than the prompt in the book. It was really great for me beca...

Aside from doing some house chores, I spent most of today cleaning up my desktop and filing away all the random stuff I didn’t bother to file away during the week. I also made Bible verse images and scheduled them to post during the week on Instagram, Twitter, and my two Facebook author pages. I’m reading various marketing books (still) and one mentioned that it’s more effective to have unique content on each social media platform rather than posting the same things to all of them. I can understand the author’s point, but it’s just a lot of work. Twitter is probably my bane because I absolutely do not know how to effectively tweet. So many people on Twitter are very pithy and clever and they can post neat things throughout the day. I cannot. I usually only check Twitter once a day—maybe twice—so I would not be able to do sporadic Tweets, nor would I respond in a timely fashion to people who reply to me. In the past, I tried checking Twitter more often, but it broke up my day too mu...

I can’t believe it! I’m done plotting the serial novel! That means I’m done plotting the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series books! Okay, well, technically I still have to plot out a novella and a short story that I will be using for marketing, but the important parts are plotted! I’m now onto Stage 4 of my book creation process , which is creating a spreadsheet of scenes. Sometimes I do all the scenes at once, but sometimes I’ll only do a few scenes before moving on to blocking and then writing. I’m going to see if I can do some rows in the scene spreadsheet tonight, and also see if I can block some of those scenes. If I can get a few scenes done, then I can start writing on Monday. *** I only got 4 scenes done in my spreadsheet and one scene blocked before I had to stop because of my IBS. I had a slow start because I was a bit overwhelmed in trying to figure out the scene in the manuscript which I’d written before and what was in my Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) for volume ...