Camy's Writing Diary

Edited to add: Sorry, I forgot to post this yesterday so it's going up late on Thursday. Unfortunately I got a late start today because I overslept. I hate it when I do that! But since I cooked yesterday, we'll have leftovers today and I'll have a little more time to write. I'm going to try for shorter sprints today to try to increase my writing pace, since I seem to write a little faster with shorter time periods. I will try to shift between desks rather than taking breaks in order to ease the stress on my ankles from my standing desk, although today my ankles feel pretty good so I'll see how things go. I also came up with an idea to make the self-editing easier to do. Since I loathe it so much, I will usually either procrastinate doing it or I won't do a very good job on it. But what if I did it in 4thewords.com ? I can copy and paste the chapters into files in 4thewords, then start a battle with a monster with a long word count and generous time lim...

One of my writer's Facebook groups today posted an old article on Time Management . That seemed very appropriate since I'm trying to get better at managing my time during the day and be more productive. I liked how the article talked about "learning to focus" and identifying the 20% of your activities that produce 80% of your results. I think I started doing that earlier this month (or maybe it was the end of last month) when I pared my Goals list down to only 3 goals for the quarter . (I blogged about this earlier, but I adjusted my 3 goals slightly a few days ago.) Those 3 goals are my most important goals in terms of financial or personal success. They've forced me to only focus on writing my Regency series, narrowing my social media posting to a certain theme or style, and working on the Japanese translation of Sushi for One. The main goal I felt God giving to me for my writing was in having my books translated so that Japanese women could read it, but t...

For the past two days, I've been trying to keep a more detailed account of exactly what I do all day, because I want to try to put in more hours actually writing. Yesterday I actually got a lot of writing-related business done, and it seemed like a lot more after I wrote it all down. I finished correcting the errors my translator sent to me for the Japanese version of Sushi for One , and I think the .epub file is almost ready to go! I already corrected the errors to the PDF file for the paperback format, too, so I might actually be able to release this book soon! Thanks to my proofreader's Googling skills in Japanese, she found me a website article on the html code I can use to rotate a character 90 degrees in an epub, so I was able to correct some of the wrongly rotated characters that I couldn't solve with the Half-width Romaji keyboard output. There were a LOT of errors in the ebook that hadn't been in the print book Word document. It was mostly some shifted ht...

Since today is Sunday, and I try not to write on Sundays, I decided to post this today. I’ve been wanting to do a post summarizing my experience with 4thewords. I started using the website 4thewords.com this month. Originally I had been searching online for a website to help make my writing sprints a little more fun , and found this website. I had actually signed up for it last year, but ultimately decided at the time that I wasn't interested in it. But now, the whole concept of writing in order to "defeat" monsters within a certain time limit was really appealing to me. I only discovered late last year that I love fantasy role playing games, and this is just like that. 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. As a result, it has increased my writing productiv...

Since I have abandoned my experiment into getting myself into creative flow, I decided to pursue another aspect of my productivity that I've been wanting to improve--the duration of time that I spend working each day. Writing stamina is something you have to build up to. While it may not seem really strenuous to spend 6-8 hours sitting and writing, it's actually pretty mentally taxing. When I was working full-time in biology and writing on the side, I only had 2-3 hours each night to write, so it was easy to work since I couldn't write for more than 3 hours. But when I started writing full-time, and I had all day to write, I found it really difficult to write for more than 3 hours at a time. This was really frustrating, but if you think about it, it's not surprising. Someone used to only running 30 minutes can't suddenly jump up and run a marathon. You need to train for the longer distance. When I first started this daily writing blog on the first of June, ...

I'll be continuing my experiment from yesterday, writing on my Alphasmart and then seeing if self-editing after each writing session is as much of a mental hurdle as it usually is. I'm not sure why but I'm feeling a bit light-headed today, as well as headachey. I really hope I'm not coming down with something. Otherwise I feel fine so I'll try to still get some writing done today.
 *** I did a writing session on my Alphasmart, and as I expected, it was such a pain to go back and correct things that the rough draft was rife with spelling and grammar errors. My words per hour was very high, 2200 words per hour, but the piece needed extensive self-editing to correct everything and look up the notes I made for myself. I did my self-editing as soon as the sprint was done. It was actually much easier than when I leave it for the end of the book. However, it was still rather difficult to get myself to do it--I procrastinated quite a bit before I actually went to m...

Sorry for being AWOL for the last three days, but health issues kept me from writing for two of them, and the third day was a bit of a wash because I was feeling unmotivated to write. I actually felt pretty down on myself yesterday that I couldn't force myself to JUST DO IT and get much work done, despite the fact I was feeling better-ish and probably could have written a bit more. But I'd also just come out of a tough two days of feeling like a truck rolled over me, so after staring at the book and walking away a few times, I decided to just take a mental health day for the rest of the day to try to recover my writing juju. I do feel more refreshed mentally today, so I hope I can get some work done. I mentioned earlier that I did more detailed blocking on my scenes in an attempt to get into creative flow, but it didn't seem like creative writing when I was doing it. Now that I'm writing again, I can confirm that the writing part feels much more creative, and no...

I'm writing this, but I don't really think anyone will be all that interested in it. However, in case I needed an excuse to contribute useless information on the web, I actually was Googling how to solve my formatting problems all day today and came up with NOTHING. And I know I can't be the only (English-speaking) person who wanted to know about this. Lines per page I only briefly mentioned this part earlier , and this probably won't come up for most languages, but I had to set the number of lines per page to Exactly 16 pt, as opposed to single space. This is because when a line has furigana, Word will give it more space for the furigana, and if it doesn't have furigana, it will go back to normal single spacing. So the distance between lines will be uneven, making some lines look squashed together and others far apart. Setting the Paragraph setting to Exactly 16 pt (or whatever fits for your book) will make the line spacing even no matter if there’s furigana or...

I mentioned yesterday about trying a new writing process. First, I am going to try to treat my blocking like a rough draft, making it even more detailed than it already is, and giving myself permission to make it messy since in my mind, it's the equivalent of a synopsis. This will hopefully enable me to enter into creative flow state, since I won't be stopping to edit my blocking. Next, I will do my writing like normal, working off of my blocking notes, but giving myself permission to edit as I go. This will cater to the part of me that enjoys writing clean copy without lots of things I will have to fix later in self-editing, which is the part of the process that I loathe the most. Essentially, this writing stage will be more like a first-pass edit rather than a first draft, which is why I don't need to think about creative flow state for this stage. I decided to think of it like a second draft of the book. I'm not entirely sure how to record this in my writing ...

I woke up with another sinus headache and wasn't sure I'd get much writing done today, but the headache eventually went away and I got down to business. Intermittently, I was feeling a bit of discomfort from the IBS, so I wasn't quite as productive as I wanted to be and ran out of gas a bit early. When I nearly lost a monster battle because I was staring dazedly at the screen, I decided to stop for the day. I listened to a podcast, which was talking about writing flow. It reminded me of what I'd blogged about yesterday about editing as I go because I simply don't want to have to do it later, which has led to lower stress and more enjoyment during the writing. The problem is that what they were talking about with getting into writing flow and not allowing the critical left-brain stuff to interrupt actually makes a lot of sense, and I remember studying this kind of stuff back in my Psychology courses in college. It bothered me that I might be crippling myself b...

I woke up with a terrible migraine yesterday, so I spent most of the day in bed. But the extra sleep did my body good because I got up feeling better. I got a little writing done, but not very much, so I decided not to post yesterday. Today I feel better--no headache, and IBS is a little uncomfortable but not too bad. I'll see how much writing I can get done today. *** One thing I noticed today while writing is that I am more relaxed as I'm writing. When I usually do a sprint, I think I lay pressure on myself to write as fast as I can. But when I'm battling monsters, the time limit is very generous so I am writing at a more easy-going pace. I will fix a sentence that seems weird, or I'll look up a word in an online thesaurus.  Usually when I'm sprinting, and especially when I'm dictating, I'll just leave a note to myself to look this up later, fix it later. I heard something like this once on a podcast: Sprinting Camy is leaving Future Camy things to...

Edited to add: I forgot to post this yesterday and so ended up posting this late. It's been a rough several days. Health issues galore, all calculated to keep me from writing! The sinus headaches lasted about two and a half days, but when they cleared, my stomach was upset and then I had an IBS flareup. While I wasn't incapacitated like I was with the headache, it was still really hard to concentrate. So I decided to do some of the writing-related work I had waiting for me, namely doing the editing for the Japanese translation of Sushi for One . (As a warning, the following is a little tedious, so feel free to skip this. But I decided to write it out not only so I don't forget what I had to do, in case I have to do all this again, but also in case anyone else is curious about doing translations of their novels into another language. Another language like Spanish or German or French probably won't be quite the same type of work, since they don't have pronunci...