Camy's Writing Diary

I had a bad morning and didn’t get started on work until rather late. I woke up with IBS pain and it didn’t go away after lunchtime. While I was waiting for the medicine to kick in, I decided to do some of my easier tasks such as my Japanese study, email and marketing, and I did some Regency research reading during lunch. So despite feeling rather crappy this morning, I still did get some of my “frogs” done. I felt better in the afternoon and did my Hawaii book, then spent a few minutes on writing and blocking my Regency series. It wasn’t nearly as much as I’d hoped I’d do today, but it’s better than just the bare minimum, which I was tempted to do this morning and then call it quits. On other bad days, I’d often just immediately do the bare minimum to make sure I got the work done and I wouldn’t even try to do my frogs since they’re not as urgent as my writing. But this time, doing my frogs while I wasn’t feeling well seemed to work. My frogs don’t require as much thought and energy a

I had a couple sick days because I caught a cold, but I managed to do the bare minimum of work on my Regency novel every day to keep my streak going. It’s amazing, the power of this streak. It’s over 200 days now, so I feel anxious if I don’t get writing done because I don’t want to break it. Since my bare minimum is so low (only 100 words or 5 minutes), it’s easy to do even when I’m feeling sick. I admit, the first couple weeks of the streak were probably the hardest, especially because I was in the midst of a pretty bad IBS flare-up and didn’t want to get to work. This was before I found medication to relieve the symptoms so that I could get at least a few hours of work done. I felt absolutely terrible on Saturday because of my cold, but I managed to get words written anyway since it was only 100 words. Keeping my streak keeps me invested in my manuscript so that I don’t have long stretches of time where I don’t work on it because of illness. It helps me be more efficient when I am f

I knew I wasn’t going to get as much done today because I had a doctor’s appointment this morning, but I tried to make the most of the waiting time. I managed to check my email before the appointment, and then I finished all my Japanese study before we returned home afterwards. I did only 15(ish) minutes each of marketing and the Hawaii book, then started on the Regency. However, I also had some IBS pain that distracted me a bit, so while I managed to get some writing done on my Regency, I only did the bare minimum of blocking. I’m glad I did at least something so that the day wasn’t entirely wasted, but I really didn’t get as much done as I wanted to. Still, getting a little done is much better than not doing anything just because I had an appointment, and I managed to work through some of the IBS pain. I got all my “frogs” done, too, so it wasn’t only a “bare minimum” sort of day. Regency series: Editing: Time spent: 8 minutes Writing: Time spent: 47 minutes Writing: Total number of

I took a little too long checking my email today, and since I’ve been taking too long to do marketing work lately, I decided to shift my marketing work to later in the day. So today, the “frogs” I got done first thing were my exercise (I forgot to mention that a few days ago when I blogged about my frogs), Bible reading, email, and my Hawaii serial novel. However, putting off my marketing work was a bad idea, partly because Thursdays are always more busy for me since I have more house chores to do. I got my Regency writing done, but I was already exhausted. I also started getting some IBS discomfort, so I got only an hour of blocking done. I was going to skip marketing work, but ended up getting some done later in the evening, so it did get done today, but it almost didn’t. I always seem to forget that putting my “frogs” off until later in the day puts them in danger of not getting done at all. I had gotten too self-confident since I’ve been able to do my Regency research reading at lu

I’m a little unsure if I got distracted or if I should just accept that some things need to be done no matter how long they take. When I was doing my 15 minutes of marketing work, I realized I had to clean up some of the main pages on my website that had outdated information related to the marketing work I was doing. The task was incredibly complicated, and it would have been hard to leave it for doing later because just writing out every little thing that needed to be done would have taken a long time, plus trying to break the task into 15-minute chunks would make the entire thing take much longer than if I did it all at once. So I took the extra time and did it today. On the one hand, it was stuff that absolutely needed to be done, and I think I worked pretty efficiently. On the other hand, it took a long time, and so I didn’t get to starting my Regency writing until after lunch. I ended up with some IBS discomfort and had to wait while my medicine kicked in. Maybe because of that, o

For about a week I’ve been trying out this new schedule, and now that I’ve switched to doing half writing/half blocking during my writing time, my schedule is set for now. I’m intending to try this to see how things go. I’ve been trying to wake up early, and I exercise, then eat breakfast. After breakfast I do some house chores. Then I do four “frogs”—important items that I have to do first in my day or else they won’t get done. These are: my Bible reading, checking my email, doing about 15 minutes of marketing work, and then doing about 15 minutes of work on my Hawaii serial novel, which will be posted as a free read on my blog. After that, I start work on my Regency series, which is the main series I’m working on. I’m trying to aim for a total of 3-4 hours a day working on this series, with about 1.5-2 hours of writing and 1.5-2 hours of blocking.  As I mentioned before, this isn’t ideal for me. Ideally, I’d be writing a book in one series, and then blocking another book in another s

I got a really late start today. First I woke up late because I had a hard time falling asleep last night (despite going to bed early), then I was slowed down by some IBS discomfort after breakfast (not caused by breakfast, but by something else I ate a week ago). As a result, I lost about an hour of time I could have done work before lunch. I am starting to wonder if my method of bare minimum writing each day has caused the pacing of the story to slow down. The book is already at 80,000 words and I’m only at about 60% of the way through. I’m not really worried about what the total word count will be since I don’t have to adhere to a traditional publisher's guidelines for word count (which are usually to accommodate paperback production). However, I am worried that maybe I’ve added too much detail to the scenes so that they’re a bit bloated, which will slow reading pace and make the narrative seem bogged down. I think I won’t know if that’s true until I do the overall self-editing

I woke up a little late today, but then I wasted time after breakfast browsing iTunes movies. I don’t know why I do retail procrastination so easily! I’m really easily distracted today! I think the problem was caused by the fact that I do my daily Bible study at breakfast on my phone. It’s super easy to get distracted by my phone. So I think that I will try to do my Bible study on my older iPad Mini. Since it’s so old, and so slow to load websites and apps, it might work to just do my Bible study and not tempt me with going online. I’ll actually have to see if it still works. (I just remembered that my Bible study was one of my “frogs” that I’ve been forgetting to list. I’ve been doing it every morning during breakfast, so it’s been easy to keep up my discipline to do it.) There were some blog posts that needed to go up next week, so I spent longer than 15 minutes working on my marketing work today. That, combined with the procrastination, made me lose about an hour of work I could hav

I think the adjusted schedule worked rather well today. I did my email, marketing, and Hawaii book first to make sure they got done. I made sure to set a timer so that I wouldn’t spend too much time on any one thing, although I did go a little over when I did the marketing. Then I got started on my writing on the Regency book, up until lunch. I did my Regency research reading over lunch. After lunch, I took a short walk, so lunchtime felt like more of a break rather than a continuous time of only working. I got back to the writing after the walk, and managed to work for a good chunk of time. Rather than aiming for a certain amount of time to work on my blocking, which I’ve been doing before, I decided to stop by a certain time so that I’d have time to do my Japanese study, which was the last thing I needed to do today. So I still managed to get a lot of writing done, but I also made sure I had time for my Japanese study. I’m not sure why I can now do the Regency research reading and Ja

Today, I managed to wake up a little earlier and so I felt like I had a little more time to get things done. However, I decided to split my “frogs” up and rather than doing all of them before my writing work, I only did a few of them before writing work. I did my email, marketing, and 100 words on the Hawaii book first. I did set a timer to try to keep me from spending too much time on marketing, but I still ended up going half an hour longer than I should have. I really have to either learn more discipline or maybe shunt my marketing work to the afternoon, after I’ve done my writing work. After that, I worked on the Regency until lunch. During lunch, I managed to do my Regency research reading. I wasn’t intending to do it, but I ended up doing my Japanese at that time, rather than waiting until later this afternoon to get it done. I would have had to do it later anyway, but I had been hoping to do it after my writing. After lunch, I had a lot of house chores to do. I should have remem

Yesterday I had decided to try putting off my Japanese study until later so that all my “frogs”—the important but non-urgent tasks that I do first thing so that I would be sure to do them—would take less time before I started writing work. However I decided to try something even more extreme and decided to do my writing first and then see if I’ve gained enough discipline to do my “frogs” afterward. I have a daily checklist of tasks to do, and every day I’ve been checking off my “frogs” since I’ve been doing them first thing. Usually if I don’t do them first thing, they won’t get done. But this time, I wondered if I would still get to them after my writing work, if I gave my writing work a time limit. So I gave myself 4 hours to work on my writing, and once the time was up, I’d do my Japanese study, Regency research reading, email, a little marketing work, and 100 words on my Hawaii book. The good thing was that I got a full 4 hours of work done on my Regency writing. The bad thing was

I admit I haven’t been blogging here lately because I was lazy. For about a week I was sick from seasonal allergies as well as a smallish IBS flare up, but then for the days after that, I ended up being too tired at the end of the day to blog and so I skipped it. I’m still doing my important but non-urgent things first, because if I don’t then they won’t get done: my Japanese study, Regency research reading, checking email, a little bit of marketing work, and at least 100 words on my Hawaii serial novel. The great part is that these important things have gotten done, whereas before, I had usually been too tired to get to them after I finished my writing work for the day. The bad part is that they take up a lot of time before I even get to my writing work for the day. I have tried to limit the amount of time I spend doing each thing, but they still take up at least 2 hours. I decided to try to switch my Japanese work to after my writing work, rather than doing it before. The reason is t

I’ve been suffering from seasonal allergies for a few days and took several sick days. Today is yet another one, but I wanted to be sure to post because today marks 180 consecutive days of writing at least the bare minimum every single day. I’m so proud of myself for keeping up this streak. It means I have kept moving forward on this book even when I didn’t feel well, which means I have gotten a lot more done than I would have if I’d simply done nothing on my sick days. I hope to feel better soon, but until then I’ll make sure to at least do 100 words or 5 minutes of work on my Regency series every single day.