Day 803: Dictation, day 18

Since today is Saturday, I worked on my Hawaii serial novel, Year of the Dog. Some scenes are just revising the original manuscript, while others involve almost complete rewrites, and there are a few scenes that are completely new. Today, the scene was only revision, so I actually finished the chapter in about an hour.

I spent some extra time doing some marketing stuff, which today happened to be cooking. I was making a dish that I wrote into my book, and I had to make it today because I worried that the cream would go bad if I waited another day or two. I took photos and then wrote the blog post for the recipe, even though I probably won’t post it for a while, but I wanted to write it while it was still fresh in my mind.

I decided to go for a walk and do some dictation exercises, but it ended up being only one exercise, which was a free write. I probably should have stopped the freewrite in order to do a dictation exercise on a piece of fiction, but the free write had turned into brainstorming some marketing strategies and I didn’t really want to stop.

The dictation seemed a bit smoother today, but it was also a freewrite rather than fiction, and since I didn’t do a fiction dictation exercise, I can’t really compare today to other days. But I did my best not to pause a lot when I was dictating, so sometimes I repeated myself so that I wouldn’t stop dictating.

But I also felt like my mind was a bit more relaxed today, which may be why it was a bit easier for me to keep dictating when I was tempted to pause. And maybe my relaxed mind was why the brainstorming seemed to go really well. I got a lot of good ideas.

It took a while for me to do the cleanup on the free write dictation, because I also took the time to make notes on my freewrite in my bullet journal. But I’m really glad I did the freewrite since it helped me make decisions about marketing strategies for the next couple months. Not just things I could do, but things that wouldn’t sap my energy and would still accomplish my marketing goals.

(Related to marketing goals, I reread Get Your Book Selling by Monica Leonelle (I really wish this weren’t out of print right now although it looks like it might be republished in December 2022) which has the 10 Stages of Audience and several different marketing strategies. This was the best book I’ve read on marketing for someone who didn’t know anything about it. Re-reading the book helped me to be able to focus my marketing goals, which I realized had been a little too vague and scattershot. More focused marketing goals helped me decide what marketing plans to pursue or not.)

Now that I’ve been feeling better lately, I’ve been thinking of going back onto social media again, but I can’t do all of them anymore. I just don’t have the time and energy anymore since the IBS is still causing issues every so often.

I thought I might try Goodreads again. I like the people there, and what’s more, the pace is a lot slower than Facebook and Twitter, which suits my personality. And the people there are all readers, so it’s a more targeted subset audience.

I’m still not very good at social media, so I’m going to have to think about what I can do with my Goodreads group. I think I’ll also listen to some podcasts on social media to see how other authors are handling it these days. But rather than trying to do everything, I’ll figure out what I want to do. There’s no sense in me running myself ragged over social media.

I stayed up too late cleaning up the freewrite! I forgot to download my battle report before it turned midnight.

Writing streak: 282 days