Camy's Writing Diary

Lately I’ve been taking a course on launching your book, and one lesson (and live office hours) discussed blogging. I enjoy blogging, but I fully admit it’s probably just narcissistic of me to like doing a public journal. This blog started off as a means of public accountability, and also a “lab notebook” where I could record my experiments in trying to improve my productivity. It’s been really useful for that, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve also learned that you can never really stop trying to tweak and improve your productivity, because life always changes and you have to change with it. So essentially I could never stop doing this blog because I’ll always be trying experiments to improve my productivity. But I also have been working on improving other aspects of my life, like learning to work around my IBS and learning to put more thought and intention into my marketing. This blog doesn’t actually take up a lot of my time, but it takes up mental space because I feel bad when I’v...

I was simply way too busy last week to get my work done, and so I broke my dictation streak. :( I just had a lot of house chores to do, and then I had office hours and homework for the book launch course I’m taking. The course has been really useful so far, but taking a lot of time because I find myself wanting to attend all the office hours in order to learn from other students’ questions. I also made a mistake and kind of? broke my website. That whole thing was really stressful and ate up a ton of time on Saturday. So rather than trying to stress myself out and try to squeeze in my dictation, I decided to just do some of the cleanup editing I never got around to doing, and then called it a day. Even though I know that skipping dictation makes it slower the next time I do dictation, it’s just a bit too difficult to try to find something to dictate every single day. It’s easier because I’m working on two projects at once, but not when one of those projects is imply editing an o...

I stayed up too late last night doing marketing work for my release next week. It was all stuff that needed to be done, but it took a lot of time, and I went to bed too late. I slept in this morning, which made it feel like I had less time to get stuff done in the morning. I’m taking a course on launching your book, but it didn’t have homework last night which was why I spent so long doing marketing. However, they have office hours every weekday, which is really nice because you can ask questions and listen to other people’s questions and learn a lot. But it also does take up time during the day, and I have to plan my activities around those office hours. As a result, I got some house chores done in the morning rather than going walking and writing right away. I went to office hours, and then went walking and dictating right after it ended. I got about 90 minutes of dictation done, which was great! But it was late by then and I ate dinner. Now I’m feeling tired since it’s late in...

On Sunday, I was again put in a position where I didn’t have blocking notes for the next scene to dictate. I had been thinking I would simply dictate some brainstorming for my Hawaii book, but I realized that wouldn’t be dictation practice for writing prose. I ended up doing more blocking work yesterday than I had intended. There were a couple co-op battles (multi-player monster battles) on 4thewords.com , and since the type of monster being battled is usually up to pure luck, I decided to jump into the battle since I needed to fight those monsters to complete a quest. I don’t usually do long hours of writing work on Sundays, which is supposed to be my rest day, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to fight those monsters. I have found that 4thewords is usually more active on weekends than weekdays, and I need other players in order to participate in co-op battles. So I ended up working on the blocking for the next scene for almost 2 hours. I did the co-op monsters I needed for...

Since I have been having such issues with procrastination for the past few days, I decided to nip it in the bud. When I leave the house and write in a different location, it always forces me to get work done, so I went for a walk with my digital voice recorder. It worked really well. I dictated for about 90 minutes. My dictation speed was a bit slower because I was outside and I often had to pause and wait for a car or some chatting old ladies to pass by me, but I still managed to get a lot of words written. I usually walk before my other “ frogs ” are done, but today was a little unusual because I slept badly last night. Because of that, I actually was awake and did some of my frogs in the early morning hours, so I didn’t need to do them when I finally woke up. So my schedule was even more free than usual and I had fewer obstacles in my way to prevent me from immediately going out for a walk. I also avoided doing anything that might sap my energy before I started my writing—I di...

I’m really struggling today with procrastination. It might be because I didn’t sleep well last night yet again—even though I went to bed early, I lay awake and didn’t fall asleep until close to six o’clock in the morning. So I ignored my alarm and overslept. I don’t know why I felt such resistance to starting work earlier today. I was a little mentally tired, because it was later in the afternoon—I exercised this morning, but I also had to attend an online orientation for a class I’m going to be taking for the next four weeks, and it was not only a lot of information, but also I found it a bit mentally tiring since I’ve been a hermit lately and I’m not used to all the social interaction.
 Maybe that contributed to it—I was trying to start work right after signing off from the online orientation, when I should have scheduled some down time after that before I started work. It’s the same reason I can’t do marketing first and immediately start writing after that, it’s too mentally tax...

Again, it was one of those days where I don’t know where the time went! However, I overslept this morning, and then I actually had a lot of house chores to do today, so I’m not entirely surprised that I only had a few hours to get writing work done. I feel bad that I overslept, but at the same time I was really exhausted. It might have been because I’ve been stressed lately about the infection on the peach tree, but I hope to get to bed early tonight and get up at a normal time tomorrow. I ended up doing a small amount of dictation just to keep up my streak and to not get rusty in my dictation skills. My dictation speed was only about 2300 words today and yesterday, so still a bit slow. But today I had more accurate transcription because I was speaking more clearly and slowly, so that’s a little less cleanup work. Unfortunately, editing took longer than I expected because I decided to rewrite some introspection into dialogue, and that took more time and effort than simply cleanin...

I really thought I’d have more time to write today, but it seemed like it was just one thing after another this morning. I had a lot of technical difficulties today—an app I use daily on my phone suddenly stopped working, and I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what happened. Then I had issues with an alarm coming from our external hard drive, and I had to see what the problem was and figure out how to turn off the alarm. And finally I had issues booting up my dictation software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Granted, it’s version 13 and my ancient Mac Mini is coughing and sputtering, but it had worked fine the last time I did dictation a month ago. I was shocked to realize that I last dictated on March 1st and it’s now April 12th, so it’s been 6 weeks since I did dictation. No wonder it felt so rusty. But I’m very glad that I managed to get about 30 minutes of dictation done today on my Regency book. Unfortunately, because of the technical problems, it took over an hour to get i...

I completely admit I haven’t blogged lately because I’ve been lazy. I also haven’t gotten much actual writing done, but I had a good excuse for that—I was visiting my parents for a month, and when I returned home, after a couple days unpacking and cleaning up the house, I had a bad IBS flare-up. But now that I’m feeling better, I haven’t blogged because I haven’t gotten much done, but I realized today that I really need to keep up my blogging in order to keep myself accountable. I wrote one scene in my new book (book 7 in my Regency series) before I left to visit my folks, but I haven’t written any other new scenes. Part of the reason is that the next scene—which ended up becoming two scenes—were not blocked well. My notes about the scene were a mess of ideas thrown together, and I didn’t have a cohesive structure for the scene at all. If I tried to dictate based off of my notes, it would end up being a bunch of prose thrown messily together, and I’d need to spend a lot of time ...

I normally don’t blog on Sundays, but I today marks 500 consecutive days that I’ve been writing a little bit every single day! It helps that my bare minimum is very small and doable—5 minutes of writing work or 100 words. And in honor of the fact it was St. Patrick’s Day on Friday, I used a clover-themed graphic. :) Today, since it’s Sunday and I typically only do the bare minimum anyway, I did 5 minutes of editing work in book 6 of my Regency series. I was tempted to do more work today, but I refrained since I realize I need to take a break from the writing at least one day a week. So, I would definitely recommend trying a writing streak. If you want a more detailed analysis of what I did and why I think it worked, check out the post I did on day 731 .

The good news is that my IBS hasn’t been bothering me as much lately. The bad news is that I ended up having a lot of family/personal/house business the past week(s) that kept me from doing more than just the bare minimum on my writing. New priorities In light of the fact that I’ve had other non-writing things to do, I decided to cut back on my work time and reprioritize my projects. In a sense, it’s like when I was working full time and I only had 2-3 hours each day to do my writing. At the moment, I have to try to cram in all my work in the time I have available each day, which is usually only a few hours, and I don’t have many uninterrupted hours. The time I have to write is usually only available here and there in small chunks throughout the day. However, it’s actually been really good because I’ve been able to focus since I only have a limited amount of time to get my work done. Something about the time deadline really does make me resist distractions. Anyway, since I have...

I finished book 6 in my Regency series! I actually took a nap in the middle of the day and then I felt a lot more refreshed afterward and got the last two chapters dictated. I finished doing the cleanup editing in the early hours of March 2nd, but I’m going to count it towards my writing for March 1st. This book took a lot less time to write than the others, and I think it’s because of the dictation. I dictate into a digital voice recorder and then have Dragon transcribe it, and I am able to focus much more intently when I dictate because I can’t see what I wrote so I’m not distracted or trying to edit it. If I forget what I just dictated (which unfortunately happens a lot) I just repeat it and keep going. Often I’ll pause or repeat myself until a sentence comes out the way I want, but I think I’ve been doing that less often lately because the cleanup has taken a little less time lately, too (but the cleanup still takes, in general, the same amount of time it took me to do the dictat...

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already been over 1000 days since I started this writing blog. It has been immensely helpful to me to be able to blog about my writing productivity experiments. It has also been good accountability to blog about my word count and hours worked. I usually try to take a day of rest on Sunday, but I ended up doing a lot of marketing work, so I decided to take yesterday (Monday) as my day of rest instead and I only did the bare minimum of writing work to keep up my writing streak. I intended to only dictate 5 minutes, but it ended up being about 15 minutes instead. I also decided to try using the Dragon Anywhere app and also the text-to-speech function in the Pages app on my iPhone. I only used the microphone on the phone, but both apps performed remarkably well. Dragon Anywhere allows you to add vocabulary words so that I could add my characters’ names and record myself saying them. When I dictated the names, Dragon Anywhere correctly transcribed them. You...

It’s rather depressing that I have to work around my IBS in order to get writing done. I’m still working on adjusting my schedule so that I can continue to work on my book despite my health issues. I got a late start today because my IBS was causing me problems last night, and so not only did I go to bed late but I also got up late and had to deal with some intestinal pain. I tried to get started on work as soon as possible and not waste time in the morning. A couple days ago, I blogged about wanting to do my writing earlier in the day because I seem to write better when I do that, so I tried to quickly get started on some dictation of my Regency as soon as I finished breakfast. The dictation was a little slow, and I think it’s because I hadn’t done enough blocking of the scene. I had to spend about 10 or 15 minutes before I started dictating in order to think about the scene and figure out why and how things progressed the way they did. And even then I had a hard time with the key...

I’ve been working harder to increase the number of hours I write each day now that my IBS has been getting better lately and I have more energy. I know that it takes time and effort to build up the stamina to concentrate for long hours, so I’m trying to work up to it. My workday has been consisting of: 1) 30-60 minutes of Japanese language study, since I hope to one day translate my books into Japanese with the help of an AI translator and a human Japanese language editor 2) 30-60 minutes doing one marketing task 3) 15-30 minutes doing research reading for one of my current series 4) writing prose in my Regency manuscript 5) editing or revising my Hawaii manuscript I decided to try to make a graphic that I could post since I like making graphics in Canva. I was really surprised how long I worked today, but that also includes numbers 1, 2, and 3 above and not just writing in my two series. Still, I did about 5 hours of work directly in my manuscripts, which is more than I’...

I admit I’ve been a bit lazy about blogging lately. First I had a bad IBS flareup, although I did manage to still get work done because the pain was not so bad that I couldn’t do certain things. I did my “ frogs ” first in the morning when the pain was the worst, since I could usually do Japanese study and house chores (sometimes) even if my IBS is bothering me. Then I did marketing and editing, which I can also usually do even if I’m feeling discomfort. In the afternoon when the symptoms died down a bit, I tried to do some dictation. Sometimes the cramping was still bothering me a bit and I didn’t get to dictation, but I was always able to get at least some editing or blocking done on a book. I also only did work on one manuscript, either the Regency or the Hawaii book. If the cramping was bad, I usually only did work on the Hawaii book since right now I’m mostly doing editing and revising on old writing, and I can get at least a scene edited as long as the IBS isn’t too bad. I f...

I kept up my dictation streak yesterday, but it reminded me of why I dislike stopping in the middle of a scene and picking up the next day. It always takes me several minutes to read what I’d written before, and then read my blocking notes to remember or figure out what I need to write next. I’m always slow to start dictation, but I think it’s harder when I start in the middle of a scene. It’s quite a bit easier to start dictation when I’m also starting a fresh scene. In hindsight, what I should have done instead of writing prose is to use dictation for blocking a future scene. I think that might be easier for me to stop and start in the middle of a scene, although I’d probably need to test it out to see. The nice thing about it, though, is that on days when I’m doing only the bare minimum, I can dictate for 5 or 10 minutes and get a significant number of words written, and the editing for that only takes a few minutes. I tend to work for about 20 minutes rather than only 5. When ...

I have been re-reading Elana Johnson’s book, Writing and Marketing Systems (Indie Inspiration for Self-Publishers Book 3) . She suggests that you track your writing schedule for 60 days, and I’ve actually been doing that consistently for several months. My IBS is typically worse between 10am and 2 pm, but sometimes the pain starts earlier and sometimes it goes for longer. I’ve been trying to adjust my diet so that I don’t eat the foods that trigger my IBS, but unfortunately there are a lot of foods where I don’t know if they will affect me. Sometimes I simply avoid them, but other times I want to try them and then I pay for it later. All that to say, my IBS bothers me more days than it doesn’t. And after reading about how Elana had to figure out what worked best for her schedule, I finally decided to try something different. Instead of trying to have a flexible schedule, and writing in the morning on the days when I feel well, I think I’ll just automatically assume I’m not going ...

Yesterday, my IBS bothered me a little, but I was hit hard by a sudden headache (I think it was because of my floor mopping solution, not from the usual culprit, my allergies). So I ended up not even being able to do much marketing since I didn’t want to do much reading and risk making the headache worse. I admit I procrastinated a bit after lunch, but finally got about 2 hours of work done editing my manuscript. Today isn’t much better. I don’t have a headache, but my IBS is a bit worse today. I admit I wasted some time looking at my Amazon ads this morning, but I managed to get a bit of other marketing work done, too. I should be able to get back to editing my manuscript after lunch, since I can usually edit even if the IBS is bothering me a little. *** Okay, I have to admit, I think I need the dictation streak. What happened was that I had to pretty much rewrite a scene, so I decided to dictate since the majority would be new writing. But since I missed dictation for 2 day...

During lunch today, I was reading Elana Johnson’s Writing and Marketing Systems , because she has such good advice (at least, it really resonates with my personality) and I was hoping for reminders on how to improve my productivity. Re-reading it was a good idea, because I picked upon things I had only skimmed over before. Or maybe it’s just that my life is in a different place this time when I read the book, and so different pieces of advice were more apropos. First I made a definite goal for myself. I’ve been wanting to increase my writing time and word count, but I haven’t actually set a goal. So I set a minimum goal of 10,000 words a week, and a stretch goal of 20,000 words per week on the Regency, and then for the Hawaii book, I set a minimum goal of 2 chapters a week and a stretch goal of 4 chapters a week. I also set a couple bribes for me. When I finish a scene, I can have a piece of candy. I can only eat a small amount of it because of my IBS, but since moderation is som...