Camy's Writing Diary

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 actually got distracted after breakfast!!! Argh! Well, it wasn’t non-work related. I have a blog promotion I’ll be doing with the other authors in the multi-author anthology (which the next book I’m working on, The Wedding Kimono , will be in), and so I spent about 1.5 hours doing that. I also don’t feel so bad doing this because I had given myself a week after finishing book 3 to get other marketing stuff done (which this is), and I still have 3 more days. After lunch, I (deliberately this time) did more blogging and marketing for the anthology (mostly writing and scheduling blog posts in advance), which took another 2 hours. I also got the newsletter translation back from my translator, and so I did the final edits and scheduled for my two newsletters (Camy and Camille) to go out in March. And then my graphic designer got the interior of the Japanese Sushi for One back to me today, so I was able to upload it to Lightning Source. I also was surprised when my proofreader got ...

WOW I got a lot of marketing and self-publishing work done today, too! I was finally able to do some of the marketing work for the Japanese version of Sushi for One. I uploaded it to ebook distributors earlier this week, but there’s still work to do to submit it to Lightning Source for the print version. There was an unexpected error in the interior .pdf file and so I had to ask my graphic designer to redo the conversion. Since the ebook is now live, and since I did so much marketing yesterday ahead of time for the launch for book 3, I decided to also do some marketing ahead of time for Sushi for One. I wrote my March newsletter (for my Camy mailing list) and sent it to my translator so she can have the Japanese text for me to add alongside the English. I also did an announcement blog post. Then I decided to do some marketing I’ve been putting off for a while. I finally posted on my blog about my Contemporary romance reader magnet, and then I changed the keywords for Weddings and...

I didn't do a lot on Saturday--I checked Social Media since that's the one day a week I've designated for it. I'm actually really glad I shunted social media to only one day a week. I will sometimes check social media once or maybe twice during the week, but most of the time I don't, and it's less stress for me. But I don't feel like I'm neglecting my readers since I make sure to check Facebook once a week. Also, since I don't check social media every day anymore, I feel like I have more time to blog, which is what I enjoy most out of all my social media commitments. I've been slowly posting more on my regular blog even during the week when I usually only blog on my writing blog. So after social media on Saturday, I was intending to do a lot of marketing work, but I started reading and it was hard for me to stop after that. So on Sunday, I did a lot of the marketing stuff I would have done on Saturday--I took care of my finances and accountin...

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...

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...

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...

My ankles were hurting yesterday so I decided to rest them today and not go walking. I dived right into reading and clearing my new emails. It seems email takes anywhere from 30-60 minutes everyday. I wish there were a way to cut that down, although right now I’m dealing with a lot of emails about my Japanese translation of Sushi for One . The translation is finished, so at the moment we’re dealing with formatting options/questions and feedback from the proofreader. Once it’s published, my translator will only be working on translating the next book in the series, Only Uni , and I won’t have as many things I’ll need to be doing. I’m also working with my graphic designer to do the covers for the Japanese versions of the Sushi series. The other books won’t be translated for a while, but since she had to do the cover for book 1, I asked her to do all the ebook covers at once so that they have the same style and feel. I think she did a great job, but there have been small changes that ne...

I’m re-reading Write Better, Faster: How To Triple Your Writing Speed and Write More Every Day , and I realized that while I’ve tried the other techniques in the book, I never actually did a consistent writer’s diary. She gives good reasons why it’s important, but I just never got around to doing it when I was setting up my spreadsheet to track my writing statistics. So I think I’ll try doing this and see how it goes. I’ve never actually taken a good look at my writer’s process in all its ugly glory. I think it will be good to do this diary because it will be raw data for me—a record of exactly what I did each day for my writing. A review of each day will enable me to record any insights I might discover about my writing habits, good and bad. With that collection of raw data in my diary, I’ll be able to see larger-scale trends in my writer’s process so that I can adjust and correct as needed, and hopefully improve my productivity. So this will be a diary that will detail how I, as ...