Camy's Writing Diary

I was a little sick (not Covid) for the past two days so I just spent the time sleeping (a lot) and relaxing, watching anime on Crunchyroll. An unexpected result of that was that after watching a fun anime series (Idolish7), I got inspired for a storyline for my Regency Gentlemen Quartet series. It was really fun to brainstorm that story! I love that effervescent feeling of a fresh new romance storyline, the rush as I come up with new characters, new conflicts, new situations. To be honest, it feels a bit like I’m falling in love for the first time, all over again! I’m still reading through the synopses for the other books in my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series to get a better handle on the overall series plot. I’m glad I’m doing this because I saw some things that I had to fix. A part of me wonders if I’m just procrastinating starting work on book 4, but I feel like I want to be ready and prepared in my head before I start work on it. I want to know that I definitely have all the plot ...

I had a really good quiet time this morning. I like using the devotional book My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers. It seems to always remind me to put God first, and to give up all of myself to God. I'm not actually following it according to the dates listed. I always skip dates because I'm not very consistent with my Bible reading, and I got tired of the fact that there were lots of the devotional readings that I hadn't yet read. So I started reading it straight through rather than adhering to the dates for the readings. The past few days have been in the month of December in the book. They were all really good reminders to me of how my focus needs to be completely on Christ and the crucifixion, but I also realized today that if that should be my own personal focus, then my characters should also follow the same advice. My hero's spiritual conflict, especially, was kind of lackluster and mimicked the heroine's spiritual conflict, maybe because I hadn...

I’ve felt terrible health-wise for the past week, and today was the first day I’ve woken up and didn’t feel like roadkill. I still don’t feel 100%, but I want to try to get work done since it looks like almost the entire month of March has been a loss, in terms of my writing. I actually did do some work on my Hawaii novella on March 24th, even though I didn’t post on my writing blog that day, but I only got a couple hours of work done before I started feeling sick (menstrual pain). After that passed, I also had IBS issues and I didn’t start to feel better until today. I’ll be working on Snowflake step 2 for my Hawaii novella today. I realized that when I worked on it on the 24th, I’d marked them as steps 2 and 4 when in actuality, they were too detailed and were more like steps 4 and 6. So I will work on step 2, then go on to step 8 and blocking . I’m also trying out a new desk arrangement that I hope will be better for my core and back. I’m using a buckwheat meditation pillow t...

I'm not sure how much work I'll be able to get done today. After a few days of feeling great, today my IBS has flared up (I'm not sure what I might have eaten to trigger it). However, I really wanted to get Snowflake step 6 (extended synopsis) done on the Reader Magnet novella today, so I'm going to try to push through the discomfort. I hope I can get my work done. *** Finished outlining the reader magnet! It didn't take as long as I thought, and my IBS eventually got a bit better. Next I will do the blocking and Snowflake step 8 (scene spreadsheet) for the story. If I'm fast, I'll be able to start writing it on Monday! *** I really have to credit 4thewords.com with motivating me to push through my IBS discomfort. For a while my intestinal pain was really bad, but once it got down to just discomfort, I could have gone back to work or I could have rested. I had a quest I wanted to complete on 4thewords, so I pushed through the discomfort to wr...

Wow, because I skipped social media yesterday, I had a lot to do today online! Mostly just replying to people and stuff, but it still took more time than usual. I saw a conversation thread on Facebook where I got some good ideas for some stories I wrote that I can repurpose as marketing tools , but I'll have to think about it. I want to weight the cons and pros, because it might be work without any return on investment. When I was on social media, I was also reminded that I need to spend more time refilling the creative well each day. I haven't been as good about reading fiction everyday and I need to change that! I don't want to burn out on my writing! I also thought last night about my release schedule and about preorder links . Originally I was going to release volume 1 with a preorder link to volume 2 in the back of the book, but that means I have to set a preorder date for volume 2. If I set it for 8 weeks later, that means when volume 2 releases I have to have ...

After writing yesterday I realized that I hadn’t checked my email or social media all day, so I did it later in the evening. However, I almost didn’t do it because I just don’t really like it. In fact, it took me about an hour and a half to get it all done. For me, email and social media are things I don’t enjoy very much at all. In fact, they’re kind of up there with exercising. Productivity experts say to do first the things you don’t want to do (“eat that frog”) and in this instance I think they’re right. Since exercising and checking email and social media are my frogs, I should do that first before writing. A lot of writers advise not checking email first thing, but I think that if I don’t, I might be tempted not to do it later (just like exercise) or I might simply forget to do it entirely. So I did email and social media before working today, and they only took me 26 minutes. Based on that and on how difficult it was for me to do my email and social media last night, I thi...

I was working on formally outlining my villains' internal arcs today (as opposed to just winging it as I was writing the book), and I got through the second half of volume 4 all the way through volume 9. That means I only have volume 10 left. Technically I should probably do the serial novel, too, but I'm not entirely sure yet if I want to do it right now. Mostly because I want to finish writing the manuscript I'm working on currently, which is volume 2 of the main series, so that I can start releasing the books. I talked with my husband about options for my book release schedule. Originally, I had intended to write all the books at once and then release them once a month or so. But since I made a new goal of making some money this year, I thought it would be best to release the books as I finish writing and editing them. The only issue is if I'm writing a volume in the series and discover something I have to change in a book I've already released. But since s...

I got some writing done on my manuscript today, but I also spent a lot of time working on my characterization for the series. The reason is because I went walking and was listening to the archives of the Writing Excuses podcast. They are mostly writing craft-based topics, which is what I wanted to refresh myself on as I'm writing the books in the series. Two really good podcast episodes were about heroes and villains, and it gave me ideas for how to adjust my characters to hopefully make them more interesting and relatable. The information was what I'd heard before, but I'd forgotten about it. A relatable villain thinks he's the hero of the story. There are some purely evil villains (like Sauron), and they serve a purpose in storytelling, I think. But the villains in my story are not purely evil. In fact, I have backstories written for each of them, and they've had incidents in their lives that helped form them to being the way they are. However, I realized ...

I’m feeling better today, so I’ll start work and see if the discomfort comes back or not. I’m working on the spiritual and romantic arcs for the serial novel. *** I got two more characters done today! And they were the two main ones. Now I have only two more characters’ spiritual and romantic arcs to do, and they’re minor-ish characters, so hopefully they won’t take too long. I want to keep working, but it’s getting late and I want to make sure I do some reading before bed, so I’ll stop here. It seems like a good stopping point. Time spent writing: 5 hours, 28 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 2 minutes

I finished the characterization (most of it, I think) for the serial novel, and then started on Snowflake step 2 (1-paragraph summary). I got it done CRAZY fast, I think because I’d done so much work on the characterization. Woot! Now I’m on to Snowflake step 4 (one-page synopsis). It’s looking pretty long, maybe because this is a serial novel. It also seems like it’s going to have more (and shorter) scenes than my other books, so this might take a little longer. *** I only got partway through Snowflake step 4. I have a few hours after dinner, but instead I’m going to focus on improving the back cover blurb for The Spinster’s Christmas , since I have a promotion starting on July 25th. *** Time spent writing: 3 hours, 13 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 5 hours, 9 minutes My takeaway for today: Spending time to fill in most of the details of my characterization notes helps me go through the plotting much faster.

Like yesterday, I got up early today, but despite the fact I was bone-tired, I didn’t sleep very well last night. I’m pretty frustrated—what’s the point of trying to get up early when I’m not going to have a good night’s sleep? Anyway, I’m STILL working to finish Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) on volume 10 of my series. *** WOW I finished Snowflake step 6! It gave me so many problems and took so long! There was one plot point that gave me the most problems, and I only was able to figure out a solution after I’d also tweaked the spiritual conflict in the scene to reflect the gospel message a bit more. So maybe God wasn’t letting me move forward because He wanted me to fix that spiritual conflict. The rest of the plot points also took time to solve, but nowhere near as much time as that first one. Now I’ll try to do the spiritual and romantic arcs for the volume. I already did some of it, but now I’ll go through and make sure they’re all completed. *** My brain is ...

I finished doing Snowflake step 6 on volume 3 of my series, and then immediately started working on the internal and romantic arcs of the characters. Back on Day 3 when I was talking about my book creation process , I mentioned that Stage 2 for me is doing the Snowflake steps 2 (1-paragraph summary), 4 (one-page synopsis), and 6 (expanded synopsis), and then Stage 3 for me is doing the internal/spiritual and romantic arcs. But today I realized that while Stage 3 is a separate step for me, it could conceivably be included in Snowflake step 6. However, when I make it a separate step for me, it reminds me to do it, whereas if I lump it in with Snowflake step 6, I might forget to do it. Since this is a series, I have a file that lists each character’s spiritual arc and romantic arc as they progress through the series. It’s a bit sparse right now, but I’ll fill it in as I finish Snowflake step 6 on each volume in the series. For a character’s spiritual arc, I have a bullet list. Each...

Because I felt sick yesterday, I ended up sleeping longer than usual—nothing new, I tend to do that the night after a headache or intestinal cramping. But that also means I got started later today. I also have more housework to do today, including making dinner, so I’ll have less time to work before I have to start cooking. After going for a short walk and then making lunch, I “cleared the deck” again by checking my email inbox. I usually only check it once a day, and sometimes I actually forget to check my email for the day so sometimes it’ll have a couple days backlog. I try to get this stuff done before writing because otherwise it’ll bother me and distract me from writing. I got an email from my translator about adjusting the formatting for Sushi for One a little more, and I also got the cover back from my graphic designer for the Japanese version of Sushi for One . It looks great! She also went ahead and did the ebook covers for the other two books in the series, Only Uni an...