Camy's Writing Diary

I don't know if this is me just wanting to give up, or being lazy or something like that. But I'm starting to think that I need to listen to my instincts more. I've been trying to get a more efficient system in place for my writing so that I can be more productive. I do think it was good for me to try different things, but a lot of the things I was trying to do were very difficult for me. I kept pushing on, hoping that it would get easier but it hasn't. For example, I've been trying to get my writing done first thing after I wake up. For some people, that's the best time to write their minds are fresh and they are full of energy. I do admit that I am less tired than I am in the afternoon, but it was really hard for me to focus and get the writing done. I was easily distracted, and it was difficult to focus. It has always taken me a little bit of time to get going in the morning. I'm not entirely sure why that is, because it's not like my brain is f...

I went to a conference last week and praise the Lord! my IBS didn't act up at all while I was there. Of course, I was downing digestive enzymes like they were candy, so that probably helped. I thought I'd have more intestinal issues after I got back from the conference, but surprisingly, my bouts of pain and nausea haven't been too bad, not enough to prevent me from working for very long. I kept up my dictation streak while at the conference, although in hindsight, I probably should have just decided not to write during the days of the conference and during the travel days. However, since I was dictating into my phone, it was very easy to just whip out my phone and dictate for 5 minutes in order to keep up my streak. It's a lot easier than using a voice recorder and then taking the time to feed it into Dragon on my computer, although it's not quite as accurate. I finally got Dragon installed on my computer, but I haven't set up my profile yet since I want ...

And once again, I did not get to writing first thing after I woke up today. I knew I had to take time to pack today, and that I wasn't going to get a lot of writing done. Now that I think about it, I probably could've done a few minutes of dictation before I started packing, but it didn't occur to me. Also, considering how things on my to-do list tend to distract me while I'm writing, the thought of all my packing might've distracted me while I was working. So I took all day to pack, and then I did a little less than 13 minutes of dictation. Editing took eight minutes. So far, when I dictate using Dragon Anywhere, my editing takes about half the amount of time it takes for me to dictate. I can't get too excited about that, though, because I don't dictate as quickly when I use Dragon Anywhere on my phone, so my words per hour rate is much lower. When I dictate into a voice recorder, my words per hour rate ranges from about 2500 to 3000 words an hour, but ...

I think it must say something that ever since I decided to try to write first thing, I've only been able to do it once. I got to my office about an hour after I got up, but I found myself feeling a bit distracted again. So I took 20 minutes to do some house chores, and then went back to my office to try again. But instead of writing, for some reason, I couldn't focus on my story. Instead, I thought about a new marketing tactic that I could use for the conference that I am attending on Thursday. I needed to order business cards to do it, so I decided to do that right away so that I could have the cards rush ordered and shipped to my hotel. All that to say, I did not write first thing, even though I had intended to. Lack of preparation? I don't really know why I was so distracted and why it was so hard for me to start writing. At first I thought that part of the reason might be because I had to figure something out about the scene and make a decision about what to do. Yesterd...

I wasn't able to work first thing after I woke up this morning because I had a bad sinus headache and an IBS flareup that was causing nausea. Since I wasn't able to concentrate very well, I decided to do other things besides writing prose. I had been thinking about dictating directly into my computer using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, so I decided to bite the bullet and set that up. I should have known that getting Dragon NaturallySpeaking onto my laptop was going to be painful. First I had to renew my subscription to Parallels for Mac, and since I’m an idiot, I signed up for the Pro upgrade for higher processing speeds. I get a discount for the first year but next year Parallels is going to cost $200. And of course since I’m buying Parallels, I also have to get Windows. I thought I could get away with using Windows 10, but it turns out my MacBook Pro has a chip that can’t play nice with the ISO file for Windows 10. So I have to download Windows 11. All this to run ONE PRO...

I managed to do my writing almost first thing this morning. It took a little longer to make breakfast than usual, and I also wanted to make sure I had all the tea and water I usually have at my desk before I start. However, I did get a bit distracted while writing, and I wasted a few minutes cleaning off some junk on my desk. I suppose that’s one of the advantages of going out for a walk to dictate and write—there are fewer distractions around. When I dictate in my office, there are distractions everywhere, including my messy desk. I’m not certain why I was so easily distracted. However, I realized that just because my brain is fresher right after I wake up, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m able to focus better. In fact, I was worse at my focus this morning than yesterday, when it was after dinner. I don’t know why my focus was worse, and I also didn’t write very long—only about 75 minutes before I felt tired and distracted and decided to stop. I thought I slept okay, although...

I fully intended to start writing first thing today, but I overslept and only just made it to some online meetings on time. My meeting with my graphic designer especially was very productive. Once the meetings were done, I probably should have jumped right into writing, but I was a little brain-tired and ended up doing some light marketing work instead until I had to make dinner. I had neglected to check my email yesterday, so I spent time cleaning out my inbox, which I had finally cleared to ZERO a few days ago. I also did some work that needed to be done for the launch of my next historical romance book in (hopefully) March. I immediately started dictation after dinner. I wrote for a little over an hour and even with the time to edit my dictation after I put it in Scrivener, my words per hour rate was about 800 words, which isn’t bad. I only wrote about 1000 words, but it’s better than nothing, especially considering I also had 2 online meetings. I definitely think that I wrote...

I forgot that one of the problems I had before with dictation is that there were some days I had to do blocking before I could start writing work on the scene. I tried a few times to block all the scenes of a book before I started writing it, but I found it very tedious work, and sometimes I would change my mind about what happened in the scenes, or which scenes to include, which made my work pointless later. So today I did not get a lot of dictation done on the scene because I spent about an hour blocking it first. However, the time I spend blocking enables me to actually write the scene a LOT faster, and without as many problems. My biggest problem when writing is usually making decisions—where the conversation should go and how it should get there, what a character should do, how a character would feel, what problems the character would encounter in the scene. It’s easier to make all those decisions ahead of time before I start writing so that I don’t get sucked out of the creativ...

I decided to start blogging again because I decided to pick up dictation again. Oh, and just to fill you in on what’s happened since my last post, I made it to 714 days for my writing streak (writing at least 5 minutes every day). But then I accidentally broke it when I forgot to write on a Friday. I actually wasn’t too heartbroken about breaking the streak, because I’d been having a tough time writing on Sundays and over holidays. So this year I didn’t have to write over Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s, which was FANTASTIC. New Year’s especially would have been really hard because I was busy every day for the 4 days before New Year’s Eve, helping my mom prepare for our family’s New Year’s breakfast and dinner, which is pretty big for us. Anyway, back to dictation: When comparing my writing using dictation versus typing, I still felt that my writing while typing was better quality, although only by a small margin. I think it is because when I type, I edit as I type, and ...

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 ...

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...