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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I didn’t sleep well last night, I woke up with IBS pain, and I also found a huge plot hole in this next scene I was going to write, so I’m not sure how much writing I’m going to get done today. I intend to dictate a brainstorming session to try to fix my plot hole. I think that I tend to brainstorm better while dictating, but it might also partly be because I’m moving around while dictating, and that probably helps me to think better, too. *** Well today ended up being rather terrible in terms of word count. My IBS didn’t get any better despite taking medication, which only made me sleepy. I did manage to get some marketing done while I wasn’t feeling well, so it wasn’t completely wasted time. When I finally felt better in the late afternoon, I had technical difficulties. First my digital voice recorder set up had issues. Then our external hard drive started beeping and I had to figure out what was wrong. Then I decided to set up a different headset for recording to see how that ...

I had a bad IBS flareup last night, and it was really hard to get started on writing today. I am a bit tired, but I also wasn't able to go walking outside and dictating because the weather was too cold and I simply don't have appropriate gloves to be able to dictate in cold weather (at least, cold for Northern California). When I walk for exercise, I can keep my hands in my jacket pockets, but I have to hold my digital recorder when I walk and dictate, and when I tried doing that today, my fingers were too cold and painful before I got even a block away from my house, so I had to turn back. The gloves I was wearing just didn't cut it. So I had an excuse to spend money, and bought some gloves online so that I can walk and dictate in colder weather. Now, knowing my luck, the weather will turn superhot by the time the gloves arrive. Because I'm feeling a bit tired today due to the IBS flareup last night, I might only do a short duration of dictation, and spend a little...

I’ve had somewhat bad IBS for the past couple days—I was in pain, but it wasn’t as bad as I’ve had it at other times. It was still distracting and hard to work, but I still managed to get writing done. What I did was work on stuff like marketing and editing in the morning, when my IBS was worst, and I took medicine and waited for it to kick in. Sometimes the medicine didn’t work all that well and I didn’t start to feel better until the late afternoon, but I usually found at least 30 or 60 minutes where I wasn’t feeling too badly. I took advantage of my time when I felt better in order to dictate a bit of my book. I mentioned earlier that it seems easier for me to focus when I’m dictating. Maybe it’s because I tend to walk when I dictate—whether walking outside, or like yesterday, just pacing in my room. I find it’s easier for me to forget about my IBS when I’m walking and dictating, at least most of the time—sometimes there was just so much pain and nausea that it distracts me from...

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I have had a difficult time getting started on work today because my morning schedule was disrupted. We awoke to find the power had gone out because of the storms. I usually have a set schedule of things I do in the morning. It's partly because I have found that my brain tends to be a little fuzzy for the first hour or two after I wake up. It's not a problem if I have things to do that don't require a great deal of creativity, but I found that my fuzzy brain makes it hard to write, because I will usually stare at the blank screen or have long periods of silence when I dictate as I try to think of what to write next. So my morning ritual keeps me busy and helps to get my mind warmed up and firing. I usually exercise, do some house chores, make breakfast and make tea. The tea is especially comforting when I sit down at my computer after breakfast. My reliance upon rituals and routine is also probably why it's difficult for...

I had a bad IBS flareup this morning, which made it difficult to concentrate, so I decided to do some marketing rather than writing first thing. I ended up getting a lot of marketing done, which was great. However, my IBS never really got much better as the day went on. My IBS is still bothering me even though it is close to dinner, and so I decided to do a little bit of dictation now, even though I feel some discomfort. A little bit of dictation is better than nothing. I'm not sure how much I will be able to dictate, but at the very least I can do my cycling edit of the dictation from last week Friday. I am also almost at the end of the scene, and if the dictation isn't going too badly, I will hopefully do more than just the bare minimum and try to finish it. *** I’m so frustrated! I lost 30 minutes of dictation because I had forgotten to make sure my digital recorder was recording (it was not). I had to redo it, which took less time than before, but that’s still 30 mi...

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be better about my social media. Unfortunately, that also means that social media has become a distraction for me during the day whereas before it wasn’t at all, since I wasn’t on it at all. So I have to confess that I spent too long on social media today before I started writing, and so I began work a bit later in the day than I had wanted to. I know that getting away from my computer is best in order to remove the distraction of social media, so when I started my dictation today, instead of sitting at my desk to dictate like I did before, I took my digital recorder and dictated while walking around my house. Not as nice as when I walk outside, but it was raining so I had to make do. Walking around helped me to focus on the dictation and get it done without being distracted by social media, so I consider that a win. I dictated a tiny bit faster than yesterday, but I also had less to delete, and so my dictation was overall more efficient t...

I reconnected with a writing friend today and it was really, really great. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed talking about writing stuff with someone. She also motivated me to try dictation again because she’s been forced to use it for the past several years. It’s really hard NOT to be motivated when she talks about writing 10,000 words in one day. I had been concerned that my writing via dictation is simply not as elegant as my writing via typing, but there was one thing I realized during the past week or so of vacation when I was doing only the bare minimum of writing on my manuscript—I think that my editing has gotten better. My writing on the current scene wasn’t very good since I was writing while with my family, with lots of noise and distractions. So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that I had to edit it a lot afterward. I ended up doing several passes over what I’d written—mostly because I was only doing 5 minutes of work on my manuscript each day, just to keep up m...

Wow it’s been a long time since I blogged! I don’t have a very good excuse for the few days after my last blog post because I was just lazy about blogging (right after I’d blogged that I needed to blog daily for accountability). But then I went traveling for Christmas and was only doing the bare minimum of work during those days. I have to admit I was really tempted to stop the writing streak during the holidays because it was hard to do even a little writing every day. Some days I was busy all day and only remembered a few minutes before midnight that I hadn’t yet done some writing. After that happened twice, I decided to try to write on my phone when I was waiting in the car or driving somewhere with family. But I hadn’t prepared enough and belatedly discovered that I couldn’t write on 4thewords on my phone because the new website isn’t optimized for mobile. I had all my writing notes and the last paragraphs I wrote in the scene in 4thewords, but I couldn’t add more writing using...

I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I miscounted my days and my 365 writing streak was yesterday! I didn’t notice it until this morning when I discovered I’d forgotten to count two days before. So, yesterday was 365 consecutive days of writing at least 100 words in my manuscript every single day! It was really hard, especially on days I felt sick. But even when my IBS was particularly bad, I always had at least 10 minutes here or there when the pain or nausea would subside temporarily, and so I whipped out my phone and wrote 100 words. It was especially easy to do because I write in 4thewords, and so the most recent chapter I’m working on is saved online at the website, and I can access it anywhere. It’s also easy to start a battle with a 100-word monster and then stop when the monster is defeated. 100 words a day is really not very much, so it’s easy to do, although it would take a long time to write a book that way. But just the act of getting my head into my manuscript every day ...

I got started REALLY late today. It was totally my fault, I overslept through my alarm. On the bright side, I woke up feeling really refreshed and awake. Unfortunately, it’ll probably be hard for me to get to sleep tonight, which will make me get less sleep and feel tired tomorrow morning. I didn’t blog yesterday simply because I was a bit lazy, plus I ended work kind of late. I not only finished blocking the next scene, but I also blocked an additional scene which I had realized I needed a few days ago. Unfortunately I ended work around 11 at night and felt too tired to blog about it. I also feel guilty that I haven’t done any dictation for several days. A part of me wonders if it’s even worthwhile for me to dictate, since it has been taking me extra days just to do the cleanup editing. It’s nice that I can write 3000-5000 words in one day, but if I have to take an extra day or two to do the cleanup editing and rearrange my blocking notes, what’s the point? Then again, I am red...