Camy's Writing Diary

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...

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...

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 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...

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 woke up yesterday with another IBS flare up, but I managed to get some marketing work done in the morning, which is stuff I can do despite the pain. It got only a little better in the afternoon, but I wanted to try to get some work done on the manuscript, so I decided to dictate a bit. I realized I needed to block the scene better, so I dictated my blocking notes and managed to get that done. I didn’t write any prose, but I was ready to start writing the scene today. Unfortunately I had some IBS pain this morning, and so I did a little bit of marketing instead. But the IBS didn’t decrease much by the afternoon, so I ended up doing dictation while still being a bit uncomfortable. I thought I’d only do a little dictation, but I ended up dictating about half the scene, approximately 3000 words, which took 75 minutes. My dictation speed wasn’t too bad, about 2500 words per hour. The cleanup editing took a little less time, 65 minutes. I made a decision today to change how I recorded ...

I kept up my dictation streak over the weekend even though I was scheduled to only work on my Hawaii contemporary story on Saturday. I did some blocking for the next scene, which needed a lot of work before I could start writing it. I also was scheduled to do mostly marketing on Saturday, and I happened to have a lot to do this weekend, so I decided to only do a little work on the Hawaii book (only about the amount of time it took to finish blocking the next scene). I still wanted to keep up my dictation streak and usually try to do at least the bare minimum of 5 minutes, but I didn’t want to do only 5 minutes of dictation on the Hawaii book now when I won’t get back to it until next week Saturday. So instead I did five minutes of dictation on the Regency manuscript, and then I spent the majority of my workday on Saturday on the marketing stuff. And then on Sunday, I did another 5 minutes of dictation on my Regency manuscript, just to keep up my writing and dictation streaks. To...

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...

My IBS has been bothering me a bit lately. I think I ate too much of a food that is okay for me to eat, but only in moderate amounts. The pain has not been as bad as it has been before, but it has still been distracting. I'm doing a little bit of dictation every day. My bare minimum is only five minutes of dictation, but most days I do about 30 minutes dictation, and then the cleanup editing is another 30 minutes. I also try to do my cycling edit every day. So even though my IBS has been bothering me, I am still able to get work done on my book. I am approximately one third of the way through the book, but I had hoped to have more done on it by now. I started the book in early December, but I was busy because the previous book released in mid-December, and then I had a couple promotions to set up after that. Then I was traveling over Christmas, and got hardly anything done for about two weeks. I thought I would start getting more writing done after Christmas, but I have been ...