Camy's Writing Diary

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 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...

Yesterday, I was listening to some podcasts and thinking about my writing system. I know that many prolific authors write in multiple projects at the same time. Sometimes they work on another project while waiting for edits on the book they just finished, or else they work on two books at the same time, working a few minutes on each of them every day. So I was thinking would it be better for my career to release books in both pen names more slowly but at the same time, or to release books quickly in one pen name and then nothing while I write in the other? I honestly think it would be better to release books in both pen names rather than having a long stretch of no releases in one pen name while I’m working on the other. But I don’t know if I could work on two projects at the same time. Do I really want to do two projects in a day? Is that the most efficient use of my time? Or, on the other hand, would it be better to work on two projects so that I can give my brain a rest fr...

Today I had a ton of marketing stuff to do because my book is releasing on Wednesday. I got a fast response from Amazon (go KDP!) about why my paperback book was having that error message—apparently the title in the ISBN listing on Bowker’s was different from what I’d typed as the title in KDP. The problem was the apostrophe—my browser automatically changes the apostrophe to a smart apostrophe, but it’s a plain apostrophe in Bowker’s. So I just changed the apostrophe in KDP to a plain apostrophe and it worked fine. I had intended to do my writing first today, but I wanted to get all my marketing tasks out of the way early, especially because I had to send an email as early as possible today for my Street Team. This is all because I’m so last-minute with everything for this book launch, since I was pushing to release books 4 and 5 this year, within 1 month of each other. Next time I’m just going to release after the book is done, no matter how long it might take me to write it. It’s...

Today is 400 consecutive days where I’ve done at least the bare minimum of writing every single day! It helps that my bare minimum is only 100 words in my manuscript, but I think it’s been really good for training my self-discipline and motivating me to sit at my computer or even just type away on my phone no matter how sick I might be feeling. I haven’t blogged for a while because not much has happened. I finished self-editing my book, but it took longer than I wanted because I had some nausea from my IBS, which made it hard to concentrate sometimes. I sent the book to my editor, who got it back to me lickety-split. I put the ebook up on Amazon for preorder. I had problems with publishing my paperback on Amazon and now I’m just waiting on an email I sent to their help desk. On a whole, my IBS is better than it’s been, so I’ve been trying to increase the number of hours I work each day. It’s easier to do when I’m editing or doing marketing, which doesn’t require as much intense c...

I happened to have the cover for book 5 ready, so here it is! I usually don’t write on Sundays, but I was almost done with the book and wanted to finish it, plus I wanted to get the book to my editor ASAP because I was behind on the time frame I told her it would be ready. I only had one short scene to write, so I just decided to push through and get it done. I haven’t blogged for a few days mostly because not much has happened in terms of writing productivity. I’ve had some IBS issues (as usual), but I managed to get about 3 hours of writing done each day. I even did writing on Thanksgiving by getting up extra early, but to be honest, we didn’t have a big gathering so there wasn’t much cooking do to for just my family, and my husband did the turkey, which was probably the most labor intensive. I had been hoping to develop more writing stamina and write for more hours each day, but I haven’t been able to get more than about 3 hours every day before I start feeling tired. Part of ...

I had a bad IBS flare-up this weekend, which really set me back on my writing. I had a bunch of marketing tasks to do on Saturday that didn’t get done, so I spent about 5 hours yesterday doing all of that. It was a lot more work than I had expected, but I’m glad it’s finally done. But since that was all I did (besides the bare minimum of writing on my manuscript, about 100 words), I didn’t bother to blog about it. My self-publishing To Do list helps me to keep track of everything that needs to be done, but it’s been really tough to coordinate the scheduling of everything when a book releases a month after the other. If I ever wanted to release a book a month, I will have to readjust my self-publishing To Do list and schedule. I simplified my To Do list a bit yesterday. It makes self-publishing easier because I can just copy and paste a lot of stuff that needs to be written, such as newsletters and messages to my Street Team. The only thing that took a lot of time yesterday was comi...

I woke up a bit late this morning, and I wasn’t feeling 100%, but after doing a few of my “frogs”, I got started on work as soon as possible. I wanted to have as much time to get writing done as I could while I didn’t have too much IBS discomfort, just in case some flared up later in the day. That didn’t happen, thank the Lord, but I was still glad I was conservative with my energy today. I haven’t been spending as much time on my “ frogs ” lately because of my health. I usually try to do exercise, email, my Japanese study, and house chores. I’ve been cutting short the time I spend on my email and Japanese (my exercise is already only 45 minutes of walking and I don’t want to go less than that). Eventually, I’d like to spend more time on my Japanese in the morning before I start work, but since I’m still in that stage where I’m not sure if my IBS will flare up later the day, I’ve been rushing my “frogs” to prioritize the writing. Now that I’ve moved my marketing to Thursdays and Sa...

I had a bad IBS flareup the past few days, and I'm still not feeling well but I wanted to get some work done today. I took some medication but was still dealing with pain and nausea, but I just powered through it to get some marketing work done. My book is releasing on the 16th this month, and I had some issues with uploading it to Kindle with the ISBN I had purchased from Bowker. After chatting (rather fruitlessly) with Amazon customer service, I finally tried a different ISBN number and that seemed to work. So now I'll have to deal with customer service with Bowker in order to fix it (and likely they'll say nothing's wrong with the ISBN and the problem was with Amazon). I was still feeling crappy so I was only going to do the bare minimum of writing today, and I started work on my manuscript, typing in 4thewords. However, I started feeling better as I was writing and I ended up writing more. I also accidentally started a large word count monster, which made me wri...

Despite having terrible IBS last night and this morning, I managed to drag myself to the computer, saturated with drugs, to finish editing book 4 in my series, and I finished tonight! I’m so glad it’s done. (On a side note, I hope the drugs did not make the editing all wonky.) Unfortunately, I’m also having wrist and shoulder issues because I spent too long doing mouse work. This was the exact reason I stopped doing developmental editing for clients, because the mouse work was causing me pain. Next time, I’m going to have to separate the editing over several days. Now is the time when I usually have a lot of marketing tasks to do to prepare for the book launch. I’m really glad I made a checklist, even though it’s kind of scary long, but I know that I included everything so that I won’t forget something important. Also, most of the tasks on the checklist are very small ones that I could do in 15 minutes, so I can do a few each day. I will start to do some of those marketing task...

For about a week I’ve been trying out this new schedule, and now that I’ve switched to doing half writing/half blocking during my writing time, my schedule is set for now. I’m intending to try this to see how things go. I’ve been trying to wake up early, and I exercise, then eat breakfast. After breakfast I do some house chores. Then I do four “frogs”—important items that I have to do first in my day or else they won’t get done. These are: my Bible reading, checking my email, doing about 15 minutes of marketing work, and then doing about 15 minutes of work on my Hawaii serial novel, which will be posted as a free read on my blog. After that, I start work on my Regency series, which is the main series I’m working on. I’m trying to aim for a total of 3-4 hours a day working on this series, with about 1.5-2 hours of writing and 1.5-2 hours of blocking.  As I mentioned before, this isn’t ideal for me. Ideally, I’d be writing a book in one series, and then blocking another book in anoth...

I got a really late start today. First I woke up late because I had a hard time falling asleep last night (despite going to bed early), then I was slowed down by some IBS discomfort after breakfast (not caused by breakfast, but by something else I ate a week ago). As a result, I lost about an hour of time I could have done work before lunch. I am starting to wonder if my method of bare minimum writing each day has caused the pacing of the story to slow down. The book is already at 80,000 words and I’m only at about 60% of the way through. I’m not really worried about what the total word count will be since I don’t have to adhere to a traditional publisher's guidelines for word count (which are usually to accommodate paperback production). However, I am worried that maybe I’ve added too much detail to the scenes so that they’re a bit bloated, which will slow reading pace and make the narrative seem bogged down. I think I won’t know if that’s true until I do the overall self-editing ...

I woke up a little late today, but then I wasted time after breakfast browsing iTunes movies. I don’t know why I do retail procrastination so easily! I’m really easily distracted today! I think the problem was caused by the fact that I do my daily Bible study at breakfast on my phone. It’s super easy to get distracted by my phone. So I think that I will try to do my Bible study on my older iPad Mini. Since it’s so old, and so slow to load websites and apps, it might work to just do my Bible study and not tempt me with going online. I’ll actually have to see if it still works. (I just remembered that my Bible study was one of my “frogs” that I’ve been forgetting to list. I’ve been doing it every morning during breakfast, so it’s been easy to keep up my discipline to do it.) There were some blog posts that needed to go up next week, so I spent longer than 15 minutes working on my marketing work today. That, combined with the procrastination, made me lose about an hour of work I could hav...

Now that I’m starting to feel better, I have the luxury to start thinking about my publishing goals (as opposed to simply trying to write despite feeling like crap). At 500 words a day, it would take me over 6 months to write a 100,000 word novel, which means I would only publish 2 books a year. So I decided to increase my daily word goal to 800 words. As long as I am healthy, that will enable me to write 100,000 words in about 4 months, which would be 3 books a year. It’s the number of books I want to release each year at minimum, although I would prefer to release 4 or 5 books a year. At the moment, I think I can handle writing 800 words a day now that I’m starting to feel a little better and also since I’m learning to better manage my pain and work around it. After realizing that I could release 3 books a year if I up my word count, I’m also very motivated to push myself a little harder, which might help me be disciplined about doing those 800 words. Yesterday, I was really dist...

Need to do more exercise to improve energy levels I’ve been slowly feeling better, but still not enough to get 5 hours of work a day (the other 3 hours, I do my Japanese study and reading to make a full 8 hour workday). There were a few days I worked more than one hour, but most days I’m working only the bare minimum. I’m feeling a bit disappointed in myself that I can’t get more done, but lately I just haven’t had the energy to try to push myself when I’m feeling like fly-meets-windshield. I think it’s because I’ve been lazy about exercising—if I feel a bit uncomfortable, I just don’t go exercise. For a while I wasn’t able to exercise at all because my IBS was so bad, but now that it’s getting better, I can go out walking without discomfort, so I should just do it, as Nike would say. Keeping up my writing streak has improved my productivity I’ve still kept up my writing streak and made sure to do at least the bare minimum of 100 words every day. I’m actually really grateful I ...

Where I’ve been: It’s been more than 5 weeks since I last got any writing work done. I was sick with a variety of things ( I blogged about it here ), but I discovered that what mostly kept me from writing was the sheer fatigue of being ill. I have writer friends who battle chronic illnesses which are much worse than IBS. I’m starting to realize that it’s not just the pain they feel, but it must also be the tiredness and fuzzy brain that they have to battle through in order to get writing done. For the 2-3 weeks when I had sinus headaches, the headache naturally kept me from my computer, but when dealing only with the IBS issues, while the discomfort was pretty much constant, the pain wasn’t. It came and went irregularly, so it wasn’t as if I was in pain all the time. And yet I couldn’t work because I also had to manage the bone-tiredness, and the way it was so hard for me to think. Now that I’ve been on my elimination diet for about 3 weeks, I’m starting to feel like I have mor...

I’ve been looking at my schedule for the past several weeks. I originally intended to do social media/blogging/writing-related business on Saturdays, but I haven’t been doing that at all. Instead (assuming I’m in good health), I’m usually working on my book on Saturdays. I think it’s partly because I don’t like losing momentum. Since I was working on the book all week, when Saturday rolls around, I want to get more done on it, especially if I ended up not getting as much done that week as I wanted to because of health or other reasons. Stopping my writing momentum is not only hard, I dislike doing it because I feel like I should take advantage of it, especially since it often takes a bit more effort to get it going in the first place. Well, if that’s my personality, then maybe the most efficient way is to try to work around my strengths and my weaknesses. So instead of trying to fight my writing momentum, I’m going to try to move that non-writing day to Mondays and see how that goe...

Today is another day to try out my reorganized daily schedule. I did two of my “frogs” this morning—chores and my Daily Bible reading (I really shouldn’t call my Bible reading a “frog,” because it’s important and I’m glad I do it, it’s just that it’s one of those things that would slide to the wayside if I didn’t do it first thing in the morning)—and now I’m about to start writing work. Later this afternoon, I’ll do my two other “frogs,” exercise and my Japanese language study. The whole point of this is so that I can do some work early in the day when I’m mentally the freshest, but quite honestly, I don’t feel very mentally fresh right now. I guess I’ll just have to try it and see. I have two plot problems to solve, so I’ll see how easy or hard they might be for me to concentrate on. *** Maybe it’s just because today’s hot and uncomfortable, but I had a hard time focusing when I started work. Or maybe it just naturally takes me a little while to get into the work and really be a...

I got a lot done this weekend! I caught up on my email Inbox and Facebook messages. I also got a little bit of work done on my Japanese Spinster’s Christmas self-publishing project (editing the furigana). The book is published, but after doing the Japanese Sushi for One version and learning more about Japanese publishing standards, I’m editing the furigana for The Spinster’s Christmas to better reflect those standards, and then I’ll resubmit the print book (which costs money every time I submit a new version on LIghtningSource). Editing The Spinster’s Christmas will take a really long time, but if I do a little bit at a time, eventually it’ll get done.  I spent most of Sunday reading and refilling the creative well . I hadn’t read very much this past week, so I’m glad I got a chance to binge read. I hope it tides me over until next weekend. I’ll try this batching method and see if it works okay. It seems easier for me to batch my writing during the weekdays and my reading in a larg...

I’m still reading through the Snowflake step 6 extended synopses for the other books in the series and taking notes, and I found quite a few loose threads I had forgotten to close off. Some things hadn’t been obvious loose threads when I wrote the synopses, but they changed after I wrote the first 3 books and small events changed slightly. I’m starting to think that maybe it would be a good idea for me to do this same sort of reviewing of the synopses of the other books in the series each time after I finish a book, just to adjust things and make sure all the events are lining up. It’s also a good chance to catch any continuity errors that may arise due to changes in the series storyline that occur after I write each book. I finished reading the synopses for all 10 books in the series, but now I need to read the synopsis for the side novel, which actually is looking like it’ll be super long and might end up being two or even three novels instead of just one. I actually really hope...