Camy's Writing Diary

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...

Today didn’t start off too well. I woke up with another headache, so I had a slow start after getting up. I also had more messages to answer on Facebook so I went ahead and did that to get it out of the way. As part of my clearing the decks ritual, I’ve been doing my Japanese flashcards before work, but today I decided to spend a little extra time on it. I had been thinking of restructuring my Japanese learning for a while now, so I went ahead and organized my flashcards for kanji, vocabulary, and also grammar. A part of me worries about taking too much time to do my Japanese before getting to my writing work, but I know that if I don’t do it before work, it’s never going to get done. And the Japanese learning is important to me personally. I would really like to be proficient enough one day to be able to translate my fiction into Japanese, and maybe only needing an editor to smooth it out. I’m really far from there right now, but I hope I can get there, if I study diligently. *...

I actually got distracted after breakfast!!! Argh! Well, it wasn’t non-work related. I have a blog promotion I’ll be doing with the other authors in the multi-author anthology (which the next book I’m working on, The Wedding Kimono , will be in), and so I spent about 1.5 hours doing that. I also don’t feel so bad doing this because I had given myself a week after finishing book 3 to get other marketing stuff done (which this is), and I still have 3 more days. After lunch, I (deliberately this time) did more blogging and marketing for the anthology (mostly writing and scheduling blog posts in advance), which took another 2 hours. I also got the newsletter translation back from my translator, and so I did the final edits and scheduled for my two newsletters (Camy and Camille) to go out in March. And then my graphic designer got the interior of the Japanese Sushi for One back to me today, so I was able to upload it to Lightning Source. I also was surprised when my proofreader got ...

Edited to add: Sorry, I forgot to post this on Sunday! Posting it late. I forgot to do an evaluation at the end of September, so I'll do one now. Translation issues The Japanese translation of Sushi for One is finally done! My translator has been wonderful, especially because she worked with the proofreader, who doesn't speak English very well. If I didn't know any Japanese, I would have had to hire out some of the things I did, but since I know just enough Japanese to be dangerous to myself, I did the formatting into eBook and print book. The print book translation was straightforward, although a bit tedious since there were some furigana corrections that I needed to make (so I wouldn't have to pay someone else to do them). The eBook conversion was difficult, and I had to really stretch my very meager html skills in order to make it happen. I discovered a new way of doing it later in the process, so the next book might be a lot easier, but the conversion me...

For the past two days, I've been trying to keep a more detailed account of exactly what I do all day, because I want to try to put in more hours actually writing. Yesterday I actually got a lot of writing-related business done, and it seemed like a lot more after I wrote it all down. I finished correcting the errors my translator sent to me for the Japanese version of Sushi for One , and I think the .epub file is almost ready to go! I already corrected the errors to the PDF file for the paperback format, too, so I might actually be able to release this book soon! Thanks to my proofreader's Googling skills in Japanese, she found me a website article on the html code I can use to rotate a character 90 degrees in an epub, so I was able to correct some of the wrongly rotated characters that I couldn't solve with the Half-width Romaji keyboard output. There were a LOT of errors in the ebook that hadn't been in the print book Word document. It was mostly some shifted ht...

I'm writing this, but I don't really think anyone will be all that interested in it. However, in case I needed an excuse to contribute useless information on the web, I actually was Googling how to solve my formatting problems all day today and came up with NOTHING. And I know I can't be the only (English-speaking) person who wanted to know about this. Lines per page I only briefly mentioned this part earlier , and this probably won't come up for most languages, but I had to set the number of lines per page to Exactly 16 pt, as opposed to single space. This is because when a line has furigana, Word will give it more space for the furigana, and if it doesn't have furigana, it will go back to normal single spacing. So the distance between lines will be uneven, making some lines look squashed together and others far apart. Setting the Paragraph setting to Exactly 16 pt (or whatever fits for your book) will make the line spacing even no matter if there’s furigana or...

Edited to add: I forgot to post this yesterday and so ended up posting this late. It's been a rough several days. Health issues galore, all calculated to keep me from writing! The sinus headaches lasted about two and a half days, but when they cleared, my stomach was upset and then I had an IBS flareup. While I wasn't incapacitated like I was with the headache, it was still really hard to concentrate. So I decided to do some of the writing-related work I had waiting for me, namely doing the editing for the Japanese translation of Sushi for One . (As a warning, the following is a little tedious, so feel free to skip this. But I decided to write it out not only so I don't forget what I had to do, in case I have to do all this again, but also in case anyone else is curious about doing translations of their novels into another language. Another language like Spanish or German or French probably won't be quite the same type of work, since they don't have pronunci...

My ankles were hurting yesterday so I decided to rest them today and not go walking. I dived right into reading and clearing my new emails. It seems email takes anywhere from 30-60 minutes everyday. I wish there were a way to cut that down, although right now I’m dealing with a lot of emails about my Japanese translation of Sushi for One . The translation is finished, so at the moment we’re dealing with formatting options/questions and feedback from the proofreader. Once it’s published, my translator will only be working on translating the next book in the series, Only Uni , and I won’t have as many things I’ll need to be doing. I’m also working with my graphic designer to do the covers for the Japanese versions of the Sushi series. The other books won’t be translated for a while, but since she had to do the cover for book 1, I asked her to do all the ebook covers at once so that they have the same style and feel. I think she did a great job, but there have been small changes that ne...

I’m re-reading Write Better, Faster: How To Triple Your Writing Speed and Write More Every Day , and I realized that while I’ve tried the other techniques in the book, I never actually did a consistent writer’s diary. She gives good reasons why it’s important, but I just never got around to doing it when I was setting up my spreadsheet to track my writing statistics. So I think I’ll try doing this and see how it goes. I’ve never actually taken a good look at my writer’s process in all its ugly glory. I think it will be good to do this diary because it will be raw data for me—a record of exactly what I did each day for my writing. A review of each day will enable me to record any insights I might discover about my writing habits, good and bad. With that collection of raw data in my diary, I’ll be able to see larger-scale trends in my writer’s process so that I can adjust and correct as needed, and hopefully improve my productivity. So this will be a diary that will detail how I, as ...