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...

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...

I had a little bit of IBS that caused me to have a slow start this morning, but I got all my “frogs” done. The only problem is that I had to do a marketing task that took over an hour. It absolutely had to be done, and I’m glad I finished it, but it did make me late to start my dictation today. Because of that, I decided to cut my dictation time a bit short. The free writing exercise I did yesterday seemed to help me practice not pausing while I dictate. Freewriting is supposed to help you to release inhibitions and just write without worrying about how it sounds. I guess I need that for my dictation, because I still had a lot of words I needed to delete yesterday because I’d dictate a sentence, then repeat it with corrections. But mostly I want to get used to just keeping on dictating without silence. Sometimes that’s hard because I have to read my blocking notes on my phone to see where I’m supposed to go. Some days will be like yesterday, where I dictated some dialogue out of or...

It’s been almost seven months since I wrote my last Evaluation 6 , but I finally got around to Evaluation #7! Here’s the gist of what I’ve learned over the past few months about my writing and productivity. New schedule My IBS was slowly been starting to feel better recently. I am still extremely strict with my diet, but I am also starting to experiment with what foods I can and can’t eat. I have also started a new eating and sleeping schedule, which I have dubbed my “chrono-diet” because I’m trying to take advantage of my circadian rhythm, according to the book Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life (I had borrowed a copy from the library but I enjoyed it so much I went ahead and bought it). I have started waking up at 6 am and exercising first thing, then having breakfast after exercise. I do house chores and/or work until noon, which is when I eat lunch. I’m supposed to not eat until dinner around 5:30 or 6, but I haven’t been able to break the habit of snacking in the aftern...

I was actually feeling much better today, health-wise—my IBS wasn’t bothering me very much at all, for once. However, for some reason I also spent longer than normal doing both my Japanese and my marketing work before I started on my writing work for the day, so I didn’t have as much time to write before I had to start on dinner. I have such a love-hate relationship with marketing work—I will often procrastinate before doing it, especially if there are  a lot of marketing tasks to do, but sometimes when I’m in the midst of it, I’m focusing really intently and end up spending more time on it than I had planned. I only intended to do about 30 minutes of marketing work today, but it extended into almost an hour and a half. It was all marketing work that needed to be done eventually, so it wasn’t exactly wasted time. But I do feel a bit guilty that I was so late in starting on my writing work, especially since I was feeling better today and had been hoping to get at least 3 hours of ...

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...

I’m still working on outlining the Hawaii book. I remembered how it was useful for me to look at my Book Creation Process and figure out which steps had been done and yet still needed to be done for my Regency books, so I decided to do the same for this Hawaii book. Unlike for other books, this time I was rewriting an old book, Year of the Dog, so I had already done stage 1 in my Book Creation Process, which is developing the characters. I also had already done stage 2, which was doing the Snowflake steps for the original book, but since I was adjusting the plot, I spent the past few days altering my 1-paragraph summary (Snowflake step 2) and 1-page synopsis (Snowflake step 4). I also had already done stage 5 of my Book Creation Process, which was to create a scene spreadsheet (Snowflake step 8), and in working on the 1-page synopsis, I ended up revising the scene spreadsheet at the same time. I also already had done an expanded synopsis of the book (Snowflake step 6), and normally I’...

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...

Marketing is a necessary aspect of writing, whether you’re published traditionally or self-published. Unfortunately since I’ve published in two genres, I have two newsletters for marketing. While I can usually find something to write about in my Regency newsletter, recently I’ve had difficulty figuring out what to do about my contemporary romantic suspense newsletter when I’m not writing a contemporary novel at the moment, and I don’t have plans to release one until after I finish the Regency series. I’ve been trying to adhere to the “one a month” marketing strategy. It’s hard sometimes to have something of value to include in my contemporary newsletter. Actually, sometimes it’s hard to have something of value to include in my Regency newsletter too, but at least I can write about the book I’m working on. Mostly I’ve been blogging about “extra” tidbits that relate to my books. That includes recipes of food mentioned in the books, knitting patterns of knitted items mentioned in the ...

I had an IBS flareup starting from Thursday last week (I had been feeling better, too!). So I only did the bare minimum, but I started feeling better today and managed to get some blocking done on book 5. I did some writing on book 4 also, but I’m still getting kind of confused about what’s been revealed in the book yet or not. I’m more and more convinced that I need to get the blocking done as soon as possible for the entire series. Until that’s done, I’m going to have to really work hard to keep my timelines straight and not make continuity errors when I’m writing. Then while I write the rest of the books in the Regency series, I’ll do the outlining and blocking for the entirety of my next series, Contemporary Romantic Suspense set in Hawaii. That way, when I start writing the Hawaii series, it’ll be completely blocked. I really, really don’t think I can write and block books in the same series at the same time. It’s just too confusing and I’m constantly worried about making errors...

Writing Streak: I think I’m going to try to do a writing streak. I haven’t really done those because I’m afraid to. My thinking is, I’m afraid some other health issue will crop up, so why bother to keep up an unbroken streak? But I was reading some writing books and one mentioned writing a book in 100 days. I like that number because it makes it easier to break a novel down by 100. The book talked about writing a certain number of words a day for 100 days. I’m torn about that. I actually kind of like the idea of writing only 900 words a day and finishing a 90,000 word book in 100 days. But I also know myself, that it’s hard for me to write prose if my outlining and blocking isn’t done. This is because I’m so bad at making decisions for how I want the plot or the scenes to go, and for me, outlining and blocking is all about making all those decision ahead of time. I can’t quite remember, but I think I tried doing both writing prose and outlining every day, and it ended up bein...

Maybe because of the heat wave going through California, but I’ve had a recurring headache for the past week, as well as IBS issues. It was too difficult to focus and work when I was so uncomfortable, so I just took several sick days while trying to get my body back under control. I read a lot, which also refilled the creative well , which was honestly feeling a bit dry. I’m easing back into work today. Not sure how much I’ll get done, but I’m not intending to push myself too much since I still have lingering IBS issues. After going through all the Snowflake step 6 (extended synopses) for the rest of the books in the series, I’m a bit impatient to write these books. I want to write these stories, but I also have to admit that a part of me just likes the idea of having the series done sooner rather than later. I think it’s what James Scott Bell (I think it was him) referred to as, “I don’t want to write, I want to have written.” I fully admit I love the feeling of satisfaction when...