Camy's Writing Diary

My IBS is very bad today, and since the last time I tried working through it, I ended up being distracted and unfocused, I’m just going to call in a sick day today. I took some notes from a marketing book I read and I should go through those, plus I need to clean up after my first BookFunnel promotion ended yesterday (change prices, readjust book descriptions). *** Ugh I ended up staying up way too late! I didn’t have any house chores to do, nor did I have to cook, so I sort of worked all day and didn’t take much of a break. But I got a lot of work done on writing-related things like making up my BookFunnel landing page, and creating different MailChimp landing pages, and then updating my self-published ebooks on all the ebook distributors with the new newsletter signup links. I also wrote the rough drafts for my two newsletters going out in August, and created and tested a new reader poll I’m going to send to my newsletter subscribers. I’m glad I didn’t do any creative work, be...

I’m feeling better today, so I’ll start work and see if the discomfort comes back or not. I’m working on the spiritual and romantic arcs for the serial novel. *** I got two more characters done today! And they were the two main ones. Now I have only two more characters’ spiritual and romantic arcs to do, and they’re minor-ish characters, so hopefully they won’t take too long. I want to keep working, but it’s getting late and I want to make sure I do some reading before bed, so I’ll stop here. It seems like a good stopping point. Time spent writing: 5 hours, 28 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 2 minutes

I’m starting to feel like a complete loser because I keep cutting short my work time because of health issues. But my IBS is still bad today, and I’ve been noticing that I keep stopping work every 15-20 minutes because I’m distracted. The discomfort is probably what’s making it hard for me to focus. I got a little more done on the spiritual and romantic arc of one of the six characters in my serial novel, but I’m still far from done. I’m stopping here and will go to bed early. Time spent writing: 2 hours, 9 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: I forgot to start my Toggl timer when checking email and social media today. My takeaway for today: The next time I have health issues (which might be tomorrow) I should just take a sick day and maybe do other writing-related things.

I wanted to see how long it’s been taking me to brainstorm and plot this series. I went back through my Toggl time entries, which are not entirely accurate because sometimes I was too lazy to record when I was working on my projects. I started working on the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series in mid-2016, and from there until the end of May 2020, I added everything up to 634 hours. This is only a minimum estimate of the time I took to brainstorm and do characterization for the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series, which includes a little bit of characterization for the serial novel. I also had changed my mind about the series format in early 2019, turning it into its current 10-volume non-stand-alone format around April or May of 2019, so some of the plot ideas I had before that ended up being scrapped, but the general ideas about the characters remained the same. Also, there are lots of gaps of time in those 4 years because I suffered from several bouts of writer’s block during those years, an...

I stayed up late last night doing some category and keyword research for my series. It might seem early to be doing this, but it’s on my marketing To Do list, and doing it now will enable me to tag my current blog posts about my book, as well as saving me the time doing it later. But I only got 6 hours of sleep, and it’s taken me a while to get to work today. I’m starting on the spiritual and romantic arcs of my characters in the serial novel. *** After talking about my increased writing stamina yesterday, today I have egg on my face because I’m stopping work early. I gave in to temptation and ate some things that set off my IBS, so now I’m feeling too uncomfortable to concentrate. Time spent writing: 2 hours, 42 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 39 minutes My takeaway for today: For all my improved discipline in my writing, I still can’t keep myself from eating crap. *** Soooooo okay maybe I gave up too easily. After about half an hour, my IBS got b...

I can’t believe it’s been almost two months! Since this is the last Sunday in July, I’ll write my evaluation today. Here it is in no particular order. Increasing my writing stamina: I mentioned this on Day 54, but I’m starting to see that I’m able to increase the number of minutes I’m working each day as the months progress. This is only during the plotting phase of my writing, so I’ll have to see if this continues throughout the writing and editing phases, too. I think part of the reason I’m able to focus for longer hours is because I’m making more of an effort to refill the creative well (although I still need to work on this), which makes me less distracted. Also, the act of writing down the number of minutes worked each day on this blog has been motivating me to work for longer hours. I’ve also been smarter about my breaks, which I realized can mess up my work momentum. I’ve been working for longer periods of time before taking a break, so I take less breaks during the da...

Once again, I got a slow start to my Saturday. I really don’t understand why it’s harder to get into my work on Saturdays. I’m excited to continue working on Snowflake step 6 (expanded synopsis) for the serial novel because I’m almost done! After I finish Snowflake step 6, I’ll do the spiritual and romantic arcs for the main characters of the serial, and then I’ll be ready to start writing the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series again! *** I’m done with Snowflake step 6!!!!! Good grief, the serial novel ended up with 294 mini-scenes!!! But if each mini-scene is only about 500 words, then that’s only about 150k words for the entire serial novel, which makes it only 1.5 books. I still have to do the spiritual and romantic arcs, but some of that was already done when I did Snowflake step 6. Hopefully it won’t take too long. I’ll try to finish it all on Monday. Mini-scenes plotted total: 294 Time spent writing: 4 hours, 45 minutes Time spent doing other writing-related business: 40 mi...