Camy's Writing Diary

The problem with not blogging is that I got lazy and I don’t have the accountability of needing to confess on a blog post what I did or didn’t do that day. I fully admit I was lazy yesterday and after only about an hour of writing, I did some reading. I do know that I haven’t been reading enough and so I probably needed to refill the creative well. I feel much less antsy today and more focused on work. I had forgotten that I need the accountability of blogging in order to prevent myself from slacking off. I hadn’t been blogging because I haven’t learned anything new in regards to my productivity and efficiency. I’m doing my “ frogs ” each morning, then getting started on work. I first do my self-editing on what I wrote the day before, then I get started on writing the scene for the day. My writing speed is a bit slower than before because I sometimes take the time to look up research. I know it’s not efficient, especially since I want to write faster, but I found during the self-...

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...

My IBS is better today, and as a result, I feel like I have a lot more energy. It’s been easier for me to spend more hours working since my energy levels are higher. I can’t always count on my IBS being better and my energy levels being correspondingly higher, but I want to take advantage and get as much work done as I can while my body is cooperating. I’m editing my book right now and it’s going smoothly. However, I have noticed something although I’m not entirely sure if it’s true or not. It seems as though my writing with dictation isn’t quite as good as when I’m typing. A big reason is because I didn’t see patterns of word choice when I was dictating, and so there’s a lot of repetition. The problem is that I don’t always catch it when I’m editing, and sometimes I catch it later when I’m almost done editing the scene. I don’t think my writing is bad, and there are moments of loveliness in the prose (I hope I can say that about my own writing). But I do think that my writing ...

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 felt absolutely terrible this morning, so I took medication and relaxed, waiting for the medicine to kick in and the symptoms to calm down. It took a while, longer than I had expected, and by then, I was so tired that it was hard to force myself to get started on work. However, it was my writing streak that saved me this time. I try to do at least 100 words each day, and I hadn’t yet done my writing for the day, so I needed to at least sit at my desk to get that done. Just the act of firing up my computer helped get me in a better frame of mind, and I got started on my writing almost immediately. I wasn’t even aiming for only 100 words—I was ready to work as long as it took to finish the scene I was writing, since I had stopped in the middle yesterday. I finished the scene and decided to start the next one, and finished that, too. I think it really is very motivating for me to set scene goals rather than word count goals for each day. I seem to end up getting a lot more done that...