Tag Archives: planning

Morning Pages Entry – June 04, 2014

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I need to find a way, to make my writing my safe place to go. I need it to become more of a habit. It needs to be my place that even when people in my life piss me off, and treat me badly, that I can go to and feel better. That I can be productive, and create new worlds and people, and I can feel better about myself. Being angry, shouldn’t prevent me from writing, it should bring me back to writing even more, because it’s a place where I can have a real benefit, and make real changes, and things always go the way I want them to. That’s what my writing should be for me. A place I want to be more then anything else. I should always be writing. Even when I’m editing. Even, if it’s only for an hour a day. I can write close to 1500 words in that hour. There’s no reason not to do it. I could force myself to do it for 30 days, and it will become habit. Spend a few minutes plotting something, then write what you’ve come up with. You may have to force yourself to do it for 30 days, but then it’s habit, then you just keep going. Right now, your at 183 days with your morning journal. If you hadn’t missed that one day, your streak would be at 193. Your very close to 200. Could you possibly imagine not doing this every morning. It’s become a bit of a sanctuary Definitely, if you can get in the habit of writing every day, including weekends, even if it’s for an hour, you’ll have a whole other series to publish. You could spend the first 15 minutes in here your morning journal doing some plotting. That would work, just write something in here about what you want your characters to do. If you have other stuff you can write that too. But, if you did that every day. A thousand words, then you could publish a short novel every month. If you had done that at the same pace that you do this morning journal, then you would like seven 25K sized books out there right now. That’s seven books of a hundred pages long each. There’s really no reason not to do that. Actually you should plot out an entire 25k, then write it in one month – one scene per day. That’s easy. Then you get a story out every month, and you can still work on the bigger one. I think. That, seems very manageable. Or, maybe, you just apply that approach to your main novel, and bump up the number of words that you write per day. What you really need, is to have an outline ready before you start. If you had an outline done at the beginning of the month, then you could just write as many words as possible, till it was finished. Then, edit, make a cover, and do all the other admin stuff and get it out there. You shouldn’t have a problem editing that many words a day. Make it a habit. Do it, every day. Just write every day for thirty days, and make it a habit. At least 1000 words, preferably 2000+ words or as many as you can pump out there. Say, at least a 1000 on weekends, and the rest of the week, you do 2000+ . That gives you close to a 200 page novel a month. Nothing wrong with that. Call it a series, a serial or whatever. That’s a pretty good schedule. And, writing every day including weekends, is a better habit to get into. It becomes more routine. Like you really need to do it . . . like oxygen. It just becomes a part of your daily ritual. Could you imagine, really having 7 novels out there in this amount of time. And, if you decide to crank it up, and get to your 5K per day mon-fri, then you’ll have even bigger stories out there for you readers. At that pace, you could actually do like 2 shorter novels (200 pages) per month, or one very long 400 page novel per month. You did get to 5K days that one week. You could do it again. You could crank out that many words. There would be no stopping you then. If you could put out two 200 page novels per month, that would be pretty impressive, and for sure would get you seriously deep into a 5 figure monthly income.

TIGERBLOOD: yes DAILYMOOD: still pissed LOCATION: home office WORDSWRITTEN: none PUSHUPS: 4:00 wall sit TODO: write TV: prophets of science fiction, californication, game of thrones BOOK: none GAME: 2048 EXERCISE: none WEIGHT: 170 BREAKFAST: ham & eggs LUNCH: big ass salad DINNER: steak and brussel sprouts SNACKS: nuts (cashews/walnuts) ALCOHOL: none BEDTIME: 11 and 1:30 AWAKE: 6:30

 

Morning Pages – April 24, 2014

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So yesterday some interesting things happened. I actually, submitted my first story to CritiqueCircle.com, and in the process, I did quite a bit of editing on it. At least in terms of getting rid of a lot of extraneous words. I was pretty brutal, I though with about the first 3500 words of the story. I went through, and pulled out probably around 350 words, or 10% of the original word count. Which I thought was quite a bit, but perhaps it wasn’t really all that much. I do think the story reads better now, but I’m second guessing myself a lot on the content of the story now. Which, I suppose is an improvement, as I feel that at least the story works much better from a stylistic approach. But, after reading a few other critiques, of other peoples works, it’s a bit depressing. Knowing, that others are likely going to rip apart my writing. Mind you, it won’t all be worth it, if I get get a few good ideas. From what I’ve seen of the critiques on the site so far, a few are usually pretty good, but a lot are just opinion, and a few are really bad. The trick, is getting someone good to read critique story. And, even then, it’s just someone else’s opinion. What really matters, is how well the story sells. I think what I have written has a bit too much exposition at the beginning, and not enough dialogue, but other stories do that as well, so I’m not too worried about it. I don’t mind reading that kind of story, but I’m sure some of the other writers will jump on it. The thing with writing, is that there are a lot of rules written about it, but your totally free, to throw all the rules out the window. And, remember, this is just your first story. I think, if I can get it to read well, and be a bit entertaining, with good flow, then I won’t worry too much about the style it’s written in. I’ll always be free to change that as the second novel comes along. Remember, the key thing here, is to get the damn thing finished and out there. Go through the process, and start building a base of readers. That’s what you really need to do. Start a mailing list. Get it out there. If that book get’s really panned, you can always pull it down, or just do some revisions. That’s the beauty of self published. You can do whatever you want with it. It feels like I’m spinning my wheels with this editing, just because it’s taking so much longer than I thought, but in reality, I’m actually learning so much about it. I have a much better idea, of what needed changing, in my first book. I know, that it’s far too wordy to start with, and if I can write my first draft with a few less extraneous words, then the editing process will get better. I know, that if I spend more time outlining the story up front, that it will not only be much better, but it will go faster. I know, that I need to pay more attention to the whole scene and sequel cycle. I need to be sure, there is conflict in each of those scenes that is driving the story forward, and making it interesting for the reader. I know about structure, and that if I can incorporate the 7-point structure going forward, I’ll have a better starting point for subsequent novels. It is a lot to learn, and granted, there have been other things slowing me down, but if I can just get these process down a little bit smoother, and faster, which I’m sure I can, then this whole thing will be a more productive and enjoyable experience. That’s also what I’m going for here, is to make this an enjoyable experience. There is a core part of me, that really enjoys the writing, but at the moment, I feel that all the uncertainty around getting it done, is overwhelming me a lot. I just need to work through all the uncertain pieces, and keep moving forward, and eventually I’ll be successful with it. Which is incredibly exciting. The end game here has a lot of potential. This is the first endevour, where I feel like, once I get a bit of success with it, I can stick to it for the rest of my life. And that’s a first. It would be the first job / business where I think I’d like to do it forever. Which, is pretty exciting.

TIGERBLOOD: yes DAILYMOOD: good – anxious LOCATION: living room WORDSWRITTEN:editing PUSHUPS: 2:00 plank TODO: editing TV: californication, 70s Show BOOK: excerpts of a few zombie indie authors GAME: BitRunner, A Clone In The Dark EXERCISE: walk for 50 minutes WEIGHT: 170 BREAKFAST: bacon & eggs LUNCH: big ass salad DINNER: none SNACKS: orange, grapes ALCOHOL: none BEDTIME: 11:45 AWAKE: 6:30