Month: February 2015

Tired of this cold and tired of not having a better routine

Lynn

It’s day 7 of the cold. I want to write more today than yesterday. I never got to it, although I did read two more of the series books that precede the book I’m working on now. I feel like I have a good handle on the story to date and I’m ready to write, except, well, I’m tired. Colds will do that to you I guess. I read on one of the health sites that they typically last one to two weeks. I’ve developed a bit of a cough that’s irritating my lungs and throat. I’m hopeful I’m on the downward slope here, but I think I’m going to try to doze for a bit before I start writing today.

I have a routine I want to settle into and this is really messing with it, but I want over this cold, the sooner the better, and honestly, I’m barely keeping my eyes open right now. I think I need the rest.

Here’s the routine.

Write from 7 to 2. This isn’t “sit down and write and do nothing else” time. I just want to start fitting my writing in between 7 and 2 so I can stop living in the moment all the time. I have a lot of trouble prioritizing when I’m in the moment. :) In fact, living in the moment is exactly the opposite of what I need to do more often because I do it all the time. I really think that the living in the moment philosophy was created for people with distinctly different personalities than the one I have.

Other stuff after 2 pm. Publishing stuff, life stuff, that kind of thing. Since the publishing stuff I need to do right now is to finish formatting those paperbacks I haven’t done yet, that’s really all I have to do right now other than personal stuff after 2. I do my folks’ taxes and that’s on my list these next couple of weeks, and my own taxes of course. If I can get ahead of my 2,000 a day average, I could take a whole day for the paperbacks, but until I get this next book finished, I’m not going to do that unless I do get ahead. There will definitely be some days where I take the whole day to do publishing stuff, such as after I actually finish a book, but during the writing of said books, I’d like to stick to this routine.

Read through the day’s writing from 7 to 8 pm. Or however long it takes. I doubt it’ll take an hour to read a couple of thousand words. I haven’t changed my overall desire to write an average of 2,000 words a day, although I did have to reset my expectations already when I noticed my expectations creeping up. That happens a lot apparently. I get really bogged down in the copy editing and stuff when I’m done with a story, and I get super nervous worrying that I might have missed something important, and I think this might help. I’ve stopped reading through the previous day’s writing as I’ve become more focused on my words per hour rate and more than just making that final read through more stressful, I also think it’s hurt my enjoyment of writing. This way I can make corrections as I go and when I do that final read through I might not worry so much that I’ve missed something—and maybe I’ll enjoy it a bit more too. ;)

Read fiction from 8:30 til bedtime. This way I can fit in all the reading I want to do this year!

That’s really it. I don’t consider this a schedule, although I’m sure it fits that definition for some folks. For me, it’s just the routine I’d like to find myself slipping into so that I can concentrate on getting all those books I’d like to write this year written.

Now, time for that rest. I’m sleepy and my chest is hurting and I can’t believe it’s just 8:38 am. Hopefully I’ll wake up all energized and ready to write. I’ll probably need to get started by 10 if I want a chance of reaching 2,000 today without writing past 2 o’clock.

At loose ends

Lynn

My latest experiment isn’t working out. You know, the one where I set the timer to go up instead of down while I write? I’m not writing enough (might not be related to the experiment) and I keep forgetting to turn on the timer when I do write (definitely related to the timer experiment, for reasons I know but probably won’t be able to explain).

Still, I’ve let the being sick thing really keep me from writing what I need to write this month. Tomorrow I’m going to restart my attempt to settle into a routine of sorts. I need something different. Frankly, I need something that works.

I want—

  • consistency
  • >2,000 words a day

That’s it, that’s really all I want. I have no idea why I find that so difficult.

Well enough to get back to writing today

Lynn

I started writing again today, finally. I’m at 1,064 for the day so far and intend to finish later tonight with significantly more words than that as long as I continue to feel well enough.

Here’s the thing. I wrote most of those words on the wrong damn book. :D Since it is a book I plan to write in 2015, I’m not going to complain too much. The original opening I’ve already written for that book never felt right for this one, but what I came up with today? I really like it. :) And I think I can tie it in with the rest of the books in the series nicely, even though as of yet it doesn’t seem to have anyone in common with the other books.

And that brings me back to the book I need to write ASAP. It’s going okay, although I stepped back from the last scene I’d written enough so that I could take it in a different direction. I think it’s going to work better this way too. I gained about 235 words on it, although by the time I’m done, I’ll have to delete those words I didn’t chop off the end of the scene yet. When I do, I’ll probably lose about 500 words. If it keeps things moving in the right direction, I don’t care. I delete words all the time. I’ve gotten used to it. :D

And that’s my update for the moment. I’ve very, very far behind on my 2,000 words a day plan, but I think for now, I’m just going concentrate on averaging that 2,000 words a day for the next week or two, instead of trying to play catch up. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to have the writing of a few books go really easy for me and the catching up will come on its own. That’d be a nice change!

At least I got something done

Lynn

Yesterday morning, I thought I’d get started by fixing the errors I found on my recent read through of the book I’m about to start writing on again. Somehow I got distracted just before I’d finished and ended up doing other things.

By that I mean I decided I’d better email my pen name’s list about the new book, and then I realized I needed to update something at Amazon for another entry in the series. After doing some personal stuff, because real life is a thing to be dealt with at some point, I started on the paperback cover for the book I’d just finished the interior formatting for, and I finished that just as I had to stop for the day.

I’d promised to do something for the kids and that meant I had to leave at around 3:30 pm. I didn’t get home until 6 hours later, so what I’d accomplished earlier in the day was it for me. I’m now 2 days behind my writing restart date of February 2.

Today, though, is going to be different.

I submitted my files for review yesterday, and now I’ve already made my order for a proof copy this morning. I’m saving the rest of the paperback work for this weekend. I just couldn’t let go of that project until it was done and with the interior formatting done, I was so close.

Now it’s back to writing, with no distractions (I hope), until this weekend when I’ll try to finish those paperbacks that still need finished in record time. :D

Time to start writing again

Lynn

I didn’t quite get as caught up with the publishing tasks as I wanted, but I did get a lot done! I finally finished the interior formatting for one of the five books I need to format for print. Since all my series have at least one book that’s already been formatted for paperback, I’ll reuse my formatted Word files as templates and that’ll helps things go faster.

I had a bit of an epiphany as I was formatting this particular paperback and I created a few new styles that made the hyphenation, widows, and orphans issues easier to deal with. I already knew how to do everything I did this time, but I had never really thought about making it easier. And wow, was it easier.

So here’s what I learned this time about paperback formatting in Word. (I always learn something when I start looking for ways to streamline my processes.)

I already rely on Word styles when I format for ebook or print. This time, I created a normal paragraph style that turned on widows and orphans for the single paragraph I apply the style to.

This matters because I create balanced spreads and don’t want facing pages to have a different number of lines on them and using widow and orphan control wholesale in the document will create very unbalanced spreads—pages that are shorter than the other by as much as three lines sometimes. I also used “keep with next” and “keep lines together” paragraph styles.

The new styles let me tweak the facing pages faster than if I manually went in and changed the paragraph settings each time I needed to. But not only that, usually I force the paragraph breaks by adding space between them and using hard returns (Shift+Enter) to split paragraphs in the middle when I need to even up pages. I didn’t have to do that this time and that means the book will be much easier to reset if I have to make a significant change that throws off my layout. I won’t be hunting up manual breaks and deleting them. I’ll just highlight my text and reset it all to “normal” paragraph style.

Finally, I created a character style for “looser text” and “tighter text” using the minimum settings I try to use when needing to tighten and loosen text to correct hyphenation issues or lines that are just awkwardly loose or tight.

This also helps with widows and orphans, so I always try it first before resorting to changing the line length of pages. I set my font to expanded by .1 pt and condensed by .1pt respectively. I found only a few instances where I had no other choice but to go just a hair tighter or looser than that and had to manually adjust the text. But this was super easy to use because I highlighted the text I wanted tighter or looser and clicked the appropriate style (I expand my quick style ribbon thingy into the sidebar when I’m working, for easy access). I tighten or loosen as few lines as necessary to make things fit instead of applying it to whole paragraphs—that’s why a character style instead of a paragraph style.

Things went so much quicker this time because of those things that I can’t believe I’ve never thought of creating these extra styles before instead of manually adjusting this stuff one selection at a time.

It was still time consuming, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t nearly as tedious as usual. I’m even excited to get to work on the next one on my list. :) I need to get to the covers soon too though. No point in having the interior formatting done and not going ahead and getting the book proofed and for sale!

But today, I have to start writing my next book. This is the one that I already have about 13,000 words or so already written. I might go back to working on multiple projects if I can maintain at least 2,000 a day on my main one.

Because right now I have two books to finish writing ASAP. One of them has to take precedence, but I’d love to be able to work on both.

It’s a sunny but cold 8:52 am on a Tuesday. It’s a good day to write. ;)

Formatting is not always fun

Lynn

Yesterday I took another trip around the world to get to my neighbor’s house.

Here’s what I mean.

The Kindle Previewer in night view was giving me trouble, but only for the Smashwords converted mobi file. The file I created with Jutoh and the one I created with Calibre were fine. Since those are the ones I upload and sell through other distributors, that’s good. But I couldn’t let the Smashwords issue go. I worked on trying to figure out what it was in my Word doc that was causing it. I even went so far as to generate a Smashwords odt file through Jutoh and tweaked it for Smashwords and the problem still didn’t go away. I was seriously on the verge of pulling out my hair when I decided to put that file on my actual Kindle (Fire) and see if it was a real problem or if the previewer had a bug.

Well, I don’t know that it’s a bug in the previewer because the previewer showed the font just fine in night view for my own mobi file. But when I side-loaded the Smashwords mobi directly onto my Kindle (I didn’t want the issue to get resolved by some conversion process if I used Send to Kindle to do it) and … no problems. None. Night view looked fine, although I can tell that there’s something going on with the file because in Sepia view the font is a bit darker than it should be compared to the mobi versions of the book I created in Jutoh and in Calibre (and compared to some other books on my Kindle too).

But I wasted hours trying to track down whatever might be causing the issue, because even after that, I didn’t give up. I tried setting after setting in Word, but nothing fixed it. I went so far as to delete my custom normal.dot file, copy all the text into a new document, and more.

Nothing fixed the issue. All I can figure is that it’s something to do with Smashwords’ own conversion process.

Regardless, I finally got over it my anxiety about this unexplained issue after I went back and pulled some of my older mobi files from Smashwords and checked them too. This problem’s been going on since 2012 at least, at least for my own Smashwords mobi files. I finally gave up trying to find a reason. I know I’ve checked the night view before, but since I’d always checked the Smashwords mobi by sending it to my Kindle, I’d never noticed the problem.

My decision to be more thorough this time and check the Smashwords mobi with the Kindle Previewer instead of just on my Kindle turned out not to be such a great idea. :o