Month: April 2024

Some good advice

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Absolutely adore these videos.

It was two weeks ago, I think, when I first came across The Cozy Creative channel and Lidiya Foxglove’s videos. She has a lot of wisdom about being a writer for the long-term, and she shares it with a quirky and fun attitude that makes her videos really easy viewing.

I’ve watched more than a handful so I’m not basing my opinion on any one video, but I definitely recommend you give them a watch if you’re interested in writing journeys and good advice to get you through a long haul as an author. :)

Starting somewhere so I can end up elsewhere

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Part 1 of The Slow Writer’s Guide to Becoming Prolific

March and April have marked the beginning of my plan to create a slow writer’s guide to becoming prolific. After a strong start back in 2012 that lasted a few years, but then suffered from a bunch of life changes that seemed to hit one after another, my plans to write and publish a lot of books didn’t pan out.

From 2012 to 2023, I published books, don’t get me wrong, 44 unique titles of which 23 were novels. But I didn’t publish the number of books I wanted to publish. And most of those titles were published in the first half of the eleven year span. You can take a quick look at my progress page to see that.

In March, I began working on a way to get myself writing regularly again. It’s worked out very well.

So, step one of the slow writer’s plan to become prolific was to set a small goal I really couldn’t miss unless I really just didn’t want to make a success out of this at all. I set a goal of writing every day, and to make it count, I added a minimum word count. I had avoided that in the past, or I’d made it so small that it never really felt like it added up to anything. This time I decided not to do that. I wanted it to amount to something.

Thus began my streak of writing >200 words every day (fiction only). As of this writing, the streak is ongoing and it’s gained me 14,093 words toward my plan to be prolific.

I don’t do much editing of what I write, except I really do, because I work on my text as I go until it’s telling the story I want to tell. I don’t worry about much else. I have a decent grasp of grammar and I’m not prone to making many spelling mistakes. So I write mostly publishable words. These words are good words and they’re adding up. This is a good thing. :)

March 2024 accountability

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Accountability? Progress? Summary? I honestly just don’t know what to call these posts. So for the moment, I’m going to stick with accountability because that was what I called the last few I wrote.

In March, about mid-month—or actually, at exactly mid-month on March 15th—I decided to start writing every day again.

Usually, I avoid setting a word count goal for that, but this time, I knew I wanted to see real progress, and I wanted it to add up to something. So, I set a goal for > 200 words a day. No more of this “one word counts” or “negative words still mean I did something that day.” This was intended to be a goal that would get me some real forward progress on my stories and get me back into some semblance of a writing routine.

I’m not good with routines. Past posts on this site are littered with the proof of that, so feel free to go looking if you want. :)

Maybe because I was also posting about this goal on a Discord server of fellow writers (it’s a small server of writers from my state), I found extra motivation to keep going even when I might have normally said forget it because it was 2 am and I still hadn’t written 200 words, but I did keep going.

In March, I wrote 9,259 words, and more than doubled my February word count.

506 of those words were from March 1–14, and 8,753 of those words came during March 15–31.

My year started off weird because my daughter was home a lot longer than planned, and I really needed this push to get started writing again. :D I’m glad I did it.

I decided not to change anything for April, because it’s working, and I don’t want to blow it up just when it’s picking up steam. ;D

The only small, teensy little thing I’m hoping to do different in April is start earlier in the day. But it’s not a requirement, and it’s not a real goal. Just a hope.