Category: Learning curve

Posts in which I discuss things I’ve learned or need to learn about any of many topics.

Typing Improvement

Lynn

Another thing I’ve challenged myself to this year is to improve the accuracy of my typing. I’m a touch typist, something I learned in high school, and I can type about 60 words a minute. My accuracy is terrible and I expend a lot of effort backspacing and correcting errors. I can’t go on if I know an error is there. So the first thing I need to improve about my typing is my accuracy.

I did a few typing tests and some exercises. My speed is just over 60 wpm (not slower unless I’m trying to type numbers and special symbols), and a bit closer to 70 wpm if I’m typing plain text.

I think I’ll do some self-study on this for a while instead of using online tools and practice stroking the keys I’m most likely to confuse or miss until I can hit them every time without thinking about it.

 

100 Design Tutorials Challenge: Soft Light Photo Effects

Lynn

I decided not to do a cover design challenge just yet. I definitely feel like I need to learn more before I start pushing myself in that direction. Instead, I came up with something I think is more in line with what I need right now: I’m going to watch or read 100 design tutorials that will help me understand more about design, what I can do, and how to do it. I’ll also practice what I learn, but that’s not something I’m going to make part of this challenge.

Today I watched this tutorial.

https://youtu.be/6vVKC7yweFo

My plan is to keep up a log here of the tutorials I’ve watched or read as an easy way to keep track of my progress with the challenge.

This particular tutorial taught me that it’s a fairly straightforward and simple process to swap out similar backgrounds in a photo. Also, playing with color and light can make a huge difference in how warm a photo looks. Adding shadows gives depth. The final image shown here would make a really nice cover for a romantic YA story, whereas the original seems much too harsh for a successful cover.

I’m definitely going to practice some of the stuff I saw in this video.

An early beginning for the new year

Lynn

I’m hoping for a successful return to work today. This isn’t January 1, but it’s the beginning of the new year to me, and I want to start off strong. My plan is to aim for 4,558 words on every day that I’m supposed to be writing. That’s most days.

Here’s my schedule of days off for the next 12 months.

Holidays – 4 days a year
Unexpected – 12 (sick days mostly)
Vacation – 14
Occasional weekend – 48 (that’s 4 days a month)

Total days off – 78
Total working days – 287

Publishing days – 36 (3 days each month I won’t be writing)
Writing days – 251 (21 approx writing days each month)

Some months will have more, some months should have less, because of the fall of holidays, sickness, vacation time, and weekend days, but overall, I’m aiming for 95,333 words each month, and that’s what I’ll push for each month.

This works for me because I don’t have a lot of leisure activities I like as much as I like writing, and I cannot stand telling myself I can’t write because someone else thinks I should be doing something besides “working” (yet I have a history of taking way too much time away, but that’s another issue!). And seriously, 21+3=24 work days a month on average, and that’s just a bit more than a regular work week, but not when you take into consideration that I almost never get in 8 hours of work time a day.

I’d say this schedule is very average for number of hours of work each month. The only time I’m really pushing myself is during publishing weeks, and that I have to admit usually has me working 16 hour days. On the other hand, recently, that’s only happened about 4 times a year (definitely happened more when I was just starting out because I spent so much time learning). Going forward, I’ll be trying to cut those days down into more reasonable chunks.

I have never written that many (fiction) words in one month (95,333), but I want January to be the first month I do it. The month has very few holidays (none for which I plan to take time away from writing), and it’s a long month. I’m feeling good about it right now.

So, time to get started. I will post about today’s progress at the end of the day today. My aim is to have 4,558 words finished as early in the day as possible today. I’d aim for a record but I can’t. I have some important things to do, so when I hit 4,558 words, I’m stopping until all those other things are done.

Cover design frustrates me, but I do it anyway

Lynn

Have I mentioned before that designing covers for my books frustrates me? Yes? I thought so.

I’ve been trying to learn more about all of it, but I still can’t visualize what I want and then translate that into something that makes sense. I usually have to have a really good piece of stock art to get what I want quickly. Doesn’t usually happen. I’m not good at picking stock art, because I’m not good at visualizing what I can do with it once I have it. I seem to buy licenses for all the wrong stuff and then have to try again. And again. ;)

Today, I seem to have come up with an okay design for my next release, although something’s still off about it. Still, it will be a record-breaking achievement if I only make a few tweaks to this and consider it done.* It came together so much quicker than I’m used to stuff coming together. Or maybe it just feels that way because my new “publishing days” workflow gives me an entire day for cover design and nothing else! That my dear has turned out to be a genius move for me. I feel a distinct lack of stress about this cover. Also, I have finally accepted that covers just have to be good enough not to suck and they’ll get the job done; I’m sure that attitude is helping too.**

Finally, I do want to devote some more time to tutorials, but I’ve been so focused on increasing my daily word counts that I just haven’t had the energy left for it. Nor to spend on practicing cover design.

I have no interest in doing nothing but writing; I like having hobbies, and designing my own covers would be a great one to have. But I’ve had to focus on priorities right now, which is learning how to get more words written each day without it taking me all day to do it. :D I’ll get there, and then I’ll turn my attention to become a better cover designer for myself.

I want to redo a lot of my covers, and tbh, I would like to hire it out, but every time I consider it, I think about how that will bottleneck my publishing workflow and I really can’t stand the idea. If I had unlimited money where I could get anyone at any price to do the work on my timetable and do it exactly the way I wanted, then I think it would be easier to let go. But there’s also the fact that I want to be a good cover designer. Because of these things, I always keep coming back to the idea that I just need to suck it up and keep trying. If I don’t give up, eventually I’ll learn how to design great covers myself.

*I redid the cover and then redid it again and then again. In the end, I spent three entire days on this particular cover. :o

**Apparently that attitude didn’t help after all. See note * above. :D

Addendum: I tried hiring it out and I learned a valuable lesson: hiring out doesn’t work for me, at all.

Jealous of another’s success? Change your perspective

Lynn

Honestly, it’s hard to admit sometimes that I’ve been jealous of other authors’ successes, but lying about it doesn’t really help, so I admit freely that there have been days where I just didn’t understand why some writers were more successful than me. It didn’t feel fair, and boy did those feelings hurt.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with those kinds of feelings. I don’t think jealousy is healthy and although I think it’s a normal feeling, I don’t like it and I’ve never wanted to be the kind of person who is okay with feeling that way.

Then one day, I had one of those moments of clarity where I realized something about my view of the world and how that was contributing to those feelings and it wasn’t because I was spending time in the wrong places, reading the wrong kinds of success stories, or anything like that.

Let me start with this: I don’t buy lottery tickets.

It actually does play into what this epiphany was about.

I’ve never thought I was a lucky person. Yet I’ve always believed luck plays a huge role in how a person’s life goes.

What it came down to was that if I believed luck had such a big role in whether or not I became as successful as some other author having great success, and I believed that I was an unlucky person, that meant I had pretty much already given up hope that I could ever reach the levels of success I want to reach.

Let me add this: I’ve always thought a person can learn just about anything if the person is driven enough to learn it.

I don’t necessarily believe anybody can do anything, because there are real world limitations, but there’s always hope that those limitations won’t stop them from learning something about what they want to learn, or even that they’ll find a way around that limitation and learn something in a whole new way.

I’ve also always believed that there’s always somebody out there who can do anything I and you and everyone else can do and do it better. Always.

All this came together in that moment while I was washing dishes (a favorite thinking spot for me) and made me realize that a change to my perspective could overcome every struggle I’ve ever had with these feelings of jealousy and envy, take away the unhappiness they were always causing me, and give me back my optimism.

All I had to do was admit that the authors doing better than me are more skilled writers than me. This kind of change in perspective probably only works for people like me, but for me, it has been a life-changing epiphany.

I mean, as long as I’m alive, I can keep learning, improving my skills, and becoming better at what I do. Even when I’m seventy-five years old, there’s the possibility that I’ll have a break through and become the kind of writer I’ve always wanted to be before I reach eighty!

And I don’t mind imagining that every successful writer is just better at writing than me. I don’t mind at all, because I can accept that there’s always somebody better. And I’ve never been one to be jealous of another person’s skills, simply because I believe that skills can be learned.

Hope is really the answer to most feelings of jealousy and envy, but it can be difficult to see that sometimes. I didn’t even realize a lot of these feelings were coming about because of an unacknowledged lack of hope. I mean, I didn’t sit around telling myself I was unlucky and that I had almost no chance of reaching the levels of success that some of my fellow authors have reached, because so much of success is dependent on luck and I had none.

But that’s exactly what I think I was doing.

And a change in perspective was all it took to give myself hope.

If you have feelings of jealousy and envy you can’t seem to get past, stop and think about how you see the world. Do you believe success is dependent on luck or skill? Then change your perspective and see if that helps you overcome those feelings.

 

What is a reasonable daily word count goal?

Lynn

I had to spend some time researching this, because the fact is, I have no idea how to set reasonable goals for myself. In the end, I didn’t find much helpful information out there and that’s probably because the answer depends on who’s asking the question.

In trying to nail down a reasonable goal for myself, I’m looking at a few different things.

  1. How many hours I have available to write. (Lots.)
  2. How much of my time is lost to breaks. (So, so much. Too much.)
  3. How much I can reasonably write in that time. (Not so much if past is a predictor of future performance—but does it have to be?)

I’ve decided that studying the past and looking at averages isn’t a good idea for me. I mean, the whole purpose of this is to give me a number I can aim for each day, but a number that’s not out of my reach. Something that I can legitimately expect from myself, not a number that is a hoped for but not often attained goal. I want this reasonable number to be something that will force me to face facts. Am I putting enough effort into my daily writing?

So, if I answer with as much honesty as I can squeeze out of myself, this is what I come up with.

  1. I have to explain this answer. Writing is both a work and leisure activity for me. What that means is that I’m just as happy doing it as any other leisure activity, as a general rule. Not to say there aren’t times when I’d rather be doing something else, but it’s at least as important to me as anything else I relax with. So, when I take out sleep time, personal hygiene activities, and chores (the least I can possibly get away with because life is short and I hate chores and I’m actually fairly efficient at getting them done quickly) I end up with about 14 hours.
    24 − 8.25 − 1 − .5 = 14.25
    It’s too much to expect myself to spend all this time writing, but it’s a place to start.
  2. I take a lot of breaks. I have reasons for some of those breaks because I like my tea and I have a particular bladder condition that means my days are filled with a lot of pee breaks. If this is TMI for you, you might not want to read my blog because I don’t have a lot of respect for the TMI rule. :D Let’s say I can learn to limit these (change is hard but not impossible). ;) Let’s say I can cut down to 25% of my time lost to breaks. Right now I swear sometimes it’s closer to 50%, but that’s because I’m terribly bad at letting myself start things during my breaks that almost always take longer than I expect. Let’s say I can stop that. So, 25% of writing time is not going to be used for writing.
  3. My overall WPH average is currently 524 words. More recently, that average has gone up to 641 words per hour. I’m going to use 641, just because I want to.
    14.25 × 75% × 641 = 6,850
    But answer #1 says I can’t use 14.25 hours. It’s just not realistic. I mean, when am I going to cook, eat, yell at my kids :D, and all the other stuff that inevitably needs to be done every day? So I did a few more calculations. Say it’s reasonable to write during only 50% of that 14.25 hours.
    7.125 × 75% × 641 = 3,425
    On the other hand, say it’s reasonable to write during 66% of that 14.25 hours, still leaving almost 5 hours for stuff besides those allowances I’ve already made.
    9.405 × 75% × 641 = 4,521
    I can cut this last one back to a very conservative 525 WPH pace, and I still come up with 3,703 words. That’s a good check figure. It falls somewhere in between my two main results and shows that even if I have a day where my pace slows down, I should still expect something that falls within the range I’ve calculated. Of course, I could keep tweaking these numbers and pretty much make them spit out any result I want. I’m not going to do that. This calculation uses reasonable assumptions and I’m sticking with it.

And there you have it. I should be expecting myself to reach at least something approaching these numbers every day that I write. Just looking at that makes me feel like a complete and total slacker, because I’m nowhere near those numbers on a regular basis.

All that said, I have no intention of using these calculations to create another schedule for myself or set a time-based writing goal. All I wanted to know was what a reasonable daily word count is for me, as a full time writer. It’s a lot more than I thought it would be.

It’s also a little bit inspiring. ;) I can do this.

Maybe, maybe, maybe!

Lynn

I want to start sticking to my plans more often. It might help if I made more reasonable plans, but I don’t seem to know how to do that, or to know what reasonable for me is.

The problem with reasonable, and me, is that some days 3,000 words as a goal is reasonable. Some days, it’s impossible.

I don’t even know why.

I’ve been trying to use averages, but averages aren’t working well. My averages are based on numbers that vary wildly. If those daily numbers more often ranged toward the average, it would be easier to say that I should aim for my average.

Maybe my mistake is not aiming for my highest word counts every day but being accepting of the days where it just doesn’t happen. That’s about the only way at the moment that I see myself ever reaching and maintaining a higher daily average word count.

But that kind of daily goal generates a lot of pressure and it’s too easy for me to forget that it’s okay if I don’t make it there every day. I have a faulty memory when it comes to that kind of thing.

Still, it’s about the only option I haven’t tried recently and nothing else is working.

I want that higher word count.

Maybe I should abandon the use of averages altogether. Maybe I should start aiming for a weekly or monthly number of words and my daily goal is a multiple of that. Then if I don’t reach my daily goals, at the end of the month, I still have a real chance of reaching those numbers despite falling short on a day to day basis.

Maybe, maybe, maybe!

All these maybes are starting to make me crazy.

 

New plan

Lynn

This year has turned out to be my lowest word count year since I started publishing in 2012. I’m not happy about that. I want to turn that around and I still have time.

I am a natural procrastinator. I tend to have to work with my rhythms or I crash and burn. I’ve had to admit my schedule has not been working. I mean, it’s kept my monthly word count a little more consistent, but my overall word count is down. By a lot. I have really counted on those few high intensity work days to kind of make up for the low times and the schedule put a stop to those 16 hr days. Sounds more balanced but it’s been really bad for my word count!

On that note, here’s the plan for the rest of the year: Use timers to try to get enough writing done each day to reach and maintain a daily average of 2,995 words. That’s really the sum total of my plan. :)

Challenges for the win

Lynn

I wrote “the year of the schedule is sputtering to an end” and immediately thought about my “no more zero word days” challenge and how it’s still pushing me to write something every day even when I really, really don’t want to.

Last night was absolutely painful getting the words down. I was tired after spending more than 5 hours rearranging my living room furniture. I still wasn’t happy at the end of the night. This morning I worked out the kinks and I’ve got something I can live with for a while, I think. I didn’t have anything to add to my current scene. In fact, I came close for the second (or third) time this week to deleting the last 2000 words. I do, in fact, think that’s what I’m going to do today. It’s time to admit the story is stalled because I went somewhere with it that I don’t like and that just isn’t working for me. It’s time to get rid of that and start over.

And yet, I continue to write something each day on one of my books in progress so I can keep my streak alive.

It’s definitely something to work with.

The year of the schedule is sputtering to an end

Lynn

At what point do I just admit the schedule isn’t working and give it up? I don’t know if I’m there yet but I’m getting close.

Ah. Maybe it’s already time.

The schedule really isn’t working anymore.

In all honesty, I can’t say if it ever worked past those first few good weeks. Even then, my progress was scattered. It’s probable that the boost in productivity came about because of a random surge in creativity or with the excitement of trying something new. I like newness.

I have books to write and the schedule isn’t getting them written. Today, facing this, I am sad.

I’m back!

Lynn

Didn’t think I was going to show up again for a while, did you? Me neither! but I did it. Three consecutive days of >1,000 words.

3,189
2,740
1,116
1,075

I did those words not on one story but on five. I’ve got six novels and a short story I want to finish by the end of the year and I can do it if I start averaging closer to 3000 words a day as long as I stick to working only on those projects.

I’m nowhere near that right now, but all it’s going to take is training. Already 3000 words is starting to feel a whole lot more doable each day. It just doesn’t have that hugeness to it that it used to have.

The No More Zero Word Days restart has given me a lot of words I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Also, I’ve had two nights where I couldn’t stand to stop before I reached that 1000 word goal. Writing every day is good for me. Letting myself work on whatever has my interest at the moment also seems to be good for me.

Writing crazy long blog posts? Not so good for me.

So, I’m banning writing here until I’ve had 3 days in a row of >2,000 words. Fingers crossed I’ll be back in 3 days!

Refocusing on my schedule

Lynn

I can’t really explain why I didn’t end up writing much yesterday. I did get a few words in at the end of the day, enough to make me comfortable saying that I am restarting my “no more zero word days” challenge. From yesterday forward, no more zero word days. The more days I can string together, the greater my victory. Failure just means I have another opportunity to create an even longer string of days.

Funnily enough, after writing yesterday that it’s been five months since I started trying to follow my current schedule, I have decided that following the schedule alone is not going to be enough to keep me writing on a regular basis.

I’ve crunched some numbers and discovered that some of my best daily word count averages were stretched over times when I kept myself accountable for how much time I spent writing, not how much time I had set aside to write. It didn’t seem to matter how I held myself accountable, whether it was timed writing or simply timing my writing (counting down versus counting up), only that I was accountable for what time I did spend writing.

That probably explains why the schedule worked so well to start with but no longer seems to make a difference. In the beginning, I did treat those times much more like timed writing sessions, whereas now, I seem to treat the schedule more as time set aside during which I should be writing. I don’t even feel that guilty when I don’t write during that time! This post proves it. It’s 10:34, and I should be writing right this minute.

I’m not ready to give up the current schedule (because I really like it and I do feel that of all the schedules I’ve ever tried, it’s the one that suits me best), but there’s not a lot of room for doubt about how I should be thinking of my writing time and it’s not the way I’m currently thinking of it.

I’m going to continue to try to find ways to push myself to write during my scheduled times, using whatever tricks are necessary. I meant it when I said this was the year of the schedule. The year isn’t over yet and I’m sticking it out.

Here’s a short quote from what I wrote in that post. It’s why I’m not giving up on the schedule, even after five months of mostly failure. I did take a quick look and I was wrong about the three weeks of success. It was closer to six. Six weeks of success out of five months isn’t that bad.

So here’s the challenge. I’m going to make a schedule. Every day will be a challenge to stick to it. I’ll probably fail more often than I succeed. Maybe if I’m lucky some good habits will develop around the times I’m supposed to be writing that will make it work over the long-term even if I have a lot of short-term failures. If not, well, how’s it any worse than what I’ve already got going on?

No more searching for the best system, no more word count quotas or goal-setting, no more excuses. It’s time to move on from all that and settle in. The remainder of 2015 is going to be the year of the schedule.

As for today, I’m still thrilling over how fun writing was on Wednesday when I was working through my list of stories, trying to write 50 words on each one and then moving on, so even though I had trouble getting started yesterday, I don’t think I’m going to have trouble getting started today because it’s not the writing that’s the issue. It’s my lack of respect for my writing time. Which I’m about to fix right this minute.

First step in practicing writing faster is going to have me keeping up with how much time I spend writing these blogs posts.

Started: 10:07 am
Finished: 10:55 am

An experiment with my next cover, GIMP, and Photoshop

Lynn

Okay, so in only a little over a week or so, I really have to begin work on a cover image for an upcoming book. I thought I would run an experiment. I’m going to try to create the same cover in both GIMP and Photoshop and see which one I work best in. Despite being almost certain Photoshop is going to win, I’m not ready to commit to the subscription service if I don’t actually find it easier to create a cover in Photoshop. The proof will be in the real world application and not in that place in my head where I think I know something is true without having put it into practice.

I’m only as good a cover designer as I’ve needed to be, so this should be fun! :)

GIMP versus Photoshop

Lynn

I’ve been a GIMP user for several years now. I’ve thought it was an adequate substitute for my outdated version of Photoshop, and it was. Not so for the newer versions of Photoshop, which I now know for certain. I started using the trial of the newest Photoshop a few days ago, and I’m tickled at how much easier it is to do some things that I had a lot of trouble doing in GIMP.

It’s making me excited to spend more time learning more cover design stuff. Honestly, Gimp had begun to frustrate me. The latest update broke the interface a bit and it was annoying. I use a laptop with a smallish screen most of the time, and I love the more compact icons of Photoshop compared to Gimp. Also, right off, I noticed some significant differences in file sizes when I exported my cover in progress.

Gimp: My 1625 x 2600 JPG saved at 100% quality came in at 4,211 KB
I exported the Gimp file as a PSD and opened it in Photoshop, checked the layers and made sure everything looked good, then exported the JPG at 100% quality. Photoshop: My 1625 x 2600 JPG saved at 100% quality came in at 1,078 KB

Both were set at 300 PPI and the image properties show that Photoshop didn’t change that, so that’s not the difference.

Unless there’s something I’m missing, this seems to me like something of note. Now I can upload the same file to NookPress that I upload elsewhere (NookPress has a 2 MB limit) and I can stop saving multiple versions of cover images because of file size issues.

The PSD files are also a bit smaller than the XCF files. I backup to many places, but three of those places are Drive, Dropbox, and a 16 G memory card, all of which have limited storage. Some of my XCF files are over 500,000 KB, not leaving me much room to have duplicates for backup in the main directories (which I prefer to do for safety when I’m making changes).

All in all, I’m pretty happy right now with the change. I’m definitely going to subscribe to Adobe CC. The only decision left is whether or not I’m just going to go for the photography plan at $9.99/month, or if I’m going for the entire Creative Cloud deal at $49.99/month.

I’m just about decided to go with the whole shebang even though I hate subscriptions. I might even give InDesign another shot. ;)

Grandiose plans, despair and discouragement

Lynn

I have a problem. Confession time. I set very unreasonable and unrealistic goals for myself every time I sit down to write. The problem is that I want to write so many books and so many stories and I have no patience with myself. So, although I know my average wph (and it’s nothing like the 1000 wph bandied about here and elsewhere by the supposed average writer) and how many hours I can stay focused on writing, I still build up these grandiose plans in my head and on paper and in spreadsheets that are completely unreasonable and unrealistic for me. And when that finally settles in a day or a week later, I face despair and discouragement.

Telling myself I can do less and I should be happy with that does nothing but make me less happy. I don’t want those limits and I hate them. I writhe and twist against them, until soon enough I’m right back to making the grandiose plans and disgusted with myself when they fall through yet again.

I wish I could say I had found a way to get past all this, but I haven’t. I have no helpful tips for anyone facing the same. I have accepted this about myself and I will continue to do my best to become the writer I want to be, even if that means facing despair and discouragement.

Is the schedule improving my daily word count average (for real)?

Lynn

I was ready to do a bit more analysis of whether or not my schedule is helping me write more. This time I decided to get real and use a formula to figure out if the change I noted previously was actually statistically significant. It’s been so long since I’ve had a statistics class that I had to turn to the web for answers. One web search later, I found THIS, which I adapted quite easily to work with my daily log of word counts.

I had noted the start date for the schedule in my daily log, so it was easy to make the formulas work with my own spreadsheet. Here’s what I came up with.

658 average value of data before change (daily word counts)
741 average value of data since change (daily word counts)
952 standard deviation of data since change
133 number of data points since change (how many days I’ve been on the schedule)
1.009489 T-Value
15.73% probability that the change is only due to chance

So, I wouldn’t say the change in word count is significant. After a bit of further reading on Wikipedia, the problem I’m seeing is that I have no idea what to set as the significance level. I can’t deny that it’s quite possible the increase in my word count was/is temporary and could have other causes. The truth is that my word counts often improve after I make a change. And honestly, if I look at a rolling 7 day average, I can’t see any patterns at all.

Other than the pattern that sometimes I write a lot and sometimes I don’t write anything! Consistency isn’t something I’m good at.

I did have several more 3,000 word days recently than usual (I’ve never had three of them so close together before), but on the other hand, it had to happen sometime, right? I now have 1,112 days worth of entries and I’m adding a new one every day.

All I’ve really done is give myself something else to think about, unfortunately, while I try to pull myself out of this funk and get on with the writing.

My daily word count has increased since I began following a schedule

Lynn

I had a theory that my daily word count hadn’t increased with my schedule because of how often I seem to be missing the mark when it comes to actually sticking to it.

I was wrong. :)

I wanted the numbers to back up my theory and they didn’t. I then found myself wanting to adjust the parameters of my analysis but realized almost immediately that this would be an attempt to make the numbers prove what I wanted them to prove. So I stepped back to give this some more thought.

I realized I was probably just looking for justification to abandon my schedule. I’ve since moved on (that post yesterday was written after I started this one). I’m glad I resisted!

Although my overall daily average is still down from 2012 and 2013, it’s better than 2014 and even the all time average up until the date I began following the 9–12 & 1–4 schedule.

Since I began the 9–12 & 1–4 schedule: 744 words a day average
All time before the schedule: 658 words a day average

It’s enough of a difference that I can’t ignore it. I wasn’t very productive in 2014 or the early part of 2015 and the schedule has clearly saved me from more of the same.

The only other thing of note is that my daily average for the time period during which I used the 5 minute sessions was just over 1,400 words a day. I was trying to hit a deadline during that time and I was scheduling my 5 minute sessions in one hour blocks and scheduling 5 or 6 of those hour long blocks every day. I take this to mean that if I can stick my current schedule more often and get in the 5 to 6 hours of writing, I can hope to approach or exceed these same numbers without the stress of the timed writing. :) I would still like to see myself reach a daily average of 2,000 words because that would fit with the life I want. :)

 

Knowing something needs doing will have to be enough

Lynn

My response to the pressure that deadlines create? Complete and total shutdown. I don’t deal well with anxiety, stress, overwhelming goals or odds, or pressure. I used to believe I worked better under pressure, but I think that’s just something I told myself after the fact because I had come up against a hard deadline that left me no wiggle room and I had finally overcame the inertia holding me back and got down to business. In a limited sense, I do work better under pressure—because outside pressure can actually make me work whereas I might not work otherwise. As far as quality of that work, well, there’s just no way to know. Doing something is better than doing nothing in most cases, so there you go.

The problem with writing as a career is that there are almost no hard deadlines. Even when something has been promised to a publisher, most writers know they can ask for an extension if they ask soon enough. How hard you consider a publisher’s deadline will greatly depend on how concerned you are with your reputation and how important your self-image as a promise-keeper is to you.

I don’t know how I’d handle it, to be honest, but I have this fear that if I weren’t my own publisher, I’d be in trouble. I generally keep promises, if I see the sense in it and if I care about the person to whom I made the promise, but if I can rationalize it away, then all bets are off. I rarely bend over backwards to make most other people’s lives easier than my own.

I hope this is the last post I ever write about this topic, because I’ve come to a realization today. I have to stop setting personal deadlines and goals and start focusing on just doing the work day in and day out. Consistency is going to be key for me, because I’m not looking for goals: I’m looking for a way of life. At this moment in time, I want my fiction to be the way I earn my living until the day I die. I’m not saying that’ll never change, because I’d like to live a long time and have a long life and maybe that’ll mean I come up on the day when I’m ready for something different. But that’s not today, and I doubt it’ll be next week or next year.

I want to get up each day and I want to write. Some days it’s obvious I’ll write more than others, but overall, I want to write every day and I want a routine that makes it easy to do.

I can’t keep stressing over the goals that I’m not even supposed to be worried about right now, because I’ve got the schedule. The schedule is not working well at the moment, but I’m not giving up on it. It’ll be the backbone of my writing routine.

This post came about because of the aforementioned realization. I was choking under the pressure of the production schedule I created when I decided to focus on my income producing series.

Today, I had to face what I’ve been doing to myself. I made that schedule to see if I could squeeze in the other books I want to write alongside the ones I need to write if I’m serious about focusing on growing my income for a while. Of course, it became a ridiculous expression of everything I know is wrong with the way I think sometimes. I had input deadlines for every book I want to write between now and next year and I had compressed those deadlines to the point that I was going to have to write more words every day than I’d ever written in my life and maintain that pace for weeks at a time.

To remind you, if I focus on my income producing series to the exclusion of my other books, I can write half the number of books in the same time period and yet in all probability earn more money. There’s just no world in which this isn’t the smart thing for me to do, knowing how slow I write.

And yet, there I was this morning, staring at that production schedule and wondering why I’ve been having so much trouble getting myself to write since I created it. It should have been inspiring, I told myself, because it showed what I could accomplish if I just buckled down.

But it wasn’t.

My sanity returned after a flurry of scribbled notes and much too much time spent trying to make it work out to a smaller, more reasonable daily word count average. It’s never going to work out. I just can’t count on myself to write at a steady pace each day and I can’t work to these deadlines. The reason I love writing for a living is because I can take the daily ups and downs I naturally experience and smooth them out into what will become the whole. A book is a book when it’s done; it doesn’t matter if I wrote 1000 words a day for 50 days or if I wrote 0 words for 25 days and 2000 a day for the rest, because I still end up with my book. I can count on my averages. I can’t count on much else.

I don’t want to stop trying to improve my averages, and I’ll still keep trying to stick with my schedule as best I can. I want to improve. But I don’t want to do it with deadlines hanging over my head.

And that’s all I really wanted to say today.

Increasing my daily word count average

Lynn

It’s time I started to focus on increasing my daily word count average. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, something I’ve been writing about here, off and on, for more than a year. (That link goes to all the posts I tagged with the relevant tag. They started back in April 2014.)

Two things I’ll need to do to increase my daily word count average—

  1. increase my writing speed
  2. improve my ability to write for longer periods of time without tiring out or succumbing to boredom or distraction

Despite the popular notion that all it takes to write faster is to spend more time writing, those are two distinctly different things as far as I’m concerned. There’s writing more and there’s writing faster. Writing faster means increasing my speed, and my writing speed is how many words I write during a specific unit of time. Increasing the amount of time I spend writing doesn’t change my speed.

I’ve realized over the last few months that even though I say I’ve given up on the idea of writing faster in favor of writing more, that’s not exactly true. I do want to write faster, because there are just so many stories I want to write, and I want to have written them already! It’s unfortunate that I can’t go back in time and make that happen. ;) The next best thing is to get them written as fast as I can.

As for improving my ability to write for longer periods of time without tiring out or succumbing to boredom or distraction, I’m still working on it. Right now, with the success I’m having with the schedule, I’m definitely writing more on the days when I stick to it. So to accomplish item #2 on the list, I’ll just keep pushing myself to stick as close to my schedule as possible. Six hours of writing each day is enough. Anything over five hours of actual writing is going to make me happy.

That leaves me with trying to figure out how I can increase my writing speed. For the next few weeks at least, I’m going to be recording my efforts to do just that.

I want to be a prolific writer

Lynn

What do I want more: To write a few really good books or to write lots and lots of books?

I actually know how to answer that. I want to write lots and lots of books. One of my lifelong dreams is to be a prolific writer.

If someone asked me if I’d rather look back at the end of my life and know I’d created one book that had dearly affected millions of people or if I’d rather say I’d written 482 books, I’d say “I wrote 482 book!” I have no idea what drives me to make that choice but that is definitely the choice I’d make. I have a feeling that says a lot about me as a person. ;) Oops.

However, if I actually want that to happen, I’m going to have to stop spending so much time fiddling with my writing when I write. A prolific writer can’t spend an entire day coming up with 500 words. The math just doesn’t work out.

Besides which, I have got to start managing my time better so I can fit in all the things I supposedly want to do. I say supposedly because sometimes I have a tendency to hang on to the idea that I should do something when I don’t actually want to do it. I really need to get over that.

Also, I need to clip my nails. Just typing this is driving me crazy. :D Ah, the rituals I must go through to get into the writing zone, even when it’s just my blog!

Here’s my plan: Start writing more freely! I know I keep saying that. I even read a book about it (Writing in Overdrive covers the topic quite nicely). But yes, I’m really going to have to commit to doing it. I can’t really define what’s stopping me most of the time, except maybe fear that I’ll write something terrible or stupid or inconsistent with something I wrote earlier in the story (which does happen!). Whatever the reason, it’s time I stopped.

One thing I’m going to do to practice this is to stop rereading these posts and editing them so much before I put them up. From now on, expect to see a lot more of my natural writing style here. Practice. That’s where it’s at. Time to break some habits. ;)