Category: Miscellaneous

I was randomly flitting around the internet a few nights ago and came across a post on a blog that said a lot to me. I can’t even remember how I ended up on that site, but I saved a quote from it with the “Press This” shortcut for WordPress. In the meantime, I forgot to get back to it and actually turn it into a blog post.

Well, I saw it today and remembered, so here it is.

There is something that will make your stories unique—if you let it.  Perhaps your upbringing or beliefs, the way you tackle stories, or some aspect of characterization or storytelling.  As you keep learning, you will find it.  But if you try to write like you think you should, or like “everyone else writes,” you could lose the things that make your stories unique.  You might very well end up writing stories just like some other author.  But they won’t be as good, and you’ll never reach that point that you’d really like the reach, the spot where someone says, “I would quite like to read a story by [your name.]  That’s what I’m in the mood for.”  (Think about how you feel when you want to read one of your favorite authors.  No one else’s work will quite do, because they’re unique!)  Having stories that are a bit different will make some people dislike them.  But you’re not writing to keep your head down and hope that you’ll blend into the crowd.

Take the things that hurt you, and turn them into stories.  Take your deepest pain and tears and the things you’ve learned the hard way in life, and put them into your stories.  It’s the hardest and best thing you can do for your writing—to make it deeply personal.  Nobody will actually recognize the parts that are about you, but you will always know—and that can make it terrifying to put your work out there.  But it can also make your stories matter more and mean more.

via Love Stories About Men: some writer advice, Hollis Shiloh.

It’s good advice. I mean, really good advice.

Files were approved. I received the email at 8:54 a.m. I placed my order for a proof copy and received the confirmation email for that at 10:20 a.m. I received the email telling me the order had shipped at 1:50 p.m.

This was for standard shipping. :)

I didn’t get a lot done yesterday. There was a storm. And a ten hour power outage. Yep.

I just noticed the new twitter look today, and it makes twitter so much more interesting. Or maybe that’s just me, looking for reasons to procrastinate. LOL. Always a possibility!

I finally finished that new ebook style set—6 hours after I started at 9 a.m. OMG. I must have been in flow, or the zone, or something, because I’m telling you, it felt like an hour, two tops.

But no. 6 hours. 6 whole hours. I finished at a few minutes before 3, and I know that because I responded to an email from my daughter and then started my exercise. Had lunch. Now I’m feeling all nap-ish, so I think I’ll rest for a few minutes before I start on the writing I want to do today.

It wasn’t all wasted time, despite the fact that obviously I let my inner perfectionist run rampant this morning. I now have a reformatted novella (first in the series) ready to be turned into a fabulous ebook by Jutoh.

I’ve recently started uploading a properly formatted mobi to KDP instead of my docx files, just because it seems to make a nicer ebook. The docx conversion always looks nice, but quite often, the NCX doesn’t work.

The NCX is what gives me the working Go To button on my Kindle Fire and in Aldiko* that will let me choose from any chapter or section of my book that’s linked in the table of contents. I use this for fiction more than I thought I did, something I discovered when I started trying to read more fiction books. I read the same book on different devices, and the Go To menu is the quickest way to get to the right spot in a book when I’m switching to my smartphone to read while I exercise. :D

Anyway, I’ve dragged this post out long enough! I need to either nap, or write, or nap and then write. Whichever. See ya!

*Aldiko has directions on how to install Aldiko on a Kindle Fire. No longer available. However, the Aldiko Book Reader Premium app is now compatible with most Kindle Fires and Fire tablets so you can just get it from the Amazon app store.

Just figured out what my wasted time is worth in dollars, and wow, I’m really kind of embarrassed that I don’t write more, knowing what I know.

You know when people tell you that you should write even if you can just fit in ten minutes here and five minutes there? Yeah. Those people are the smart ones.

Based on my 2014 published words, what income I’ve generated this year, and my average writing speed per hour, I’m passing up $0.90 every single minute that I choose to do something other than write on one of my upcoming releases (income growth is spurred on by new releases—my baseline is going up, even though month to month income drops as more time passes between releases). Basically, I can theoretically earn at least $10 on every 11 minutes of writing I do. And that’s now, without the added growth that a bigger backlist of books could bring me.

All this means is that I should really be spending more time writing and less time doing other stuff.

And yet. Here I am. Gah!

I unpublished some posts this morning, because of … reasons!

Some of those reasons are because I got up and had second thoughts about some of the things I said in them.

I’m just in one of those moods. I’m not sure if I’ll put them back up or not—I’m still thinking about it.

When I quit my job and turned writing and publishing into my sole work, I thought I would write a lot more. :D Obviously, I am not that person.

I’m not going to add those backdated posts after all. Just looking at them made me tired. I read back through the very first of the posts I was planning to put up and concluded I was doing exactly what I started using the writing on multiple stories to avoid doing.

Here’s a quick quote from the post named “Avoidance Issues; Let’s Knock Out Those Teeth”:

This is all about harnessing my unfortunate need to take frequent breaks and making that work for me, instead of against me. I’ll be using my other projects as my breaks. When I feel myself pulling away from a story and have that uncontrollable urge to shift my attention (and it will happen, because it always happens), I’m hoping having these other projects just ready and waiting will be to my benefit. Instead of slipping away to check email or read a message or two on a forum (and end up thoroughly distracted and out of the writing zone), I’ll slip away to write on another story.

What am I doing with the blog posts? Using them to satisfy my craving for a break, because I decided to do this right after I paused after 121 words into my novella this morning.

So, not doing this! Getting back on track and doing what I need to do, which is get back to writing!

Adding more backdated posts I wrote in Evernote* and never got around to posting this month, because—easier than writing! Brain’s foggy after staying up half the night because of those nasty storms that came through.

*Evernote is such a nice program. Fun to use, too.

It’s currently 75° F in the house and blustery outside. Wind keeps whipping my blinds’ lift-cords through the air, and I swear I feel like I’m coated in pollen or something. Who knows? All that dusting yesterday was kind of pointless with all this wind stirring around. Even my laptop keyboard is dust-covered now.

The greatest potential … is across the lower Mississippi and Tennessee Valleys. Widespread severe storms – including strong tornadoes, damaging winds and very large hail are expected.

Hmm. Sounds like the weather could turn interesting here later. Might should get that writing done sooner rather than later and quit messing around.

I procrastinate on a lot of things, not just writing.

So, today’s the deadline for the health insurance stuff at Healthcare.gov. I have health insurance, but I’ve been debating the benefits and cost of the different plans in the marketplace. Many offer better benefits than those I currently have, although even for the least expensive plan that has almost no additional benefits over my current high-deductible plan, it’s still more costly.

So basically I’m one of those people who aren’t benefiting from lower premiums in any way. I get the same coverage (nearly) for about twice the price. Yeah. You can see why I’ve been  in a hurry to get this done.

Anyway though, I decided I might want to go ahead and pay up for a plan that meets the requirements or I’ll just have to do this next year when my plan expires. I’ve already been warned that when my renewal date comes up I’ll have to choose another plan. And I’ve just about decided that at my age, it might not be a bad idea to get more coverage.

But of course, today is the last day to sign up, so the website isn’t working. And of course, although I started my enrollment well over a month ago, I did wait until today, the last day, to finish it up because that’s just the way I roll. :D Guess I’ll keep trying as the day goes on…

Come on. Is there some connection here that I don’t recognize? Because Story of My Life reminds me of a Plain White Ts song so strongly that it actually took me a week to realize the song wasn’t being sung by Plain White Ts—you know, at about the time I bought the mp3 from Amazon.

On another note, I’m not writing. Who the hell knows why. I’m totally in a shitty writing place right now and I don’t know why and even though I’ve spent the last 6 days doing nothing much but reading fiction, I still don’t feel better.

And that’s the story of my life…

Confession. A lot of writers talk about how they’re driven to write. Well, I’m driven to read. I write because I want to and I like it, but I’m not driven. If I could get paid to just sit and read everybody else’s stories, I’d probably write a short story or two a year and that’d be it.

Even writing fan fiction was hard for me. I liked doing it, and I was motivated by my interactions with my friends, but I didn’t feel driven to write those stories. I mean, I don’t think I did. My last big fan fic was for Grimm. I don’t have any Grimm fandom friends, but I only started with a very short piece but because of comments I wrote more, and then more, and more again. As long as the comments kept coming, I’d have probably kept writing, but I turned on to self-publishing just about the time I got most of the way done with my last Grimm fic and I moved on to writing original fiction again.

I wish I was driven. If that were the case, I’d probably be a lot less like I am now: constantly searching for the one true way, the one best system, the ultimate schedule that would make reaching my writing goals effortless. But maybe that’s my problem, having this idea that anything can be effortless. Is it all a myth? A dream? A falsehood propagated by self-help gurus and feel-good enthusiasts?

Sometimes writing does feel effortless. I guess it’s silly of me to think that effortlessness should be the way it feels most of the time. Instead, that feeling of effortlessness is something I’m always striving to attain (and it’s a damn lot of effort I put into that too!) but hardly ever reaching.

I often wonder if the writers who claim to be driven to write or die really are that obsessed or if it’s some kind of self-delusional mind game they play with themselves, or if they just don’t have enough other interests to hold their attention, or if they’re control freaks who love to read but can’t let go of the idea of how a particular story should go.

I’ve heard many times of the writers who started out because they preferred to write their own endings to stories they’d read. Never happened to me. I just started from scratch and wrote my own stuff. I didn’t start writing fan fiction until I’d been writing for nearly 10 years. Even when I first heard of it, I thought it was silly. And then I did it and discovered there was definitely fun to be had playing with characters and situations that had already been set up, and the what-if became my favorite pastime.

It’s a conundrum. Really.

Some days, I really hate writing.

Which is funny, because I really love writing.

And that’s the real story of my life.

Why do we let these people do this to us? Daylight Saving Time is ridiculous. As someone who can only easily get up once the sun’s come up, I think I’d just live on standard time year round and to hell with everyone else. Except I have kids still in school so that’s not exactly feasible. But someday, I tell you! Someday!

So, my Kindle Fire has a habit of changing all of my Google Calendar one and a half hour events and appointments into one hour appointments for no apparent reason. It’s done this for months and I can’t figure out why.

An internet search hasn’t given me any answers.

Surely I’m not the only one this happens to?

The Weather

And of course, 2 minutes after I post this, the sun comes out for the first time today, at 10:30 am.

focus@will

I’ve been using focus@will ( https://www.focusatwill.com ) to help me concentrate. I especially like their new ADHD Beta Test music. :D It does seem to do something for me! The Classical and Up Tempo are nice too. Honestly, I’m this close to subscribing to the service. I’m going to give the free version just a little more time though in case it’s just a phase.

Push play and focus at will! Yeah. ;) I wish it was truly that easy, but I still have to actually focus on the right thing—like something besides this post, which I started messing with at 10:30. Twenty-four minutes later and here I still am. But the background music is nice. :D

If you’ve used the focus@will site and you just happen to happen by my page, why not tell me what you think of the service? Thanks!

Hot Cocoa

1/2 Tbsp. of cocoa
1 Tbsp. of sugar
Pinch of salt
Dash of Vanilla Extract
Cup of Milk

Microwave all of it and stir a lot. It’s really good.
Side effects: Makes coughing worse. (Does that mean it acts as an expectorant?) Makes ass bigger. :D

Okay seriously, I think I’ve got all that out of my system and my fingers limbered up (this qualifies as automatic or free writing, no?) and I’m ready to torture my characters some more—quite literally, mind you. Isn’t writing fiction just the most awesome job ever?

 

There’s a lot of “fiddle-faddle” wrapped up in that word “inspiration.” It is the last resort of the lazy writer, of the man who would rather sit and dream than be up and doing.
—The Fiction Factory, William Wallace Cook

I feel purple today. Purple header, purple prose… It’s all the same difference. :o