I am a curious person, so after hearing about some of the AI tools popping up for writers, I decided to check one out for myself. Here’s what I discovered in a little over an hour with Sudowrite.
Continue reading “An hour with Sudowrite”Category: Writing
Posts about writing. Writing is my work but since I work better when I pretend work isn’t work, I mostly call it fun—even when it isn’t. ;)
Getting back into the swing of things
It has taken a while, but I have finally restarted my writing in a way that feels real this time. I’ve had a few false starts, not gonna lie, but this time does feel different.
Continue reading “Getting back into the swing of things”Attempt to write 60,000 words in July
I’m off to a slow start this month on a big goal. My current best word count for a month is 57,249. I want to write 60,000 words this month to beat that.
Every so often, it’s a good idea for me to try to beat one of my previous records. This feels like a good time to try.
Plans for the year—2022
I’m just pasting this from my year in review post so I don’t forget I’ve already planned this out. :D
Here’s the plan.
1) Start a 1,000 words a day streak. That would get me about 183,000 words before the end of the year.
2) Focus on finishing each book quickly instead of jumping between projects.
3) Work on more than one project at a time. This doesn’t contradict number two, because it is based on working on the same multiple projects each day. I have two pen names. I also have three types of stories under one pen name (novels, short stories, and my experiment with a serial). I also have different series. I will settle on a way to choose which projects get worked on and then I’ll work on them until they’re done.
June 2022 progress
This is my first monthly progress post in a while. I thought I was about to get back to productive writing in November, and I did for a while, but then some life events happened that threw me back into the place where my ability to write creatively disappeared again.
I lost both my father and an aunt I was very close to in June. My father passed after multiple strokes, the first of which we thought he had come back from remarkably strong. It was a false win. Less than a month later, he was hit by an even bigger, more devastating stroke, and in the end, I had to let him go even though I wasn’t ready. Dad died without life insurance, a will, or any beneficiaries listed for any of his accounts. This has created a lot of financial issues that will have to be resolved, but I’ve done what I can on that at this point.
Things are settling now and I am ready to try again to get back to my plans for 2022.
Emotionally, I still feel out of sorts and not quite able to draw on whatever part of my brain it is that drives my creativity, but I don’t think it’s ever productive after a certain point to sit around and wait for it to get better.
I have big goals for July. Even if I fail, I will succeed as long as I try, because that will mean I’m getting better.
I am surprised that I got any words in June at all but I did putter several times and end up keeping alive a streak of no zero or negative word months for 2022.
Today, I’ll try to start a 1,000 words a day streak for the rest of July. I have a better than average chance since this is a Camp NANO month and I’ve set a goal that will break my record for words in a month. The record is 57,249 from April 2016.
June words: 335
Year in review—2021
Oh, boy. 2021 was not a great year for me in a lot of ways. I feel like I escaped it by the skin of my teeth, and in some ways, I feel like I’m still stuck there, trying to get out.
I wrote that first paragraph before things went bad in 2022, but I do think I finally escaped 2021 at the end of the year. I started off 2022 in a way that feels good. It didn’t last, but at least the issues of 2021 didn’t linger past their expiration date.
If there’s anything I learned from the mess I made of the year, it’s to not wait when I’m stuck in a book.
Looking back, I can see in February 2020 I was having an issue with a book that didn’t get resolved until I sat down in 2021 at the end of the year and made myself just claw my way through the material until I had something that worked. A lot of the stuff I was unhappy with ended up in the end product. It wasn’t bad. I was the problem. And the hardest truth is the one that says if I had just tossed all those words back in 2020 (multiple times if necessary) and started over from any point that felt like a good place to restart, I could have finished several more books instead of staying stuck.
2021 was my worst year for production of words since I started keeping track in 2012. It edged out 2020 by 1,515 words.
Two bad years in a row could be a death knell for my career unless I can improve dramatically in 2022.
The first half of 2022 has been just as bad, but I do still think I can recover.
Here’s the plan.
1) Start a 1,000 words a day streak. That would get me about 183,000 words before the end of the year.
2) Focus on finishing each book quickly instead of jumping between projects.
3) Work on more than one project at a time. This doesn’t contradict number two, because it is based on working on the same multiple projects each day. I have two pen names. I also have three types of stories under one pen name (novels, short stories, and my experiment with a serial). I also have different series. I will settle on a way to choose which projects get worked on and then I’ll work on them until they’re done.
I’m not going to post my month by month word counts for 2021. Too much trouble, and no one cares to be honest.
I published a novella, started a serial, and published a short story in 2021.
2021 words: 34,134
False starts and reconfigurations
I’m recovering from a few false starts this year, the first of which began in November of last year. I’m trying to settle into writing again, regularly, after a long stretch of not writing much at all.
I still don’t know with absolute certainty what caused that, although I have several theories. I worry that it’ll happen again, but since I can’t be sure of the cause, there’s not a lot of point to that worry. It happened, and now it’s time to move on. That’s the way of life more often than not anyway.
Despite the false starts, I’ve continued to improve. But we all know the saying, two steps forward and one step back, so I’m not surprised by the path I’m on.
I’ve made a few changes. I decided to ditch writing every day in favor of writing every weekday.
I don’t like schedules, but I realized I really need some regular downtime.
If I was facing burnout, and that’s just as possible as my other theories, I need to guard against future burnout. Since most people I know and interact with have weekends off, I chose to have weekends off, too. I need to visit family more often, spend more time with friends, and that’s a good time to do it.
So far, I have loved it. To a degree far greater than I expected. So I’ll be keeping that going forward.
But yes, I have had a little more trouble getting back into routine writing, but I’m working on it.
This is my accountability post to say that although I’m working on it, I’m still a ways off from true success and I need to keep working on it.
My intention is to be a prolific writer. Prolific writers keep writing. :)
Sprinting in Discord
If you’re in many writing themed servers on Discord, you’ll probably know all about sprinting and sprint channels. What it is is something like a chat with features specifically for people sprinting to get words.
Most use a bot that you set as a timer with something like _sprint for 20 in 3 which translates to start a twenty minute sprint in three minutes, for me and whoever joins me. Then you join the sprint with a beginning word count, and when it’s over, you update your word count and it tracks the numbers for you, doing all that pesky math if you want it to.
I don’t need it for that, because I use my own spreadsheet. But I like the community of it when I’m having a hard time focusing.
Today, I realized that although I like the community of it, I never seem to get in flow doing them in the same way I can when I run my own timer, and I rarely end up with any appreciable word counts after even long sessions of them.
Basically, time spent in the sprinting channel does not translate into a commensurate number of new words.
This is probably a case of me liking them the way I like chocolates and candies. They’re delicious, but they aren’t doing me any favors.
So, this is my post to myself to say I’m not going to do them anymore.
I can hang out in Discord when I want to chat about writing with other writers, but using it for sprints is not a fit for my personal work style. It’s time I admit that and take the necessary steps to make sure I’m writing to my fullest potential when I’m focused enough to do it.
Sometimes, it’s hard for me to remember the things I’ve set my mind to do and not to do, but writing things down sometimes helps. I won’t say always, as the dining room chair I am now doing my writing in again reminds me. My post about that is coming sooneventually. ;D
Ah, the critical voice
Critical voice is that part of yourself that wants you to be perfect. Since perfection doesn’t exist, that voice will win any argument it starts.
The trick is not to argue with it.
It’s that person at the party that you can’t have a discussion with because they aren’t really listening, they’re just thinking ahead to their next rebuttal. But, but, but…
You can’t argue with those people (why are you trying?) and you can’t argue with your critical voice.
It knows all your secrets and it knows all your weak spots.
It knows mine.
I’m going through my own battles with critical voice right now. I recognized today that something I thought wasn’t even related was, in fact, just a sign that my inner critic had gotten the best of me.
When the critical voice is winning, it’s hiding from you. It doesn’t want you to realize it’s there, because you might fight back.
But you can’t attack it directly, with words, with reason. It’s not reasonable. And it will win.
You have to put it in a closet, or in the ground. You have to bury it, and ignore it, and pretend you don’t see its ghost out of the corner of your eye. It will hide in the shadows and it will claw at your brain. The moment you look at it and say I know you’re there, it will go into hiding again, to wait, to lurk, to sulk.
Face it and it will hide. Ignore it and it will lose.
Give it a voice, and you’re the one who loses.
It can feel like an unending effort to ignore something buried so deep inside you that you can never cut it out.
It’s worth it. Writing is never more fun than it is when you’re completely, unabashedly ignoring your inner critic.
I see critical voice as one facet of perfectionism. Perfectionism will destroy your soul. It will kill every creative thought you have. So guard against it. Fight tooth and nail to keep it out of the light and out of your head.
Here are some of my favorite links about critical voice for further reading. Some address critical voice directly. Some talk about things that are a sign that your critical voice is making trouble, even if you don’t recognize it as such.
Back to the drawing board
After several days of the 20 minute writing blocks, I realized I was having a lot of trouble with the getting restarted part of this. Every session ends with the need to restart, unless something (usually a person in a sprint room on discord) was keeping me from taking a break.
Even though I kind of knew this going in, I thought the sets of blocks might be enough to keep it from being a problem. I am ever the optimist, unfortunately. It’s part of my problem with planning—I can’t be realistic to save my life.
I also kept trying to schedule the sets, because to reach the word count I’m aiming for (3,000 words) I would need three or four sets (possibly more). I knew there was little chance of success if I waited until bedtime to try to do four sets of these.
But schedules really don’t work for me, even if I make a point of allowing myself to stay flexible. There’s just something about them that triggers all the wrong thoughts in my head. I didn’t have even one success at starting when I had scheduled a start.
After several days of failing to do the number of sets I need, I realized last night that there are just so many points of failure that this plan makes no sense for me.
I reevaluated and came up with a new plan.
Today I’m going to try to eliminate as many points of failure as I can by using a timer for one long block of 3 hours.
As soon as I finish this post and close this window, I’m going to start that timer.
I won’t stop it for breaks, that way I’ll keep my need to get back to writing at the forefront of my thoughts and not get distracted.
After the timer goes off, I can catch up anything I was tempted to do during the breaks.
If I feel like today was a successful trial run (even if I don’t reach my 3,000 words), I’ll add a rule for tomorrow to get started within an hour of waking up. :D I’m tracking my successes and failures with the Loop Habits app on my phone, and I’ll add that as a habit to track.
I’m only three hours behind today so that’s not so bad. It’s still early enough to be called an early start.
Well, back to timed writing!
My 2022 goals are off to a slow start. The plan is to publish something (novel, short, whatever) every month. I’ve lost some momentum into this new year because I got sick early in the month, and I’ve had a hard time getting moving again.
Last night, after the umpteenth time waiting too late to start (even though I stay up late sometimes, I haven’t been lately, and I haven’t had any willpower at all left once it gets late, so no matter how many times I tell myself I can just get started anyway, it doesn’t happen).
So, new plan.
I want to finish a book, but since “finish the book” isn’t really working for me as a daily goal, today’s is simpler: write 3,000 words (which will probably finish the book). So many mind games. It’s hilarious. But whatever works!
I’ll do 20 minutes 4 times, take a break (or not, depending how I feel), then repeat this a few times. That will get me between 3–4 hours of writing. Which might be enough time to get to 3,000 words.
(I want to write about 90,000 words a month this year, which is insane for me, but I’m seriously tired of dragging out the time it takes to write all these books I want to write. If I really want to write them, I’m going to have to speed up! And there is absolutely no good reason why I can’t write that many words. I am not physically incapable of it, and I have enough ideas to last the rest of my life and beyond. Mental hangups just do not count as real limits. I can do it. Once I break through this barrier, it will get easier. I just have to keep pushing until I crack the wall.)
So, anyway, that’s the goal today. 3,000 words. I’ll report back at intervals, much like I used to do, and keep myself accountable to getting these 20 minute sessions in.
Update #1
I finished the first set. 694 words and 1.333 hours (20 x 4) and I came it at 521 words per hour overall, with one session short actual writing time of about 4 minutes because of a phone call interruption. So it could have been better but probably not by much.
I did a lot of backspacing. My typing is atrocious, but this was mostly me having trouble coming up with a next sentence issue.
I’m going to try to do better with the next one. Think for two seconds before I type or something, I don’t know.
I’m still planning for two to three more sets, but I’m going to have to have a break, which I will need to keep reasonably short. So good luck me with that.
Update #2
Finished the second set and ended up at 980 for the day. I threw in an extra five minutes on the timer so my numbers would round better. :) 2.75 hours, 980 words, 356 wph. Not gonna lie, I’m disappointed with the wph number. This was new material and shouldn’t have been so hard to get up to speed with.
Practicing
I’m practicing writing more. By the new year, I want to get my week’s word count up to 16,800 and keep it there. It’s going to be hard to do with the holidays in the way, but I think it’s possible. I’ll probably have a few really good days and a few very low days, but it will all add up.
This is all because I’ve dumped using averages to tell me anything about my writing.
I took a hard look at all my numbers a while back and realized that the data I’ve collected is nothing but a series of outliers. Meaning averages don’t tell me anything useful about myself or my writing habits other than that sometimes I write a lot and sometimes I hardly write at all.
The thing that will be more useful to me than averages is a quota.
I had thought about sticking with a daily quota but it leaves more room for failure. It’s easy to miss a day here and there.
But if I use a weekly quota, it’s still short-term enough to keep me focused (I think, evidence still to be accumulated) but not as dependent on me having a good day every single day. (2,400 words a day every single day is a big ask for me. But some days with bigger word counts and some days with smaller word counts is more realistic.)
On the surface, this really isn’t any different than pushing for a daily average word count of something or other, but underneath, there’s a different mindset at play when trying to hit a weekly word count target versus trying to maintain a certainly daily word count.
Getting stuff out the door before Christmas and a new year’s goal
Finished my story. Now on to publishing, writing an episode for the serial I’m doing on Kindle Vella, and finally getting back to editing those novel chapters. Trying to do it all today. Time will be short because of a family obligation but I’m going to try.
I wrote over 2,400 words yesterday. I will have to look at my spreadsheet and see when the last time is that I made it over 2,000.
I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’m trying to get my 7 day total up to 16,800 before the new year and keep it there. That’s a 2,400 words a day average, although I’m not talking in averages anymore since they really don’t fit my writing/work style.
Working on a short story today
I’m trying to finish a short story today, set in the world of one of my longer series. It’s taking a little more effort than usual because I had to ditch two different plot threads I started to go with because I had a faulty memory of the dynamic between two characters. :D
I’ve had to read bits from three different books and I keep going back to them for little tidbits so the story doesn’t try to rewrite history. I paused my attempts to write 1,200 words an hour, because I just don’t think this is the right project.
And also because I don’t think I want to track my time spent writing for a while. So there’s that, too.
But I’m having fun with it, so I’m going to get back to it now. I’m really hoping today will be the last day on it. It’s a holiday story and I want to get it out asap.
1,200 words an hour—Attempt #2
Even though I didn’t reach 1,200 words an hour yesterday, I did finish one of the things I needed to finish writing. \o/
Today, I need to finish a different thing, and do some editing of a lot of chapters. Typo hunting, continuity, clarity, that kind of thing. I’ll be doing my best not to be tempted to change anything else, because that way lies madness. :-)
Results—
Not even close.
I think, and this is me being proactive here, I’m going to pause this particular challenge and come back to it when I’m working on a different project. This one is a little tricky because I have to stop and look up information a little more often than usual (from books in the series that I wrote quite a while back).
1,200 words an hour—Attempt #1
I didn’t finish what I wanted to finish yesterday (or the day before) so I’m building some accountability into today with a short challenge.
1,000 words an hour is usually a stretch for me. I’m not a really fast typist. I only come in around 60 words per minute when I’m pushing myself. Sure, that’s 3,600 words per hour typing speed, so it’s not that slow, but that is not writing time. I write much, much slower than I type.
So a 1,200 word an hour challenge is just the thing to try to push me past my internal critic and get some real writing done. Even if I fail, the push to write faster will probably help get past critical me. :-)
See you later for an update. :D (To this post.)
Final results—
I never made it to 1,200 WPH today. My best session was 441 WPH.
I’ll be trying this again, probably tomorrow. I have some reading / typo hunting to finish first, but if I make it through that, I’ll be writing again.
As needed, when needed
The writing is going well. The blogging, on the other hand, is as dead as one of those mice my stray cat keeps leaving in front of my door in exchange for “real” food. :D
I’ve started innumerable posts that I end up leaving in draft stage. So I guess that’s that. If I needed the blog, I’d be using it more. I’m not even making journal entries in OneNote, or diary entries in any of my many notebooks scattered around my desk.
I’ll take what I can get right now, and that’s the fiction writing. If I figure out what I want to write here, I’ll come back and start regular posting again. Otherwise, it’ll be as needed, when needed, and that’s that.
Forward momentum
As usual, the goals I’ve made are probably out of my reach for the time frame I set. But I’m still trying!
I did finish a story and publish it, and I published a bit more in a test run on Kindle Vella. Not because I’m particularly interested in the platform, but because I’ve always got stories in progress and I’m testing to see if I can make money on them as ongoing stories, then publish them as books and make more money on them as novels. :D
The book I wanted to finish by November 1 is still not finished but I’m pushing hard to finish it before December 1 and I think I can make it. That will leave too many WIPs to be written in December to be realistic for me, but hell, I’m going to try anyway.
Failure isn’t something I’m scared of, and if it means I’ll get that much closer to clearing out my WIPs before the new year, then that will be more than I started with.
I can’t even explain how nice it feels to finally be writing again.
I’m going through a major life change and it has had repercussions I didn’t expect, but that’s fine. Things have gotten better, as things tend to do, or I’ve reached some kind of equilibrium, and I’m feeling a lot better these days. Looking back and trying to rewrite history so that it feels like a failure on my part—my character, my work ethic, or my self-discipline—would be the worst kind of insult to myself. I’m not going to do it.
I’m putting it behind me and moving on.
Forward momentum is what it’s all about. Backward momentum doesn’t even make sense. Time travel is a thing of fiction. :D
Writing today
I have finally made it back to writing. :) It took a while, longer than I expected for sure, but I’ve moved on to the next step in my plans for a fresh start in 2022.
Before November 1st, I am going to finish one more work in progress. I think I need to write between 10,000 and 20,000 words to finish it. I’m hoping it needs fewer words than that, but I don’t think it will need more. If it does, it will become the longest book in that series.
In November, I’m going to write a long delayed book.
And then in December I’m going to finish the rest of my works in progress.
Progress continues, hope to finish today
Yesterday, I made it most of the way through my story. I’ve made enough changes that I’m going to start today at the halfway point and keep going from there, in case I messed up something. I added a few lines, deleted a few more, and need to double and triple check for typos. :)
I think I’ll finish this today.
I’m also planning to make time for some actual writing today. I didn’t mean to skip that yesterday, but it happened, so today I am going to make extra effort so it doesn’t happen today. :)
I feel really good today. I’m thinking there is something to the fact that I’ve been pushing myself to go to sleep earlier. Even though I don’t have anything keeping me from sleeping as late as I want to sleep, the truth is I feel like I sleep better in the earlier part of the night than in the morning hours. I like to stay up late, but once I wake up in daylight, I’m already losing the fight to get more sleep. I will almost always get more sleep if I go to sleep earlier and get up earlier. So, maybe I have an explanation for why I’ve been feeling better this last week and am still feeling better. I’ve only had one night where I stayed up until about 3 am. That was the night before, and yesterday I did notice a fall off, in both how I felt and in how long I was able to stay focused on my writing work.
My ideal sleep time would be 11 – 7, but I’ll settle for a regular 12 – 8. I top out at about 7.5 hours of sleep anyway. After that, my body is just done with sleep. But daylight comes here at about 6:30 right now so that’s why my ideal is for a 11 pm sleep time. I’m allowed to dream! ;-)
Time to get started, I think. Talk to you later!