Rest rethink restart

After my nano crash I have also crashed a little. It’s a combination of things. December is not my favourite month. After breaking my walking streak, I haven’t been inspired to do my daily amount of steps. The device I use keeps a ‘longest streak’ not a ‘current streak’ so until I pass 300 days I can’t see any progress. That’s kind of disheartening.

I usually listen to audiobooks as I walk. Often this encourages me to get out there when there is a story that I am eager to continue listening to. My current audiobook isn’t doing it for me so I am finding other reasons to stay inside.

[I know the easy solution is to just dnf that book…]

I’ve been messing with recording my time in an attempt to keep myself on target, and it isn’t working for me. I end up beating myself up because I wrote so little in so much time, or whatever fault my brain decides to pick on.

[look how much time you spent on tumblr … I swear those pics of naked men are inspiring. I write erotic romance… ]

I’ve said it before, the nanowrimo kind of word count thing works for me.  I do NOT know why. It seems to be just enough of a step away from setting the target myself. I often do the camps where I set my own word target, so how does that inspire me… shrugs. But it does.

This week I saw some writers on twitter singing the praises of another kind of word count app and I went to check it out. It’s free. Yay. And I saw more people rave about it today. So I will give that a go.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Links:

Toggl time recording app

Pacemaker word count app

Do it today

I have a heading in GoogleKeep that just says ‘do it today’ and then there is nothing listed under it… scratches head. Maybe I meant write this blog post? *grins*

I was messaging a reviewer in the fanfiction site. We were in Offerings and that was a story I was inspired to write after seeing a banner made by Goldengirl27.

We got onto talking about ideas and how to get them; they were stuck. I suggested that they could look at writing prompts, images or photos, or check out contest entries or any of the banners on printing paws available for adoption if they want ideas for the Twilight wolf pack.

I told them that I am swamped with ideas. They suggested that, seeing as how I have so many ideas, I could give some of mine to them to write.

I kind of know what they were getting at, but I told them that it doesn't work that way.

I mean... it's not the idea  that makes the story good.

How many times have you read a story that had a great premise but was just really badly executed? Or, you read a great story that basically rehashes an old trope and it doesn't matter if it is well written.

How can I explain? Recently I was watching a video lecture from Brandon Sanderson and he was talking about this. He was laughing about how he was at a conference with Jim Butcher, who writes the Dresden files and they were arguing with a guy in the crowd about ideas and execution. Jim said he could write ANY idea into a good story and the guy challenged him to write a mix-up of the lost Roman legion and Pokemon... and he did it. And he got so carried away he has published six books in the series! Way to go with winning that fight, Jim. lol

"The Codex Alera is Jim's six-book fantasy epic set in another world, mixing the politics of Rome with a world alive with elemental animism."

From his website 

I get ideas from all sorts of places, on tumblr there are a dozen sites that send images or starter sentences every day. Or just Google writing prompts.

The trick is to ask yourself: what happens next?

Or what do these people have in common? What would they fight about? Fighting/arguing is conflict and conflict is the heart of a story.

Or think of the ending and then ask: how did they get here? And then go back and start them at the exact opposite point.

Just write... if it is 300 words or 3,000 just write them down.

Word count

I try to keep track of the amount of words I write each day. I like to keep count and it also pushes me to write everyday. I do not want to see a zero word day.

BUT... it’s almost impossible.

I write in Google docs  drive. I plot and drag cork-board stuff around in Scrivener. I write in Word for Windows. I make notes about story ideas in OneNote, Evernote and Google Keep. And I scribble in half a dozen different coloured physical notebooks in pen.

I write blog posts, book reviews for Goodreads, short stories, longer stories, fanfics and I am working on too many longer stories at once.

I found a word count script that works in Google drive, but only for documents I have stored in a particular folder. And I often forget to put them in that particular folder. I have 400 documents in the writing prompt file, alone. Not counting completed ones. When I say I have a thousand ideas, I am not joking.

Scrivener has word counts for each session in each document, but I have a dozen of them. At the moment, I have four open and I have to reset the counts each day.

Plus, I am plotting out the story I may write for NaNoWrimo in Scrivener. (National novel writing month - write 50k words in a month.) Actually, I am plotting two different stories; I haven’t decided which to write, yet. 

Each method works for different things or in different ways so there is no one product that does everything I need. I can access google drive on several different machines. Evernote is brilliant for storing (and tagging) research and webpages for fledgling ideas. And is also multi device accessible.

I'm not sure why I still use Word; habit? Perhaps. I am sometimes set in my ways. Old dog ... you know the rest. Mortal fear of online failure?

I have acquired most of these newer programs in the last year or so, so Word is still familiar to me and I am clearly clinging to it. 

I try to keep track but it is obvious that my word count is underestimated.

1.5 million words

Today I posted the final chapter in ‘Offerings’ my Jake/Bella fanfiction story. It has just passed five hundred reviews and most people seem to like it. It is not a huge epic, like some of my more recent stories, but pulls in just under thirty thousand words. For some people that would be two chapters, for me that is a story.

It is here at fanfiction, here at fictionpad and here at Ao3.

But one thing that shorter story does, is push me through another milestone.

I posted my first story at fanfiction in June 2010 and since then I have posted (as the pic says) 1,504,830 words.

Wow.

2013 in a nutshell

I keep a spreadsheet and enter in how many words a day that I type up. It was last year’s resolution. My target was 2,000 a day; some days I miss that by a mile, some days I obliterate it. Some days I look at my scrivener total and say, ‘whaa… no way.’ Other days my PC auto-restarts before I got to write the total down.

I hate those days.

I would love it if Google docs could make a session target word count or a running count like scrivener. I keep asking; maybe, one day. There is some hideously complex way to write program commands for it, but me Luddite… don’t know how… yet?

So what did I work on in 2013?

·       I finished ‘Swan’s mate for life’ (217,071 words),

·       I wrote nine Twilight one-shots (29,000 words) plus a few more anonymous competition entries.

·       I started expanding ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ and finished it (187,764 words).

·       I posted 48 original short stories on the blog (and wrote a few more that I haven’t posted yet).

·       And I rewrote Bluebeard as my nanowrimo project (50,521 and counting)

plus I worked on some fanfic (my Nov total was 78k) I did work on some other original stories, and

·       I finished an erotic novella.

My total words written for the year, according to that spreadsheet is 487,374. That sounds like a lot but it isn’t 2k a day; it’s about 1400. And dammit, I won’t crack the half million. Ah well, that can be my aim for 2014, right?

So, here were my resolutions for 2013:

1.         I will write and publish one novel (approx. 100k words) and a novella (20-40k).

2.         I will reach 500 likes for my Facebook author page.

3.         I will write 2,000 words a day.

4.         I will write less fanfiction.

5.         I will improve my writing, grammar etc.

So how did I do?

1.               I wrote that novella (YAY) and half of two more novels (which sadly is not a whole novel - grin). I sent the novella out but forgot to send it to other publishers when the no reply time period was up. I think I need a literary agent who can do that for me, but I can’t get one until I finish something big and can wave it at them.

2.               I have 152 Facebook likes. I don’t know how to use FB properly and it annoys me asking me to pay for ads to contact people who have already liked me. It’s not advertising; it’s extortion. But I must remember to post there more frequently. Sorry FB fans.

3.               I wrote about 1400 words a day. I almost did Nanowrimo every single day of the year. Wow.

4.               oopsies. Still maybe two thirds fanfic.

5.               I didn’t read any more of the grammar books I bought after July. But I still think I am doing okay on this one. I did try to follow better story planning setups but there are so many of them that it confuses me sometimes. And I fell in love with Scrivener.

Basically it was an epic fail.

As MTR, I won six awards and was nominated for a few more that I have honestly lost track of. Bad mtr.

I did manage to finish the Goodreads challenge and read 80 books (21,382 pages) for the year. I did 50 last year, and set 75 as the target for 2013, so that is a big improvement. I don’t think I can do 100 but might set it at 80 and see how I go. That’s one and a half books a week.

So, I think I just have to try to be more organised; not easy for a scatter brain like me.

Nanowrimo 2013

I have decided to do nanowrimo this year. Feel free to friend me or however it works. Newbie, here.

http://nanowrimo.org/participants/mrstrentreznor

Nanowrimo is the national novel writing month and it requires you to write 50k words in November in order to ‘win’ your completion badge. It cannot be something you have already half written, so none of my sketched out rough plot bunnies could be used. I have already written more than that this month and I still have two days left. Grins. So 1600 a day should be doable.

I am probably insane because ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ is still going. I have posted more than 145k words for it so far, and it is still weeks to the battle. It has veered so far away from the original storyline that it will take some effort to get it back into line. A cast of dozens gives me too many characters to want to write for.

BUT can I do that AND finish Josh? That is the question.

I have told readers that Josh may drop its daily updates, but I can't stop writing it. I will do my best to complete both.

So, in two days I have worked out how to install a widget. Yay. And I have written 3,041 words for Bluebeard and done quite a bit of plotting and brainstorming plus I wrote 4,000 words for Josh. Phew.

Check-up of my goals for 2013

It’s halfway through another year. Man, where does the time go?

I wrote a blog post back in January on my goals for 2013 and it is probably time to see how I am going.

So, here were my resolutions for 2013:

1.     I will write and publish one novel (approx. 100k words) and a novella (20-40k).

2.     I will reach 500 likes for my Facebook author page.

3.     I will write 2,000 words a day.

4.     I will write less fanfiction.

5.     I will improve my writing, grammar etc.

Hmmm… first off,

1. I will write and publish one novel (approx. 100k words) and a novella (20-40k).

I finished the novella. Polished it up and sent it off to an ebook publishing company that accepts erotica. It was pretty much pure erotica. After more than a few weeks, I have no reply. In publishing terms that means they don’t want it. Now I have to decide what to do with it. Still thinking on that. Do I put a cover on it and put it up on Smashwords?

The novels? Still working on them and going through huge moments of self-doubt. Omg everything I write is a trope - ahhhh. Plus, I keep getting more new exciting wonderful shiny ideas that tromp all over the old unfinished ones.

2. I will reach 500 likes for my Facebook author page.

121? Hmmm… I’ve got 560 on twitter. Dammit… should have written twitter.

3. I will write 2,000 words a day.

I keep a record of how many words I write each day. When I finish something I toss the word count into an excel table. I really wish Google had a running word count app for Drive; please?! Scrivener does it for each project and you can reset it when you want. I do daily. According to my chart I wrote just under 200,000 words up to the end of June. 120,000 of that was fanfic. I have written a large pile of short stories or flash fiction; usually under a thousand words. I think I have written about forty of those; some have been posted on this blog. Some are just scraps or fragments that (as per usual) beg to be extended.

It is probably more than that because I lost data when my PC auto restarted a few times,  and I hadn’t saved the table and one day Scrivener was drunk and said I wrote 32k words - yeah right. I didn’t count that.

That sounds like a lot, but it works out to be just over 1,000 words a day or half my goal. DAMN.

4. I will write less fanfiction.

Well that didn’t go well… 60 percent fanfiction? Is that less than I used to write? I can’t tell.

The truth is I think I complete and post more fanfiction.

5. I will improve my writing, grammar etc.

I’ve been reading up and spending ages looking through RSS feeds of writing sites, grammar rules and so on. I’ve read Seth Godin, Larry Brooks and am currently on Nail your Novel by Roz Morris. I listen to podcasts from Joanna Penn and Writing Excuses. So I think I am doing okay on this one.

So in summary, I’ve failed. I have managed two (and a half) of my goals - the last ones. If I can count half the word count? Lmao

I look at my total and I think, wow imagine how productive you could be if you just concentrated on one thing at a time? I’ve known me for a while now, and I know that is just not how my mind works. Pity.

I watched Adam Hills the other night and he interviewed Paul Kelly; Aussie muso - very famous and talented. He called that self-doubt the ‘pretendies’ and he said it was contagious. That flat panic that you shouldn’t be here doing this, and you are terrified that everyone will realise that you do not have a clue. I was oddly comforted by the fact that all the other people including Leigh Sales (journalist interviewed Hillary Clinton recently) said the same thing. One comic Josh Thomas, said that was his default life position. Lol

Paul Kelly said you just have to play through it. Stick your head down and do it. That’s good advice.

So I have six more months to just play through it.

I must say, I was looking up a book on the Barnes & Noble website and I thought I would have a peek how I was doing. Kissing Cousins had a sales rank of 8,906 and Alejandro & Maela was 10,209. I think that’s not bad. Yay me.

Let's call my goals a conceded pass. I scraped a C grade.

My goals for 2013

I was reading an update from Joanna Penn of the creativepenn . She was talking about the goals she had set for herself at the beginning of 2012 and comparing how well she did in achieving them. I think she did very well with her list. And as she says, putting it down in words makes her accountable. Good point. I will add that her site is a fabulous resource for not only writing, but also for marketing and publishing advice too. She writes both non-fiction and fiction, does video interviews with all sorts of people and does public speaking on publishing etc. So she has many hats. Definitely worth a look. And a listen. Besides, I could sit and listen to her English accent all day. Lol.

I was also reading an update from lit reactor about resolutions.

So, here are my resolutions for 2013:

1.     I will write and publish one novel (approx. 100k words) and a novella (20-40k).

2.     I will reach 500 likes for my Facebook author page.

3.     I will write 2,000 words a day.

4.     I will write less fanfiction.

5.     I will improve my writing, grammar etc.

I am already looking at that list thinking… ‘What? 500 likes?’ Sigh. My inner critic is a whiny bitch.

So, how am I going to do that? That is the question.

1.            I will write and publish one novel (approx. 100k words) and a novella (20-40k).

I have a pile of unfinished projects. Obviously I need to finish stuff I have almost finished, or kill it if it is never going to work. This is where the inner critic goes feral. I have an acquired habit of self-doubt. It’s a long and ugly story that I might write one day and change the names to protect the innocent, but suffice it to say that I used to have a real living critic and my inner critic has absorbed all the statements I used to hear. The critic is gone, but the inner voice remains. I read a quote the other day that was the perfect example.

“People don't believe what you tell them.

They rarely believe what you show them.

They often believe what their friends tell them.

They always believe what they tell themselves.”

― Seth Godin

So, silence my inner critic. Hang draw and quarter it with a ball gag so I can’t hear the screams. Sounds like a plan.

2.            I will reach 500 likes for my Facebook author page.

I’m still a little doubtful on the power of FB and Google+. Too often I see comments that indicate that the people never actually clicked on the links. So I am not convinced that they are the major marketing tools they would like to be thought of as. Twitter is more immediate and personal (it feels more personal to me). But, again, I am not sure I am using it the best way. I hate people who only tweet about their books or post the same damn quote every three hours. So I need to do more Twitter research, find out about tools and apps etc. God forbid I get a phone that is recent and not more than ten years old. Like my current model. Tech dinosaur here.

3.            I will write 2,000 words a day.

I had fun with Excel a while ago and worked out how to draw graphs. Again with the tech dinosaur… don’t go all judgy on me. From the 1st July until now I have written 242,288 words. WHOA. It works out to about 1400 a day. Each and every day. For example, 1600 is the amount that the Nanowrimo sets people to write in a month and they all complain about it. I've almost done that every month of the last six months. So I should be able to push it up to 2k a day.

But, most of that is fanfiction and that leads me in to the next point.

4.            I will write less fanfiction.

I love fanfic. It’s safe. People there like me. Their love drowns out the fear of sticking my neck out and being judged. (Inner critic again.) I did it before; I stuck my neck out when I posted my first fanfic stories. It was a nerve wracking experience and I was so surprised when people actually liked me, so I should be able to do it again. I have bills to pay and fanfic doesn't pay them. Unless some publisher offers a pull to publish of my fanfics? Yeah right. Cue moral quandary if that ever happens.

So, more original fiction.

5.            I will improve my writing, grammar etc.

If I improve my work space/tools/methods and fitness, then I will write more. It sounds dumb to say it, but you can’t write if you are sitting in an uncomfortable chair, or you are in a foul mood or whatever. And you can’t write well if your grammar and language skills are not up to par. So I need to read, purchase grammar books or do courses - whatever will work for that.

As an extra point, I won a flash fiction contest a while ago run by Biting Duck press. It’s a tiny new publishing house and I won a trip to the top of the slush pile. If I send them something, they promise to read it. But, I don’t have a WIP that fits their specs. So, should I try to write something that does? Or am I wasting my time? These are their submission guidelines for fiction.

Fiction: science fiction; genre fiction about science or scientists; medical thrillers; fantasy/supernatural with a nerd element (you know who you are); cyberpunk; young adult. Please no poetry, romance, goth, religious, or explicit sex or gore.

No romance and no sex? Hmmm… doesn’t sound like me, eh?

So, there you have it; all written down and now I just need to do it.