I know it’s been a few days since I posted. Been a busy bee, which is all good. Things have calmed down a bit so we should resume to our current posting pattern. Camp Nano is finished. I’m kind of sad, to me that was a great motivator. It’s all good. I still tried to post there today when i finished writing. I guess old habits die hard.
So here’s what I’ve written so far this week –
M- 3523
T. 3519
W. 3624
TR. 3644
So a good start to the week. I’m still in the very beginning stages of book 4. I think book 4 may be a “full length” book. Which should be 80k pages or so. I don’t know I guess we’ll all see. I saw a really good video yesterday from Hugh – it’s a good retelling of how he made it in publishing. What I really like is the fact he is a genuine dude. You can check that out here –
Cigar band from a Fonseca cigar from the collection of Tim Davenport. Scanned for Wikipedia. Some digital editing performed, no copyright claimed. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Came very close to finishing book 3 today, in fact I thought I was going to finish, but my characters had something different in mind and so I didn’t. You guys ever have that problem.. or is it just me. I think for sure I should be finished by tomorrow. Then I’m going to finish my bit of editing all three of them, then I’m going to start on the next book. Of course I really hate skipping writing a day. I actually thought about doing that for three seconds, then changed my mind. So tomorrow will be a full day of editing and writing. Sunday will be probably at least a half a day of editing, and hopefully I’ll have book 1 in good enough shape to send to the editor.
Should have my first book out there in May, if things go well. I’ve heard about folks that edit there books to death, I’ve learned in business there comes a point when you have to move forward, it is impossible to make something perfect. Maybe I’ll publish on my birthday. Did a lot of other things that took a lot of time today, got a cool gig to go to with my daughter tonight as we celebrate her artwork at school. I can’t draw a stickman – she can do so much more. Enjoy your weekend and we’ll probably talk to you on Monday and tell you how things went.
Hope your day has gone well. It can’t really decide if we want to have Summer or Winter here. In the morning temps are in the 30’s in the afternoon they approach 80, so my heat pump doesn’t know whether it wants to be on or off.
I actually have spent some time this week editing my first book, before sending it to my editor, sounds a bit counter-intuitive I know. I’ve also been writing like crazy on the 3rd novel in the series, I think we should be finished with it probably early next week. I’ve also got in mind what the series arch is going to be – all twelve books. I know it’s ambitious, after all, don’t even have one book out yet. I think one thing I’m going to do is outline a bit more, maybe a really flexible outline. I need to do this for a couple of different reasons. After you finish your work, you’ll be needing to make a rough outline anyway… just to make sure you don’t repeat yourself and things make more sense. I’ve about got the titles / what the other nine books are going to be about.
I wrote 3527 today. I’ve told you before I’ve been participating in the camp Nano – don’t think any of my bunk mates have taken it seriously or maybe they’ve gotten busy with life. My goal was 50k words and I’ve hit 76,853 woot woot. I have to take one of my poochs to the vet tomorrow. Really don’t like doing that but it is one of those necessary things.
Hope your day was good and productive. I’ve been using scrivener for all the writing I’ve done, and I love it. I don’t really know how to use it very well yet.
Also found a great guide for Scrivener today during my wonderings its free from this link – click me.
I’ve mentioned before I’m on the third part of the book and that book has three threads. Today I finished one of them, now two more to go. I wrote 3555 words today, so I’m keeping on pace for the million words this year.
I’ve been pretty busy too – on my ‘real’ job, it’s hard to squeeze everything in. Need to get the first bit edited. My goal is to work on that quite a bit tomorrow. I’m writing it here so I’ll be accountable. Enjoy your evening.
MA – Massachusetts State Police (Photo credit: Inventorchris)
I know it’s been a few days since my last post, but hey we’ve been working hard. Never fear we have met our goal everyday for 3500 words. Today we hit 3610. So what have we been up to –
The Boston Marathon / manhunt – one of the people we work with, her husband is a Captain in the MA State Police Swat Team. So he was really busy last week. When they finally captured the terrorist at the boat, her hubby was the man guiding the pole on the Bearcat (the armored personel carrier) they had in the backyard. She showed me some pretty cool pictures and videos. You can find some they’ve made available to the public here –
She is a good friend, so I was giving her encouragement all of last week. It was really good that things ended well.
Saturday was busy. I’ve been working on getting a book for my wife ready to go on Amazon. Almost have it finished, still need to work on it a bit more tonight after I finish this… see you guys are important.
Sunday got up at 330 am. A wrote quite a bit in the morning, went to church, then during the afternoon we had a birthday for my nephew, can’t believe he is almost 20. Also on Sunday got a note from my editor confirming when I was going to start work – I’m starting to get excited. I’m on part 3 of the story and should have it finished this week. Part 1 we’ll be rough editing and send it next Monday. Part 2 we’ll be rough editing then sending it the next Monday, Part 3 the same deal. So when all the business is complete we should have 3 shorties ready to rock and roll. It will just take a whole lot of work between now and then, but hey anything worth having is worth working for, or so they tell me.
Anyways that’s the update. Enjoy your evening and keep writing.
I’m really sore after yesterdays work a thon. It’s good to get some hard work in, good to get some exercise in as well.
Today was a good day 3556 so a good day. A quick post today. We’re at a good part in the story, One that flows pretty nicely from one bit to the next. I love writing fights, we had a few good fights today. I think probably fights and car / horse / foot chases are my favorite. We did complete one of the projects we had been working on a billed them. Billing is always a good thing. We’re supposed to have some severe storms overnight so hopefully our power will stay on. I can’t imagine writing 3500 words with ink pen, would not be fun. Tomorrow or over the weekend I’ll try to put a timeline of what’s going to be happening.
English: COPYRIGHT 1896 BY C.S.PEARCE”. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Wow hard day today. We had a whole lot of rain last night and this morning. So much rain that it overwhelmed my ditch. So the afternoon (which was nice) was spent doing manual labor with a shovel, pick, huge pry bar and a Mattick. Along with a tiller thrown in their for good measure. I’m going to be so sore tomorrow it’s not even going to be funny.
We had a lot of thunder this morning, and I refuse to get on my computer when there are storms. I know that’s kind of silly because I have all the latest surge protectors and things, so the morning was wasted. .. well not wasted, I did get to read a bit which is always a good thing.
I also finished a big project for one of our clients – that’s always a good thing as well. Nothing like making a little cash to make things look much better.
I did manage to write 3, 538 words – so that was good. One other thing I promise to you unless we have no electricity I will be trying to post.
Hopefully tomorrow we’ll have a little calmer weather, although this year has been pretty crazy, so it’s hard to say what the weather will be like tomorrow.
Hope your day has went well. It’s been a fast one here and super busy.
We had a new goal today – 3500 words and we hit it. 3730. I actually could have kept on writing, was definitely on a roll in a good part of the story. This story is going to have three threads in it as well. I’ve found that writing a thread at a time, till a distant point, then writing the next thread and so forth has worked pretty well for me.
One of the tips from the book I suggested yesterday was to do a brief outline of what you wanted to write for the day. I’m not an outliner, but doing that has definitely helped me to boost my productivity a bit.
I started book #3 today. I actually hate starting a new book, it is good that I’m familiar with most of the characters. I got 3125 words written today. I’m not much of a plotter – maybe I should be. I just start typing and go with the flow. I enjoy writing. I don’t think I could not write now. Do you do that? Do you dream about your characters? Maybe I’m just a little bit weird.
I mentioned to you earlier that I got a good book about writing. See that’s another thing, I want to learn all I can about my writing, so my stories will be the best they can be. I know I can write, I just can’t write well… yet. I read somewhere that it takes a million words before you get the hang of it. We’ll see if that is true or not, I think I should make it a goal to do a million words before the end of the year.
Takes out a sheet of paper.
So we have 259 days till the end of the year.
So far I’ve written 90,000 words.
That leaves 910,000 / 259 = 3514.
And so a new goal has been made. The good thing is, the longer I write the faster I write, hopefully that all remains true.
Sorry for the sidetrack bit there – so the book I’m in the process of reading is 2k to 10k – the process of writing more. Again I’ve just started it. I’ll give you an outline of it and how / if it helped my writing as well. You can find the book here – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009NKXAWS/
Our thoughts and prayers go out to those in Boston.
I know it’s been a couple of days since I posted. It’s been a crazy end of the week / weekend here. Also my wife’s cousin passed away so it’s been an endless stream of relatives too. It’s funny how many folks you only see is at funerals or weddings. I think that’s kind of sad really.
I did manage to finish part 2 of my series. I’m getting ready to start the first words of part 3 tonight. The first words to me are always super important because they can make or break your book. So I usually take some time on the first page and then get things rolling pretty quickly.
I also wanted to mention that numerous wordpress site have been targets. Apparently some preetty sophisticated people have been trying to get access to anyone’s accounts they can. See what they do when get access is to use the wordpress site as one they will take over and it will become a host. They use all the hosts for their attacks. I’m not sure exactly why someone would do this craziness, but there are crazy people. And if you think about it, if they get enough sites they can do some major damage. Here are a couple of tips.
1. I never us ‘Admin’ as the log in for any of my blogs. I delete that username for the mix. It is easy for them to tell what my username is, they just need to look at a blog post. Most of these attacks are automated, so they use Admin, since almost all wordpress sites use that user name.
2. Make sure you have a good password. A good password is something you wouldn’t be able to remember, it uses a mix of letters (capital and lower case), number, and symbols. These guys have a list of all the most commonly used passwords and try them over and over again.
