2018 was the longest year that ever was a year. That was the repeated description from one of the handful of Youtube personalities I follow and I can't help but agree. I have to actually look at the spreadsheets to see what the first book we launched in 2018 was (ONSET: Stay of Execution, apparently. Wow.) Seems like we wrapped up ONSET longer ago than that. 2018 was a year of missteps for us. We ended up shifting our mix more towards Urban Fantasy than we meant to, which hurt our ... Read more »
Goals
A Year Full Time
Something I didn't draw too much attention to last year for a lot of reasons was my transition from writing part-time to writing full-time. It was a careful thing, done in stages, carried out with the full support of my then-boss. And it started September 1, 2015. As I think most people reading this blog can guess, it went well enough that most of those stages got jumped over and I was no longer even working part-time by the end of 2015. Since September 2015, I have launched five novels ... Read more »
Conflict
Today's post is about two different kinds of conflict. One is the conflict between a writers goals and the realities of life (calling back to last weeks post), and the other is on conflict in your story. First, on goals. Like I said last week, goals are awesome. Set them. Small ones are good until you know you can meet them. I thought 500 words a day was great. I'm still going to try to hold to it, even though Ive failed miserable this last week *grin* Inevitably, life is going to ... Read more »
500 Words a Day – Goals and Discipline
So, of those of us who have tried to write a novel, who has reached a point where you are having problems finding the motivation to go on? Yes, you in the back. You in the front. You in the second row, with your hand down? You're lying. It can be hard to keep writing. It tends to come in dribs and drabs, a spurt of a few thousand words here, a good week there. Most of my completed books were written in four or five spurts of really good inspiration. There are writers, who will remain ... Read more »