There is a class of Indie author mindset out there that promotes prolific writing, using Kindle Unlimited, launching hard, making sure your Amazon Also Boughts are clean, and writing absolutely to market as the only way to make serious money writing fiction. I did buy into that approach for a year or so. It seemed […]
Another Factor That Might Change Your Mind About Writing to Market Read More »
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” ― Flannery O’Connor From <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/315733-i-write-because-i-don-t-know-what-i-think-until> There’s a lot of hype around journal-writing for authors. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, calls journaling ‘Morning Pages’ and credits them with nothing short of creative miracles. In the early twentieth century, authors and writers
Diaries, Journals, Notebooks. What’s the difference? Read More »
Just a quick thought-prodding idea for today, from something I’ve found myself doing, lately. If you have a writing schedule, then it’s likely your brain knows exactly when you’re supposed to start. For me, that’s 5.30 am to get into yesterday’s edits, and I should be writing new manuscript by 6 am. But when you
Watch, thou, for thy mutant voice! Read More »
I’m pretty savvy with technology. I had the first computer out of everyone I knew–a for-gosh-sake Commodore 64, complete with printer and floppy disk drive. I ran a resume service using that computer. Yeah, really. Then I switched to an MS-DOS PC with a whole 20mb on the hard drive! Ooooh! I wrote stories using
How to Avoid A Puke-Making Disaster Read More »
Many years ago, I learned that many professional, full time writers have workstations dedicated ONLY to writing. All the other business of writing — bookkeeping, promotion, post production, etc — all that business was kept on a separate computer. Or computers. Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, in particular, are well known for have
A Dedicated, Unique Workspace. Read More »
I’ve tried standing desks. I’ve used sitting desks. And I’ve even used a device that would turn my sitting desk into a sit/stand desk, which only lasted for about a year before I gave it up and went back to sitting. In the last year, thanks to that global event we’re all so sick of
Make Your Writing Space Work For You Read More »
Only a short post this week as I’m seriously behind. Cal Newport has a long and interesting post about the use of ASMR in Immersive Single Tasking. (Along with a retro image of Bob Ross painting, which was what caught my attention in the first place.) Immersive Single Tasking is the new sexy in productivity,
Deep Focus While You’re Writing (or Plotting!) Read More »
Compiling your book into ePub and Mobi requires that the manuscript be in a text editor of some sort. It doesn’t matter if you use Vellum or Jutoh, or one of the many other epub compilers, or if you upload your book direct to the retailers and let them do the heavy lifting, you still
Formatting eBooks from MS Word Read More »
This post is a bit of an outlier, although it does have some relevance to productivity and prolificacy. I read Advantage: Harnessing Cumulative Advantage In The Winner Takes All Publishing Market in one sitting. It’s dense. It has charts and graphs and footnotes. It is not prescriptive (you have to deconstruct it carefully to figure
How to Woo Cumulative Advantage Read More »
There’s a “new” time management system doing the rounds, that I was tickled pink to learn I had already been doing all along. Sort of. Cal Newport (Deep Work), has launched his new time block planner, which is a paper planner designed to work with his time block planning system. There is a comprehensive video which
Time Block Planning Read More »
