Part of being prolific is having a great many ideas for stories, from among which you can pick and choose what inspires you the most. Also part of writing quickly, is having plenty of resources at hand for ideas for characters and settings, story beats, personal ticks and characteristics, and much more. Quirky appearances, […]
How to Never Run Out of Ideas — For Anything Read More »
Following up on last week’s post, “How I Got Published, and What I Learned Along The Way“. I mentioned in that post that the book would be part of Kevin J. Anderson’s NaNoWriMo bundle for authors. The bundle is now available, and includes inspirational how-to books from a great many authors you’ll recognize: Joanna Penn,
A Dash Of Inspiration for November Read More »
Writing sprints, as reintroduced by Chris Fox in his book, 5,000 Words Per Hour, is one of the most useful tools for increasing your hourly word count. I use them regularly to increase my words per hour rate. I don’t use them all the time, for a number of reasons. I will go back
Tailor Writing Sprints to Maximize Flow Read More »
I have bought all the Stone Tablet Singles that Sean Platt, Johnny Truant and Dave Wright have put out so far, but this particular one I resisted. That’s because my mind was made up. I have, over the last decade, given dictation four serious tries. I mean, two or three books’ worth of trial, with
This Is Why You Should Never Say “Never”. Read More »
One of the most powerful techniques for increasing your word count is, simply, don’t click away. Avoid as much as you can alt+tabbing or clicking away from your manuscript. Interruptions chew up time, throw you out of flow and have the potential to divert you completely away from your story. BUT Particularly when you first start
Index Card & Notepad Hacks To Keep You Focused Read More »
Here’s a simple experiment you can try today and it only takes 30 minutes. Open up the book you’re currently writing. Grab a timer — IOS, Windows and Android all have built in timers/clock functions that can act as stopwatches and timers. If you don’t have one installed, there are a ton of free apps
Write 15% Faster Today Read More »
Do you have a fully developed Production Schedule, with release dates for the next year? Do you still find you’re skipping writing dates, and cramming an entire novel’s worth of writing into ten days before the deadline? Want to know a way around that? This was me up until a couple of weeks ago. The
How to Really Commit, and MAKE Yourself Write. Read More »
How paperless are your work processes? How close to completely paperless should you try to get? I’ve been as close to 100% digital as one get get, these days, and have been for many years. The only thing stopping me from 100% is the occasional paper letter that lands among the junk mail in
Handwriting and Efficiency Read More »
It’s likely this post will be late, because… well, let me explain that one. Yesterday was a day from tech hell. In this era of app integration, I’m still somewhat amazed that disparate apps can talk to each other and automate some amazingly complex processes. Yesterday, though, two of them decided to not play nicely
Don’t Let Overwhelm Overhwelm You Read More »
As today is World Backup Day, (yes, it’s really a thing) let’s talk about that. You only have to lose an entire book manuscript once, to learn to backup your data with multiple redundancies. Yes, I speak from experience. I can tell you that there is nothing as sick-making as the jolt you get when
It’s World Backup Day Read More »
