Day 5 My keyboard is still not fixed. My friend, the social media expert for my writing group, showed me on her keyboard what to change. The problem is, my keyboard doesn‘t look at all like hers. Hers is probably newer. We‘re great believers here that if something is broken you only replace it if it can‘t be fixed. Well, knickers to that! I may just buy a new keyboard to save my frayed nerves. However, my son did figure out somehow that if I press shift and 6 I get a ? Ta-da! So I‘m getting a badge at least from all this (insert expressive word here) bother – Thank you, Ben, for helping me with my noveling 🙂 Now how do I fix the need to press Ctrl plus the quotation key and press it twice to get a ‘ ? Forget it -I‘m buying a new keyboard! And my novel is taking on a life of its own. It keeps changing what I wrote in the outline. I‘m not sure it‘s flowing right and I‘m highlighting things that may need revision later. I‘ve come to realize I need to observe life more. Plodding on. Total word count with all this messing around – only 6152 – way behind. Looks like I‘ll be working late nights and most of Saturday. Plod on beautiful Plotters and Pantsers! 🙂
Day 4 Still haven`t figured out how to change my É to a question mark! I looked it up in `help` and also online. Other people said it helped them – not me. I`m going to have a lot of editing to do when I`m finished! I took a lovely walk outside when I had my break today. I was in a t-shirt on November 4th – bliss. We have huge fish swimming upstream! Not an easy task. We have sections where the river is about six feet deep and has a fast current. Other parts are shallow with rapids. The poor fish. I`m not sure what they are. We used to think they were trout, but these guys are huge. I took videos of them to send out a query, but uploading them to Facebook was taking too much time away from my novel. Hey, do I get a badge for procrastinating by fish (insert your own question mark here, please). Still need to catch up a bit with word count, but I got my 5,000 word badge today – wahoo! Have a good sleep everyone 🙂
NaNoWriMo Daily Notes on Progress – or lack thereof!
NaNoWriMo Day 1
So this is my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. I decided to blog about the experience so you can make an educated decision if you’re thinking about doing it next year. And no – I don’t use a typewriter, but I liked the image and it was free. Here goes:
Day 1 It had to start on a Sunday, didn’t it?! I had decided to take Sundays off so I could go to church and visit family who I wouldn’t see otherwise because they work full-time. So here I was gearing up for the big event – my first NaNoWriMo – and I wasn’t even going to write on day 1! Fortunately, it was Daylight Savings Time and we turned the clocks back an hour, but not till 2am. So – aspiring to be a fringe fiction novelist – I figured out that the time between midnight on the Saturday and 2am on the Sunday, when the time officially changed, was no-woman’s land and up for grabs. I grabbed it and wrote furiously for two hours. I had to tell my inner-editor to pipe down several times, but I did manage 633 words – Wahoo!!! I need to catch up a bit tomorrow, on writing and sleeping, but writing a little more for six days should keep me on track. Fiction is a lot harder than Faction. (Oh dear, I seem to be losing the ability to find the right words. Bedtime).
Day 2 I started late because my son had a craving for French toast with cheese – a delicacy he came up with while at a restaurant yesterday. The chef wouldn’t cook one for him so he’d been wanting one ever since. Two French toasts with cheese later I set to writing. I already had 633 written from the Twilight Zone time of Saturday night, so I was feeling confident. “Just write away – don’t edit!” is what we’re told. Just get the 50,000 words written in abandon. Edit January and February. Ok by me, but sooooo difficult to do once you’re a writer. I also had to take time out to do my gardening responsibilities which I had procrastinated. So, with 15mins to spare before dinner had to go in the oven, I finished my word count for the day! Sweet bliss. Of course, I have no idea what I’m writing next, just a rough outline of start-middle-end. So I took some time tonight to research names for my antagonist. Yes, I’m learning all the big writing words so I know what people in the forums are talking about. See you tomorrow!
I thought I would spend the entire winter improving my social media and using it to market my books. Then I’d sell a lot of books and become successful, right? It turns out that all this social media takes a lot of time and drags me away from what I really want to do – write! How can I become a successful author if I don’t have time to write any books? It’s like a giant cake sitting on my laptop, and – though I like cake once in a while – I couldn’t eat a whole one without being, well – you know!
What do I get from all this social media stuff anyway? As time-consuming as it may be, I’ve realized through it all that I have in fact gained something. I’ve gained an online writing community. I’ve gained friends and colleagues along the way and followed mentors. So that’s what this blog is all about. Success doesn’t come overnight – for most of us anyway. We need to take it one bite at a time, savour the morsels of small successes along the way, and share a piece of the cake with someone every day. The task isn’t as daunting that way. Let me explain…
Each day, if I follow my writing schedule, I will have worked on one of the following:
My blog is where you’re at now. You can see what I’ve written in my past posts and you can follow me if you like. You can also follow my Facebook page and Pinterest boards. All of these social media sites are an interest/hobby and I can share a piece of my cake there without it taking a lot of time. I’m doing a small piece of marketing while having fun. It doesn’t seem like much effort or need to take up too much time (although do set your timer for an allotted amount of time if you tend to get carried away!). Occasionally someone will like what I’ve posted/pinned and buy one of my books because of their interest in what I’ve shared.
If you’re a writer – share a sentence from the novel you’re writing (no spoilers!) or an excerpt from an ebook you just published. How about pinning a picture that inspired part of your book? Or make a 30 second YouTube video of you reading part of your published book, as a teaser.
If you’re an artist, share a part of your sketch, or the colour scheme of your latest design.
Remember to keep it about your work – not what you had for lunch. (Unless you’re a blogger or author of recipes). Whatever your work is, that’s your focus. Each thing you share with others becomes part of your collection. Your collection becomes who you are as an author.
Even one minute each day to pin or post something will be 30+ things you’ve shared at the end of the month.
Turn each one into a couple of paragraphs and that equals a 30 page ebook!
10 ebooks becomes a 300 page novel!
See how that works? –
Piece of cake!
Lynne
Artist’s drawing of a gran (me) eating cake with her cat, by Crafyjoe on Free Digital Images
Lynne Collier 