A Writing Day

I am still working on trying to get more words on my WIP each day.

Seems I have settled into a routine when I write only around 500 words a day. Weekends are the worst because we have lots of things we like to do and some we don’t want on weekends. Weekends have often been zero word days, now I am trying to write some on both Saturday and Sunday, even if it only amounts to a page of 250-300 words.

Yesterday for the first time in quite a while I got close to 2,000 words – wish I could do that every day.

I am also trying to take more breaks,  get up and walk around more often as I write, might keep me fresh.

I am approaching 50,000 words on my WIP (work in progress, for my new readers) this book will end under 60,000, which means I am getting close. But then ugg, editing. 

Along with my writing, I have been able to get out for a few hours with my camera. Photos were all taken this week and within a few minutes of our house.

Here is the link to all my books on Amazon

Words

I have always been a goal setter, but not much of a New Year’s Resolution writer. When I did try to set a resolution or two, they were often so general that even if I reached them, I would not know. Things like, exercise more, get in shape, or lose weight, really are not goals. This year I decided on one, and it is a writing goal. This year I will write at least 250,000 words.

How Many? - I follow one writer that consistently writes one million words a year. For me, that is unrealistic, I am much too lazy to work that hard. For three or four years, I wrote 200,000 to 250,000 words each year. Lately, that has slipped to 100,000. This year I am recording when and how much I write each day. In this case, when is what days, not the time of day. I am an afternoon and evening writer, not sure why other than when I worked full time that was when I wrote.

So Far - Through yesterday, I have written 41 of 52 days, mathematically about 80% of the time. Writing, on average, four out of every five days is not bad for me.  Total words this year, so far – 37,030 words. That puts me on pace for more than my goal of a quarter million words this year.

Keeping On – I know it might be tough to keep writing at this pace, especially when I get to the editing phase of books and stories I am working on. I also am an avid amateur photographer, taking upwards of 10,000 photos each year. Most of my photos I take with fixed lens cameras with good telephoto range. I use these because I take most photos while we are hiking, or from my pickup as we travel backroads and explore new places. My favorite camera is wearing out after 25 or 30 thousand shots. Looks like I will be ordering another soon.

Looking Ahead - Now we head into March, and at last, we have snow covering the ground. I have already started some of my seeds that will be nice plants by mid-May. Spring cannot be far away.

Photos – on this post, I took this week, and with my dying cameras, still works if I am patient enough. I do have a couple others, so am not camera destitute.

Have a great week, get outside, and enjoy the end of winter.

Edit or Self-Edit and Book Covers Too

I have been spending more hours than I want to count this week updating two of my book covers. I like the new ones, probably because I may have a better understanding now than I did when I built my first ones two years ago.  I am not going to re-do all of them, right now, but likely will do one or two more soon.

I am also back working on my nonfiction book. I took five months off to finish up some other projects and am now enjoying the research and writing of nonfiction once again.

At one time in my life, I spent a lot of time, often too much, editing other writers works. I don’t do much of that any longer as I mostly worked with historical nonfiction although I did take on a few fiction projects. Now I mostly edit my own. What am I getting to here? All the advertisements I get in the form of tweets or email offering, book doctor or editing services. Often the promo starts with a line telling all who read that there are so many, maybe millions, of books and eBooks for sale that are chalk full of errors. And, it’s possible there are, but I would rather read a book with a handful of errors than one that is perfect but without a good story.

 I have downloaded, read and enjoyed, self-edited books by several authors. All were people I follow online or on Twitter, and most were pretty good reads. I did not notice a multitude of errors in any of them and the things I noticed can sometimes be found in mainstream novels. As I said above, if the story is a good one, I will read it.

My point is not that books do not need a good edit, but that some self-edited books come out pretty clean. If you are writing a book and hope to sell a thousand copies, which is what you will need to sell to pay for a middle of the road priced editor. I mentioned book covers above, and good ones will help sell books if the book can be found among the 8,000,000 or so on Amazon. Once again writers like myself, who sell books, steadily but not spectacularly, need to be weary of not spending too much for the creation of a cover. I am not crazy about many of the new covers that seem to be black no matter what the subject, they all look the same to my old eyes.

Today’s photos are from my backyard.

Meanwhile, keep on reading and keep on writing.

Oh - one of the redone covers, this for my first kid's chapter book

Writing & The Month of March

I am still surprised at how many posts I see each day that have the same theme. The theme is always something like this - The five mistakes writers make, or, the six no no’s of writing in first person. They pretty much rehash the same things over and over. Seems like I remember a few years ago that bloggers were told to put a number in the blog title for more hits, I still see so many five of this, or six steps to this. Not sure if it works but still seems popular. 

Lately, it looks to me that writing books about writing or marketing are the way to sell books. I seem to get multiple tweets, emails, and links each day to this kind of information. It also seems that writing how to for a hobby or small business books could be a money maker. I see more and more of these often offered in eBook only format and many in the 15-80 page range. How much? All are priced from .99 cents to $2.99. Maybe I will give it a try.  How about, Living Uncomfortable on Retirement Income, or maybe for golfers, Turning A Fade into a Screaming Slice. Probably not, maybe a writing book, Hours and Hours of Writing Only to Start Over – Again.

Well, another month has come and gone, and my book sales were mediocre. My trial at giving away one of my novels met with moderate success and did give me a bit of an uptick in sales. I would recommend it to anyone who writes and is still building an audience.

I finished my first draft of my gardening book – it was fun and so different from what I am used to writing. This one will be a .99 cent eBook and likely an $8.99 soft cover. It gives both sound gardening advice and some fun to read garden murder mysteries. Not sure I have ever seen anything quite like this book. Here is a brief excerpt from the first chapter.

It’s Planting Time

Gardening should be fun. Most of the time it is, but where I live, at high altitude in Wyoming, it can sometimes be tricky business. Start the season too soon, and a gardener may find the garden snow covered by morning. Start too late, and the garden might be covered in snow before harvest. When the growing season is short, timing is everything.

So, when do you start? Tough question, easy answer. No matter if you are gardening at altitude, or in the lower areas of America’s heartland, start after the last snow and harvest before the first hard frost in the fall. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were that easy? Yes, it would, but, unfortunately,  it is not.

Can an experienced gardener predict the best time to plant every year? Ahh, no. But we can all find a way to understand when the time is right to sow those first spring seeds. The best way is to live in the same place for a long time, and then you will know, know the perfect time to plant. If you are new to the area, or if, like me, you forget what last year was like, or didn’t write it down anyway, here is a start.

In 2012, the USDA updated their Plant Hardiness Zone Map. This is the best way to start, all you need to do is type in your zip code and up it comes.

All Photos were taken Thursday in our back yard
It is looking like Spring, at least some days!