Monthly Archives: June 2008

American Idol, for Writers?

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I’m talking about WeBook, a site I ran across the other day through StumbleUpon. From their about page…

Webook is an “online book publishing company, which does for the industry what American Idol did for music.”

That’s a pretty interesting intro, don’t you think? From browsing around the site, it looks like you can start a project, collaborate with others on projects, and vote for projects (the American Idol part). I haven’t joined, but I’ll keep it in the back of my head. Right now I’m more focused on finishing my novel than getting started with something like this.

Any members out there?

If you like this post, please take a second and use the buttons below to submit it to StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. I’d appreciate it!

Weekly Goals

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Keys

Photo by Martin Kingsley

I’ve been lax in posting (and achieving) weekly goals for my writing. I do think it helps me get more done, however, so here we go again.

One thing you might have noticed is that I usually set goals that are a bit higher than is reasonable. I know that it’s not likely that I’ll do everything on my list, but having a long list means that I’ll accomplish more in the long run than if I’d set a reasonable goal in the first place. Make sense?

Think of it like this. If you were going to train to compete in a triathlon, you’d train harder than you would if you were training for a 5K. You might never get to the point that you can do a triathlon, but I’ll bet you’ll be in better shape than if you’d shot for the 5K only.

And here are my goals for the week.

  1. Spend one hour writing every morning before work (see my post on Rising Early to Write)
  2. Write 11 blog entries for my three blogs
  3. Spend two hours EDITING the novel (in addition to the time I spend writing)
  4. Spend two hours networking and promoting the blogs
  5. Write two articles to sell on Constant Content
  6. Work on the Zombie short story I started a few months ago
  7. Go through my e-mail

Ambitious, yep. But I guarantee I’ll get LOTS of that finished by next weekend. So, set some ambitious goals and see how well you do.

Rising Early to Write

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Rise Early to Write
Photo courtesy of clemson

I’m finally going to do it. Really. For sure this time.

I’m going to start getting up an hour early in the mornings to write. And I’m going to keep you updated here on the blog (to help keep me on track).

I’ve been frustrated for a while at my writing time. I don’t get home until 5:30 or 6:00, and my writing is crammed in to my evenings with everything else I need and want to get done. I’m surprised that I get as much accomplished as I do some days.

So, I’m doing to give this a try for a month and see how it works out.

My rules…

  1. Spend the 1 hour WRITING, not reading, networking, e-mailing, etc.
  2. I can write blog entries, short stories, articles, or work on the novel
  3. No editing allowed, just writing
  4. I’ll track my word count progres
  5. I’ll update the blog frequently (every couple days or so) to let you know my progress

I’ve also set a goal to finish the novel I’m currently working on by the end of July. That’s a lot of work right there, so having an extra hour a day will come in handy.

Anyone care to join me?

Novel Writing Software

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Novel Editing

Photo courtesy of mysticchildz

I’ve been working hard at finishing/editing my novel, and I just had to share a nice little piece of software that I found.

YWriter

If you’ve been looking at Scrivener and can’t use it because you’re not on a Mac, this might just be the answer.

It has the storyboard layout that I’ve been looking for. You can drag and drop scenes and rearrange them easily, which also means all the text associated with the scene moves too. This is much easier than copy/paste in a word processor.

The thing that really sold me was that it will import works in progress. Go through your existing document and make sure chapter titles are “Chapter 1″ etc. Then, put “* * *” between scenes. (Note, that’s *space*space*). Save your file as RTF.

YWriter’s import tool will bring it in and automatically split it into chapters and scenes. How cool is that?

Writing Prompts

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Writing Prompt

Image Courtesy of Kiwanja

It’s been a while since we did any writing prompts, so I thought it would be fun to do a few.

  1. What was the best summer vacation you ever had?
  2. What did you like best about summer break?
  3. What did you miss most, or least, about school?
  4. When did you see the ocean for the first time?

Here are a couple story starters as well.

  1. Janice pulled her ragged flannel shirt tighter around her middle despite the oppressive heat. The bus wasn’t crowded, and she found a seat near the middle. It smelled of sweat and perfume and reminded her of her mother.
  2. When Frank opened the door to his apartment, he sensed something was wrong. He flipped on the too-bright lights. Everything seemed in order, even the change he had left on the table was untouched. The refrigerator hummed softly, and he watched as his cat padded across the linoleum.

While we’re at it, let’s get outside and do some writing. No need to stay couped us, is there?

Social Media Update

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Social media sites can be a great way to promote your blog. However, choose one that fits in with your site’s content and tone. For example, Digg is a great site, but it would be a bad fit for most of my content.

I tend to use StumbleUpon and Twitter primarily. I try not to bombard by followers/friends with links and posts, but many of them are nice enough to Stumble my posts when I do.

The one thing I recommend about using any social media site is to spend time really socializing and contributing before trying to get something back. Many of the people who frequent these sites are very attuned to what they consider “spamming,” and it’s all too easy to seem like you’re in it just for yourself. Remember, these sites are intended for everyone’s use and enjoyment, not as a marketing tool.

If you’re interested in following me, here are some of my social media identities.

Twitter: cornerscribe

StumbleUpon:  cornerscribe

Ravelry: jkay

Please feel free to leave your identities below, and I’ll reciprocate.

Running a StumbleUpon Campaign

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I recently bought a small StumbleUpon campaign for one of the posts here at Corner Scribe. I did it without much research or planning; I just picked a post I thought was good and bought $10 of StumbleUpon traffic.

The results… I’m not really sure.

I got about a 4 percent thumbs up rating, which was lower than I’d hoped for. However, since it’s my only campaign, I don’t have anything to compare it to either.

I didn’t promote the campaign other than buy the visits. From time to time I’ll promote my content on twitter, stumbleupon, entrecard, etc. and drive more traffic and stumbles that way. I deliberately chose to not do that in this case because I wanted to see how the post fared all on its own.

I didn’t include images, although I know now that Stumble users tend to prefer posts with them. Next time, I’ll try that.

Next time, I’ll also experiment with putting the same article in multiple categories; I know that that can have a big effect on how well a campaign goes.

If you’re interested in running a StumbleUpon campaign, you’ll pay $5 per 100 visits. Yes, that’s a bit high, but the potential is there for your content to get thumbs-upped and really take off. Here are a couple links you might find helpful.

Problogger gives some advice on advertising using StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon Alerter is a great little tool that lets you track certain posts and see how many times they’ve been voted up, and by whom. By the way, if you have trouble getting it to run under Windows Vista, right click the shortcut, choose properties, and set it to run as Administrator. That did the trick for me.

Time Wasters

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Humorous Pictures
more cat pictures

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the things that I do that take time away from what I’d rather be doing (writing.) I’m sure many people have the same issues I do. I fall into a rut and find myself spending lots of time doing things I shouldn’t be doing.

  • Television. This is a gigantic time suck. The one solution is to quit watching so much darn t.v. Of course, that’s easier said than done sometimes. If you’re like me, then you actually LIKE television (some of it anyway). So sue me. My solution is to watch only things I really like and stop just watching because something is on. I use Netflix and MythTV (like TiVo for geeks) to have better control over what and when I watch.
  • Tweaking. Spending an hour searching for new wordpress themes isn’t really productive work. Neither is any number of blog-related activities I spend time on. I’ve started asking myself if what I’m doing will really help get me where I want to be.
  • Networking. Don’t get me wrong, real networking is good. Spending two hours chit-chatting on twitter probably isn’t good. I’m not saying that I never take time to have fun, but I don’t kid myself into thinking that I’m doing something writing-related when I’m not.
  • Reading Blogs. I love keeping up with lots of blogs, but I can easily use an hour or two this way without realizing it. About once a month, I go through and start purging my RSS feeds. If I haven’t read a blog in a month, and I haven’t really missed it, chances are it’s going to get removed.
  • Research. Real research is great, but sometimes I find myself spending way more time “researching” than what is needed. If I’m honest, I’ll recognize that what I’m doing is avoiding getting started on the real work.

When it comes right down to it, most of these are often forms of procrastination. It can be tough to settle down and get busy, but it’s well worth it. What are some of your biggest time wasters?

Getting Organized

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If you’re like me, you have writing ideas, to-do lists, reminder lists, etc. to keep track of. Here’s a little piece of free software that you might find useful.

Tiddlyspot

This is an online organizational tool that’s free to use. It’s based on GTD (Getting Things Done), but it will work with your own methods too. I use this kind of setup to organize my writing into projects. A project might be a short story or novel, an article, a query. It might be something not really writing related, like maintenance on the blog, networking with other bloggers, ad campaigns, etc. If you’re going to work on something that takes more than one task to complete, it’s a project in my organization system.

I then list out all the tasks for that project. A short stories list might look like this…

  • Finish writing rough draft
  • Do research on medical conditions that cause convulsions
  • Find two or three appropriate markets

A project list for the blog might look something like this…

Improve blog SEO

  • Research SEO plugins and choose one to install
  • Add plugin for Related Posts
  • Change post titles
  • Find new theme to install
  • Announce new theme and downtime on blog

I store tasks in this system and ideas in another, Google Docs. When I have an idea for an article, I make notes in a new Google Document. Sometimes that’s no more than a title, but other times it’s the skeleton of an article. I divide articles and short stories, novel ideas, etc. into folders, one for each story, novel, or blog. When I need an idea, I have some already there, ready to be used.

There’s one more benefit to using these systems; both are online and available anywhere you have internet access. Log in for five minutes at lunch and makes a few notes, work from home or on the go, even jot down some ideas from your mobile phone. This is a great way to get your writing life (or regular life!) organized and track your ideas and projects.

Of course, I still carry my moleskine, for times when I just want paper or the internet is inaccessible. I like knowing that, no matter what, I have some method of collecting ideas and notes so that I won’t lose them.

Anyone want to mention other organization tools you use with success?