Greetings everyone and welcome back! I hope the week is treating you well so far. I am slowly getting some of that sleep back, so hopefully I will be more awake than I have been. Admittedly yesterday was better than Monday, which means today should, in theory, be better than both! That's the scientific theory though, let's see what happens next.
Yesterday I got through one of the editing phases for 'Through the Broken Mirror' now if you remember correctly I said once you do that you should take a break and do something else for a little bit. So, technically I'm doing something else in that I'm going to work on getting 'Feathers of the Dead' out of that stupid notebook, but I know that I meant do something not writing related in order to give your brain a break. The reason I'm breaking my own advice is because next week I am on vacation and will have some 8 days or so to do just that, so I can take 3 days to get some work done if it means over a week of doing nothing afterward. I justified it you can't be mad!
When it comes to moving a story from a written format to a digital one, I don't know if there is a fast way to do it. At least I haven't found one, and if there is one that exists, PLEASE SHARE IT BECAUSE IT IS CRAZY. My hope is that it doesn't take forever and a year to get this done, mostly because I would like to get things finished before it takes another 2 years to release a book. If you are about to do what I'm doing, or are in the middle of it, please take to heart that you aren't crazy (well not completely, you're still taking something you hand-wrote that's potentially hundreds of pages long and deciding you want to type it now) and that it does take forever. I don't even remember when I started typing out 'Daughter of the Shackled King' but I remember it felt like it took far longer than it should have. Also don't panic because it's shorter than you were when it was written, that's going to happen too, this is all normal, it's just weird.
Part of me wishes there was a magical thing that would scan the pages for me and put everything onto a page instantly, but the only thing I can think of is how many mistakes I'd need to correct, and whether or not that would really save time in the end. I think overall it would, but time fixing things would probably make me want to kill something. Unless your handwriting is perfect anything that scans isn't going to recognize every word you wrote for what you intended (if those ATM's that scan checks have taught me anything) and yeah...I think I'd rather just type it.
I am really looking forward to 'Feathers of the Dead' though, even if it's the shorter (so far) between it and 'Daughter of the Shackled King' I got to have a lot of fun pulling from some of my favorite mythologies and playing with some more obscure references. I also got to play with my favorite ritual from Egyptian myth that the God I named my cat after, and his soon to be buddy, were both involved in, so there's that. So even if it drives me nuts, I am looking forward to it, and if you're doing the same thing you should too. You get to relive what is hopefully a really fun story for you, and get reintroduced to your world. If you don't enjoy that then maybe you need more than a few days off.
For now I will leave you with that. I will see you all when I get back from my much-needed break. If you all could do me a huge favor that would be appreciated; my Channel Manager at Smashwords is saying 'Rending the Seal' is available at all my different locations, however at least at Kobo it's not there. If you find the link elsewhere can you please send it to others or at least me so I can make sure it's available? That would be great! I just want to make sure there aren't any problems. Have a great rest of your week!
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Monday, May 12, 2014
05/12/2014 Magnificent Monday!
Hello everyone and happy Monday. I hope the weekend was nice to you. Mine was super busy, but it was worth it. Mother's Day was fun; got to spend time with my mom and also see a neat concert by the Seattle Rock Orchestra where they did the entire White Album. Right now though, I am very tired, since I don't feel like I had an actual weekend, but I just need to push through this week and I'll have a bunch of time off. Just need to make it there.
I've been doing a lot of thinking, and I have decided to make any posts of Friday a not-guaranteed thing. I will look for stuff when I have time, but with how infrequent they have been as of late, and with the last of time I generally have on those days, lately I feel like I have been shooting down everyone's expectations. I don't want to promise something that I can't deliver. At some point in the future I may switch it up so that the review post is on a different day of the week, but for now I am setting things up so that if it happens, which seems to be about once a month or so, it happens and it is awesome, but if there isn't a post then the world isn't shattered and I don't feel awful about disappointing people.
Part of it is that there is a lot going on for me and while I think I'm handling it, my brain is not letting me focus enough to actually comprehend reading in the morning as well. At least not to the locating something to read, read it, review it, then put the posts up everywhere. By the middle of the day on Friday typically I am a lot better, because it's the middle of the day, but I'm at work and well, no access to internet. Once things figure themselves out and/or whatever phase I'm going through is over we may go back to normal, but for now I think this is for the best.
Currently I am looking forward to next week. There will be no posts at all or that following Monday as I realized that is a holiday, due to my vacation. I have been needing this for so long and I just want some time to feel like I have very few obligations. Sure I will have a new kitty that I will flood the internet with pictures of, but other than that I don't want to have to worry about really anything else. I will also being going to the Lindsey Stirling concert on the 21st and I am just too excited for words.
For now I appreciate your understanding, and of course if you find a story you want me to review don't hesitate to send it to me and I'll look it over. It's just more that I'm not going to get up on Friday mornings and rush around the internet if I feel too tired to see clearly. I think that'll be best for now. Have a great start to your week though, I'll see you all back here on Wednesday!
I've been doing a lot of thinking, and I have decided to make any posts of Friday a not-guaranteed thing. I will look for stuff when I have time, but with how infrequent they have been as of late, and with the last of time I generally have on those days, lately I feel like I have been shooting down everyone's expectations. I don't want to promise something that I can't deliver. At some point in the future I may switch it up so that the review post is on a different day of the week, but for now I am setting things up so that if it happens, which seems to be about once a month or so, it happens and it is awesome, but if there isn't a post then the world isn't shattered and I don't feel awful about disappointing people.
Part of it is that there is a lot going on for me and while I think I'm handling it, my brain is not letting me focus enough to actually comprehend reading in the morning as well. At least not to the locating something to read, read it, review it, then put the posts up everywhere. By the middle of the day on Friday typically I am a lot better, because it's the middle of the day, but I'm at work and well, no access to internet. Once things figure themselves out and/or whatever phase I'm going through is over we may go back to normal, but for now I think this is for the best.
Currently I am looking forward to next week. There will be no posts at all or that following Monday as I realized that is a holiday, due to my vacation. I have been needing this for so long and I just want some time to feel like I have very few obligations. Sure I will have a new kitty that I will flood the internet with pictures of, but other than that I don't want to have to worry about really anything else. I will also being going to the Lindsey Stirling concert on the 21st and I am just too excited for words.
For now I appreciate your understanding, and of course if you find a story you want me to review don't hesitate to send it to me and I'll look it over. It's just more that I'm not going to get up on Friday mornings and rush around the internet if I feel too tired to see clearly. I think that'll be best for now. Have a great start to your week though, I'll see you all back here on Wednesday!
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
05/07/2014 Writing Wednesday!
Hello everyone and welcome back. I hope this week is being nice to you so far. I am pushing through my long week, thankful that I have tomorrow off, but not so much with all the work I have to do during that time. It'll all be worth it though, I just need to make sure it all gets done. My laptop seems to be working normally again too, which is great, a little frustrating because I spent that money, but still great. I have gotten back to work, so I am all ready to go.
Even if it was only for about a week, coming back to everything after that small break was like coming back with a really fresh and clear mind. I mentioned last week how surprisingly useful that video game time was, now it's time to see the benefits of it. Well, I get to see the benefits of it, since I'm editing, you all just get to hear about it I suppose. It would be weird to start posting pieces from my editing progress here, so I won't do that.
My brain didn't feel tired anymore, that was the biggest thing I noticed. I mean I'm still looking forward to my big bout of time off in a couple weeks, and during that time I plan on doing very little that's considered productive, but this was still nice. When I sat down and pulled everything I needed out it didn't feel like some unending chore to edit, it just felt like a piece of the process that needed to get done. That is a big step because editing drives me nuts sometimes.
I am seriously attributing this way of thinking to those few days of nothing. I know it seems silly, but like I mentioned before I had been editing pretty much constantly for over a year if not significantly longer and I just lost track of time, to be able to sit down and do something that had no baring on anything important let me brain finally relax. By the time I was fairly certain my laptop would charge when I came home from work I was ready to get back to editing and it didn't feel like some damning second job that I don't get paid for. I wanted to do it. That is the important piece of all of this; I wanted to edit the project.
For me I would rather write everything and have it all magically come out perfect the first time. As I'm sure every writer ever would. I find actually crafting the story and typing it out to be infinitely more enjoyable than the editing portion, which is why the fact the physical writing part is actually the smallest sliver of time in the whole 'writing project' pie chart makes me sad. That hasn't changed, because I still find writing super lots of fun, however at this moment editing doesn't make me tired, and I think it's because I needed that break more than I thought I did. Sure it was only for a few days, and a smart person with some kind of degree would insist I take a longer one, but that was what I needed at that time. So while I may not have talked about anything specific about writing today, take away from this the benefit of having a few days off; you come back refreshed like when you wake up from a nap and then have ice cream.
Thanks everyone for stopping by today. I will do my best to be back on Friday. As I mentioned in a couple weeks I will be on vacation. I'm not going anywhere, but I'm also not doing anything, so the blog will be on break too. That will be on the 19th through the rest of that week. For now I hope the rest of the week is super nice to you! Have all of the fun!
Even if it was only for about a week, coming back to everything after that small break was like coming back with a really fresh and clear mind. I mentioned last week how surprisingly useful that video game time was, now it's time to see the benefits of it. Well, I get to see the benefits of it, since I'm editing, you all just get to hear about it I suppose. It would be weird to start posting pieces from my editing progress here, so I won't do that.
My brain didn't feel tired anymore, that was the biggest thing I noticed. I mean I'm still looking forward to my big bout of time off in a couple weeks, and during that time I plan on doing very little that's considered productive, but this was still nice. When I sat down and pulled everything I needed out it didn't feel like some unending chore to edit, it just felt like a piece of the process that needed to get done. That is a big step because editing drives me nuts sometimes.
I am seriously attributing this way of thinking to those few days of nothing. I know it seems silly, but like I mentioned before I had been editing pretty much constantly for over a year if not significantly longer and I just lost track of time, to be able to sit down and do something that had no baring on anything important let me brain finally relax. By the time I was fairly certain my laptop would charge when I came home from work I was ready to get back to editing and it didn't feel like some damning second job that I don't get paid for. I wanted to do it. That is the important piece of all of this; I wanted to edit the project.
For me I would rather write everything and have it all magically come out perfect the first time. As I'm sure every writer ever would. I find actually crafting the story and typing it out to be infinitely more enjoyable than the editing portion, which is why the fact the physical writing part is actually the smallest sliver of time in the whole 'writing project' pie chart makes me sad. That hasn't changed, because I still find writing super lots of fun, however at this moment editing doesn't make me tired, and I think it's because I needed that break more than I thought I did. Sure it was only for a few days, and a smart person with some kind of degree would insist I take a longer one, but that was what I needed at that time. So while I may not have talked about anything specific about writing today, take away from this the benefit of having a few days off; you come back refreshed like when you wake up from a nap and then have ice cream.
Thanks everyone for stopping by today. I will do my best to be back on Friday. As I mentioned in a couple weeks I will be on vacation. I'm not going anywhere, but I'm also not doing anything, so the blog will be on break too. That will be on the 19th through the rest of that week. For now I hope the rest of the week is super nice to you! Have all of the fun!
Monday, May 5, 2014
05/5/2014 Magnificent Monday!
Hello everyone and welcome to Cinco de Mayo. I'm going to do everything I can to make this a coherent post. The rain was impressive last night and I'm pretty sure it woke me up every two hours so needless to say words are running together a bit. This is supposed to be a 'No Pop' day for me, but we'll see if it still looks like it's going to be that way when I get to my break time.
May is looking like it is going to be an absolutely ridiculous month. I just finished pet sitting for my parents while they were in Phoenix, which was nice because my cat over there is 16 and recently diagnosed with cancer, so I liked being able to see her. That little tabby has quite the set of lungs on her demanding self that is for certain. With mother's day this weekend as well I am looking forward to a Seattle Rock Orchestra tribute to the Beatles where they will be doing the entire White Album. After that it'll be trying to get through one more week then it's kitten time plus vacation, and my Lindsey Stirling concert. I'm excited, but right now I'm just trying to find time to sleep. I'm so tired.
My laptop, in all it's crazy glory, can't decide if it wants to be able to charge or not. However since I now have a back-up battery and external charger, it'll be back to work for me today. Having that break to just play a video game was amazing though, I really recommend everyone do that at some point. Just when you are about to get to another phase of your work, do something different that is completely unrelated for about a week. It is a great rest for your brain and I seriously didn't realize how badly I needed it. Today though it means it's back to work and I will be going into another editing phase for 'Through the Broken Mirror'. I want to think it's going quickly for this today, but I keep telling myself it's actually because it's somewhat shorter than the others. I'm sure once I actually get to a beta-reading portion and have to do major edits that it'll take just as long.
For now, I am going to be off. My goal for today is going to be to stay awake for as long as humanly possible. I really hope that works considering this is my long shift week. Don't forget, 'Rending the Seal' is available at 75% off with coupon VQ68M, and 'The Light Rises' is FREE with coupon ZE43N. These are good until May 25th, so check them out and tell everyone!
May is looking like it is going to be an absolutely ridiculous month. I just finished pet sitting for my parents while they were in Phoenix, which was nice because my cat over there is 16 and recently diagnosed with cancer, so I liked being able to see her. That little tabby has quite the set of lungs on her demanding self that is for certain. With mother's day this weekend as well I am looking forward to a Seattle Rock Orchestra tribute to the Beatles where they will be doing the entire White Album. After that it'll be trying to get through one more week then it's kitten time plus vacation, and my Lindsey Stirling concert. I'm excited, but right now I'm just trying to find time to sleep. I'm so tired.
My laptop, in all it's crazy glory, can't decide if it wants to be able to charge or not. However since I now have a back-up battery and external charger, it'll be back to work for me today. Having that break to just play a video game was amazing though, I really recommend everyone do that at some point. Just when you are about to get to another phase of your work, do something different that is completely unrelated for about a week. It is a great rest for your brain and I seriously didn't realize how badly I needed it. Today though it means it's back to work and I will be going into another editing phase for 'Through the Broken Mirror'. I want to think it's going quickly for this today, but I keep telling myself it's actually because it's somewhat shorter than the others. I'm sure once I actually get to a beta-reading portion and have to do major edits that it'll take just as long.
For now, I am going to be off. My goal for today is going to be to stay awake for as long as humanly possible. I really hope that works considering this is my long shift week. Don't forget, 'Rending the Seal' is available at 75% off with coupon VQ68M, and 'The Light Rises' is FREE with coupon ZE43N. These are good until May 25th, so check them out and tell everyone!
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
04/30/2014 Writing Wednesday!
Greetings everyone and welcome back! As tempted as I am to have every word is today's post be 'kitty' repeated over and over again, I will spare you from that special kind of hell. If you haven't guessed, we are working on getting a new kitty, and today I found out it will officially be only a couple weeks until then. I conveniently have a vacation coming up around that time, and then I'll get a new fuzzy kitty to play with! Kitty, kitty, kitty!
Ha! Tricked you! Don't worry, I won't fill the entire post with the word kitty. I wanted to talk about important things like letting your brain do other things even if it doesn't want to and will think its weird you go to do it. I bring it up today because I had the experience yesterday because my laptop is being stupid. Don't get me wrong, I love the thing, but it has decided the battery isn't charging, like almost every other laptop I've ever had, and on the HP forums there's no actual fix. After my fits of rage of having to do this again, for yet another computer even though it's not a Dell (though this one did last longer so...that's something), I am now waiting for a second battery and external charger for said battery. The thing is I am currently unable to bring the laptop to work while waiting, so I need to find something else to do, and my brain was super not happy about that.
I got to thinking about the importance of break time and everything because of a show they pretty much always have on at work during my lunch. Generally I take what they have on there with a few grains of salt because they are still paid to promote certain things, and medical shows I am always a little skeptical about, especially ones that are run by the same people that run Dr. Phil. However sometimes they are pretty entertaining, and once in a while they actually do have pretty good information and I think they actually do want to help people. One day they mentioned burn-out. Now, I listened to that because I actually do suffer from it, but it's more on an official work capacity because the idea of taking time off stresses me out because I am convinced if I do that, when I come back there are going to be a series of fires I'm going to need to put out. Yesterday I saw the same things happening with my editing though, and it freaked me out, which is why I needed to bring it up today.
I have been editing for...pretty much it feels like over a year. I think there were a couple spaces where I played a game (nothing will interrupt my Pokemon time) and NaNoWriMo happened at some point, but for the most part I was editing. Putting myself on some kind of schedule that was more 'this seriously needs to get done' and less 'this needs to get done by noon' was better, but that didn't mean I wasn't doing it. Now I am still editing, and while it is going smoothly, I am now to where I need my laptop to for further. So with me waiting for things like the mail, I brought my 3DS to work and it felt so weird! It was in that moment I realized that I needed that break so badly just to do nothing of importance. I'm not even playing a new game, I'm playing one that I have already beaten I'm just trying to see how close to 100% I can get. I could start Final Fantasy X or X-2 or Braverly Default, but I haven't because right now that is far too much effort. In some sense the only break I've had was playing Pokemon X (and man I played the HELL out of it) and that was months ago, and it was a gap between months of editing/writing while still working my normal job in the mix of everything.
Taking a break is so important because if you don't you will get so incredibly tired. Not in the 'it's midnight I should have gone to sleep a while ago' tired either. I mean mentally and emotionally so. The vacation I have in May is the first week off I will have that wasn't spent jobless in over a decade. If you are feeling frazzled, exhausted, somewhat irritable, or that you are just super done with something that is your normal routine, then take a step back and go do something different even for an hour. It will really help. It's going to feel weird because your brain is going to be confused, but you will feel a lot better once you're done.
Thanks everyone for stopping by today! Hopefully I'll be able to do stuff for Friday too. This week is just a bunch of running around for me, so we'll see. Remember, 'Rending the Seal' is available at Smashwords so check it out and use coupon VQ68M to get it 75% off!! For now, have a great rest of your week!
Ha! Tricked you! Don't worry, I won't fill the entire post with the word kitty. I wanted to talk about important things like letting your brain do other things even if it doesn't want to and will think its weird you go to do it. I bring it up today because I had the experience yesterday because my laptop is being stupid. Don't get me wrong, I love the thing, but it has decided the battery isn't charging, like almost every other laptop I've ever had, and on the HP forums there's no actual fix. After my fits of rage of having to do this again, for yet another computer even though it's not a Dell (though this one did last longer so...that's something), I am now waiting for a second battery and external charger for said battery. The thing is I am currently unable to bring the laptop to work while waiting, so I need to find something else to do, and my brain was super not happy about that.
I got to thinking about the importance of break time and everything because of a show they pretty much always have on at work during my lunch. Generally I take what they have on there with a few grains of salt because they are still paid to promote certain things, and medical shows I am always a little skeptical about, especially ones that are run by the same people that run Dr. Phil. However sometimes they are pretty entertaining, and once in a while they actually do have pretty good information and I think they actually do want to help people. One day they mentioned burn-out. Now, I listened to that because I actually do suffer from it, but it's more on an official work capacity because the idea of taking time off stresses me out because I am convinced if I do that, when I come back there are going to be a series of fires I'm going to need to put out. Yesterday I saw the same things happening with my editing though, and it freaked me out, which is why I needed to bring it up today.
I have been editing for...pretty much it feels like over a year. I think there were a couple spaces where I played a game (nothing will interrupt my Pokemon time) and NaNoWriMo happened at some point, but for the most part I was editing. Putting myself on some kind of schedule that was more 'this seriously needs to get done' and less 'this needs to get done by noon' was better, but that didn't mean I wasn't doing it. Now I am still editing, and while it is going smoothly, I am now to where I need my laptop to for further. So with me waiting for things like the mail, I brought my 3DS to work and it felt so weird! It was in that moment I realized that I needed that break so badly just to do nothing of importance. I'm not even playing a new game, I'm playing one that I have already beaten I'm just trying to see how close to 100% I can get. I could start Final Fantasy X or X-2 or Braverly Default, but I haven't because right now that is far too much effort. In some sense the only break I've had was playing Pokemon X (and man I played the HELL out of it) and that was months ago, and it was a gap between months of editing/writing while still working my normal job in the mix of everything.
Taking a break is so important because if you don't you will get so incredibly tired. Not in the 'it's midnight I should have gone to sleep a while ago' tired either. I mean mentally and emotionally so. The vacation I have in May is the first week off I will have that wasn't spent jobless in over a decade. If you are feeling frazzled, exhausted, somewhat irritable, or that you are just super done with something that is your normal routine, then take a step back and go do something different even for an hour. It will really help. It's going to feel weird because your brain is going to be confused, but you will feel a lot better once you're done.
Thanks everyone for stopping by today! Hopefully I'll be able to do stuff for Friday too. This week is just a bunch of running around for me, so we'll see. Remember, 'Rending the Seal' is available at Smashwords so check it out and use coupon VQ68M to get it 75% off!! For now, have a great rest of your week!
Monday, April 28, 2014
04/28/2014 Magnificent Monday!
Greetings everyone and welcome back. I hope the weekend treated you all kindly. Friday was exhausting, but it was still a good experience. Got some good potential prospects for future projects, so that will be interesting to see what happens with them. For now I am just going to relax and look forward to the rest of this week and hope today isn't too much of a disaster.
I say that because they are letting us do these self-governing think tanks at work. Right now the people who want to be 'in charge' but not actually 'in charge' don't particularly care for one another and one of them out right refuses to work with the other. Our first meeting turned very loud and incredibly passive aggressive. My only hope is that we can make some sort of progress or something that is reasonably looking like progress if you squint and turn your head to the side. I don't know if that will happen, but I can hope. Right now I'm just hoping not to get in anyone's way because this is a train wreck.
On the bright side things are going very well for 'Rending the Seal' so far. I made coupons for the craft fair, so please feel free to check it out and use the code VQ68M to get it 75% off. I am quite pleased with how this story turned out so I would like for everyone to pass it around as much as they can. I also made one for 'The Light Rises' that makes it free, XE43N, so toss that to people too please! I would really appreciate it.
For now I am going to have to get a move on. I have a lot of work to do today, some of which includes calling a billing company and getting answers over something I was just now sent from months ago. Needless to say, I am not happy. I hope you all have a great day and a nice start to your week. I'll see you back here on Wednesday!
I say that because they are letting us do these self-governing think tanks at work. Right now the people who want to be 'in charge' but not actually 'in charge' don't particularly care for one another and one of them out right refuses to work with the other. Our first meeting turned very loud and incredibly passive aggressive. My only hope is that we can make some sort of progress or something that is reasonably looking like progress if you squint and turn your head to the side. I don't know if that will happen, but I can hope. Right now I'm just hoping not to get in anyone's way because this is a train wreck.
On the bright side things are going very well for 'Rending the Seal' so far. I made coupons for the craft fair, so please feel free to check it out and use the code VQ68M to get it 75% off. I am quite pleased with how this story turned out so I would like for everyone to pass it around as much as they can. I also made one for 'The Light Rises' that makes it free, XE43N, so toss that to people too please! I would really appreciate it.
For now I am going to have to get a move on. I have a lot of work to do today, some of which includes calling a billing company and getting answers over something I was just now sent from months ago. Needless to say, I am not happy. I hope you all have a great day and a nice start to your week. I'll see you back here on Wednesday!
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
04/23/2014 Writing Wednesday!
Hello everyone and welcome back. I hope this week is treating you all well. I had a nice day off yesterday, so that was good. Now I just need to make it through today and tomorrow and everything should be fine. The final actual preparations for the craft fair will be done tonight or tomorrow (need to make coupons) and then everything should be ready. Still absolutely terrified, but I'm sure it'll be fine.
Since I'm fairly certain you didn't come here to listen to me talk about how the idea of talking to a constant stream of people sound really scary or how cute my cat is, I'll actually talk about something you care about. My cat is fluffy and cute though..just saying. As I work toward getting back into the came, I need to consider something, and that is how long it takes to move something from a notebook to a digital format. There is going to need to be time made for this, so I wanted to look at potential options for that today.
We talked last week how progress isn't always a straight line, and that sometimes it's this curvy, twisted mess that seems unending. That's how things are for anything I have written in a notebook. 'Daughter of the Shackled King' took a specific kind of forever to put into my computer because I didn't just sit down and work on that. I had a lot of other things to do at the exact same time. I can already see that starting to happen with 'Feathers of the Dead' and while I know there's going to be some of that, I want to try and organize some of the chaos.
So let's say you have something in a notebook you want to edit. That is really awkward to do without putting it into a more easily editable medium first, and in this day and age that means it needs to be typed. Back in the day it would mean putting it into a different notebook, so I guess we're making progress? Less hand cramps at the very least. The first thing you are going to notice, unless your handwriting matches your preferred font size exactly and the paper you're working with also matches the 'paper' on the screen perfectly, that things are not going to line up. You are going to be all excited because you will be suddenly on page 3 in the notebook, but only about 1/4 of the way into page 2 on the computer. Don't freak out, that is normal, but it will start throwing off how much progress you think you're making. It's fine, but we'll come back to that
The second thing that is going to lead directly into the third is that it is going to feel slow. Partially because it is, but also because if you're anything like me when you were writing things down by hand you started getting a bit impatient with things like exposition or 'details' and started just being kind of vague and jumped ahead a bit. You knew what was going on in your head when you wrote everything down, and sometimes your hand started to hurt or you were just getting frustrated with that scene and wanted to get to something else. Handwriting isn't a fast process, and if you wanted to make sure you could actually go back and see anything you put down you had to make sure those little squiggles on the page were words, so you were writing slower than you would have been typing. However, now what's going to happen since you're moving everything to a typed format is you are going to start filling in the gaps you knew you left in for one reason or another. This will make it so you might be on a paragraph on page 12 for a lot longer than you had anticipated. This causes forward progress to actually slow down a bit and you need to anticipate this going into the project because it's going to drive you crazy along with that other thing I mentioned before.
The page numbers are going to absolutely mess with you. As you start making more and more headway you are going to find that the pages in your notebook are getting way ahead of you. This is going to start tricking your head and along with everything else that's going on it is 100% not helpful. I remember thinking about how short 'Daughter of the Shackled King' was going to end up being and that started to stress me out because I couldn't understand how something so short was taking so long to get done. I was on page 45 in my notebook, but only page 23 on my computer, and that gap stayed until I was done. It didn't matter that I used a composition notebook to write in, or that it was double-sided and my handwriting was larger than the font, I was still convinced there was something very wrong. The whole process took forever too, but I was also working on other things too, but that didn't matter, it still felt like an eternity.
These are all things that can cause a person to just toss something out the window because they are super done with it. Just remember that you need to keep looking forward and that the important thing, when nothing seems to be connecting, is to use logic with it. The reason the page numbers don't match is because when you were writing by hand you weren't a robot and at times you felt kind of impatient and lazy, which is fine. It's slow going because you are looking at a notebook, back at a computer, typing maybe a sentence and then back at the notebook over and over again. That is not a fast process. The page numbers are messing with your head because your brain is a jerk, and we've already been over how it wants things to make sense and if it doesn't it gets uncomfortable and decides it doesn't want to try that hard. Just tell your brain it needs to shut up and keep working, with how long it's going to take it's only going to feel that more satisfying when you get it into the new medium.
Thanks everyone for stopping by. Wish me luck on Friday, as I am really nervous about it. Remember, tell everyone that 'Rending the Seal' is available at Smashwords, also the Barnes and Noble link is up, so that means you should be able to get it at the other retailers too, so start searching! Have a great rest of your week everyone!
Since I'm fairly certain you didn't come here to listen to me talk about how the idea of talking to a constant stream of people sound really scary or how cute my cat is, I'll actually talk about something you care about. My cat is fluffy and cute though..just saying. As I work toward getting back into the came, I need to consider something, and that is how long it takes to move something from a notebook to a digital format. There is going to need to be time made for this, so I wanted to look at potential options for that today.
We talked last week how progress isn't always a straight line, and that sometimes it's this curvy, twisted mess that seems unending. That's how things are for anything I have written in a notebook. 'Daughter of the Shackled King' took a specific kind of forever to put into my computer because I didn't just sit down and work on that. I had a lot of other things to do at the exact same time. I can already see that starting to happen with 'Feathers of the Dead' and while I know there's going to be some of that, I want to try and organize some of the chaos.
So let's say you have something in a notebook you want to edit. That is really awkward to do without putting it into a more easily editable medium first, and in this day and age that means it needs to be typed. Back in the day it would mean putting it into a different notebook, so I guess we're making progress? Less hand cramps at the very least. The first thing you are going to notice, unless your handwriting matches your preferred font size exactly and the paper you're working with also matches the 'paper' on the screen perfectly, that things are not going to line up. You are going to be all excited because you will be suddenly on page 3 in the notebook, but only about 1/4 of the way into page 2 on the computer. Don't freak out, that is normal, but it will start throwing off how much progress you think you're making. It's fine, but we'll come back to that
The second thing that is going to lead directly into the third is that it is going to feel slow. Partially because it is, but also because if you're anything like me when you were writing things down by hand you started getting a bit impatient with things like exposition or 'details' and started just being kind of vague and jumped ahead a bit. You knew what was going on in your head when you wrote everything down, and sometimes your hand started to hurt or you were just getting frustrated with that scene and wanted to get to something else. Handwriting isn't a fast process, and if you wanted to make sure you could actually go back and see anything you put down you had to make sure those little squiggles on the page were words, so you were writing slower than you would have been typing. However, now what's going to happen since you're moving everything to a typed format is you are going to start filling in the gaps you knew you left in for one reason or another. This will make it so you might be on a paragraph on page 12 for a lot longer than you had anticipated. This causes forward progress to actually slow down a bit and you need to anticipate this going into the project because it's going to drive you crazy along with that other thing I mentioned before.
The page numbers are going to absolutely mess with you. As you start making more and more headway you are going to find that the pages in your notebook are getting way ahead of you. This is going to start tricking your head and along with everything else that's going on it is 100% not helpful. I remember thinking about how short 'Daughter of the Shackled King' was going to end up being and that started to stress me out because I couldn't understand how something so short was taking so long to get done. I was on page 45 in my notebook, but only page 23 on my computer, and that gap stayed until I was done. It didn't matter that I used a composition notebook to write in, or that it was double-sided and my handwriting was larger than the font, I was still convinced there was something very wrong. The whole process took forever too, but I was also working on other things too, but that didn't matter, it still felt like an eternity.
These are all things that can cause a person to just toss something out the window because they are super done with it. Just remember that you need to keep looking forward and that the important thing, when nothing seems to be connecting, is to use logic with it. The reason the page numbers don't match is because when you were writing by hand you weren't a robot and at times you felt kind of impatient and lazy, which is fine. It's slow going because you are looking at a notebook, back at a computer, typing maybe a sentence and then back at the notebook over and over again. That is not a fast process. The page numbers are messing with your head because your brain is a jerk, and we've already been over how it wants things to make sense and if it doesn't it gets uncomfortable and decides it doesn't want to try that hard. Just tell your brain it needs to shut up and keep working, with how long it's going to take it's only going to feel that more satisfying when you get it into the new medium.
Thanks everyone for stopping by. Wish me luck on Friday, as I am really nervous about it. Remember, tell everyone that 'Rending the Seal' is available at Smashwords, also the Barnes and Noble link is up, so that means you should be able to get it at the other retailers too, so start searching! Have a great rest of your week everyone!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)