Daily Content and a Publishing Schedule

While reading The Millionaire Messenger (and yes, eventually I will stop mentioning that book), it occurred to me that if I really want to sell books, I need to do more than just write books, or writing articles or stories when I wanted to sell a book. Having brought up the book so much, and thought about it a lot, I got the idea to publish The Winter Folk over the period of December.

It was a no-end-in-sight plan. Not that it had no end, but that I wasn't doing it for a particular reason other than: (1) I wanted to do something nice in the run up to Christmas and (2) ParagraVerse has been awfully lonely, lately. So, I wrote it as twelve-part poem, to help make it last longer while my work schedule picked up.

As it happens, the poem created its own end.

In the writing of it, I began to think about how interesting I might find the story to write. In particular, I wanted to write the story of the Ice Queen. The world has seen Jack Frost. The world knows all about Santa Claus. But the Ice Queen... well, any time there's a queen or a witch who dresses in white and surrounds herself in ice or snow, she seems to be a villain.

Not for me, not this time.

So, that's what I'm writing now. The Ice Queen. It's a short story. I'm hoping to publish it for Kindle later this month. I'll need to design a cover, soon. And write the two flash stories I want to publish this month on ParagraVerse, too. All of this, out of a little wish to write a poem and make it last.

I hadn't even been set on writing this, until yesterday. And even then, I only thought about it. It wasn't until I actually sat down to plan a schedule that I also decided to plan the book. The schedule was for daily content online this month. I know I missed December 1st, but from then on out I've got things in mind. The Winter Folk helps by taking up half the days between now and Christmas. Thankfully, the poem also sparked a book which sparked a couple of other pieces that need to go online.

Somehow, the poem created a published schedule around itself.

It wasn't the practice I had in mind, but that's fine. At least I know in January, when I get to work on a campaign towards launching another book, I'll have an idea of how best to follow through on my ideas. Scheduling is definitely of benefit to me. It's basically the only way I'm managing this right now.

Anyway, my original plan for daily content, now fully completed, is seeing the following going online:

- 8 blog posts,
- 9 videos,
- 2 flash stories,
- 2 poems - one in 12 parts, and
- 1 ebook.

How much of this is written or prepared? Less than half. How much will be prepared in advance and pre-scheduled? More than half. And how much of it is going to be fun to put together?

I'm going to go with just about all of it.

What this all boils down to is releasing a lot of content that I find interesting, setting new challenges for myself on a regular basis, writing about what I know and, with the exception of the ebook, making it all free for anyone to look at. I think it's a fair deal, getting all of that for nothing and having no obligation to buy the story in the end. And if you enjoy yourself along the way, all the better. That is the point of this sort of stuff, after all, to provide some entertainment.

If all goes well, I'll keep up this sort of thing in 2014, and not just because I'll be releasing new books in the future. This is the essence of The Millionaire Messenger, I think, or part of it at least. The best way to reach an audience is to give people something for nothing, and tell them that there's also something they can buy if they want. The point, though, is that the "messenger" is passionate about what they're talking about.

I think in this case, that goes without saying.

(P.S. If you want to keep up with everything I post this month, Twitter is probably your best bet. You can find me @writeranonymous.)

Do I Need a Tablet?

I've decided to save up and buy a tablet computer. But not an iPad. It just doesn't appeal to me.

To help me on my way, I counted the money in a jar in my room, with the money in a chest in my room, and the coins from my wallet. A surprising sum total of €42.73. So that's fun. Obviously nowhere near my target, but I can put money aside every week to get this. Because let's be honest: I really want a tablet.

I need to be able to write on the go, and a laptop isn't exactly convenient to bring into college every day in 4th year. Mine has a 15.5" screen, so it's a tad on the big side.

Yes, I am trying to justify this.

So here's some more justification: I'll be in college a lot with Drama this year, again. It won't do to have to carry the laptop bag with me every night from the bus stop, and I can't attempt what I did last semester, putting my laptop into my regular bag with everything else. The bag didn't survive that...

Something lighter, and something I don't need to plug in to be able to use all day, is exactly what I need to get my work done. I won't be formatting everything on the tablet, but I won't need to. There are computers in college. Just not where I need them to be (i.e. in the canteen, or in the lecture room where we rehearse).

I also need to be able to write on the bus. When the traffic gets heavy in the morning, I'm generally left with nothing to do. Reading is mostly out of the question, because pretty much everything I bring to college is overtly religious. That's not fun exposure to the world. Especially not when the only thing I have is a Bible.

We'll move swiftly on from there, shall we?

I'll get a lot more work done with a tablet. That's just a fact. I'll keep it clear of games, if I can. They're not a good use of my time. I'll probably put a puzzle game on it, or something, just in case I'm too tired for work but not wanting to waste an hour of my life on something else.

Also, Internet access. My iPod is okay, but it's old and it refuses to do most of what I want it to do. And, you know, no camera.

Have I convinced you that I need this, yet? Let's look at my regular day from last year:

Up early. Early enough to get a bus at 8. I can't wait much longer, or I'll get stuck in traffic. If I miss the 8 bus, I'm twice as long getting into college.

Lectures started at 9 or 10. I'll need something to do before they start. In fact, I really have to do something before they start. I would usually end up on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter in the morning, until someone else came along.

Lunch. An hour and a half of talking to friends, attempting to get work done, Drama, or a mix of all three. Work is significantly more difficult when it involves finding a place to set up a laptop.

After lecturers, but before Drama, I had a two or three hour wait. I usually filled this in the same way I filled the morning: meaning to do work, ending up on social networking sites.

After Drama: a bus ride home.

Basically looking at a lot of time to use the tablet in the day when I instead used my laptop. And, you know, this would be much more convenient. Not just for setting up for work, but also to carry into college. My laptop bag gets annoying after a while, and I hate being stuck with it at my feet all day in college. It's caused more than one person to trip in the past.

How about now? Are you convinced?

I am. I am definitely going to save up for this. I need it. Or, I perceive that I need it. And if either of us need any more persuasion...

My childhood clearly wants me to do this.

Camp NaNoWriMo (and why you don't have to wait)

There's been a lot of discussion lately about Camp NaNoWriMo - a summer camp version of National Novel Writing Month (which I failed spectacularly at last November due to a lot of college work and various other things flying around in my head...). The details are still sketchy, but from what I can gather, here's what we've got so far:

• There will be a new site for the camp experience.
• The challenge isn't set in stone to 50,000 in 30 days, like NaNoWriMo normally is; the exact words I've read are, "It's not limited to months with 30 days, I'll tell you that much." I gather from that that rather than the event being a month long challenge, it's a summer challenge. You stick around for as long as you want. You don't just pop along for a month and then go away until November (or do two months in a row...). But like I said, it's not set in stone.
• There is no free printed copy of your book when you "win"; the sponsors have to offer that, and so far they haven't.

So, that's what we know about Camp NaNoWriMo. That's not why I'm writing, today, though. No, I'm writing to discourage people from waiting for the event to start before they write. They can squeeze 50,000 words out in a month, right? So why not keep writing throughout the year? Why do people need the site to keep writing?

They like the community experience, right?

They like the way the website keeps track of their novel as they go along?

So why not just do that themselves? There are these new things called Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter and Facebook that allow people to tell their friends how they're doing. People want a community? There are loads there. There are writing forums dedicated to regular people writing whatever they want. I ran one for two years. Last summer I wrote about 60,000 words. I didn't need NaNoWriMo to get me to do that. I just wrote, and I posted stuff on Facebook to say how I was doing.

This summer? Well, I'm not waiting for Camp NaNoWriMo. I've already started to write a book, and I'm enjoying it. If I finish it in time to "go to Camp", then I will. But I won't organise when I write around a single time of the year. And do you know why? Because I like writing. I like to do whenever I feel like it, and not just as part of some challenge. My first and third novels that I completed were done outside of NaNoWriMo. My novellas were written last summer. My current book is being written despite Camp NaNoWriMo on the horizon.

And you know what? I'm not the only one who writes like this. I'm not the only person who writes because they enjoy to write, and who does it whenever they get the time, not when a website tells me to. One of my college friends texted me the other day to say she'd stayed up all night writing half her book. Darren Shan, popular children's author, writes a minimum of ten pages a day. Most authors on the bookshelves all around the world wrote their books when they wanted to, when they had the time, and not when a website told them to write. If everyone waited to write then, then there wouldn't be so many books in the world.

I'm not downplaying the importance of NaNoWriMo, of course. I'll still enter, if I find my time not-so-consumed this year. I'll do my best to write a book in a month, like everyone else. And that'll be for the fun, for the competition. But that doesn't mean I'll stop writing once NaNoWriMo is done, never to write for the next eleven months until it starts again. No, when I stop writing after NaNoWriMo, it'll be because I'm preparing stuff for teaching practice and putting the finishing touches on my final assignments for the semester. But once I'm free of all that work, I'll be writing away again. It's my hobby, all year 'round. And, you know, hopefully it'll be my job. Most people don't just work for a single month, then edit a few months later, then call it a day. Most writers can't afford to do that. They have to write continuously just to buy food to put on their tables.

Write for fun, all the time. Sell for money whenever you can. Don't get trapped in a cycle of writing and editing whenever a website tells you to. But, if you must, take advantage of the encouragement to get the writing done. It's still a worthwhile task, so long as it's not your only one.

Daily Writing

This blog post comes as a response to Alison Wells' blog post on the same topic; writing every day - good or bad?

During Lent, I gave myself the challenge of writing something every day. A lot of this was blog posts, poems, college work and editing (the latter being stuff I was adding to the draft). The book I was working on, mostly, was Meet Sam, which is, by now, my case study on writing. I wrote that during NaNoWriMo 2008; come 2009, the same challenge was quite as fun.

This brings me to my point - if we start to write every day, we might like it. If we force ourselves to, then the odds are that we most likely will stop liking it, because it will seem like a chore. Nerd as I am, I don't like chores, and I don't want to make writing a chore. Heck, I started writing to avoid trouble, to avoid doing things I didn't want to do, to say things I couldn't say otherwise.

Most days, I do write. But I write as the ideas come to me with the correct words, not when I get an idea and think it has to be written down straight away. And, oftentimes, an idea won't have the right words for a while. Sure, one of my lecturers gave me tips on how I might improve Meet Sam, based on her reading of it and other books (many other books), and I agreed with her; one of the areas was in the development of some of the other characters, especially the father, the mother and the cousin.

Ignoring the parents for now, as I'm yet to work them out properly, I only recently, last couple of days stuff here, figured out how I might expand on the cousin's story. The answer has been right there with me for months, talking to me, telling me all about itself - even before I met him, my friend Liam was the cousin in the book. Freaky stuff to realise, but very useful to know, if he's willing to help me get this done properly. (note: based on an excited and hilarious text, I think he's willing)

That's the best example I can give for letting ideas settle: it can take a long time. That book was written a long time ago, and I didn't know then how to fix it, or how to fix it when I'd first met the guy. It wasn't until a year and a half later, still thinking about the book, that it came to me. Now, I'm not going to say it's always like that. Even for me, it's not always like that. I get words to poems in my head spontaneously, and an hour later they fit together in the right order. Once it was just an image in my head that turned into words. Another time a feeling in my gut. They didn't all take a lot of time to come to fruition.

The point I'm making is that if we push ourselves to write every day, it doesn't necessarily mean you'll write what you wanted to. Part of being a writer is not writing. It's in the living of an event, of life, to get the answers you're looking for. I had all but stopped looking for ways to improve on the character, until the realisation hit me. I know that if I'd tried to force it, it would be rubbish. That's a fact. My 2009 NaNoWriMo novel attests to that. It became over-ambitious drivel, because I attempted to write a book I just wasn't feeling, every single day of November.

So what's my advice? Well, if you plan on doing NaNoWriMo, be prepared to write something you're not happy with. Once it's written, find someone whose reading you trust and ask them to read it and give you some sort of advice to help towards making the book more complete. If they find a character is lacking in, well, character, then you know where to try improve upon. If they find that something is too weakly expressed, or that something could do with more attention, then you know what to work on. Plan your novel in advance, if that's how you work, or go by spontanuity that hope for the best. All I can say is, if you plan on forcing yourself to write every day, not all of it will be great fun. Eventually you will burn out, and you'll have to take a break.

Let yourself rest.

Writing burn-out sucks. It can take days, even weeks, to recover properly. The bad part? Regular-life stress can do the same thing. After exams, I recommend writers to take a destress period. But try write something small every day. Something insignificant, by the way. It will be just something to keep words in your head. Keep a diary. Then, when the ideas slot themselves into place, and "the muse" comes back around, write. Write until your heart's content. Don't over-do it, though. (Over-doing it, by the way, is forcing yourself to write when you really can't think of anything. Unless you're coming up to a deadline you're contractually obliged to, I don't recommend it.)

And with that, and my own lack of being able to write anymore for increasing exhaustion, I bid you adieu, and good luck. May you write freely and happily for all of your days.