Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 10

Returning to the Office

With Labor Day 2022, companies are trying asking employees to begin commuting back to the work site. According to Fortune, this is an ongoing cultural change, especially among senior management. The employees already know things have changed and won’t be the same as it was before.

All the focus has been on what happens after you arrive at work and neglects the personal side, which is also impacted.

I started going into the office once a week, and there’s been the suggestion that next year, the company might require three days a week. But the once a week is already providing training in what to expect.

Waking up Early

Any commute means we have to wake up earlier so we can get on the road and battle traffic. Even setting your alarm clock back thirty minutes can make a big difference on how you feel when you wake up.

You might look at things you do in the morning and see if you can eliminate any, or do them later.

I always found it challenging because I had to eat breakfast so early. Preparing anything takes time—anything you can consume quickly probably won’t hold you until lunch. Oatmeal was particularly problematic. Contrary to all the advertising, oatmeal left me starving by 9:00, and then I would look for sugary food. I was already starting out my day with an energy management problem.

Over the COVID years, I started using the Fab 4 Smoothies ideas. I like this because I can make it the night before, and it’s portable. It also fills me until lunch time so I’m not looking for junk food at 9:00. When I telework my one day, I take the smoothie with me and drink it after I arrive at work.

So think about things you can try that will help you out when you get up. No one wants to sacrifice sleep!

Getting Out the Door

I was surprised at the impact of the simple task of leaving the home for work. I did it for many years. But I didn’t understand how stressful and chaotic it was because it had always been that way.

You’re thinking, “Did I forget anything?” or simply about getting there on time as a default. Add things like winter coats, weather, traffic…yeah, it adds up.

You can do some things to help alleviate the stress, though it doesn’t make all of it go away. Like setting out your clothes the night before so you’re not making a decision in chaos or preparing your lunch. I put my computer by the door and make sure my work cell phone are the bag. But since forgetting any of those is requires a return home, I check for the cell phone once I’m in my car.

It’s just something to expect and prepare for.

Commuting

If you’re in a big city, you have to deal with rush hour traffic, road construction, and the weather.

In Washington, DC, the area I live, it has some of the longest commutes in the country, according to NPR. When I used to live in Dale City, it was easily ninety minutes to drive into the District. My commute is now about thirty minutes each way, but that’s still time that won’t be available to me.

Start by thinking about your schedule, since you’ll have to make adjustments.

Eating

One of the things that struck me after COVID-19 shut everything down was how long making meals actually takes. I hadn’t quite understood that because I often treated meals as firefighting.

Lunch would be in the office. Unless you want to spend a fortune in the on-site cafeteria, that means prep time for the meal. You might have to buy a container, as I did. I do a salad, which is easy to drop into a large container. Add tuna or salmon pouches, apple cider shots, and Marconi olive oil pouches, and it’s meal. I did have to remember to pack a fork though, since I wasn’t sure I could get one onsite.

Dinner also becomes a challenge because of the commuting time. You’ll probably be tired. Then you come in and maybe have to make dinner. It’s easy to want to head down to the local restaurant, but that adds extra cost.

Start with doing minor prep work on the weekend. You don’t have to batch cook for the entire week unless it works for you. But cutting up all the vegetables doesn’t take long and saves a lot of time during the rest of the week. I invested in a knife skills class and am glad I did. It helped me get faster at preparing the vegetables.

In the Office

We’ve all been working at home for two years. The office is a big change because it’s a different environment.  I remember when the senior manager moved me from one cube farm down to another. The first one had been relatively quiet. The one I went to was hub of activity. My cubicle was near the copy machine and a major intersection where everyone went. I had to get used to the noise level.

The transition from the home office to the work office will probably be somewhat similar.

Finally…

There’s no once and done with preparing to go to work. Each day can present new challenges. All you can do is be aware that there will be challenges and do what you can to limit the impact of them.

Critical Voice Report Week 8

First up is a link to a Tik-Tok video that hits on intellectual property. A company offered an influencer essentially token pay to promote their product. Meanwhile, they can use what she creates on it for advertising, so she’s creating the content for their advertising for token pay.

No one respects the creators, so we have to be ever-vigilant.

This week:

I’m not going to break down this week by days. Saturday I was about to start writing Broken Notes again. Then it hit me that I was close enough to finishing Time Management for Fiction Writers that I needed to focus on that.

Previously, I’d been writing the short story, then cycling on Time Management. I felt that if I continued that process, it would be another month before I got it done.

So I cycled through the entire book. Critical voice surfaced to say, “But you’re not writing Broken Notes! How will you get a book done by the end of October?” It conveniently ignored that I would have a book done by the end of October if I focused on cycling!

I spent most of the week getting truly sick of cycling through it. I don’t count words during cycling because it would create more critical voice problems. Words always come out, and they get added. I’ve previously tried to count words by pasting what I cut out into an extra file. That just feeds critical voice.

Plus cycling on non-fiction is different than cycling with fiction. I had to fix chapter openings, fuss with Microsoft Word wanting to turn chapter numbers into bullets (and then screwing the numbering up), and make sure I’d accounted for all the books I’d used as a reference.

One week from Saturday (today), and it’s done.

It’ll still need another proofreading pass for typos I probably introduced during the cycling. But it can sit a week or two for that. I’m looking at a February release date for it.

Space Dutchman is also back from the continuity editor, so I’m going to focus on getting that ready over the next few weeks. Critical voice says that I could spend an entire day and get it all done. It’s a lot of work, and my brain would short-circuit if I spend all day on it.

Meanwhile, I also did a major refresh on my Digital Minimalism book. Originally, I’d purchased a pre-made cover so I could put it out in print. But I needed to replace it. It was a risk for me to do it, since the book is selling well. But it was also a risk leaving it as is because I didn’t ask them for the license for the cover.

Besides, I like mine better than theirs!

Naturally, critical voice jumped in when I decided to do the refresh. It declared that the information was out of date (especially after I wrote the Time Management book). It actually wasn’t, except for two links that were bad.

Next up? I’m shooting for getting more done with Broken Notes.

Then I’ll bring in another project that’s been sitting: Research for Fiction Writers, out of the Pantser Rebellion series.

Critical Voice Report – Week 7

This week was chaos. I’m not sure what it was. Maybe it was the weather. Everyone just started gulping down crazy pills like they were chocolate.

But it might have had a lot to do with a decluttering I did over the three-day weekend. I mostly threw junk out. I grew up in the era where you used everything until it fell apart or you donated it. But with thrift shops being a lot more more picky, I’ve been tossing things instead.

Saturday

Broken Notes – 825. And it was a slog to get through. Always slow in the early part of the book. I don’t know the characters yet and it takes a bit of time to warm up.

I also refreshed Crying Planet and Last Stand in preparation for the release of Space Dutchman. I update the covers and added the next book’s sample chapter to the end. For Last Stand, this was Space Dutchman, so I was stoked.\

Sunday

Major cycling on the Time Management book.

Broken Notes -804. It hit me that I was stalling on my prologue because critical voice kept saying that I needed to learn more about summary chapters first. So I decided that I could review the material later and cycle as needed and wrote the prologue.

Also, I’m doing an alternating viewpoint like Dean Wesley Smith’s Cold Poker Gang. It’s a romantic viewpoint, between the female lead and the male lead. I’m surprised at how challenging it is for me. It might be one of the reasons I fell off the book originally.

I like to park in a single viewpoint and then bring in another one when the story needs a change of pace. So this is quite different from that.

I also took some of a POV workshop, which defined a prologue (an event that sets up the novel), and also mentioned summary chapters. Since both are great options for a mystery, I was planning on using them. Little did I realize, critical voice had wormed into that.

Monday

Time Management – 862

Broken Notes – 901. Here I set the timer for 30 minutes and put it on the table so I couldn’t look at it. Until the timer went off, I couldn’t look at word count. 348 the first 30 minutes. Second round was the rest.

Tuesday

I was mistaken that the 60% in the office started today. It actually starts in January. But I did have to go on Tuesday anyway. So it was dry run of what it might be like. There’s a surprising amount of stress getting out the door. I even put out my clothes the night before and had everything in front of the door. But once I added the emotional part of getting to work on time, it ramped up the stress.

Time Management – 826

Broken Notes – 1200. That was a direct result of the timer.

Wednesday

This became an admin day due to a scheduling issue later in the evening. I took a class on Art Crimes from Smithsonian Associates. It was done via Zoom call and very professional compared to other calls. It started on time and had only a few technical issues.

A retired FBI agent talked about four of his antiquities art cases. I only recorded two notes:

He grew up with an antique background. His father ran an antique store. So he had some knowledge. When he went undercover as a buyer, he would stop by a local museum first. They’d take him in the back and show him the kinds of items he was “buying.” He’d get enough information that he could come off as an expert during the sting.Did he worry about criminals coming after him? Nope. Art criminals view going to jail as part of doing business

I’m sure I’ll use that in a story somewhere! My next one is Dining on the Rails: A Moveable Feast.

If you find these lectures interesting, bear this in mind: They do not do replays. So if you miss it, you miss it.

Thursday

More work chaos. I’m glad it’s an admin day.

I finalize the refresh for a GALCOM boxed set called GALCOM Books 1-3 (formerly GALCOM Log One). This was a book where I had to think about what was going to be easiest for me. Putting the three books in? Easy.

The cover? Problem.

Boxed sets often feature several of the covers of the books inside. Well, if I did that, it created a version control problem. If I updated the other covers, I’d have to remember to do it on this book as well. I also didn’t like how it looked. So a new image:

GALCOM Boxedset

After that, my writing meeting that evening. We talked a lot about the Smithsonian Associates lecture I took.

Friday

Optimistically, I thought since I had an admin day on Wednesday, I could write today. Nope. The week at work calmed down by Friday. But I felt like I needed the time to wind down.

So I did something rather mindless on the Time Management for Writers book. I pulled all the chapters back into Scrivener, and I started playing with the order of the chapters. I was actually looking for gaps.

Instead, I discovered what my creative voice has been telling me: The book is pretty much done. I need to do general housekeeping:

Microsoft Word passGrammarly passProWriting Aid passA final big cycle for clarity and typos and flesh out more details.Run PerfectItWrite the closing chapter

So I will have a book done in October!

Meanwhile, critical voice says, “You didn’t write enough this week!”

So it goes.

17 Critical Voice and Goals

We live in a goal-infested society. Books promise to supercharge your goals or how to focus on them. Apps track a variety of goals from steps to calories to sleep. I can buy planners with drawings of water glasses to track water consumption.

For writers, a typical goal is “Have a best-selling novel” or “hold my book in my hand.” Many writers focus on word count goals.

But did you know goals have elements of critical voice?

If you look at the business books on setting goals, they’re cheerleading books just like time management books were. The writers make extravagant promises. Many focus on why you can’t achieve your goals (critical voice). It’s like everyone’s scrabbling for the answer of how to be successful and no one knows.

Here’s the problem with goals:

They have emotion wrapped up in them. That makes the stakes higher if you succeed, or if you fail.

What if you succeed in the goal?

Let’s suppose my goal is to write 3,000 words in one day. So I accomplish that. Now what? Is it fun? Or was it a struggle because critical voice took control to aim at the number?

This is common for people who focus on the metrics. They check the box but don’t get any satisfaction from the accomplishment. It can also turn toxic. We’ve seen that with diets and also with exercise.

For a brief time, I walked 10,000 steps a day. It was fun at first, seeing the numbers bounce up, and then reaching the top. I also liked to walk, get sun, and pet the dogs I ran into.

One day, I looked at the step count, and it was 7,000. My reaction was dread because I wanted to stop. I have problems with my feet and this was just starting to show up.

Critical voice jumped in: “You have to get 3,000 steps or you’ll miss your goal!”

So I’m walking, checking my step count, rinse, repeat.

I know someone will say it’s good to push through. But no, walking had evolved into checking the box rather than being fun. My range now is 3,000-7,000. Occasionally I’ll hit 10K. Critical voice zooms back in and says, “Let’s start doing 10,000 steps again.” It’s a cheerleader but ignores the fact that with my feet, I shouldn’t be doing it daily. It also entirely forgets that walking should be fun.

What if you fail to reach the goal?

With every goal, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you won’t accomplish it. We’ll take the same word count goal of 3,000. For whatever reason, I don’t reach that goal. Maybe work exploded into chaos and my brain is short-circuiting. Maybe I hit a traffic jam coming home (combined with ice, this can be all night issue). Maybe the writing took longer because it was a challenging scene or skill. But I do write 1,021 words.

Critical voice runs in, sneering, “You failed! You didn’t write 3,000 words. You’ll never be a writer if you can’t produce!”

What if it’s the wrong goal?

This is also common. Sometimes goals are simply wish fulfillment. “If I won the lottery, all my problems would be solved.” Writers cheerfully set a goal of being a “best-selling author”—and have no clue what that means. It isn’t even a true goal because it relies on other people making it happen.

It can drive you into doing things that maybe you shouldn’t be doing. We’ve seen writers have meltdowns on the internet over four-star reviews because they fear their entire writing career hinges on that single review.

When I broke up with my co-writer, my next book became an unintentional event. I felt like a failure, believing I would never write anything but short stories. So I had to write my get-back-on-the-horse book.

If you haven’t guessed, the goal of writing this book had a lot of critical voice reasons behind it. I felt like a failure in my writing. I felt like I’d reset myself back to square one with the breakup and hadn’t learned anything. I thought if I couldn’t write this book I was doomed to write short stories forever.

As I result, I wanted to push through and get it done. At the time, I’d dropped off cycling. I’d naturally drifted into cycling when I started writing. But I saw advice on the message boards saying to push straight through.

I picked up a book on writing a novel in thirty days. The book had tasks every day to help with the writing of 1,667 words. I started writing and followed every task.

At first, it was fairly easy to hit my 1,667-word count every day.

Halfway through, the author did a sudden left turn. I skidded to a stop. One of the tasks she assigned was weird. Not weird like I’d have fun with. Weird, like, “wait, have you lost your mind?”

She introduced a movie technique that had no business being in a novel. It made me question the author’s credibility.

I read the author’s biography. Not a lick of fiction. My desperation to get a novel finished in thirty days had led me to violate one of my own rules. I’d always checked the biographies of the writers before I bought writing books. This time I hadn’t.

Still, I’d finished so much of the book already. So I plowed through my 1,667 words a day until about the last week. Suddenly, it became apparent I was writing to meet the word count goal. The story? My wheels were spinning on thick ice.

I stopped before I finished the story. It was also apparent that I’d fixated too much on the number of words. The story was sloppy. It needed to be revised. Then I ran into the second problem, as my critical voice gleefully informed me.

The sloppiness meant writing came out. Some were caused by the tasks the author introduced that didn’t fit how I wrote. There were days when my progress was a negative number.

Critical voice jumped in, saying, “How can you possibly write and get negative numbers?”

I was frustrated. I still wanted to be published traditionally then, and my books were barely hitting 50K. Revising brought the word count down more, so it fed the critical voice.

Since then, I’ve wrestled with word count. I’ve tried weekly goals instead of daily. Nope. I can’t do pages…doesn’t work with Scrivener.

And tracking it? I tried spreadsheets. They would self-edit. I’d find them later, with only one or two entries.

Yet, critical voice sits right on my shoulder waiting to point out that I haven’t done enough.

So, are they needed?

Yes, no, maybe.

The answer’s not that easy.

Without a tiny bit of structure, it’s easy to write fifty words and then stop.

After looking at two books I wrote concurrently—this one and a novella, Space Dutchman—it was apparent that I’d let word count steer me. I started both around the same time. The non-fiction book had more words, while Space Dutchman lagged at about 10K. My critical voice said, “Yes, we got word count.”

But it wasn’t on the novella where I needed it.

I decided to break the hold word count goals have on me. I started a 90-day challenge of writing 800 words of fiction Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. If I wrote non-fiction, I had to do 800 words and write 800 more of fiction. If I was cycling, I didn’t count the words.

As a result, I reframed how I thought of these metrics. Most writers will either pick a number that’s too high (3,000 a day) or a number that’s too low (250 a day). Instead, I considered what was doable, given my day job and the time available. Then I added onto it just enough to make it a little uncomfortable, The number was 800 words.

I also had to change my thinking about what the word count meant to me. The culture is success or failure. The culture brings in the critical voice.

It turned from a goal into a task. A task can be important. But it isn’t emotional.

Thinking of it as a task allowed me to focus on the writing itself, instead of having to get a certain word count. Some days it was hard. I struggled with critical voice saying, “Are we there yet?” I’d check and find I’d done 300 words. It was 450 when I checked again. Then 600, and then 700.

So I shifted again, a little. I set a timer for 30 minutes. I couldn’t look at the word count until the timer went off.

I’ve also debated how to record them. Many writers put too much emphasis on tracking. I’m just plugging it into a bullet journal. No spreads, nothing presentable for Instagram to show off. More simply for a record.

Do I need to actually record the word count? I don’t know. It might be that if I don’t make my task’s number or don’t do it, I have to explain to myself why I didn’t.

But my focus is on getting the writing done, not on a number.

16 The Importance of Learning

Yay! I have another installment. I’m writing out of order so I’ll return to another session on critical voice later.

Learning at the day job gets a bad rap. We’re all inundated with “mandatory” training. Who wants to do more?

Yet, it’s an opportunity to build your skills in both your job and your writing. Business is a woefully neglected skill for many fictions. They feel they don’t need to know anything about that “boring business stuff.”

These writers are most vulnerable to scams.

One of the things I don’t like about developmental editors is how they guilt-trip writers into purchasing their services. I attended an editing panel at a science fiction convention. I was struggling to find a copy editor for the first book I published. Everyone I’d researched did developmental editing and maybe basic proofreading as an afterthought.

I was early, so the panelists asked me why I was there. “Copy editing,” I said. I thought I would find one from the panel.

Nope. Once the session started, the panelists openly lectured, “Everyone needs developmental editing.” They clearly directed it at me, the lone wolf in the crowd.

The audience was rapt, absorbing every word. None of them understand that the people recommending developmental editing were the ones making money from it. No matter the emotional appeal, businesses do not recommend services from the kindness of their hearts.

They want to make money.

After the panel, I attended another panel with one of the developmental editors. He showed PowerPoint slides. Most notably, he’d used an image from one of the photo sites. It had the watermark on it.

He’d clearly didn’t understand intellectual property. But he was handling the intellectual property (stories) of other people.

This is basic business.

If your work offers online training, look for courses on the following topics.

Financial Management. It’s a dry topic, but people in the United States woefully lack basic knowledge. Every business finances daily. If you spend money on your writing, you must have a basic understanding or you’re likely to waste it.

When I was eighteen, I subscribed to one of the writing magazines. They sold my name to an agent who was pandering to beginners. He sent me a nice-looking four-page brochure with author pictures I didn’t recognize. Over four pages, he alluded he discovered writers with their editing services. Only $500! If I’d had the money, I’d have spent it, not knowing any better.

Contracts. Businesses run off contracts. Writers sign contracts without reading them carefully, lured by the excitement of “I’m being published.” During the Gold Rush days of print-on-demand, writers signed away their novel rights for seven years. When they tried to get them back, they discovered it wasn’t possible.

With this skill, another one to study is negotiation. That “I’m being published! Whee!” leads writers to accept whatever the publisher is offering. Maybe they can negotiate better. And it’s hard. I’ve had trouble with that one for salary going from employer to employer. Critical voice gets involved and tries to devalue what I’m worth.

Risk. A big business topic with a lot of ramifications. Risk is planning for a future event that could threaten your business. The COVID-19 shutdown was an obvious example of that. My local Thai restaurant immediately laid-off employees and converted to takeout. They stayed in business, but a massage parlor three doors down didn’t survive.

Risk for fiction? If you’re traditionally published, changing editors and the new editor doesn’t like your book. At Superstars, Kevin J. Anderson talked about how the publishing industry abruptly dropped TV tie-ins.

Indie published? We’ve already seen one. A major retailer changed its algorithms and book sales for writers tanked. This alone is a reason to understand how business works. When I got out of the Army, I worked for a beltway bandit. The company had contracts in multiple industries. But they won many contracts at one government agency, so they had forty-two people there. Then the agency cut the contracts, and overnight, forty-two people lost jobs. If you go exclusively with one publishing vendor, you’re at the mercy of their changes.

In conjunction with this, look for problem-solving courses. Risk is a problem to solve, so there are opportunities for additional skills.

Project Management. This is a huge topic with many aspects, including risk. If you’re indie publishing, project management will apply to you. Every book is a project. Not just the act of writing, but scheduling release dates, deciding who to ask for reviews, determining marketing methods, finding a cover artist (or making your own), and maintaining an inventory list.

You’ll find plenty available on this in your day job because it’s such a vital business skill.

Intellectual Property. Not understanding what IP is has gotten a lot of writers in trouble. A writer grabbed an image from the internet and posted them on her blog. She thought that since it was available online, she could use it. The photographer contacted her. It was very expensive and involved lawyers.

Writers talk all the time about getting free images for covers. There are some recommended public domain sites. I won’t touch them. I don’t know if the person who uploaded that image owned the rights to it. But if I purchase an image from Deposit Photos, Dreamstime, or IStock, I have the license for the image. Psst. It’s not that expensive. And you save the watermarked image to try it out as your cover before you buy it.

You’ll also learn to ask for the licenses for all the images from a cover artist. If they refuse, don’t do business with them because they might get you into trouble.

This isn’t a complete list. But these are topics you’ll find uses for in your writing.

On the fiction side, learning is as important. I used to read this one writer. Her stories were amazing. Whenever I went to the bookstore, I would check for a new book. Then she hit best seller status and decided she knew everything she needed. It showed in the quality of the books, and I stopped reading her.

Seek courses that push your skills upwards. These are actually pretty hard to find. Most courses are for beginners. Many are taught by fake experts.

Research the instructor. If he has only a few books published, he’s not skilled enough to teach (especially pantsers!). If he has many books published, read the samples or a few of the books first.

Stay away from general courses. There are a lot of courses called “How to Write a Novel.” Those are beginner-focused and too broad. You won’t get much on how to improve your skills. Find specific subjects.

If you have a strong skill, find a course that will push on that skill. For years, I ignored taking classes on characterization. This was one of my strongest skills, but I always passed on courses on it. I felt I had so many others I had to work on. I took a class on Emotions in Fiction and suddenly realized I had a skills gap in my characterization that I’d been ignoring.

Options for courses include WMG Publishing, Cat Rambo, Apex, Story Grid, and Superstars Writing Conference.

Scheduling will be tricky. Learning becomes one more task to squeeze in our limited time. Like having a day dedicated to admin, you might do the same for learning. Since most of my courses are learning at my own pace, I cherry-pick topics I want to know. Though I have to ignore the whining from critical voice, who thinks I need to power through the whole course.

Finally, have fun! This is about fueling your creative side with the knowledge it can use. It’s truly amazing to see how your skills grow as you write.

Critical Voice Report – Week 6

A bit of a soapbox here. Earlier this week, I discovered my landline wasn’t working. No dial tone. I knew what was wrong because it happens about once a year. A technician visiting one of the other apartments unplugged it.

So I contacted the phone company via text. It took about 30 minutes to establish that a technician needed to come out. Then comes the spiel.

Help desk guy said that if the technician had to do any work, such as cutting open a wall and doing rewiring, it would cost me $99 for the visit. It was a little vague when that $99 would kick in during a visit. But I could save half that if I signed up for their $15 a month maintenance program. Under the terms, I would be able to cancel after 3 months.

I said no. Got a second spiel. Said no thank you again. There was no on the fence about this decision. Companies do not offer these plans to save you money. They offer them because they’ll make a profit. Most people are likely to lose visibility of it after the first month and let it continue to renew.

In my case? The technician came, checked the line inside. Then went down to the closet and plugged the line back in. If I’d signed up for the subscription service, I would have been charged $45 for a visit that didn’t cost anything.

This week’s report:

This week turned crazy fast. Next week will be worse.

Saturday

I started Broken Notes. This was a novella I started in 2018, based on an exercise from Dean Wesley Smith’s Research for Fiction Writers. Work overload sneaked up behind me and suddenly caught up, and this story fell victim.

During Heinlein’s Rules workshop, I had to list all the unfinished projects. I think I had about 25%, mainly because of that time frame. So I spent about a month warming into the idea of finishing this story. Critical voice: What if it hits you with a two-by-four again?

I had to work through some of my fear of tackling this particular story. I’m in a very different place from 2018. I decided at that point to change it from a fantasy to a mystery. I think originally that’s where it should have gone, but critical voice jumped in. Though I read lots of mysteries, I’m afraid to write novel-length mysteries. So another reason to tackle it.

However, a spoiler alert: Things never go as intended.

I started with building a cover to help inspire me:

After that, I did some preliminary research. The story was going to be set in a historical house, but I didn’t want to set it in the mid-West. I wanted a location I was more familiar with. So I searched on Queen Anne houses in Virginia.

I found a house that caught my creative side’s attention. The house was built in 1890 and used as a music conservatory. The owner taught students music. Remember, this story was titled “Broken Notes.” Yeah, my creative side liked that a lot.

I did screenshots and pasted them into PowerPoint. The site also provided some terminology for the house parts, so I copied those down too. It looks different from the historic house in my family: white with cool blue trim, about 2,000 square feet.

I thought going into the story I would reuse the opening that I’d done for the workshop. I write 1,046 words.

And my creative side was unhappy.

I think that was critical voice swooping in to not waste any words, even if the words didn’t work anymore.

Sunday

I tossed everything I’d written the day before and drafted the opening. New character names, except for a dog’s name. That stayed the same. One of the big nagging things was that the setting had changed from what I used in the exercise.

982 words.

Then I wandered onto Facebook and spotted a post from Kevin J. Anderson about the Dark Mermaid anthology call. He said there were 10 days left. I’d been thinking it ended on October 31. When had he posted the message?

Five days ago.

I emailed a writer friend who also wanted to submit a story to it. Our mutual response: “Oh, crap.”

So I dropped everything else and wrote 1273 words on a short story called Voices in a Calm Sea. It’s science fiction.

I struggled with what I would write for the call. The call wanted darker stories, but dark is not where I want to write. After Desert Storm, my fiction got really dark. I had to consciously shift away from those kinds of ideas. But science fiction allowed me to use an area that’s a little dark.

This was the cover, which I did a few weeks ago while I was thinking through the story. I saw that image and immediately said “That’s the story!”

Monday

I wrote 1082 on Voices.

I started a new scene and realized critical voice was rubbing its hands together because it could see the ending was near. I actually looked at the word count and thought the story was only going to be 2,500 words.

So I stopped immediately to cut that off.

Tuesday

It was a bit of a struggle with Voices today. If I wasn’t going to finish the story, I had to get to 800 words. I hit 812 and felt like I was missing something though I didn’t know what.

Wednesday

I started out cycling through the entire Voices story. I immediately discovered the first thing I was missing. I’d skipped ahead a little in the opening (critical voice strikes again), so I needed to flesh that out more.

No word count today because I was entirely cycling.

Thursday

Enter the reason next week will be worse. Work is suddenly requiring me to go into the office 60% of the week. It starts Tuesday!

Most of this hit me like a snow globe that you shake up. It takes a few seconds and then starts spreading out:

Extra cost for the gas. Maintenance costs will also increase.An hour of commute for three days of the week. In turn, that impacts both my morning time and my dinner time. If dinner gets pushed back, writing gets pushed back.Making food to take to work. This was something I didn’t miss. It was so challenging that I defaulted to spending money in the cafeteria.

And probably a few more challenges I haven’t thought of yet.

I veered off my admin day to get Voices finalized. Now I did some research for the story and Googled “How to swim like a mermaid.” There were videos!

I fleshed out a few more details, both in the beginning and the climax. Then I discovered I’d written past the validation, so I wrapped it up and shipped it. Story weighed in at 3,400 words.

Kevin posted generally that it was a bad idea to send a story at the last minute like that. The first readers are getting overwhelmed by the last-minute submissions, so they start looking for any reason to reject. All I can say is that it is what it is. If it gets rejected, I’ll send it somewhere else.

Friday

I took the day off from what. Spent most of it doing GALCOM refreshes. With Space Derelict in for editing, the others needed a little love. I updated Last Stand with a new blurb and cover, adding the first chapter from Space Dutchman at the end. Then I reviewed the blurb on Crying Planet. It was good to go, so I added the first chapter from Ghost Ship. Repeated for Ghost Ship, adding the first chapter of Cursed Planet at the end.

Then I had to stop because that was a lot of work!

I took some random videos from writing workshops, starting with some on POV for Broken Notes. I found some information on a summary chapter, which I will be using in the book. I also found a definition of a prologue (it’s an event that leads to the rest of the story, so it works well for a mystery.).

I didn’t want to take whole classes because I don’t have time, not without sacrificing writing. But I can target a few areas I want to know more about.

And that was my week!

Fantasy Book Giveaway!

For October, I’m part of a big fantasy book giveaway. Check out this amazing list of books. There’s sure to be something you like.

I had a good laugh when I saw some of the covers. I used one of the images previously and used one from the same artist (both refreshed).

Critical Voice Report – Week 5

This week, nothing from the Time Management book. It become very apparent that I was at the finish line of Space Dutchman. I also wanted to have it done by September 30, which was Friday!

So I not only set aside the TM book (mostly), I didn’t do admin because getting this book done was the most important task (project management 101).

Saturday

Cycling to add more details about the Dutchman spaceship.

Sunday

Time Management: 1141 words

Space Dutchman: 803 words

Our weather took a nosedive today, and I needed a jacket. Usually, we’re bouncing between too hot and too cold about this time!’

Monday

This was the day I officially decided no admin. Space Dutchman was that close. I optimistically thought I could get the 800-word count. Nope. Not happening.

I started the major cycling round at 19600 and bounced around that number, no matter how much I added because other paragraphs were coming out.

I also discovered critical voice sneaked in. There had to be that “no hope” scene, right before the main character figured out what she needed to do. I started typing the scene and realized that I’d been anticipating who it involved.

I’d been adding details to other scenes that would lead to this second character. And I asked myself, why is it this character? He was relatively minor. He wasn’t a red shirt, but he was a level above that. So I flipped it to a more important character and the scene flowed out.

That also meant I would have to cycle back through the entire story and change one piece involving him. I decided I’d deal with that on Tuesday.

Something still wasn’t right. I started moving into the validation but stopped because something was off.

Still, it wasn’t much left to do, so I officially called the story done, which I always do about this point.

Tuesday

Cycling today was primarily running Word’s spell check, then Grammarly, then ProWriting Aid, then PerfectIt.

It’s a lot of programs, but they catch a lot of problems. Also a lot of false flags. Thanks to ProWriting Aid, I’m doing a lot less passive voice as compared to stories from past years. I also had a phrase that showed up a lot (as in sometimes twice in one paragraph). I added that to my macro to highlight it, and I saw a significant reduction in Space Dutchman.

(But you have to be careful. Critical voice can wriggle in and say, “Look at all these mistakes. That’s terrible! How could you have missed that?”

I looked at the validation, but I still didn’t know what’s wrong. Another rule from me: No fixing until I understand the problem.

Contacted the continuity editor for a slot on her schedule. I’m expecting it to be like last time, a month away. I wanted to get a slot before Nano hits and sucks them all up.

Wednesday

More cycling. I’m still stumped on the validation.

Continuity editor has a slot for next week! Now I have to figure out what’s wrong, and fast.

Thursday

That morning, I woke up dreaming about that “no hope” scene. My creative voice was working on it behind the scenes. I had to change the character to yet another one. This wasn’t as simple as changing names. I had to cycle back through that scene again and make sure all the parts worked.

Friday

Now I tackle the validation and it all fits together, from beginning to end. Still want to circle back and look at the last few paragraphs, which I’ll do over the weekend.

Final word count 20,933

What’s next?

I’m looking at doing a small challenge, just until the end of December. It’ll be one novella a month, using the 800-word count. I think I’m ready to try that.

Critical voice immediately panicked, and rightly so. When I jumped into the Great Challenge (a story a week for a year), I didn’t know what I was going to do with all of those stories. I was lucky I didn’t fail the challenge for that reason.

The problem with three novellas is the cost of the editing. I’m just getting a continuity edit and a light copy edit. I don’t know how someone does this with developmental editing. That falls into $XXXX, not $XXX. Still, I don’t want to put myself in debt to get a story out.

But I don’t want them to sit either. The solution, so far, is to schedule them in alternating months with the option to adjust the dates.

October book: An amateur sleuth mystery.

Critical Voice Report – Week 4

An interesting discovery came out of last week’s Nostalgia Con. I attended a panel on Zane Grey, a writer from the early 1900s.

What I didn’t know: He didn’t write Western. All the bookstores I visited over the years put him straight into the Western section. The publishers gave the books typical Western covers. But he wrote Western Romance. His women were reported to be better drawn than the male characters.

In his life, he wrote 9 million words.

That’s on a manual typewriter. He wouldn’t have done ten or twenty drafts like writers do today.

Readers read his descriptions of the locations and visit to see what he’s describing. That’s the depth Dean Wesley Smith talks about.

Since I’ve never read any of his books, I picked up a collection of 22 so I can read, then study his writing.

The writing week:

Saturday

This was the last day of Nostalgia Con (weird, right?). I picked up an iced coffee from Peet’s to make a travel smoothie, then returned to cycling on Space Dutchman.

At 9:00 I attended “Do You Believe in Magic?” a panel on 1966. Some notes from it:

Star Trek rights owners are incredibly protective of the IP. I imagine they realized fairly early that every part of it was going to make them money if they leveraged it right.On the other hand, the IP holders of Batman wanted nothing to do with the 1960s TV series. They thought it was too campy and ignored it for many years. Only a few years ago did they finally recognize that it’s another income stream. Now if publishing would be that smart…

Robert Fuller followed at 10:00. I envisioned that It would be in and out and on my way home after that. I stayed in line until about noon. It was the highlight of the con.

Though I’ve found my con tastes have changed a lot. In years past, I would have roamed the dealers’ tables and spent a fortune. I’d also have collected autographs from every actor. Now, I wanted more panels to attend. I also carefully selected the actor I was going to spend money on to meet.

Sunday

More cycling on Space Dutchman. One of the reasons I’m not counting words here is that my cycling can make the word count bounce. I’m still actually at the same word count that I was at when I started, though I’ve added and removed words.

But on this round of cycling, it’s apparent that critical voice sneaked in once the characters got on board the Dutchman. Once it sees obvious plot, it likes to aim at it and rush through to the end.

So I didn’t get enough world-building of the Derelict. I turned to a pop-up I already had (from one of the WMG Kickstarter) addressing this type of spaceship. That gave me some ideas to ponder.

I put more words in, and more words came out. The story of my cycling life!

Monday

I started on a short story to submit to an open call from a magazine for Hopepunk (a fancy term meaning they want optimistic stories). 

I thought I could do a redraft of a story I’d retired. It was a flash fiction piece about fairies, so too short for pretty much anything. But if I could turn it into a short story…

Critical voice immediately jumped in, saying, “Let’s get this done!”

Made first contact with the story and immediately changed the fantasy element from fairies to a gnome. I couldn’t see it at the time, but critical voice came in with the thought of the redraft. I wanted to do a light, fun story, and that’s not what my 808 words netted me.

Space Dutchman: More cycling to add the Dutchman world-building details. Some come in, some come out.

Tuesday

The Gnome Story: Back on that today for 838. But I feel like I’m spinning my wheels on it. I find myself circling back to write what I’ve already written, as odd as that sounds.

Time Management for Writers: I jump on cycling for that. I think I’ll need several passes to clean up all the repetitions that crept in.

Wednesday

The Gnome Story:  I dumped the 1600+ words from the last two days and redrafted it from scratch. I was just walking outside on a break from the day job and an opening line hit me. Once I had that, I had the character’s voice and the story went in a different direction than the last two days. 808 words (don’t ask me why that number shows up as much as it does. I have no idea!).

Thursday

This was my admin day, and I’m sticking to it until I get everything done. Hopefully, I can adjust my schedule by the end of the year. I released one of my Al Travers Mystery short stories, Ransom.

Private Investigator Al Travers gets what he wishes for. He sees a movie star at a local restaurant.

Then she disappears. Kidnapped for ransom.

Al races against time to find her before the kidnappers kill her.

An exciting Al Travers mystery short story.

Get a copy!

Friday:

Also an admin day. I did a refresh of Mask Pretty to put it into the new template. The original blurb needed a lot of work, so I replaced that.

Reeling from the devastating loss of his wife, Rik Vale accepts a job as a fixer for Hollywood’s only alien, Trevi.

Trevi walked out of Roswell and became a movie star. His face stirs the hearts of movie fans. But he harbors a heart-breaking secret, one darker than Rik suspected.

A Writers of the Future Silver Honorable Mention science fiction short story.

Get a copy!

The week’s made me antsy to get Space Dutchman done. It’s so close, and yet, the additions are taking some time. And they must be done before I do the climax or that part of the story will be broken.

I actually despise revision. This might be something coming from my day job, If you don’t have a lot of time to complete a task, why do it in such as way that you have to fix it?

15 Critical Voice in Disguise

Critical voice’s biggest skill is getting us to waste time doing tasks that look like writing but actually keep us from finishing the book. Obviously, this is deadly if you’re sharing your day job with your writing time. Time can pass until you suddenly realize a year has passed and you haven’t started the book!

These are common time wasters that disguise themselves as writing.

Revision

Probably the most controversial in this section, and fueled by what all of us see in our day job on a regular basis. Reports undergo multiple revisions, with each person using Microsoft Word’s track changes to put their mark on the document. One of my bosses sarcastically called this, “Changing happy to glad.”

This also lends itself to the thinking that the first draft can be sloppy because everyone is going to change it anyway. So, when the original writer drafts the report, he treats it like he’s checking the box.

For fiction writers, revision becomes a safety net. They hear the mantras of “the real writing starts in the revision” and think of the first draft as this gauntlet they have to get through.

They become overwhelmed by battling with critical voice while creating the story. Revision feels like a sigh of relief because now they can hand the story over to the critical voice.

And it ain’t got a clue what it’s doing!

But it promptly says, “I can create a best seller!”

Of course, that’s not true. But once it dives into the story, it’ll keep finding fault, reasons to revise because that’s what it does.

But critical voice says, “I’m being productive. I’m writing.”

So the writer spends ten drafts in full critical voice mode, or even in that never ending revision loop. It even makes it easy to skip writing regularly because there’s that feeling simmering below the surface that something isn’t right.

For me, critical voice gave me an endless revision and blithely informed me that I could learn craft from revision.

The first became a story that I eventually hated. And learning craft from revision? An outright lie.

It was my first novel, called Remember No Evil (amnesia story, so I hit the low-hanging fruit for the idea). I’d write to the 10,000-word point, and then stall out.

It was frustrating because I could see that I should have plenty of story, and yet, it seemed to have dried up. The place I was stalling out is the one-third point, a common place to fun afoul of fear.

But no one discusses it in any writing book anywhere or how to overcome it. Critical voice gleefully said, “There must be a problem in the beginning! Let’s revise!”

That’s remarkably similar to what happened with the co-writer.

Then I would revise that first section, reach that one-third point, and get stuck again. Rinse, repeat.

In all the time I spent on it—twenty years!—I could have done twenty books and built on my craft skills. Instead, I learned bad habits that I had to unlearn.

It still took more than a clue. I wanted to move on to other books and critical voice kept saying, “But you spent all this time on it! You can’t waste the time!”

Revision is insidious because it’s all around us, in our day job, and from other writers. But if you’re not finishing your stories, that’s a problem.

Submitting to Non-Paying Markets

When I started submitting short stories, the first thing I heard was to submit to non-paying markets to build your credits. This is all over the writing community, and the non-paying magazine encourage it, promising they’ll give you “exposure.”

Though I heard the lectures on “money must flow to the author,” critical voice wanted to believe the “build your credits” version. Especially after I looked through the Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market. At the time, it showed you the statistics for the chances of getting published in various magazines. I’d see a pro-paying one that looked impossible, and a non-paying one looked doable.

I also think the “money must flow to the author” wasn’t quite a sale for me because I was getting all form rejections from paying markets. It’s hard because until you start getting personal rejections, you can’t tell what you’re doing wrong. The allure of getting published at all, even if it is non-paying, becomes a draw.

Especially when you do get something published and you can actually see it or hold it in your hands.

But after taking advanced writing skill courses and practicing the skills I’d learned, I realized that by submitting to a non-paying magazine, I was subconsciously telling myself that I wasn’t good enough to be paid for my writing.

It was an astounding revelation. The point was proven to me when a non-paying literary magazine invited me to write for it. It was on a veteran’s topic, so I entertained it briefly. I visited the site and read some of the stories available. The level I was writing at was better than the stories.

If they don’t pay, they will not get good quality stories. Is that what you want to be associated with?

Critical voice strikes again, and this one plays into a lot of myths.

One of the myths that came out of my family was that you’ll never make any money writing. I had an uncle who wrote during the pulp era. He was never able to make enough money to write full-time. I heard that as a child and absorbed it without realizing there might have been another reason. He only wrote children’s fiction, not a popular genre like mystery.

Another comes from authors who take a year or more to write one book. About 2010, I took a social media course with other writers. I still follow a few of them.  One’s written six books in eleven years. Another has done one short story and two books.  It’s hard to make sales if it takes years to get one out. By then, readers have moved on.

But it provides the critical voice with that little piece of “truth” to the myth that you can’t make money writing and reinforcing that you’re not good enough.

If you’re writing short stories, submit only to markets that pay five cents or more. When you run out of markets, indie publish.

Analyzing published fiction

This is done under the umbrella of learning how to write, and it’s common among beginning writers.

The writer picks up a best-selling novel, puts on a magnifying glass, and picks apart the words. Usually, the writer declares that the bestseller can’t write because of “flaws” in the writing. The flaws can be anything from a perceived grammatical error to breaking one of the random writing “rules” that are rampant in the beginner community.

On writing message boards, you’ll see the writers foaming with outrage that this writer became a bestseller with all these flaws while they can’t get published.

I ran afoul of this—just went with the crowd. I didn’t know any better. My only experience with studying how to write was school. English teachers taught me to analyze stories exactly the way I was doing it.

Eventually, I found myself thinking that the quality of fiction had gone really downhill since the books I had read growing up. It felt very discouraging!

One day at work, someone left out some old Nick Carter and Mack Bolan books on the table. I’d read a lot of those from the time when I thought books were better.

So I snatched those up, thinking I was going to prove my point.

The books were okay, not spectacular.

Maybe the problem was me, not the books.

So with the next book, I decided to simply read it for fun. That was The DaVinci Code.

If you’ve been to writing message boards, this is a book that the writers foam at the mouth over. Many of the writers despise it being so successful.

I read it, I enjoyed it. I even thought about why it became such a success.

But it was a huge wakeup that I was the problem, not the writing.

I’ve seen another writer on Twitter who rails constantly at how disappointing books are. She analyzes like this all the time, has been doing it for fifteen years, and won’t stop. But she doesn’t enjoy reading.

Yet, she wants to write and wants the books to sell. I’ve read her samples as a reader. I can tell she’s not enjoying writing either.

Shiny Ideas

You’re writing along, getting into the story.

Bang!

A new idea!

It looks so shiny and exciting, and just have to write it right away. So you veer away from the current story to jump into the new story. You start writing it, get into the story, and bang! Another idea you have to jump right on.

I used to call these flash in the pan ideas. They’d get me all excited and I had to write the story right now. I’d stop on anything I was working on to jump in…and end up with a field littered with abandoned starts.

This is the critical voice because it jumps in at just the right time to keep you from actually finishing anything. You end up wasting a lot of time starting stories and never actually finishing anything.

You get one of these, find a place like Evernote or even just another part of Scrivener and drop the idea into it. Chances are, when you return to it later, it’ll have lost its shine because you didn’t fall into the critical voice’s trap.

Developmental Editing

This one’s going to be controversial. Developmental is a paid, in-depth review of your writing. It might focus on plot holes, characterization, or theme.

It’s often presented to writers from an emotional perspective: “You have to do the best for your book (baby).”

That’ll appeal to your critical voice because it’s more revision. Critical voice will find ways to justify keeping control. It’ll all sound very reasonable, especially when your critical voice tells you this will help you get published.

A writer friend submitted his literary science fiction novel to a developmental editor, who charged him $6,000. Going in, he thought the book was pretty good. He just wanted to bring it up to the next level.

 Then he received the edits…

It was very apparent the editor hadn’t understood the book at all. The editor even condescendingly said, “You pantsed this, right?” and he’d outlined it. (Developmental editors are often very anti-pantser.)

He was very demoralized…just the same as we get with critiques. He ended up ignoring the developmental edit he’d paid for and publishing the book. But he also hasn’t written anything else since, either.

I’m sure the above experience is why agents are now asking for writers to have their manuscripts professionally edited before submitting them. It’s a backdoor rejection.

The agents figure a huge chunk of writers will have my writer friend’s reaction to the developmental edit and give up. Or they could look at the cost and give up. Or critical voice could mire the writer in revisions for the next ten years.

The effect is all the same and prime critical voice territory. The book doesn’t get done.

What’s the worst that will happen if you get developmental editing and send it to an agent? They send you a form rejection.

What’s the worst that will happen in you don’t get developmental editing and send it to an agent? They send you a form rejection.

Critical voice doesn’t want you to know that.