Talena Winters's Blog, page 13

Can Someone Stop the World? I'd Like to Get Off.

As I type this, I’m sitting and watching a Christmas episode of Doctor Who with my family (at -29C and after a week of snow, it seems about right) and, once again, marveling at the originality of the ideas these writers came up with. Like, seriously, every story they think of is just brilliant. Also, I’ve watched an episode and a half while writing this paragraph, so this is not a good way to multitask. (Note: I was watching the first two episodes of modern Season Seven with Matt Smith.)

But, I digress.

Since my last personal post, it seems as though the world has been turned upside down by coronavirus. That’s just my perspective on the timeline, of course, sheltered in the wilds of Canada. Three weeks ago, China had already been enduring the ravages of the virus for months, but it was only about to plunge our side of the planet into the plot of Contagion.*

What a different three weeks makes.

All the functions I was supposed to attend in the next few months have been cancelled—Creative Ink, Aurora-Con, and more than likely, my year-end piano recital at the end of May (though I’ve been holding off cancelling the hall in case things turn around by then). Not just those, of course. The world is on hold as people stay home and try to avoid coming into contact with or spreading the virus, doing our part to “flatten the curve.”

So, the kids came home a week early for spring break. After two weeks of scrambling and heroism, their teachers began teaching classes online this past week.

I also began teaching piano lessons through online streaming sessions in the past week, so that’s been a fun learning experience for everyone. I can see using that method in emergencies in the future during inclement weather or other emergencies. We’ll see how it goes. One thing’s for certain—the world may be in chaos, but streaming companies are having a very good month.

Writing News

Two weeks ago at this time, I was also in the middle of a different sort of crisis—a writing one. The word count on The Sphinx’s Heart kept going up, and based on where I was in the plot, my estimated final word count was getting into “alarming” territory, especially for young adult fiction. (For posterity’s sake, I suspect it would have finished up around 240,000 words—which is almost as long as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. But I ain’t J.K. Rowling, and this isn’t book five of an addictive runaway series. That word count is just plain intimidating to most people.)

So, after a weekend of soul-searching and plot analyzing, I decided to split the book. And even still, I’m guessing the book will come in around 155,000 words—only 9,000 short of the first book.

Yep, it would have been a really long book.

That means my trilogy has now escalated to grand ol’ “series” status. As I’ve thought about it, I may even be able to split my planned original third book, making the main series five books long (not including my prequel The Waterboy).

The good news is, that means I will likely be able to finish the book in the next few months and publish this fall. The way things were looking before, I didn’t think that would be possible. Because really long books? They take a really long time to write.

In other news, I posted the cover for The Sphinx’s Heart on Patreon today. It’s so beautiful, I can’t wait to go public with it, but that will wait until next week.

Welcome Daisy Duke!

Only a week and a half after we lost Sunshine, we were asked to take another dog by a family friend who recently lost his wife to cancer and is moving away to be closer to his kids. We hadn’t planned to get another dog right away. But, given the circumstances, we agreed and welcomed Daisy into our family (whom he had named Daisy Duke, which is totally fun, but we just call her Daisy).

She and Hiro get along like two peas in a pod. Plus, she has an awesome doggy smile.

Daisy Duke, welcome to the family.

The only down side is they think tormenting the cats as a tag team is good sport, so we’re working on nipping that game in the bud.

Milestones

Yesterday, Levi would have been eight. Despite a busy work day for Jason and me, we celebrated with pan cookies and ice cream after supper. Jabin made the cookies, Jason bought the ice cream, and all three boys tried blowing out candles and still missed one.

We didn’t have an “8” candle, so we had to get creative.

It was perfect.

On Wednesday, I did a Facebook Live video on my author page talking about how I’ve been handling the pandemic, offering some encouragement, and even singing a song. You can check it out here:

Happy Friday, friend. May we all still fit into our wardrobes by the time we’re out of quarantine and have stopped binge-eating comfort food. (I kid you not, I’ve baked and eaten more baking in the last three weeks than in the previous three years. Jeepers.)

I had a little online fun today with some Facebook friends when I took the #formalfriday challenge. I haven’t been dressed this fancy since Christmas! (And it’s only the second time since then I’ve worn full-face makeup.) It was fun feeling fancy for a while. I might make this a weekly thing. Wanna join?

*Which we watched last weekend, by the way. I hadn’t seen it before, and considering the scope of what they were showing, it was exceptionally well done. However, I’m not sure watching it was a great idea. While the virus in that movie was way more aggressive than COVID-19, it was both a terrifying emotional journey and, once it was over, felt like we should also be on the other side of our current threat.

But that’s not the way it works.

Knitting Book Review: Socks from the Toe Up by Wendy D. Johnson

Repost from January 2020 My Secret Wish Knitting newsletter.

Socks from the Toe Up by Wendy D. Johnson

Inside Socks from the Toe Up by Wendy D. Johnson.

Lovely photography and a variety of options in a clean, minimalist design as fresh as new snow.

When reading a knitting book, the experience of reading it should be as pleasurable as the projects one makes from it. This is definitely the case with this helpful, clear volume. Lovely photo styling and plenty of close-up views of each design from every angle complements the beautiful, varied design options perfectly.

The author assumes no sock-making knowledge going in. She explains the tools you'll need (right down to the scissors), and clear illustrations in Part 1 demonstrate the techniques you will need to make the patterns in the book. The designs cover a range from basic, no-frills socks to textures good for either gender to lacy dreams you'll be yearning to wear. With 23 designs of varying difficulty, this sock-knitting book will keep you busy for months—or, if you knit like me, years. :-)

My one disappointment was that, for the only pattern I've made from the book so far (Gusset Heel Basic Socks), there were several errors in the size I made. (I made the large. The small looked fine to me when I was doing the math.) However, I still plan to make at least two more patterns from this book this year.*

Check it out on Amazon

*Since writing this in January, I’ve begun the “I Heart Toe-Up Socks” pattern, modified by moi to make a larger size than they have written in the book. Their math looks good so far, and the pattern is super cute in Earl Grey Fiber Co.’s “Darjeeling Sock.”

“All you need is tea and warm socks” desktop wallpaper. Get more free wallpapers here.

LYS Spotlight: Quintessential Knits in Duvall, WA, USA

Repost from January 2020 My Secret Wish Knitting newsletter.

Quintessential Knits employee Kim Birum also designs stunning crochet patterns, like this medallion cowl.

A riot of colour, knitwear eye candy, and touchable texture reigns in this small town Local Yarn Store.

Tucked into the small town of Duvall in western Washington, this charming store is stocked top to bottom with delicious knits by brands such as MadelineTosh, Malabrigo, Earl Grey Fiber Co., Noro, and more.

The space is dotted with gorgeous sample projects showcasing sumptuous yarns, including original knit designs by store owner Judith Quinton and crochet designs by employee and class instructor Kim Birum—"not your grandmother's crochet," according to employee Meredith Westerside. (Indeed, this lovely Slouchy Chapeaux fooled both my mother and me into thinking it was knit at first glance.)

They have classes for knitting, weaving, Tunisian crochet, and even spinning classes—the kind where you make yarn, not sweat. :-)

In the seven years since they opened, they have established themselves as a community gathering spot. The shop is a regular destination on the mid-May Puget Sound Local Yarn Shop Tour, sometimes attracting as many as 800 people in the five days of the tour, according to Westerside.

If you're in the neighbourhood, stop by for a cup of tea and a chat with the friendly staff over your latest project in their comfy hearth-side sitting area—the perfect retreat when you just need some fibre therapy.

Like the sign on their wall (and their muggy merch) says, "Move over reality. This is a job for yarn."

Learn more on their website.

Take Another Step

Reposted from my January 2019 Books & Inspiration newsletter

“The time for action is now. It’s never too late to do something.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This past weekend, I was privileged to get to cover a local TEDx event for my job as a magazine writer. The topics inspired, provoked, and moved me. But the biggest takeaway I had was how every one of these speakers, whether I agreed with their ideas or not, were doing their part to make a difference in the world.

The great thing about my job at Move Up is that the focus is unerringly positive. I get to write 8-10 feel-good stories about people in or from my area every quarter. After two and a half years, it is easy to see the common theme about the people I interview—they are doing their part to make a difference in the world.

Some of the people have influenced hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of others. Some of them have made a difference in only a single small community. But whether their impact was small or big, each person started their journey with one thing: a single step. And then kept going.

This is nothing new, is it? We've all heard the quote about a journey of a thousand miles starting with a single step. In fact, we've probably heard it a thousand times! But I think sometimes we underestimate how far along the road we already are. Or how the next step is just as important as that first one was.

Last summer, Jimmy Lefebvre of Grande Prairie, Alberta walked 5,215 km (3,241 miles) across Canada to the grave of the father he'd buried the year before on Prince Edward Island. He did it to raise money for cancer. And he did it with his entire family following him in a motor home for four months.

In his speech on Saturday night, he told us to not become overwhelmed by the entire length of the remaining journey.

"When it's hard, focus on the next step," he said. "Remember your goal and keep working towards it. There are going to be challenges and problems, but if you take the next step, you can get past them. The momentum that comes from taking the next step builds and grows and carries you to your destination."

Sometimes, I get worn out from the steps I've already taken. I forget that I'm on the long haul and that the reason the next step seems hard is because I've already taken so many steps to get to where I am. But I'm not at ground zero, though it might feel like it. And even if I am, even if I am starting something new, that next step is the only step I need to focus on right now.

The next step—whether it's my first or my five thousandth—means I'm taking action. I'm working to improve my life and the lives of others.

In other words, I'm doing my part to make a difference in the world.

The next time you feel overwhelmed by the road you are on, remember you are only one step away from being one step closer to your goal.

So take a moment to pause and see how far you've come. Notice the view from here. Realize that if you've made it this far, you can make it that far again.

Then take the next step.

“A dream becomes a goal when action is taken towards its achievement.”

— Bo Bennett

Covering Books and Life in General

I've had a very busy week on a couple of fronts, one of which was some maintenance and upkeep of my writing business, and the end result is some exciting news:

New Covers

Finding Heaven finally has a new cover that I hope will connect much better with its intended audience. And the coolest part (to me) is that I made it myself!

The quick backstory is that I had actually commissioned a second cover for the book, but when I got it back from my graphic designer, I still felt like it was missing the mark. (Not her fault at all—I’m a very demanding client and I ran out of revisions and, therefore, budget, before I was happy with it.)

I’ve been working on improving my Photoshop skills for a couple of years, and a goal I had for this year specifically was to learn enough to be able to do my own covers for my contemporary fiction books (which require less digital painting, etc., than fantasy covers). I’d intended to practice that skill first on short stories, but, er, I’ve been a little short on short stories to cover, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I decided there was no time like the present, so I spent an entire weekend on YouTube (especially Phlearn’s 30 Days of Photoshop, which is awesome, if anyone’s curious) working to see if I could produce something that would look professional and fit in with the many other books in this genre. After what felt like ten years in my chair and hitting up my Facebook community and my sister (especially my sister) for many rounds of feedback, I came up with this:

My new cover for Finding Heaven, a psychological fiction about a woman trying to break the lies that bind her with the help of a humanitarian who is hiding a secret of his own…

I love it so much. And I hope my readers do, too.

Anyway, I was having so much fun with Photoshop, I decided to take a crack at a new cover for The Friday Night Date Dress, which I’ve been wanting to update for a while, too. That one turned out like this:

New cover for The Friday Night Date Dress, an uplifting contemporary romance novella about a woman working through grief by sewing couture dresses she never wears and an aspiring fashion photographer trying to draw her out of her shell—as long as his meddling sister doesn’t mess it all up.

And, since I was updating covers and files on all the platforms anyway, I did some other back-end maintenance stuff with distribution that I’ve been wanting to do (some of which is still in transition), but as of today, Finding Heaven is finally being published on Apple Books for the first time! WHOOT!

Note that for now, the new cover for Finding Heaven will only be on eBook editions. My next goal is to master Adobe InDesign and start doing my own typesetting, and both of these titles will be my first projects, as they are both in need of revision. I’ve just purchased a beginner course about InDesign from Udemy, and I hope to get started on that this weekend. (I’ve played with the program before, but just enough to get thoroughly frustrated. I’m hoping to shorten my learning curve with a course.)

Lastly, my three for-sale titles (e.g. not The Waterboy, which you can only get for free by signing up for my newsletter, or my short fiction titles currently only available to Patreon members) should all soon be available through library lending programs like Overdrive and Hoopla for the first time. So readers can borrow books for free and still support my writing (just like borrowing print books from libraries does). Whoot! Whoot!

Personal News

On other fronts, it’s been a busy year in general, but not how I used to measure it. After my near miss with burnout in January, I have been intentionally reducing the amount I work in a week (most weeks, anyway). Unfortunately, this means that I’m also being less productive.

I’ve also been learning that when I’m working on an intense developmental edit for someone, I have a very difficult time switching to my own writing, as so much of my brain space is consumed with working on their story.

In addition to all that, I had all four wisdom teeth removed at the end of January in an unfun, traumatic experience (after which I actually went into shock) that I am still not fully recovered from (my jaw aches most of the time).

And then, two weeks ago, my dear friend Laverna Stanley passed away quite suddenly from a cancer that everyone had thought was under control but which had metastasized to her liver within six weeks of her previous (clean) scan. From the day she went into the hospital with shortness of breath to the day she died was only two weeks. I have multiple reasons to be sad about this, some of which I talked about in my newsletter last month, but I am thankful that I was able to be with her and her family as she passed.

And last week, my sweet Sunshine girl, the Golden Retriever we’ve had since 2010, passed away.

My sweet Sunshine and me circa 2015.

My news isn’t all sad, though. I’ve been grateful to have a very busy start to my editing schedule this year, with more work lined up in future months. I’ve also confirmed that I will be presenting at the upcoming Creative Ink Festival writers’ conference in Burnaby in May (barring COVID-19 reasons to cancel). (Edit: Two hours after posting this, the conference was cancelled. Between that and VCON, I’m oh for two for Vancouver-area conferences in the past year.)

However, going back to the “being less productive” thing—between all that’s been going on, I’ve been plain ol’ exhausted a lot of the time, and that has affected how much fiction writing I’ve been doing. I haven’t done much for over a month, which has been discouraging on its own, but I’m looking forward to getting back in the saddle for The Sphinx’s Heart starting today.

And speaking of The Sphinx’s Heart and covers—the new cover is done. Or so I thought. But, like other titles in the series, part of the art includes a jewel (significant to the story) over one of the title letters, depicted as a pendant on a chain. Unfortunately, neither my graphic designer nor I noticed that in this case, the chain looks like it’s connecting two letters in “sphinx”. But two of the three people I’ve shown this cover to so far took one look and said “The Sphunx’s Heart?”

So … yeah. I’m getting it tweaked. But I can’t wait to show it to you. The cover is stunning, fitting in very well with this beautifully covered series of books.

Anyhoo, I better get to that writing if I’m going to hop in that saddle today, after all. Happy Friday, friend! I hope you have a good, safe, and healthy weekend.

The Year of Playing with Words and Yarn

When I look at my website stats, I am consistently floored that my knitting tutorials, posts, and all things knitting-related are consistently what brings traffic to this website, despite the fact that my knitwear design business is one of the smallest parts of my income and, therefore, business focus. (But without it, I’m not sure Google would know I exist.)

Honestly, based on how badly I wanted my income-generating sources to switch to fiction- and writing-related content, this used to discourage me. I mean, I currently get around 4,000 unique visitors to this site a month, and non-knitting content ranks so low in the traffic results that it’s usually on another page in my stats.

I’ve tried tackling the problem of audience vs. income imbalance a few ways in the past, and none of them have been sustainable for me. So this year, I’m trying something new.

I’m not going to focus on making knitting income so much as finding what my knitting audience wants. Fortunately, all those analytics have told me a great deal about where to start—most of you want help with learning to knit.

Guess what? I love teaching. Teaching knitting is a huge part of the My Secret Wish Knitting brand, as each of my patterns has tutorials and links to techniques I think my customer may be less familiar with. That’s why I made all those tutorials in the first place! That’s also where all my hits are coming from.

And I also love writing. And knitting.

What I don’t particularly love is the amount of work and repetition that goes into making one of my patterns publishable in the limited amount of knitting time I have, keeping me stuck on the same project for a year or even more. (One of my more complicated designs in the works is the Lady Guinevere Socks, which was conceived seven—make that eight—years ago. Yes. I REALLY want to get that out in the world. But it’s not ready.)

So, in an effort to both recapture the joy of knitting for myself and find more and better ways to serve my massive knitting audience, I have declared this the Year of Playing with Words and Yarn for my knitting business. I have created a new formula for my knitting newsletter that focuses on play and inspiration, not so much on promoting my own knitting patterns.

Photo courtesy of Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

I’m excited. I put out my first issue a couple of weeks ago (once the MailerLite changeover was complete). It included features about a Local Yarn Store (LYS), a pattern book review, some colour inspiration, photos of pretty yarn, a fun knitting quote graphic, and a Tales from the UFO Pile section, which is where I talk about the UnFinished Objects (UFO—get it, you non-knitters in the crowd?) that I am finally finishing and my efforts to reduce my stash by trying new things.

I have deliberately decided not to publish patterns this year, but to play with knitting and writing about knitting. And pictures. Of course there will be pictures!

However, another focus I have is to serve that vast audience of knitters that shows up on my website on a daily basis. So, once I’ve created all that lovely content for my new newsletter, I will be reposting it in sections over the following two months until my next newsletter comes out, in order to create an archive of these types of posts that knitters should find helpful.

I don’t yet know how this will address my income/audience imbalance thing. That’s part of the reason for the play—find out what you knitters want, then find out a way to offer you value that you will pay for to make this a great deal for both of us. But I’m going to just take this year and figure that out. And I intend to have fun doing it.

I bought this new sock yarn while at Quintessential Knits in December. I’m excited to see how it knits up! Of course, I took this lovely photo to share in my new newsletter. (And I look forward to posting my article about Quintessential Knits on here soon.)

What that means for you, dear blog reader/subscriber, is that there will be a post every two-to-four weeks or so that is focused exclusively on knitting. I realize that many of you are not here for those posts. And others of you have also probably been missing them since I rarely post about knitting anymore.

As always, I’m an eclectic person. I thought about creating a separate knitting blog, but this blog has always served the purpose of sharing what’s important to me personally, and knitting has always been a part of that. So I decided to continue using this blog for both audiences. And, according to my newsletter stats, a surprising majority of you are actually in both.

So, if you’re one of the folks who has no interest in knitting, when you see one of these knitting-only posts come along, just archive it and move along. There’ll be more content for you on the way, trust me.

I will continue striving to provide about two personal updates a month to this blog. In addition, I will also be reposting at least one past Books & Inspiration newsletter feature to this blog per month for the remainder of this year.

If a post was originally featured in a newsletter, I will make sure to include the original date and newsletter list in the post.

The end result is that this blog’s activity (and value to you, I hope) is about to go way up, but I’m hoping the additional strain on my time will be minimal. If I find this new plan to be unsustainable, I may have to revise it. For now, though, I invite you to stick with me as I keep moving forward in my Year of Playing with Words and Yarn.

Happy knitting! (And reading. :-D)

 

*

 

Yarn Tails - MSW Knitting Newsletter, Issue 20.01

Tales from the UFO Pile

This year, I intend to tackle my accumulating stash and Unfinished Object (UFO) pile. It is extensive. (I'm sure you have no idea what that's like.)

I don't intend to limit myself to any sort of plan or structure, I'll just knit what I want. This section is where I'll share my recent adventures.

While some of these patterns may eventually become published patterns, in the spirit of Play, I'm going to leave that up to Future Me to decide.

This month, I've been hitting up my sock yarn bins. I'm on my second pair of Just Plain Socks in a month, both knit with Knit Picks' Stroll Tweed. Just Plain Socks is a great, basic pattern for utility knitting for the men in my life, and one of the few things they actually want me to make for them.

Here's the first pair, made for my second son, Noah. I'm hoping his feet have finally stopped growing so I can start getting ahead of the game for him instead of only being able to make one pair of homemade socks that fits him at one time.

Yarns used: Knit Picks Stroll Tweed in Lost Lake Heather and Oyster Heather.

Noah’s new Just Plain Socks. I’ve got another navy pair for Jason almost off the needles. (See Instagram post below.)

*I had my son Jude make me a new “Making Magic with Words and Yarn” logo which I’ll be using in the newsletter. I love it!

View this post on Instagram

I asked my husband to pose with his sock-in-progress to post to IG, and this is what I got. Fortunately, I was fast enough to get the great photo of him laughing, too. That's my sexy, goofy Canadian lumberjack. . #saturdayfun #justplainsocks #sexiestmanalive #thatshowweroll #knitstagram #amknitting #knittersofig #knittersofinstagram #knitweardesign #mysecretwishbytalena #mswbtprojects

A post shared by Talena Winters (@talenawinters) on Jan 25, 2020 at 11:43am PST

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Like a Phoenix

Despite being of a personality type that frequently flies too close to the sun, pushes my limits, and therefore threatens burnout on a regular basis, it's not often that I actually crash and burn.

Last week, I crashed. I crashed hard.

I’ve been switching email service providers this month. After working through the weekend (again) to get MailerLite set up—something I was convinced I didn't have time to do in my regular work week—and suppressing escalating panic about an unrealistic manuscript deadline that I had set for myself, I found myself fighting tears on a near-hourly basis and knew something about my system was broken.

I hadn't taken a real break at Christmas, as I had been staring down this impending deadline since the beginning of December, when I was sure I could learn to dictate successfully and write a 200,000-word novel in a month—because other people could dictate ten to fifteen thousand words a day, so why couldn't I?

That question “other people do this, so why can't I?” has defined my attitude for much of my life. While this has often been a good thing, causing me to tackle new passions and interests without fear, it is also the reason I have so often fought (or experienced) burnout. Because it fails to recognize my limitations.

Let's talk about limitations for a second.

Limitations get a bad rap. Every inspirational poster out there tells you that limitations only exist in your mind, and even very real physical limitations can often be overcome.

Which is often absolutely true. I mean, we all love a good underdog story, don't we? I love watching Sean Astin as Rudy overcome his small size to become an American football legend.

Yes, even this unsporty girl still loves sports movies, because nearly all of them have this inspirational theme. Who doesn't love to see the underdog “make it?”

In fact, many great stories are about the hero overcoming a limitation in the form of a Lie they believe. As an eternal optimist, I want to believe that everyone has the potential to overcome their own lies if they choose to. That is how I write my characters.

Last week, I had to overcome one of my own lies. And the lie was this: I must write and publish books quickly because that's the only way I can be a full-time writer and make a living doing it, which is what I want to do.

But why on earth would you think that? I hear you asking.

Please indulge me for a moment while I explain the current state of the publishing industry as briefly as possible for those who don't keep up on these things.

Is it getting harder to find the books you love? There’s a reason for that. Photo by Kenny Luo on Unsplash.

The Whys of the Modern Author Life in a Nutshell

Changing technology and the increasing power of Amazon in the industry has had both positive and negative consequences. For readers, it's been great—Amazon has continually offered products and services that make access to books easier and cheaper, first with eBooks and the Kindle, and about five years ago, by revealing their Kindle Unlimited subscription service, which lets you read as many books as you want for a reasonable flat monthly fee. For the two-books-a-day people, this was a boon from heaven. Yay, readers!

These new technologies have also had positives for authors, too. For the first time in history, anyone can publish a book with a few simple and easily accessible (for many people in the world) tools, and people around the world can have instant access to it. No more gatekeepers. The readers get to decide if your book is any good. Yay, authors!

The early adopters of eBooks had to suffer a lot for the cheapness and convenience, as many of those first offerings were, well, just not very good. Despite that, authors who began publishing at the beginning of the eBook revolution ten years ago could very quickly replace their day job, because their “not very good” title was one of the very few readers had to choose from. When supply is low and demand is high, quality isn’t a limiting factor on making an income.

But as more and more authors have flooded the market, competition has gotten stiffer, and many independently published books today are indistinguishable from their traditionally published cousins as far as quality is concerned. Many are even better. Indie authors have truly become indie publishers, investing not only care and love into their creations, but also the money required to polish them to a shine. Yay, readers and authors!

But there's a secret war going on behind the scenes. (Or a not-so-secret war.) The glut of good, independently published books is causing big publishers to consolidate, tighten their belts, and take even fewer risks than they used to. Often, they want an author to already have an established platform. And how does one do that? Publish independently. Get good at marketing. Connect with readers. Do all the things, most of which have nothing to do with the craft of writing. And by the time an author can do all that, they may or may not even want to run the risks associated with traditional publishing, depending on whether the publisher can actually offer them something they can’t do themselves.

In the meantime, programs like Kindle Unlimited require exclusivity (from participating authors) to that platform and pay half a cent per page read, not by the borrow, constricting an author’s ability to make a profit or establish a platform outside of Amazon. Even Amazon's basic site-wide algorithm rewards publishing on a 30-day schedule by boosting visibility for new books—which, since Amazon represents 80% of the publishing market and there are literally millions of books in the Kindle store, matters.

I’m a strong believer in publishing “wide”—meaning, on all the available platforms, not just Amazon—but Amazon gives authors strong incentive not to do so, which becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. And even “wide” authors depend heavily on Amazon sales most of the time. It exerts tremendous control over the industry, and some authors are one algorithm adjustment away from their most sustainable income source going down the toilet.

All this amounts to authors going to ever-more-desperate lengths to get their books in front of readers while watching their profits (if they ever had any) diminish.

This has resulted in an indie author model of rapid release, with those authors who are able writing books very quickly, sometimes as many as twelve or fourteen per year. (Sound impossible? I know several authors personally who do this, and I know of many more who do.)

In other words, books are becoming a commodity in a system that rewards those who can create them the fastest, not necessarily the best, while simultaneously creating smaller and smaller profit margins for the producers.

Fast books can be good books. They are definitely going to be different books than slow ones that are the result of an author’s noodling and thought experiments over a period of months or even years. But, fast or slow, if you have to give away that book for free and then pay for an ad for that free book in order to find readers, the math is going in the wrong direction.

Fast writers get around this by producing enough work they can charge for that they can give away some of it to entice readers to the paid work.

But what about slow writers who only put out a book a year or less?

For the authors who can manage to write quickly, the rapid release model works. These are the authors that make six figures a year by writing fiction. Most traditionally published authors can't even hope for that anymore unless their name is Steven King.

However, I wanted to write fiction full time. So when I heard that I could potentially make a very good living as a full-time fiction author using this rapid release model, I set my sites on making my career look like that.

Because if they can do it, so can I. Right?

Being an author often means trying to make your books stand out in a crowded market—where a new book is published every five minutes. Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash.

How that Looks IRL

Now, as a fiction writer, I'm still pretty new. I haven't been scribbling stories on every available surface since I was a kid, and though I've read hundreds of books, I've only been studying fiction writing for about ten years. So I thought I'd start with putting out one book a year. Then two books a year. Then four. Then six. You know, work my way up to it.

Last year, four years after I published my first novella, I hit my first multi-title year, publishing one long book and one short one. Plus two short stories/novelettes. This year, I wanted to up that number, maybe even double it.

So I set myself this crazy deadline for The Sphinx’s Heart. I was going to learn to dictate and finish a novel in a month. How hard could it be? Another author had done it*, and if she could, so could I. I even booked a date with a developmental editor and put down a deposit. Set deadlines that scare you, the common knowledge said. Force yourself to commit.

Not that getting to my writing desk is a problem for me, but with money on the line, I knew I’d be as committed as I’d ever been. I don’t miss deadlines when other people are counting on me. I just don’t.

So I pushed myself. I skipped sleep. I skipped weekends and holidays. Fear became my constant companion, especially as my deadline crept closer and I wasn’t even halfway through the plot.

As the deadline approached and I knew I wouldn’t make it, my editor graciously let me push it out by another month. I can do it by then, for sure, I assured her. And myself.

But I began to dread getting in my chair in the morning. I was spending twenty hours a week on my novel, but all I was doing was cleaning up the mess I'd made dictating the early parts of the book—and being afraid. Being very afraid. (It turns out that “learning to dictate” was not quite so straight-forward as I’d thought it would be.)

Last week, I was ready to break. I started crying at the least provocation. Something’s wrong. I need to change something.

But I have a deadline! I caaan’t! I wailed to myself.

By chance, I'd recently heard author and writer coach Becca Syme interviewed on a podcast, and, practically on impulse (or rather, out of complete desperation), decided I needed to read her book, Writer, You Need to Quit. (Even though I was more than a little afraid that what I read would advise me to quit writing altogether.)

So I downloaded it. And I was relieved to not be among the group whom she said should maybe reconsider a career in writing.

However, I was even more relieved when she got to the part that she billed as one of the “hardest chapters to write”—because it gave me permission to be myself as a writer.

I’ve been spending so much time trying to learn how to write like other people write. But I never once took into consideration the things about me and them that were different—so different that for me to do what they do, especially to learn to do it in a short period of time, may be impossible. Things like the genre of books I write. Life circumstances. Skill. But above all, what I value about writing and the books I produce and the kind of lifestyle I want to have.

I had also never considered if, once I’d done that, I’d want the lifestyle I’d created for myself.

With the current state of the publishing industry, being an author can feel a lot like this. Photo courtesy of 123rf.com.

What My Limitations Are

If we truly want something, we will often be able to find a way around our limitations. There might be a price, but we can find the way.

We often forget that limitations are like boundaries that nature sets for us. Push them too far too fast, and not only do we risk unrecoverable injury, but we end up miserable.

It does no good to anyone to deny your limitations when you’ve been beating yourself bloody trying to overcome them and have made little to no progress. Despite what Eddie the Eagle went through to make it to the Olympics, he had very real limitations that he would not have been able to overcome if he’d wanted to win a medal.

But his goal was not to get a medal—it was just to compete at all. He wanted to be allowed to enter the field. And somehow, he found a way to do that—but it still cost him. If he’d have been determined to get that gold medal, he well may have killed himself in the process of trying.

Just like I’ve been killing myself to reach a goal that my inherent values limit me from achieving.

There were lots of great things I learned from reading Becca’s book, but the most important one is probably that the things I value in a book are not conducive to a fast writing process.

I write long, complicated, epic, political (kind of) stories about heavy subjects in worlds I either have to make up or research heavily. I value representing cultures, people, and locations accurately and putting out excellent, thought-provoking books.

I also value time spent with family more than work, supposedly, and here I was, working through my precious weekends instead of hanging out with my kids and husband. After we lost Levi, I swore I wouldn’t do that again.

So why was I doing it?

More truths hit me as other sources I encountered last week talked about the advancements in AI technology and how it pertains to authors. Soon, humans won’t be able to write books fast enough to out-write an AI who can do it in minutes and for pennies on the dollar. This crazy publishing paradigm that has been created will be a house of cards ready to explode (forgive my mixed metaphors) when fiction becomes as easily produced as a toothbrush or any other gadget off a Chinese assembly line.

Yes, there will always be a market for human-written books—as long as they are unique enough to be considered artisanal. Just like the Walmarts of the world have created a backlash culture that values slow fashion, buying local, and growing your own food, eventually there will be book consumers who would rather pay premium rates for a well-written authentically human-made book than pennies for dime-store AI pulp fiction.

So that means I could sacrifice my health and sanity to learn how to write at the speed of my fast writer friends just in time for all of our “fast” work to be made obsolete, for the system to collapse, and for the really valuable books to have been written by humans who put their heart and soul into the content, making them “special” in a way no machine could ever reproduce.

Sorry, Data, no offense. Though I’m pretty sure whomever actually played the notes we’re hearing was not an android. ;-)

But wait, there’s more…

In addition to these sobering thoughts, many of these rapid-release authors still work sixty hours or more a week (especially if they’re indie and do All the Things). What will they do when the books they’re writing could be written by a machine?

In light of all that, I had to ask myself a really important question:

What is it that I really want?

I think we too often forget to ask ourselves that. Or if we do, we give the wrong answer.

Not so long ago, I would have answered that with “be a full-time fiction writer.”

But when I look at the realities of what that would mean, that’s not what I actually want.

What I want is to create a sustainable income that I enjoy and which gives me the flexibility and freedom to schedule my own hours while feeding and nurturing my creativity and which lets me help others do the same.

And then I realized what’s probably obvious to you: I’M ALREADY DOING THAT.

I love teaching piano, editing, and freelance writing. I love talking to people and telling their stories. And I can already make a decent living doing that which still allows me plenty of time to write fiction while retaining my sanity and health—if I would just stop burning myself out to become someone I’m not.

I kicked off this year talking about how my goal is to develop healthier habits.

Well, Habit Number One is this:

Accept what is.

Accept that I’m a writer who values excellence in my books more than writing them quickly, so if it’s a choice between the two, I choose to write slow excellence, and that’s okay.

Accept that I will still find fulfillment as a writer even if my primary income is from other sources. I can write just because I want to do it and my readers will still love my books!

Accept that I can have a happy and fulfilling life with what I already do. I don’t have to try to do more.

After all, a happy and fulfilling life is what I see as success.

Sometimes, we need to fake it ‘til we make it. And sometimes, we need to examine if what we’re trying to achieve is what we truly want out of life. Photo courtesy of 123rf.com.

Beauty Will Rise

Those truths were hard to swallow, but they were truths I needed to acknowledge.

So, I crashed. I burned. And now, like a phoenix, I’m rising from those ashes a happier, healthier person.

Already, I’m seeing the fruit of writing relaxed—I’m finally moving forward in my story. No, I probably won’t be releasing The Sphinx’s Heart this summer. But I’ll just keep typing until I get to the finish line, trusting that the result will be worth the wait.

More than four years after my world burned, I’m still rising. And that’s kind of encouraging, actually.

How about you? Have you experienced a moment where you realized that what you said you wanted was not what you actually wanted? Where your values conflict with the lifestyle that goes with your supposed goal? Where you found where your true limits actually are?

Let me know. We can shake our heads at our foolish younger selves and raise a cup of hot chocolate to better days ahead.

And to finish out the mini playlist I’ve included in this post, here’s a song from my inspiration track for The Sphinx’s Heart that is especially apropos to today’s post.

It’s been on this playlist for over a year. Apparently, my subconscious was trying to tell me something.

There’s something so freeing about accepting what is. Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash.

*The author in question is the amazing Andrea Pearson, who learned to dictate a novel in a month to meet a deadline after she broke her finger and couldn’t type. Did I stop to ask myself how long her novel was? No. Not to mention where she was in her writing journey or even if she immediately started with the crazy-high hourly dictation rates she now achieves. These are things I should have asked myself, though. Or her.

Developing Successful Habits

‘Tis the season for new beginnings, assessing goals, and setting new ones. As I did my yearly wrap-up assessment of what I had achieved in 2019 and set goals for 2020, I was both pleasantly surprised at what I had achieved and sobered by how short of my goals I was in some areas.

I’ve also spent much of the week fighting off a low-level state of panic. You probably would, too, if you were only a quarter of the way through an expected 200,000-word first draft of a manuscript that’s supposed to be getting assessed by a developmental editor in two weeks.

Yeah. I’ve had mixed results with the dictating thing (talked about in my last post). Don’t get me wrong—I love it. I absolutely know it’s going to change my life, and it has already helped. But I’ve found it has its drawbacks—such as, it’s super-hard to dictate anything when you are in a room with other people who are all on holidays for the Christmas break, for instance. Or when you’re sick and can barely speak without coughing. (I caught a cold on my way to visit my sister in Seattle and didn’t really start to recover until just before I came home a week later.)

I also find it’s more difficult to dictate fiction than nonfiction like blog posts, but that’s the same as typing for me. When I’m dictating fiction, I tend to “break” things more and then, because I can’t just look up and remind myself what I said before or quickly fix the thing I broke, things tend to get worse before they get better, and then take excessively long to edit back to something I can work with.

I know that I can learn to dictate fiction, but apparently, blithely planning to do so in such a short amount of time and while trying to also spend time with family on holidays was not the best idea.

Quite aside with my challenges with dictation, despite having written 50,000 words on The Sphinx’s Heart and producing a new 11k-word short story for my Patreon community in December (mostly written on my phone, a new one for me), I found I really would have been better off mentally to just plan on two weeks that really were a break from everything and allow myself to enjoy time with family—or to read more. (I only read one book. Wah. At least it was fiction. And it was good. In Her Shadow by Mark Edwards, if you’re curious.)

So, note to self: Next December, take two full weeks OFF. Completely. Not this “I’m on holidays but still worked 40 hours this week” nonsense.

Photo courtesy of Aaron Wilson on Unsplash.

I think that’s why it’s important to keep track of what one has actually achieved, especially if you are driven or work for yourself, like me. It can be so easy to focus on “well, if I don’t do this now, then I’ll be that much further behind where I could have been.” But there are other things we need to do in life besides work, such as spend time with family, refresh our creativity, and unwind. Maybe even clean our blinkin’ house. (Hey, it should be a priority at least once a year.)

And this is me talking to me. You are probably much wiser than I am and don’t have to literally schedule in down time so that you’ll take it. Unfortunately, this is a lesson it seems I never fully learn.

I think it’s because I’m so goal-driven. Going in to 2019, my goal was to have both The Undine’s Tear and The Sphinx’s Heart published by the end of the year. Well, obviously, I only got halfway there. (But I did publish two books last year if you count The Waterboy. Which I do. Between those two books, that’s 187k words of fiction, or 2-3 ordinary full-length novels.) I also FINALLY succeeded in writing an honest-to-goodness short story. Yay!

And, of course, I have set lofty goals for my writing career for the upcoming year, too, one of which is to make publishing fiction a priority. But still, because of getting close to burnout a couple of times this year, I’m looking at those goals with caution.

I think it might be wiser for me to have goals to work toward but without deadlines. Instead of saying “this is the month such-and-such will be published,” I plan to focus on establishing and maintaining the habits that will allow me to create the kind of career I want to have.

This seems so simple, yet it’s kind of a revolutionary way for me to set goals.

So, here is my very simple plan to develop the career I want to have:

I will PUT WRITING FIRST BEFORE OTHER BUSINESS ACTIVITIES: I will spend 50% of my non-billable hours writing. (This is roughly 1/3 of my work week.)

I will PRIORITIZE MY FAMILY: During non-work hours, time spent with my family will take priority over all other activities.

I will NURTURE MY HEALTH: I will develop habits of self-care that will keep me healthy, both during work and non-work hours.

I will INSPIRE OTHERS: I will make an effort to pass my skills and knowledge on to others, especially other writers.

Yes, I have some more tangible steps laid out in my yearly plan to help me to accomplish these things. But when I do my assessment for the year in 2020 to decide if I am closer to my dreams, these are the four benchmarks I want to determine whether or not it was a successful year in my mind—not how many books or patterns I published or even what my annual revenue looks like.

Because my habits are the one thing I can control. And if my habits set the stage for success, it only makes sense that success is more likely to show up.

I hope you have a plan to get closer to your ideal life in 2020. If not, consider what habits you can establish that will help you set the stage for success.

Tomorrow, I’ll be part of a panel-style webinar about productivity hosted by Mark Leslie Lefebvre with authors Tracy Cooper-Posey, M. Jane Colette, and Andrea Pearson, all of which are highly productive creatives. If you want to get in on the live webinar, you can sign up here:

Register

Happy New Year, friend!

Holiday Photo Album Highlights:

My mom and I on the way to Seattle at an obscenely early hour of the morning. December 18, 2019.

Fleeing a Minecraft creeper at the Microsoft Store in Redmond, WA.

Lovely shawl on display in Quintessential Knits, Duvall, WA. (I walked out of this shop with only 4 new skeins of sock yarn. I’m so proud of me.)

My mom, sister, and I got to see Guys and Dolls live at the Village Theatre in Issaquah, WA. So good!

I decided it was time to go for unicorn hair.

It did clash a little with the dress I wore for our Christmas Eve medieval feast at Camlann Medieval Village. Which was amazing, by the way. If you ever get a chance to go to one of their feasts, DO IT! (Thanks to my sister for supplying the dress.)

I wrote and published this short story to my patrons—only $3 to get access! More at All I Want for Christmas. (I know it’s past Christmas, but it’s still a heartwarming read.)

The last week of holidays has been at home with my family. We’ve been pretty chill, mostly finishing up some shows we’ve been trying to get through for a while. Various groupings of us finished Friends (yay!), Carnival Row, The Witcher, Supergirl Season 3, and Season 3/started Season 4 of Doctor Who. Jason, Jude, and I also watched The Laundromat, which was intriguing.

Winter holidays are for hibernating. :-)

And I made Noah a pair of Just Plain Socks.

The Week of Epicness That Will Change My Writing Life

As my mom likes to say, "Life is never dull or boring around here." That has certainly been true this week. It’s one of those weeks I file under “epic,” the kind you remind yourself of when things aren’t going so well to know that dark days won’t last.

I have been experimenting with new technology this past week. This has been motivated by my constant desire to increase productivity and my fitness level as an author. And, just so you can’t accuse me of burying the lead, I have been trying to figure out how to dictate my novel.

First, some context.

(Psst… if you don’t work with words all day in some form or another and aren’t really interested in how I might be producing even more stories for you to read within the next year or so, feel free to skip to the end of this post where I talk about a sale on one of my books and the other epic stuff that happened outside of this exciting new writing skill I’m learning. Fair warning if you read the whole thing through: I’m going to be geeking out about word counts a lot.)

This week, writing became magical again… again.

Since I actively began working towards a full-time career in writing in 2016, I have been on a constant quest to increase my productivity. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you make money from writing words, the more words you write, the more money you have the potential to make. Not to mention, the more words I write, the more stories I get to tell—and that’s really the fun part!

Now I know there's a lot of debate about writing fast in the industry, as writers go back and forth about quantity versus quality versus how do you make a living doing this indie gig? I'm not here to debate that today. I'm just here to tell you what I've been doing to bolster my own productivity within the last year with the starting premise that I want to be more productive.

You might remember my experiment with knittercising last year. That was my brilliant idea to exercise for an hour a day by walking around my house knitting, thereby making it not unfun by being warm and more fun by getting to, you know, knit.

I stayed with it pretty faithfully for about a month, and then… deadlines hit. Suddenly, taking an hour a day to not only knit, but walk around instead of creating the words that I was being paid to create, didn't seem quite so justifiable. “I'll get back to it after this issue is out,” I told myself.

Yeah, right.

Needless to say, the knittercising quest died. Because after the issue was out, then I had a book to put out. And then I decided to put out a novella (The Waterboy). And then there was the marketing, and the next issue, and a piano recital to plan, and, and, and… The list goes on.

However, in the midst of all that craziness, I began some other productivity habits. For one thing (and in my defence), once springtime hit, I did actually exercise outside by walking about an hour day while listening to audio books. (Yay! An hour of fiction a day! Fun!)

I did that for about a month, too, before a plague of grasshoppers hit the Peace Country and made walking outside about as much fun as, well, as going outside and being bombarded by thousands of grasshoppers. (I’m sure you can imagine it.)

I'm trying to like audio books. They’re growing on me, but I can't say I love them yet. So maybe that wasn’t the best hook for me. For instance, I don’t love listening to audio books more than I like not having insects crawling on me. Weird, right?

My experiment with audio books, however, did lead me to a new experiment: podcasts.

My interview on Joshua Pantalleresco’s podcast this spring wasn't my first podcast interview, but after it came out, for the first time I actually started listening to a podcast on a regular basis. (Yes, Josh, you were first.) I started listening partly because I knew some of the guests, and partly because I found it very inspiring to hear what other writers had done and what they were doing and how they were making a success of this whole “writing for a living” thing.

My list grew from there. I went to WWC and heard about a couple other podcasts. So I added them to my list. As of about a month ago, there were maybe three or four part podcasts that I listened to on a regular basis—Stark Reflections by Mark Leslie Lefebvre, The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn, and, of course, Joshua Pantalleresco’s Just Joshing. (I’ve since added a few others which I’ll probably be talking about on my Writing Tips blog later this week.)

Despite my limited listening library, podcasts were quickly becoming one of my favourite ways to consume information during times that would otherwise have been “wasted”, such as folding laundry, starting a fire, making a meal, or even just driving.

Okay, no, those times were never really wasted. I actually value my mental downtime.

Often, I use that time to listen to music that inspires my stories and to work out plot problems or even just to plan my day. Having mental downtime is a key component of mental health as a writer. (And as a person, by the way.)

However, I usually had more of that than I wanted or needed, so now, I fill in that “extra” time by taking in information through podcasts. What this has allowed me to do is to stop feeling the need to keep up on the industry news while seated and reading from my phone (one less thing I need to sit for!) or while sitting at my computer, and to use those “sitting” times to be productive instead.

So now I love podcasts. I listen to them at every opportunity like the learning addict I am. And that listening time has allowed me to be more productive during my “work” time. Win!

Now, that audio book I’ve been in the middle of for three months? Yeah, that's another story…

Meanwhile, I have also added a few other productivity tools to my toolkit. I mentioned before how I increased writing productivity after reading Rachel Aaron’s 2K to 10K while finishing The Waterboy this spring. What I learned from the book increased my fiction writing productivity right away, and within a few weeks, I began to see my word count per hour go up across the board. Plus, for the first time in my career, I was actually tracking these things, so I knew when I was or was not being productive and whether or not I was improving.

Of course, I decided to apply Rachel’s techniques to the next book in my series, The Sphinx’s Heart. But after starting with my initial bullet point outline for the entire epic novel, I realized there were some plot twists and turns that I needed to know in more detail before I even began writing. So I decided to apply Rachel Aaron’s write-it-out point plot technique to my entire book at once (except I typed). I was soon doing it for every scene. That eventually developed into what I call the “zero draft”—a beat-by-beat outline for my entire novel.

(Incidentally, I finished that zero draft on December 2. It's at about 47,000 words. Yes, that is twice as long as my first novel and The Waterboy, and well, frankly many other novels that exist in the world, too. Yes, The Sphinx’s Heart will be just as long as or longer than The Undine’s Tear. You're welcome.)

Was writing this novel with a zero draft faster, per se?

Well, let's see.

[Warning: We’re about to get uber-geeky.]

Writing The Undine’s Tear started from an idea I got in 2010. It's hardly fair to count from there, because after that point, I had to learn how to write fiction, how to publish fiction, and how to market fiction. Plus, I wrote two other books and published them before I started, not to mention had a major family upheaval, all while running other businesses. So for a starting point on this story, despite the epic amount of research I'd already done by the time I got there, I’m going to say I started outlining it when I completed Finding Heaven and decided it was finally time to write my mermaid story.

I published Finding Heaven in November 2017. I’m not 100% sure when I started drafting The Undine’s Tear, as my record-keeping on that was sketchy. All I can tell you is that by February 4, 2018, I had written nearly 20,000 words. And a 1,500-word day was a good day for me at that point in time.

So, for argument’s sake, let’s say I worked on the outline and first draft of The Undine’s Tear from the end of November 2017 to the end of November 2018, around twelve months.

I started outlining the next two books in March of this year, while simultaneously publishing and launching The Undine’s Tear. During the three months between March (when I published The Waterboy) and May (when I published The Undine’s Tear), I mostly brainstormed into a recorder app on my phone (unwittingly becoming a dictator) as I travelled to book signings. But for the most part, I had not had a single session with my butt in a chair where I was working on this until I started transcribing those voice notes in early July.

So, let’s say the bullet outlining started on July 6. My first day of zero-draft outlining The Sphinx’s Heart was July 25. From July 6, 2019 to December 2, 2019, or over the course of almost five months, I worked on that zero draft and brought it to 47,000 words.

While some people would consider that a fantastic rate, prolific authors can do that in about two weeks or less, and that would be pretty pathetic.

I’m still proud of it, though. It’s a huge step toward the productivity I crave.

How’s that, you say?

That zero draft is where all the hard work was. That's where I had to make all the different pieces of my plot fit together, and that's where I did most of my research. I may have some to do as I go through my first draft, but it will not be nearly as intensive as what I've already put into it.

But wait, there’s more…

I started my official capital-F First Draft on December 3. In other words, seven days ago. Last night, I hit 18,000 words.

I expect my daily word count on this first draft to be epic. However, despite hitting over 5,000 words in less than four hours last night, I’m not quite there yet, and here’s why:

On December 2, I decided I needed to draft the entire first draft of The Sphinx’s Heart in a month.

You heard me. 164,000 words or more in a single very busy month, with a week-long holiday to see my sister and other writing assignments in the mix. (Fortunately, no piano lessons this month. Whooee! And I purposely didn’t take editing clients so I could do this.)

That’s a daily word count of around 5,500 if I only skip one day (and I’m already over that limit!). I used to be happy hitting that in a week. That's a lot of freaking words.

I have hit 5,500 words per day during the mad rush to finish books before, but it definitely has not been my most consistent number.

Am I crazy?

Well, that’s another blog post…

BUT!

If I succeed, that means I’ll have completed the entire outline and first draft of this book in only six months!

Yeah, I’d say that’s faster.

Key words: “If I Succeed”

There were a few recent events that made me think I probably could succeed at this and decide to give it a shot.

First, I recently did an editing report for a client where I wrote (typed) 10,000 words in less than six hours. So I knew that I could type fast enough to write 5,500 words per day if I set aside enough hours to do it—as long as I knew what it was I wanted to say.

(And, thanks to my zero draft, I do know what I want to say.)

Second, all within the period of a week, I heard from three different sources about ways to make dictating a part of my writing routine and triple my hourly word count (one of which was Chris Fox’s 5,000 Words per Hour). So I purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking and began my career in dictation.

Guess what? Everything in this blog post up until this point was (mostly) dictated into my phone while I’ve been cleaning up from lunch and making myself a coffee. (I’ve edited it with a keyboard since, but that was pretty painless.)

This is my first experiment with dictating using Dragon by speaking into a recorder app and then transferring it into my computer afterwards to be transcribed. I know have to clean it up (done!), but I'm excited to see how it works. So far, I've been recording for twenty-two minutes. If I had been typing for this amount of time at my average rates for typing a blog post, I would be at about 440 words. While dictating, I've already reached 1,889.

Yes, I'm very excited about dictating.

(Of note for those who have used voice-to-text apps. They are NOT the same as using a dedicated app like Dragon, which can be trained, and which actually lets you dictate in quotation marks. If I tried to dictate an entire book into Google Docs using their voice-to-text engine, I’d probably take up drinking.)

So that 18,000 words I hit last night? 5,300 of them were from yesterday, my best day dictating yet—and I was doing it while exhausted and with multiple interruptions from my family. Only a week into the experiment and I’m already starting to figure this dictating thing out and have caught up to my average recent “good day” hourly typing speed of 1,400 words/hour. (Note: while drafting The Undine’s Tear, my average hourly speed was about 700 words. Last night, I hit 1,400. My hourly word count for this post before copying to my site, including revision? 1,710. Boo-yah!)

Yes, I'm behind on my 5,500 words per day, but I'm expecting to catch up soon. Even more exciting, I'm looking forward to being more active this winter—not by knittercising, but writercising! (Like Kevin J. Anderson, who writes his books while taking long hikes.)

I am super excited about the idea of no longer being chained to my desk in order to do my job. I'm going to leave this here, as I'm sure you can imagine the possibilities yourself. However, stay tuned for further adventures of the dictating writer as I keep you posted about how it works for me.

(A little extra motivation to learn to dictate is the deposit I’ve paid a developmental editor to look at this book on January 16. So I’m VERY motivated to finish this book this month and still have time to revise!)

If you don’t hear from me again until 2020, you know what I’ll be doing. :-)

In other news:

Last week was epic for other reasons, too. First, I was honoured to be featured on Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s podcast, Stark Reflections. In the interview, I give a brief overview of my journey as a creative and a writer, talk about how awesome my mom is, and encourage you that it’s never too late to decide what you want to do when you grow up.

I’m also part of a Young Adult Fantasy promotion on Bookfunnel this month to promote YA fantasy with other authors. If you’re looking for some new authors to check out, you can see what’s in the promo here.

Check out YA Fantasy Promo

As part of the promo, I have put the eBook for The Undine’s Tear on for $1.99 everywhere. And thanks to that little sale, The Undine’s Tear Kindle book hit the top 100 bestseller list on Amazon in three categories for both Amazon US and Australia.

No, I’m not quitting my day job. The number of copies required to do that was embarrassingly low. But it’s something, so I thought I’d at least mention it.

If you haven’t yet added this book to your library, you can find it on any platform from this universal link:

Get The Undine's Tear

Well, that’s it, folks. I’m back to the writing salt mines. Except, instead of mummifying myself slowly in front of my desk, I’m looking forward to all the ways I can make dictating part of a healthier, more productive lifestyle.

Happy Tuesday!

Mark Leslie Lefebvre Finds His Voice

Several years ago at When Words Collide in Calgary, I was lucky enough to sit in a couple of sessions presented by Mark Leslie Lefebvre. I say “lucky,” because they were some of the most worthwhile sessions of my weekend. Since then, Mark has started a podcast (one of the few I listen to) and has made several changes in his career, but he has continued to be a dynamic force in the Canadian and global publishing industry, especially for self-published authors.

Recently, in an interview on Joshua Pantalleresco’s podcast Just Joshing (another on my very short list), he admitted that despite all the speaking he does, he often still gets nervous making small talk and that he has had to learn to project the confidence others see.

That’s someone I want to talk to, I thought.

Fortunately, he wanted to talk to me, too.

Whether you are a writer or not, I hope you are also inspired by Mark’s story of overcoming personal fears in order to pursue his passion of telling stories and helping others be successful doing the same.

Author, speaker, bookseller, and publishing industry expert Mark Leslie Lefebvre on overcoming personal fears to fulfill his passion—telling stories and helping other authors be successful.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre, also known simply as Mark Leslie, is a study in contrasts. He describes himself as “very tall and recognizable. I’m a big bald guy with a beard and look like I can beat the crap out of you. But I define myself as a book nerd—books are my life. I’ve been passionate about books and writing pretty much my entire life.”

Mark is the brains (and brawn!) behind the self-publishing platform Kobo Writing Life, and last year, transitioned from heading that up to being the Director of Business Development for the self-publishing platform Draft2Digital. Besides dozens of published short stories, he has written or edited over 20 books, including three novels in the horror and thriller genres, a non-fiction paranormal series focusing on ghost stories in his home province of Ontario, Canada and elsewhere, and three publishing guides for authors. He presents at around a dozen conferences and workshops every year about writing, publishing, and bookselling. His podcast, Stark Reflections, recently topped the 100-episode mark, and his guests have included some of the most respected names in the writing industry. He also does one-to-one author and publisher consulting.

Wherever he speaks, he comes across as knowledgeable, confident, witty, and, above all, passionate about stories.  But despite his credentials, he is completely self-effacing, freely admitting that he’s an introvert who is shy making small talk and that he is still occasionally bothered by the nervous stomach that made him throw up before going onstage when he was in university theatre. Like many writers, his public persona is a set of skills he’s learned and intentionally employs, not something that comes naturally to him—even after more than 25 years in the industry.

“When I'm on stage, I'm expected to entertain, educate, and inform, and I better do my job and leave everything else behind,” says Mark. “But the minute I come off stage, even if it’s to roaring applause, I'll go shirk off and sit in the corner somewhere. I’m more than happy to talk to someone who approaches me, but I would not walk into a room and expect to command everyone’s attention unless they are there to see me. It’s the way I’ve always been.”

“ I would not walk into a room and expect to command everyone’s attention unless they are there to see me. It’s the way I’ve always been.”

Mark sold his first short story in 1992, the same year he began working as a part-time bookseller. Later, in 2002, his first professional story sale was published in an anthology (Stardust edited by Julie E. Czernada) meant to teach science curriculum to Ontario fourth-graders in an entertaining way. Mark’s story used the idea of a futuristic window pane made of water that would let you look back in time one minute, enabling the characters to solve a crime, to teach the refracting properties of light.

“Julie got a letter from a teacher with a reluctant reader in her class. The teacher said that my story was the first one the little boy had ever finished reading on his own. Not only that, he was so excited and inspired that he wrote his own sequel to the story. I still have that letter—it’s the most cherished piece of fan mail I’ve ever received. I could get a thousand five-star reviews on Amazon and it wouldn’t mean as much to me as the fact there was a boy who didn’t like to read, and suddenly liked to read, and not only that, he liked to write too. I’m not sure how I can top that,” says Mark.

Mark’s own passion for both reading and writing stories began very young when his Baba would read to him. His mother also kept him well-stocked with comic books which she purchased from the corner store where she worked. Mark eventually started drawing his own comics—using stick figures, to be sure, but it was enough for the storytelling bug to bite him and not let go.

“It's one thing to have imaginary things going on in your own mind. It’s another to tell a story to a friend. And it's quite another when you put that down on paper and someone else can come along at any point and read it. It’s their story now, even though you’ve written it, because the movie playing in their head is different than the one you’ve created. The story is yours, but it’s also theirs. That's magic,” says Mark.

“The story is yours, but it’s also theirs. That’s magic.”

Mark always wanted to become a teacher, but, as he says, his grades weren’t good enough to get into the university program (which required a 95% GPA at the time due to the demand). Instead, he used his passion for drama and theatre to teach a two-week drama camp for teenagers at his university campus. The skills he picked up both participating in and teaching theatre have served him in surprising ways in his career in writing.

“I've always thought of myself as a nerd and an outcast. I never had a lot of self-confidence. When I worked in the book industry, I had an amazing manager who told me ‘When you’re here in the bookstore, I don’t care what’s going on, you are playing the best bookseller in the world. You leave everything else in the back room.’ As an actor, that's something a director would do. ‘What do you want in this scene?’ As a writer, you think, ‘What is the purpose of this scene? What does the character want and how do they try to get it?’ And now, I’m more comfortable on stage than in the audience, because I’m there to perform a role,” says Mark.

He attributes the tough-loving figurative slaps upside the head his fiancée, Liz, gives him with helping him reach outside himself when in group situations that make him uncomfortable. She frequently reminds him that he has value to share, he just needs to share it.

When Mark is presenting with his “author hat,” he frequently brings one of his bony sidekicks with him.

“I was at an author event as a writer, in a room full of authors all chatting with each other. Liz pulled me aside and asked me why I was being so quiet and reserved. ‘You talk to hundreds of people around the world and help them. There’s a new writer here who’s trying to figure things out. Why aren’t you helping him like that?’ I said, ‘I’m Mark the Horror Guy right now. I brought my skeleton!’ But she told me I could help that author be more successful, and she was right,” says Mark.

That’s not the only time Liz has helped him to step outside his comfort zone to be a better teacher (possibly because she is an educator herself, which Mark says means he can live his teaching dreams vicariously through her—“but on her worst day, she’s far better than I am on my best day.”). He also recently read The Alter Ego Effect by Todd Herman, which promotes the idea of creating a persona—”the best version of yourself”—to help you achieve your goals. The book inspired him to take the performance skills he’d been using as a speaker for years and trigger them very intentionally to help in his career. He even created a persona to help overcome writer’s resistance and achieve his word count goals.

“I had to get over the fact that people would actually be interested in what I had to say, whether it was a story I was making up or something I had to say about writing or publishing. It’s not an insignificant thing to overcome. That’s where the Alter Ego Effect comes into play, because I can trigger a guy who’s not nervous and then I can do it,” says Mark.

Mark says one of the most important lessons he’s learned can be summed up in a quote from the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly, what Mark calls the Harry Bosch Principal: Everybody counts or nobody counts.

“Recently, I was at a NaNoWriMo writing session to get to know people in my new community,” says Mark. “I could have said to myself, I’m important because I’ve published twenty books and I’ve worked in the industry. But there was someone sitting beside me working on the first thing they’ve ever written, and there was something I could learn from them. So in your writer journey, treat people with respect by default. That’s the best advice I can give to anyone, not just writers.”

“Everybody counts or nobody counts. Treat people with respect by default.”

Like many multi-passionate authorpreneurs, one of the biggest challenges Mark has is making time in his busy schedule to write. However, he looks at this as a positive, saying that he hasn’t worked for a long time.

“Even though I work sixty- to eighty-hour weeks, I have to fight to have time to write,” says Mark. “I hope I’m lucky enough to continue to have that challenge—it’s a sign that I’m doing something that has meaning, not just for me, but for other people that I can hopefully help along the way. I hope I get to continue to inspire, inform, and entertain people, whether it’s through fiction or writing.”

You can find more about Mark, his books, his podcast, and his social media links at http://markleslie.ca.

On a personal note, I am hoping to finish the “zero draft” for The Sphinx’s Heart today! YIPPEE!

This is a new way of writing a book for me, someone who has always leaned more towards the “pantsing” side of things. And I certainly won’t be doing every book this way. But with this complicated epic-ish fantasy trilogy, after doing my typical bare-bones outline, I found that I wanted to really work out the twists and turns of the book before taking the time to commit beautiful words to the page (that may then need to be trashed because of things I developed later).

Using this technique came from a combination of ideas from two other authors—Peter V. Brett, who claims to make 50,000+ “step sheets” for his epic fantasy novels (The Demon Cycle series), and Rachel Aaron, who suggests taking a few minutes before each writing session to write out what happens in a scene point form before you begin to type (in her book 2k to 10k).

I used Rachel’s technique to finish The Waterboy this spring and was astonished when I wrote the last half of the novella (about 10,000 words) in less than two days. However, my handwriting is slow and somewhat painful. Ideas flow better for me when I’m typing. So when it came time to begin working on The Sphinx’s Heart in earnest and I knew I had to make all the little “toys” I’d dropped in Book 1 (The Undine’s Tear) into something that actually matters for both this book and the next one to finish the trilogy, I decided to use the “write it out first” technique on the entire novel before I began writing the real first draft.

And the “zero draft” was born.

As of this morning, this draft is at 41,000 words. I estimate the finished book will be right around the same length as the first one at 164,000 words. My hope is that, as of Monday, I’ll be able to start the first draft without much to slow me down, because the hard work of deciding what happens when and doing research to support what needs to happen has mostly been done. And I’m planning to finish writing that first draft by the end of December so I can stay on track for my planned publishing date of July.

Just typing all that terrifies me a little. That means I’ll be writing a 164k-word novel in a month. That’s about 5,500 words per day if I only take one day off all month. If I want more days off, I’ll have to write more words on other days.

It’s like the most epic NaNoWriMo challenge ever.

Plus, I still have other writing assignments this month and I’m going to visit my sister for a week.

So. Wish me luck? And pray for me! Haha.

Hey, even if I don’t quite make it, it will still be one of the most epic things I’ve ever accomplished. And my book will still be almost done.

Happy Friday, friends! (I’ll keep you posted.)

What are you doing this month that scares you a little?