Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 52

NE NJ NaNoWriMo Word Nenja Editing Deadlines and Quest Badges

NaNoWriMo’s been over for almost 3 full months now and many of you haven’t even touched your novel since then. In fact, that’s one of the biggest complaints NaNo participants have. Once the inspiration and frenzy of NaNoWriMo is over, how do you make yourself actually sit down and edit that novel you wrote in 30 days? It’s not uncommon for a winning Wrimo to never do anything with that novel they worked so hard to finish and that is a little sad, don’t you think?

I’m here to help with the two...

Meanwhile, on my other blogs…

Don’t read all the sites I blog for? Here’s a peek at what you’ve been missing:

Purchase The My Little Pony G2 Collector's Inventory through Amazon and get the…
Purchase The My Little Pony G2 Collector’s Inventory through Amazon and get the eBook version for $2.99 (that’s almost 60% off the normal price)! Give the paperback as a holiday gift and keep the eBook for yourself, we won’t tell!

The My Little Pony G2 Collector’s Inventory: an unofficial full color illustrated guide to the…
www.amazon....

Meanwhile, on my other blogs…

Don’t read all the sites I blog for? Here’s a peek at what you’ve been missing:

The infamous vintage My Little Pony Cotton Candy pony purse with half a pony sewn on
I remember when I found this purse at a garage sale in the pre-internet days. I was like… is that half a freaking pony sewed on there? But the wild part is that it isn’t like they cut a pony in half, as I originally thought. If you look at it in person, they actually […]

Buffer shows that sometimes great customer service is just bein...

One page of a script equals one minute of stage time? It depends on your script.

There’s a rule you’ll see over and over again in script writing that states that one page of script is about 1 minute of stage or screen time. You’re told that a 30 minute play should be 30 pages or a 90 minute movie would be a 90 page script. But while it’s better than nothing at giving you an idea of how long your script will be performed, it’s not the ironclad rule you’ll see it presented as.

For example: I have never seen a production of The Love of Three Oranges that ran under an hour and...

Augment your work count goals with percentage based benchmarks for more focused writing

Zucchini percentage (Photo credit: TonalLuminosity)

As I discussed over here, I completely redid my writing goals for 2014. A couple of people have asked me to explain my new system (and I know that other post is mad long) so here’s the TL; DR version.

Instead of just setting a single total work count goal for the year, I set a yearly goal with percentage based benchmarks based on my current needs. For me, this was that over 50% of my writing had to be focused (which means editing or working to...

10% off the acting edition of Daddy Issues on Amazon.com & the eBook is free!

I bought this for a speech student, not at all hopeful that it would be of use as I had been disappointed by several scripts already. Both the student and I loved it.

-Cat Woods’ review of Daddy Issues 1-Act Play

I just wanted to pop in to alert you that Amazon currently has the paperback edition of my one act drama, Daddy Issues, on sale today here. It’s rather inexpensive to begin with so it’s handy if you’re just looking for something to add to your cart to reach the threshold for free Super...

Getting more writing done with less time

Time is a Tickin’ (Photo credit: im elsewhere)

Pre-motherhood, it was not uncommon for me to work well over 40 hours a week. I tried to devote at least 40 to my money making activities and then leave myself a couple dozen hours for writing. (OK, yes, some of my day job work is also writing. But I tend to think of that was work and stuff like novel and play-writing as writing.) Even with all that time, I was almost always in over my head and buried with more work than I felt like I could handle...

Meanwhile, on my other blogs…

Don’t read all the sites I blog for? Here’s a peek at what you’ve been missing:

So, we all know the “eBay was created because the founder’s fiance collected Pez” story is BS, right?
If business creation myths have their own creation story, it was penned by Mary Lou Song. One of eBay’s first employees, Song grew frustrated trying to get the attention of dot-com-weary reporters. She hit on the notion of telling them that founder Pierre Omidyar had started the site to help his fiancée, Pam Wesley,...

5 out of 5 stars for The Bear Went Over the Mountain by Iza Trapani

I absolutely love this book! Gorgeous illustrations, a ton of fun to read! It’s successfully held my daughter’s interest from when she was only a few weeks old until now (she’s just over 1) and us grown-ups love it as well.

It’s a little thing but I especially love the attention to detail with the types of birds. We have many of those same types in our backyard and she loves recognizing them. It makes it feel like the story happens in our own backyard.

We own the hardcover now but we originally...

How a yearly writing goal can give you more flexibility than a daily one

Write every day.

That’s the mantra you hear from just about every writing adviser online and off. And I agree that writing every day can be incredibly helpful to your productivity and creativity. It would be ideal if we could all write every day… but it’s not always possible.

For years I beat myself up because, working several jobs with a long commute, I often didn’t get the chance to write every day. Or, if I did manage the daily words, it was at the expense of sleep, something I was getting p...