Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 7

Walking Vietnam's Coast - Virtual Challenge

After spending 434 days on the walking the Amazon challenge, I decided to take the short route for the Coast of Vietnam challenge.

For those of you who are newer to the blog, I enroll in virtual challenges where I can earn racing medals. There are two companies I really like, but one of them requires many of their challenges to be done in one session and sorry, I'm not doing a marathon.

The other company has long challenges that you can set your own timeline to complete. For example, the Amazon River challenge had two options--a short route and a long route. I opted to take the long route which is why it took me 434 days. It was more than 1600 kilometers long (Just short of 1000 miles.) As this challenge went on and on for more than a year, I wished I'd chosen the shorter route. :-)

That's why I chose the shorter route for the Vietnam challenge. I didn't want to spend another year walking the coastline.

This one seemed to fly by after the Amazon: 56 days to walk 160 km.

I like earning the medals. I signed up for my first virtual race in 2021 after I had surgery. I wasn't allowed to exercise, lift weights, go to the gym or anything for six weeks afterward and I was worried it would be hard to get back in the swing. I thought earning a medal might encourage me.

It did and I keep using the medals as encouragement.

(BTW, I received NO compensation of any kind for this post, and I've always paid for my own races/medals.)

Organizing Books on Apps

Okay, as I was writing last Thursday's blog post, I had something pop into my head and decided to write this post right away before I forgot all about it.
How in the world do you organize your eBooks?
I have a major disaster on my hands and literally spend forever trying to find which book to read. I have so many books on multiple reading apps (Kindle/Kobo/Book Funnel/Etc.) and nothing is categorized or organized.
How do I sort things when I've been collecting eBooks for years and haven't organized anything? How do I even start to sort out this mess?
The other night, I had some free time, and I wanted to read a book. I knew I had just downloaded a couple that were intriguing, and I'd been excited to read. Then I went into the app, and I didn't know which ones they were. I kept opening book descriptions and reading them, but I never found any of the stories I was looking for.
I'm sure everyone else must have a system in place. It must be only me with this chaos.

Well, Huh?

I just recently learned that there are two different types of readers. The first type makes a list of books they want to read that month/week/year and then reads them.

The other type picks which book they read based on the mood they're in.

I'm a mood reader. Sometimes I feel like a romcom. Sometimes I want romantic suspense. Sometimes I just want a contemporary romance with some angst. I have books for any mood in my reading apps.

I guess I never thought about it before, but it never occurred to me that anyone could make a list and stick to it. What if my list is all angst books for the month and I need a story that makes me laugh? What if a certain plotline is calling to me and it's not on my list? What if I just need to reread a favorite author?

Maybe this list thing isn't absolute and there is room to mood read? I'm guessing yes although that isn't the way I saw it explained online. It sounded pretty set in stone, but it could be the person who was talking about it has her list set in stone.

In fact, it makes more sense that it's a spectrum. That some people are hard over on the mood reader side (this would be me) and that there are others hard over on the list side and that everyone else falls in between the two somewhere.

That spectrum is there for writing, too. Plotters on one side. Seat of the Pants authors on the other. And everyone else somewhere in between.

Backtracking

I try not to do too much revising while I'm writing the first draft of my books. I have perfectionist tendencies and can tinker forever if I allowed myself to do that. I save the revisions for when the entire book is done.

Almost always.

Except sometimes something in the story will change what I already wrote. If it's small, I keep going. If it's a larger item with implications that reverberate through the story...well, things are different then. I need to go back and revise the parts that are affected.

Guess what happened with Wicked Ambition this week?

Yeah.

After I finish this blog post, I'll be opening up my draft file and revising the earlier chapters with the new information in mind. I'm hoping it won't be a massive amount of work, but it might be because this change has tentacles going back through the entire book. But if things change so much, I have to go back and fix before moving forward again.

Revising, here I come!

Pomodoro

This post contains affiliate links which means I might earn a small commission with no extra charge to you. 

I use the Pomodoro method when I write. Basically, it means you do your task for X number of minutes with a break when those minutes are up. Standard lengths are usually 25-minute writing sprints with 5-minute breaks or 50-minute sprints with 10-minute breaks.

My personal preference is the 50-minute sessions because the shorter one doesn't let me get deep enough before it's over.

Usually, I use YouTube. There are videos there that do the timing for me.

Only my favorite video was taken down, and while I've found other ones that are okay, I'm not crazy about them. I did some online searches and saw recommendations for actual physical timers that do Pomodoro.

I decided I was going to try one. This way I can play whatever music I want while I'm working, and I don't have to rely on whatever the person who put the video together liked.

This is the timer I bought:

It has two modes, clock and timer. I'm using timer mode here. All I need to do is turn the device so the number of minutes I want is on top. This is from Mooas and it's so easy to use. I love it! I got the yellow color because it has the 50-minute Pomodoro timer, but there are other colors for shorter times.

The timer takes 2 AAA batteries which are not included. Luckily, I had some on hand when the timer arrived, and of course, I immediately had to try it out.

It might be silly to be this excited about a timer, but when I think of all the time I've wasted on YouTube trying to find a Pomodoro session that I like, well, I am excited. Now all I do is start the music I feel like listening to, flip the timer for 50 minutes, and go. (I like instrumental music, BTW, frequently movie soundtracks, but not always.)

Anyway, if you're looking for a Pomodoro timer and aren't sure which one to get, I can recommend the Mooas Timer.

This post contains affiliate links which means I might earn a small commission with no extra charge to you.

Before and After

I thought I'd share some before and after pictures of my weekly 2024 planner. It's Tomoe River Paper (TRP) and this was the first time I'd used it. As it turned out, I absolutely love this paper even though it's much thinner than the normal 80-pound paper my daily planner had.

Originally, I bought this planner for 2024 to help me keep track of my dad's appointments, but he passed away at the end of 2023 and I didn't really do much with the planner for most of the year.

Then August happened. I suddenly looked at the 365+ blank pages behind the weekly spreads and went GAH!

I began journaling to use up the blank pages.

And then I began decorating the planner with stickers and washi tape and vellum. I tipped in a whole lot of vellum paper because I liked how pretty it was, and I had a pack of vellum so I could print my own.

And the more I decorated the book, the more I used it, and I started carting it along with me everywhere. It's a B6 size, so much more portable than my official A5 spiral planner.

For 2025, I am using another Tomoe River Paper planner. This one will have a lot fewer decorations because it's my every day, official 2025 planner. I'll put in occasional stickers, but not much more than that. I did, however, buy another weekly planner and that one I plan to decorate like I did this one.

Are you ready for the before and after pictures and how I chunked up my 2024 planner?

Side view of my 2024 planner as received.

Side view of my 2024 planner around August. Before I started decorating it like mad.
And here are three views of my chunked up, finished 2024 planner:

Front view. You can see I put a bunch of Post-it flags/tabs in there to mark different things I wanted to find again.

Side view of my chunked-up planner. The gold coating is still on the edges of the pages, but you can't see it because of the chunk.

Top view. More tabs to flag out things I want to find again. Also, I'm using Oli Clips to mark out the different sections. The first one is for the monthly pages, the second it for the weekly pages, and I used the final one to keep track of where I was writing.
I think it's wild how much thicker this planner became in the year I used it. Actually, in the final five months that I used it because before August, it remained close to how it arrived. This was just so much fun to decorate, and while I don't feel like I want to do this to my official planner for 2025, I am looking forward to chunking up my weekly B6 planner. I wonder if I can get it chunkier than 2024's version?

Exploration

I think I blogged about Oz remaining secretive about himself, but I was sure I knew Ayla, his heroine, fairly well. It's not that I didn't know Oz at all--I most definitely know enough--but he's staying quiet about his background.

I know he can be manipulative (poor Lurch), but it's always for the greater good, not for any malicious purpose. It's part of why he was sent undercover with the drug lord.

He's still not sharing his background. Either that means there's nothing there or it means there's something major he doesn't want me to know. IIRC about blogging about this, I'm sure I mentioned talking to his friends and that none of them would share information either.

That's super strange. Whenever I have a character who won't talk, their friends will usually share so that they can have their happily ever after.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about today.

No matter how well I think I know my characters, writing is an exploration of who they really are, and things come up that I never knew about before I wrote the scene where they reveal something of themselves.

As an example, Ayla in Wicked Ambition. She didn't tell me that she's afraid of flying. It never occurred to me that she'd have this phobia since she hopped on a jet and flew nine hours from Los Angeles to Puerto Jardin to rescue her sister.

And then I wrote the scene where Oz is asking her why she didn't fly from the Puerto Jardinese capital to the city of Trujillo.

That's when I found out about her fear.

I don't know if this is a big deal later in the book or not. It did drive plot in the beginning of the story and (so far at least) it hasn't come up again. I'll find out as I keep writing.

Not Quite the Scale I Wanted

I have a thing about numbers. My eyes kind of go right past them without really registering what they are. I've always been number challenged and usually I compensate for it by going back and forcing myself to reread them more slowly.

Yeah. I didn't do that this time while online shopping.
I saw the picture, made an assumption, and I'm not sure I did more than glance at the item's description. I know I didn't pay any attention to numbers. Heck, maybe I didn't even read the description. This might have been a full-on assumption on my part.
The Dodgers (my team even though I grew up with the Minnesota Twins) won the world series and I wanted to pick up some merchandise to celebrate. I saw stickers and my eyes lit up. These would be perfect to put on or in my planner!
Um, not quite. (I put an envelope on top to show the scale)

These stickers/decals are HUGE!
I knew something weird was going on when the post office left a box at the door on the day the stickers were supposed to arrive. We have a group mailbox. My post office literally will never come to my door if they have a chance in hell of avoiding it.
My puzzlement grew when I saw this enormous box, a box far too large to fit in the group mailbox's parcel locker, outside my door. How strange, I thought, as I brought it inside. My prevailing theory was that maybe they ran out of boxes. Or maybe the other item I ordered was with the stickers and they forgot to put it on the shipping notice.
And then I opened the box and saw the stickers--decals--filling up nearly the entire bottom of the box.

I like the stickers, but I'm trying to figure out how to use them. Maybe on my laptop case? Two of the stickers might be too large even for that.

Journal Prompts and Journaling

One thing I see over and over in some of the planner communities I'm in is people posting either 1) asking how you fill a blank page when you want to journal or 2) saying how they buy these tiny-sized planners because they can't journal enough to fill an A5.
Um? Maybe it's because I'm a writer and I'm always facing a blank page, but it never even occurred to me to get locked up over journaling.
Journaling is like stream of consciousness as far as I'm concerned, and it's never taken much effort to barf it all out onto the page.
What's hard is telling a coherent story complete with character arcs, a suspense plot, a romance, and tying it all into the series the book is part of. :-)
I spent the last four months or so, maybe five months, of 2024 journaling in a B6 because it was one of my 2024 planners, and I wanted all the empty pages filled by the end of the year. I just bullet pointed parts of my day or thoughts I had.
Also, I have never in all my life seen so many people put their grocery lists in their planner until I joined larger planner groups. Why wouldn't you just download the store's app and put your list in that? It's easier to bring my phone to the store and the app will tell me exactly where my item is located. Dragging a planner to the store and not knowing that capers are on aisle 6 boggles my brain.
I literally always have my phone within reach and it's a simple thing to add an item to my app's grocery list. It also tells me if the item is on sale, something my planner definitely won't do.
And while I frequently cart my small planner around with me, my bigger planner stays on my desk, so it's not as if it's remotely convenient to add grocery items to it. Grocery list in planner just strikes me as incredibly inefficient. My goal is to get in and out of the grocery store as quickly as possible. I don't want to be wandering the aisles and going back and forth searching for something.
Um, anyway, journal prompts are helpful for blank pages. One of the best sites for journal prompts (IMO) is: TheCoffeeMonsterzCo. Some of the prompts are light and fun, some are more serious, but it's nice to have a mix and not a constant stream of heavy-work prompts.

Time Tracking

In 2024, I was diagnosed with ADHD and suddenly my entire struggle made a lot more sense. I didn't suck at being an adult, I was operating in hard mode without realizing it. I watched a number of videos with experts giving life hacks for ADHD and discovered I already did all those things.

An example was create a station, a one-stop shop, so to speak. One of my stations is for coffee. Everything I need to brew a pot is right there. Everything I need to create my actual cup of coffee is right there.

I needed more tips and tricks. After doing some thinking on the matter, I came up with a multi-pronged solution I wanted to test out. It's likely pieces of it won't work and I'll have to go back to the drawing board, but I'm hoping at least some of it sticks.

Now that we're in 2025, I'm going to share some pieces of my new system for keeping myself on track.

Item one: Time tracking.

A very real problem I have is what I call time drift. I think only a few minutes has gone by, but it's much, much longer than that. I thought what if I kept myself accountable by recording what I'm doing in half an hour increments?

I bought a set of two booklets for 2025. One is January through June and the other is July through December. (Volume one is pictured above.) This is Traveler's Notebook size, but I don't have them in any kind of cover. Each volume has a vertical column with time blocks.

I hope that by making myself write down what I'm doing, that this will nip time drift in the bud. There's nothing worse than thinking ten minutes have gone by and realizing I've wasted two hours.

I'll post an update on how this is working, maybe when I finish the first booklet.