Charissa Weaks's Blog, page 5

Plan Your Progress: Tracking Tools for Writers

HEY GUYS!



I know there are 999 million New Year’s resolutions posts floating around, but I had to add mine to the mix!



Just KIDDING. In truth, I just wanted to quickly share some organizational tools with you, because resolutions are a dime a dozen and most of us forget about them after a couple months anyway. GOALS are where it’s at. At the end of the year, wouldn’t it be cool to have a way to see what you’ve achieved? Especially in your writing life? Did you write 40,000 words or 340,000 words? Revise 25,000 words or 250,000? Read 3 books or 33? Critique 100K or nada?



There are so many ways to do this, and I’ll provide some basic info on a handful. Different strokes work for different folks.



So here we go!

The Sticker Method

Don’t laugh. It works. And it’s easy. Just track your goals with shiny stickers on a desk calendar. Voila. Here’s a link to author Victoria Schwab’s post on how she does this, and this pic below is a shot of one of my star sticker months:

Daily Planner/Journaling



I love planners. That said, they only work–as does anything else–if you actually document your stats in them. These are the planners I bought for the year:

All of this is from OfficeMax. The Planner and Calendar are via Inkwell Press.

 

This is my Powersheets Goal Setting Workbook via Lara Casey. You can find it and more info here.

I have also used the Erin Condren life planner, and it’s pretty awesome. There’s the Passion Planner too! It’s really up to you if daily planning is part of your method. You never know until you try! If you’re new to journaling, I suggest heading over to Pinterest for some ideas.

Spreadsheets
 
I love spreadsheets. I do. I love lists. And lists of numbers. Especially progress numbers. You can make your own, or you can check out these:
 
Writing/Revision Specific: Jamie Raintree’s Writing and Revision Tracker $8


THE SPREADSHEET INCLUDES

Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly writing statistics for up to 8 projects.
Customizable project names.
Monthly goal setting for writing and revisions for each project.
Project goal setting.
Visual calendar layout that automatically calculates your day, week, and month totals. Weeks start on Monday.
Revision tracking by word count or page number.
Graphs to display your progress toward your monthly writing and revision goals.
Yearly totals for each project, each month, for writing and revisions.
A writing and revisions grand total for the year.
Also works in Numbers for Mac users and, so far, any other spreadsheet program.

 

 
All goals: Chris Guillebeau’s Annual Review Template (which I just found this morning via author JT Ellison’s post on her annual progress).
 
This spreadsheet covers any goal you might have for the year, whether it’s to finish a novel, run a 5K, save money, whatever. It’s in depth, but might give you ideas!
 
Reading Tracking
 
GOODREADS. Take the reading challenge! Make yourself a 2017 TBR list. Set a goal. Then at the end of the year, you can see if you made it. Here’s what mine looks like so far:



 
 
 

Whatever your methods, even if you don’t have any ;), I wish you a progress-filled 2017! May you read more, write more, create more, smile more, and love more!!! Good luck!
 

~ Charissa

Announcing Blood Divine by Greg Howard!

About three years ago, I was lucky enough to meet author Greg Howard, and to help give some guidance in his writing endeavors. He emailed me his work in progress, and what I saw was a raw talent for storytelling. Fast forward three years and a lot of hard work, and Greg is celebrating the release of his first novel, Blood Divine, and in 2018, he’ll celebrate the release of novel #2, Social Intercourse, a YA story picked up by Simon & Schuster.



The word proud doesn’t begin to describe what I feel. He endured me (I’m tough, guys) and worked until he held his dream in his hands. He’s an inspiration to me, a reminder to go after what you want, full throttle, and that with dedication, you will succeed.



So here’s what Blood Divine is about:

Cooper Causey spent a lifetime eluding the demons of his youth and suppressing the destructive power inside him. But a disconcerting voicemail lures Cooper back home to the coast of South Carolina and to Warfield—the deserted plantation where his darkness first awakened. While searching for his missing grandmother, Cooper uncovers the truth about his ancestry and becomes a pawn in an ancient war between two supernatural races. In order to protect the only man he’s ever loved, Cooper must embrace the dark power threatening to consume him and choose sides in a deadly war between the righteous and the fallen.



Cool, right?? I’ll honestly say that I fell in love with every single character, not to mention the setting, world building, and rich history of the Anakim. Greg’s writing is beautiful, but he also manages to make you laugh, cry, and feel completely creeped out and on the edge of your seat. I love this description of Blood Divine from a reviewer: This book is like a marriage between Dean Koontz and Stephen King with their love child being a famous gay romance writer. 



That made me smile

5 Tips for Querying Your Novel

I’m querying this year, and in my journey to write a solid query letter, I’ve come across some not-so-great advice online in regards to not only query writing, but the querying process in general. It led me to write this post, in hopes I could help someone avoid making needless mistakes. I don’t claim to be amazing at query writing, but I’ve done my research, and can point many of you in the right direction.

So here goes

A Writer’s New Year’s Resolutions + A Tip for Success

Resolutions. Do you make them? I always have, though I’ve learned to be a bit kinder to myself over the years. One of the biggest reasons people often don’t meet their NY’s resolutions, or any goal for that matter, is because they simply set the bar too high. I am a guilty party. We want such big things to happen, so we set those goals, and then end up feeling like we’ve failed in some way when the New Year rolls around and we didn’t meet whatever stringent criteria we set when we were giddy on bubbly.

I think there’s an easy fix to this: Make attainable, realistic resolutions.

That’s not saying to shoot low. You should always aim high. But 1) aim high for things you have say over, and 2) don’t misjudge the height.

Want to get an agent in 2016?? That’s an awesome thing, but it’s also out of your control for the most part. You can make a goal to have a book ready to query by December 31, 2016 (which means accepting the work load it takes to get a book to that point), or you can make a goal to get a book out to agents before 2017 rolls around, but you cannot control whether or not an agent snags that book.

How crappy will you feel if it doesn’t happen?? Pretty crappy. BUT, if you do the deed and get the book out there?
Accomplishment.
And something you CAN control.

Want to finish that novel? Give yourself time. “I will finish this 450 page work of art in 30 days” is not realistic. That’s misjudging the height of the goal. It’s making things super tough on yourself especially if you have other life responsibilities. Accept that such a goal takes time, allow yourself that time, get your ass to work, and do it. Just don’t make it an impossible feat.

The bottom line is to be kind to yourself. We expect so much out of ourselves that we end up stressing out and giving up 1/4 of the way into the year. I’ve done it. There’s no need for all that. Writing is a long term thing. If you’re a writer, chances are you’re a writer for LIFE. It’s not something most writers can give up. For long, anyway. If you’re a writer for life, the endeavor of this craft is a daily task. It’s always on your mind. It’s a career you already have or are working to have.

So don’t make it miserable.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me give you guys a fabulous tip I learned this year!

Keeping. A. Calendar.

This has been the single most effective tool for me in 2015.

The point of keeping a calendar is so you can see at a glance what you’ve achieved in any given month. Instead of focusing mentally on all the things you didn’t do, you see what you DID do. If you track life stuff along with writing stuff, it’s even better, because you see what you were capable of achieving even in spite of life craziness. I managed to write just over 30K in November even though my dad had his bladder removed and I was his caregiver all month. Seeing that made me realize what I’m capable of. Talk about motivating!

It’s a positive swing on dealing with yourself. Instead of negative thinking at the end of a month because you didn’t get that book finished, you can see that maybe you wrote 10K and edited 20 out of 30 days. Or maybe you were sick for an entire week, or your day job worked you long hours, or the kids had crazy schedules, or you were out of town a lot. Seeing progress, or even seeing why you maybe didn’t have as much progress as you would have liked, is so much better than having no record of anything. It allows you pride in yourself for achievements made and self-love and kindness to yourself for times when you just couldn’t do ALL THE THINGS.

Typically, you just grab a desktop calendar and some stickers of choice, set a key for the things you want to track, and get to it. It’s so motivating at the end of the month when you do the tally. The first month you kinda see where you are, a baseline, and then you feel more determined to see an increase in words written, or pages edited, or miles walked, or…{insert goal of choice}. It works!! Here are some pics of mine and my CP’s calendars.

I’m using the Erin Condren Life Planner to get even more organized this year. If you haven’t seen those, check them out. If you’re a bit crafty, they’re especially fun.

So good luck to you guys!!!!

Don’t be so hard on yourself.
Be realistic.
Set attainable goals.
Track your progress.
Love 2016.


Happy New Year!!
Charissa

My 5 Fave Books of 2015

2015 was a year of Great Reads for me, and I want to share!!

“On this cool October morning, her life would change. From the morning she boarded this train… she would no longer be the girl in the bookshop… 
From now on, she was Juliette Gervaise, code name the Nightingale.” ~ Kristin Hannah

My favorite book of the year was The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah . I recommend it to EVERYONE. Even if Hist Fic isn’t your thing. This book is so much. It encompasses so many parts of life, from love–sisterly and romantic–to loyalty, war, trust, fear, bravery, secrets, resistance…It’s just packed with meaning. I was floored by the research that had to go into the making of this book, and by the absolute flawless delivery of the story. Hannah has such a way with character development that you feel like you know the sisters this book revolves around. But more than anything, for me, the thing that caused this book to stick with me long after I read it was that true accounts exist of women dealing with these very same horrors, and these very same choices to be brave or not in the face of fear. A must read work. This book also won the Goodreads award in the Historical Fiction category this year. Here’s the blurb:


In love we find out who we want to be.   

In war we find out who we are.
FRANCE, 1939
In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France … but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.
Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can … completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.
With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France–a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.

“What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models… None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.” ~ Anthony Doerr

In the same vein as The Nightingale comes my #2 fave, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr . I did not set out to read 2 WWII books set in France back to back. It just kinda happened. ATLWCS won a Pulitzer this year, and with good reason. Here’s the blurb:


From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.


My #3 pick is Me Before You by JoJo Moyes.

“You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live 

it as fully as possible. ~ JoJo Moyes 

I can’t say much other than–MY HEART. This book
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punched me where it hurts. I was pretty much a basket case for 3 days after finishing. But it fascinated me, because this was a unique romance. Gone were any formulaic conclusions. Moyes made me cling to the impossible until the very last pages. It was pretty amazing. Here’s the blurb:

They had nothing in common until love gave them everything to lose . . .

Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has barely been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cannot live the way he is.

Will is acerbic, moody, bossy—but Lou refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living.

A Love Story for this generation, Me Before You brings to life two people who couldn’t have less in common—a heartbreakingly romantic novel that asks, What do you do when making the person you love happy also means breaking your own heart?



My #4 fave is The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. I had NO IDEA I would adore this book. Let me just introduce you to the AJ that occupies the opening of the book:


“I do not like postmodernism, post­apocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be — basically gimmicks of any kind. . . . I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and — I imagine this goes without saying — vampires.”


But, as impossible as he seems, and as book snobbish as he is, I SWEAR you will love this character the more you read! Here’s the blurb:


On the faded Island Books sign hanging over the porch of the Victorian cottage is the motto “No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World.” A. J. Fikry, the irascible owner, is about to discover just what that truly means.
A. J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be. His wife has died, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. Slowly but surely, he is isolating himself from all the people of Alice Island—from Lambiase, the well-intentioned police officer who’s always felt kindly toward Fikry; from Ismay, his sister-in-law who is hell-bent on saving him from his dreary self; from Amelia, the lovely and idealistic (if eccentric) Knightley Press sales rep who keeps on taking the ferry over to Alice Island, refusing to be deterred by A.J.’s bad attitude. Even the books in his store have stopped holding pleasure for him. These days, A.J. can only see them as a sign of a world that is changing too rapidly.
And then a mysterious package appears at the bookstore. It’s a small package, but large in weight. It’s that unexpected arrival that gives A. J. Fikry the opportunity to make his life over, the ability to see everything anew. It doesn’t take long for the locals to notice the change overcoming A.J.; or for that determined sales rep, Amelia, to see her curmudgeonly client in a new light; or for the wisdom of all those books to become again the lifeblood of A.J.’s world; or for everything to twist again into a version of his life that he didn’t see coming. As surprising as it is moving, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is an unforgettable tale of transformation and second chances, an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love.
And last but not least…
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. This book. You guys. If you are a creative–and Gilbert believes we ALL are, then you need this book in your life. Some quotes from the book:










What are your fave books of the year? Have you read any of these??


~ Charissa