Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 43

First results with Pomodoro, and an excerpt from Island of Glass for #WIPpet Wednesday

Today I’ve been applying the Pomodoro technique for the first time to try and become more disciplined about the tasks on my to-do list, and I’m quite pleased with the results so far. Once I’ve been working with it longer, I will write a post on it in more detail, assuming it continues to work for me.

Most of what I’ve been doing today, however, has been the Big Translation Project. I don’t have much in the way of new material for A Wasted Land, although I’ve spent a lot of time on it in the...

Deliberate practice and the next round of goals

For this Round of Words, Kait has challenged us to keep “deliberate practice” in mind when putting together our goals. I’m going to take her up on it, and in this round I want to concentrate on FOCUS and becoming more effective with the time I have. I’ve downloaded a program for the Pomodoro technique, a time management tool, and I’m going to try out the program Freedom with it, which shuts off the Internet for a specific amount of time. Before my writing sessions, I will also work on plannin...

More from A Wasted Land for #WIPpet Wednesday

I’m not getting around to much blogging these days other than WIPpet Wednesday, it seems! I feel dreadfully behind on just about everything, like I will never be able to catch up. But at least I can post an excerpt.

On WIPpet Wednesday, a bunch of us writers post something from a Work in Progress, a passage that is somehow related to the date. You can view the other excerpts here, and you’re welcome to join in the fun!

My math for today: 9+25+13=47. I’m giving you a short excerpt from page 4...

The 20 Year Overnight Success: Interview with Michael Wallace

Reblogged from David Gaughran:

I have an interview today with Michael Wallace, an author who has sold over 400,000 e-books since he started self-publishing back in January 2011.

Michael patiently took the time over several days to answer my questions about writing, marketing, the craft, and the business.Given the length of the interview, and because I didn't want to cut any of the great answers he gave, I'm posting this over two days.

Read more… 3,348 more words

Here's a great interview with su...

Quarterly update and a cover reveal for Gawain and Ragnell

It’s that time of year again, taking stock on how well I’ve achieved my goals in the last couple of months for “A Round of Words in 80 Days.” For those who are unfamiliar with ROW80, you can check it out here.

First off, to get it out of the way, here are the goals I didn’t achieve:

- I did NOT manage to get 50,000 words written on A Wasted Land

- I did NOT do much more experimenting with posting to Wattpad and similar sites

- I only managed to do a few experimental fast writing sessions, not e...

Quartely update and a cover reveal for Gawain and Ragnell

It’s that time of year again, taking stock on how well I’ve achieved my goals in the last couple of months for “A Round of Words in 80 Days.” For those who are unfamiliar with ROW80, you can check it out here.

First off, to get it out of the way, here are the goals I didn’t achieve:

- I did NOT manage to get 50,000 words written on A Wasted Land

- I did NOT do much more experimenting with posting to Wattpad and similar sites

- I only managed to do a few experimental fast writing sessions, not e...

By popular demand, more from Kustennin for #Wippet Wednesday!

Ok, I admit, “popular” is a bit exaggerated — I think it was a sum total of one person who wanted to see Kustennin again. But I’m an obliging soul (sometimes), and one is enough of a demand for me. So in honor of the date, 9-18, here are nine short paragraphs from page eighteen of A Wasted Land. In this scene, Kustennin is at the horse fair of Durnovaria to try to find some likely mounts for their mobile troops, the basis of much of the British military success in the previous Pendragon book...

Back to A Wasted Land, and another #WIPpet Wednesday

After getting Chameleon in a Mirror off to my beta readers last week, I returned to A Wasted Land. First, in order to get may head back into the project, I did some editing of scenes leading up to where I left off. As a result, the added word count is modest: 2,000 new words to Kustennin’s story. The ongoing, long-term translation is also keeping me pretty busy. More on that eventually, since it’s also an indie experiment, but not today. It’s late now in Central Europe, and I don’t have enoug...

Excerpt from “Chameleon in a Mirror” for #WIPpet Wednesday

I finished the read-through / editing pass of Chameleon in a Mirror yesterday, but it was late, and I didn’t have any brain cells left for contacting my beta readers. I did that just now.

I did a complete overhaul of the novel earlier this year and sent it to a writing buddy for a critique exchange, but he became a brand new daddy last year, and he’s pretty swamped, so it’s back to the drawing board. Since it had been several months since I’d last looked at it, I figured I could read it with...

The 8 Hour Ebook Challenge: The Destruction of Ys

I allowed myself to get a little distracted from my to-do list the last couple of days. When I was reading some discussions on the KBoards on Monday, I learned about a challenge Joe Konrath had posted on his blog and that a lot of KBers were taking him up on. The basic idea is to write, format, create the cover, and publish an e-book in under eight hours.

It sounded tough, but not completely impossible, so I figured I’d give it a try. At first, I was playing with the idea of writing a short s...