Lauralynn Elliott's Blog, page 66

ROW80 Check In-A Day Late Again

I'm about to catch up, I think, from my six days off. I'm only a little over 600 words behind, which is better than the 2800 I was behind.

One thing I've realized while writing in first person for the very first time. It's really hard to flesh out the other characters. You can only know them through their actions. It's a challenge.

Sales?

Just a quickie post today. I'm pondering on why the first novel I published, A Rocky Path, and normally the one with low sales, is suddenly picking up in sales. Not hugely, but enough to notice. I've googled it and can't find any unusual activity. So what would suddenly cause the sales of a certain book to go up? This one is about a ghost and my ghost stories never sell as well as my vampire stories. Who knows? I just wish I could figure it out.

My sales are picking up in the UK on Amazon. Is anyone else experiencing that?

ROW80 Check In A Day Late

I'm still behind on word count, but I'm slowly creeping back up. It didn't help that I didn't write on Saturday. My husband wanted to go see Thor that afternoon, then that night I went to a lingerie shower for my future daughter-in-law. But I think I'll catch up soon.

Thor…oh my stars! I loved the movie, but even if I hadn't, it would have been worth it just to SEE him. Bad Lauralynn! *smacks self* I have never seen such a perfect body. And the face was equally worthy of adoration. The first time it showed him in a pair of low riding jeans and no shirt, my husband actually put his hand over my eyes. LOL

Okay, I'm finished shamelessly drooling. I don't usually go this gaga over an actor or character, but…just wow.

ROW80 Check In 5/11

My goal is to average 500 words per day. When I checked my spreadsheet (yes, I'm on of those spreadsheet people), I realized I hadn't written in six days during the death of my best friend and all the other events surrounding that. I ended up over 2800 words behind in my cumulative goal. I started writing again Monday, and in the past two days, I've changed that deficit to about 1900 words. So I've made up about 900 words so far. I really think I'm doing pretty good considering what I've been going through. So yay!

So how is everyone else doing?

ROW80 Check In 5/8

First of all, I want to thank everyone for all the kind words concerning the death of my best friend. You guys are so awesome! Because of everything that's been going on, I haven't written in a few days. It's mostly because I've been busy with things regarding my friend's death. I made and printed the programs for the memorial service and made a power point presentation with pictures of her. I felt so honored to be asked to do these things. I was so glad to be able to keep busy. I spent time with her family Friday night, and we had the memorial service on Saturday. So, yeah, I'm behind in word count. But I'm going to catch up, hopefully this week. I've been a really bad ROW80 sponsor because I haven't checked in on all the blogs I should, but I hope everyone understands. I intend to remedy that for this check in. Life must continue on, and my friend would not want me to abandon my writing. Her husband, Jonathan Eli, also intends to continue to write.

My goals are to write an average of 500 words per day and to have the first novella in this series ready to release by June 1. I can do this! :0)

Check In and My Best Friend

This is a post that I really don't know how to write. The last round of ROW80 was hijacked by fate when my mom had a heart attack and I had to help her out a lot. I thought that was the worst that could happen to me for awhile. Not so. At 2:00 am this morning, I got a call from my best friend's husband. Calls at that time of morning are never good. He told me that she had passed away. My friend of 38 years was gone, just like that. She was the same age as me.

The question is…can I go on with my WIP? The answer to that is yes. Why? Because she would want me to. She would never want me to abandon my writing to sit around and grieve over her. I'll do a lot of grieving, there's no question of that. Right now I feel like a heavy weight is on my chest and I can barely breathe. I don't know when the dam will break and the crying will start. I hope it doesn't happen at church this morning, because I don't like public displays like that. But my church family would understand.

I would ask that you all send to her family and mine prayers if you pray and good thoughts if you don't. She was the wife of an author friend that some of you might know, but I don't know if he's ready to make that public yet. I would ask special prayers and thoughts for him.

To all of you that are doing ROW80, I hope that you're doing well…and I'm still there with you.

Check In 4-27-11

I'm over 1600 words ahead! That means that I'm more than three days ahead of my cumulative goal right now. I keep being afraid I'm going to suddenly get stalled. There's going to have to be a lot of detail in parts of this story and I just hope I'm up to the challenge. I've got to figure some stuff out, so even though I'm a pantser, I may have to plot just a tad on this one.

How is everyone else doing?

Check In 4-24-11

I'm just sitting here on a Sunday morning before church, drinking a cup of coffee, and reflecting on yesterday. I got so much accomplished…house cleaning, laundry, using my new steamer on the floor…and writing. I'm now ahead of my goal by 640 words. I like being ahead so that when something happens that I don't get to write one day, I don't get behind. Being ahead is a great feeling. And I'm really getting into the story. Sometimes that takes awhile, and I think it has to do with getting to know my characters.

How is everyone else doing?

Pet Peeve

I've said this before…one of my big pet peeves is people having blogs that are hard to comment on. I tried to post a comment to a blog today (it was one of the ones I was supposed to post to as a sponsor) and they had the open id option disabled. So if you didn't use FB, Twitter, LJ, or some others I never heard of, you couldn't post. I couldn't post from my WordPress ID. I have a LJ account, but I never use it anymore. I wondered why no one else had commented on the post, and that's apparently why.

Yesterday, I wanted to comment on a blog where I would have received a free ebook (it was that IBC indie author cage match). The author's site thought I was spam. I answered the question that proved I wasn't (math problem, 13+2), but when I submitted the comment I got this message "Sorry, but your comment appears to be spam." What? Really? I tried several times because I REALLY wanted the book, and I wanted to comment on this blog (it's a contest for the most comments). My friend didn't have any problems commenting. Why didn't it like me??? I promise, I answered that 13+2 was 15. I wouldn't mind just buying the book, but I'm aggravated enough that I just won't.

I've tried to make my site easy to comment on. The first time you comment, it has to be approved (to weed out the spammers), but after that, you should have no problems. But if anybody EVER has problems posting to my blog, PLEASE email me at lauralynnelliott@yahoo.com! I never want to make it hard for people to talk to me.

ROW80 Check In

Okay, so I'm doing two posts today. I never do that, but I HAD to show everyone my awesome new shoes. They might be a little over the top for some people but…. Anyway, check out my previous post if you want to see a picture.

Now, back to ROW80. I'm a little bit behind again (not too bad), but my friend wanted me to go shopping with her last night. Shopping? When was the last time I really did that? So I thought about how I had worked so hard on my books and how I deserved to use a little of that money on JUST ME. So I did. :0) Anyway, I'm moving along pretty well on the novella. Part of the beauty of being a pantser (shut up Kait and Susan, LOL) is that I was going along writing what came to me, and I suddenly thought of a perfect reason WHY what was happening was happening. I had no idea when I started writing. So sometimes I'm as surprised as the reader would be. And that's really fun. :0)