Zoe Carmina's Blog: Zoe Jane Carmina, page 15

2021 Holiday Guide for Writers

In this article we talk about holiday gift ideas for the writer in your life and for every price point. 

Up to $25.00

Gifts don’t have to be expensive to still be thoughtful. Here are some items for the office party or gift exchange writer who needs something useful in their life.

Desk Vacuum $11

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This tiny desk vacuum is super cute and powerful. It has tiny brushes on the bottom that help pick up any dust, dirt, or crumbs that fall onto my desk and keyboard and empties easily. W...

Self Care for Writers

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In this #NaNoWriMo article we talk about 5 self-care ideas to keep you motivated the whole month during NaNoWriMo. 

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? If you don’t know, November is the National Novel Writing Month, and the challenge is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. If you start on November 1st, it means you’ll have to average 1667 words per day in order to make that goal...

Managing Your Expectations During NaNoWriMo

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In this #NaNoWriMo article we talk about how to manage your own expectations during NaNoWriMo. 

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? If you don’t know, November is the National Novel Writing Month, and the challenge is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. If you start on November 1st, it means you’ll have to average 1667 words per day in order to make that goal a reality. 

For ...

When Not to Participate in NaNoWriMo

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In this #NaNoWriMo article we talk about when you shouldn’t participate in NaNoWriMo. 

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? If you don’t know, November is the National Novel Writing Month, and the challenge is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. If you start on November 1st, it means you’ll have to average 1667 words per day in order to make that goal a reality. 

For a lot of ...

Staying Productive During NaNoWriMo

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In this #NaNoWriMo article we talk about some ways you can stay productive during the entire month of NaNoWriMo. 

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? If you don’t know, November is the National Novel Writing Month, and the challenge is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. If you start on November 1st, it means you’ll have to average 1667 words per day in order to make that goal a...

Scene Cards for Novel Prepping

In this #PrepTober article we talk about some ways you can make scene cards for NaNoWriMo this year. 

Have you ever used scene cards to plan your novels? A scene card can be as complicated or as uncomplicated as you want it to be. You can make as many or as few as you think you will need. Whether a physical card or a digital card, scene cards can help you to sort out where the scenes in your novel will go, and just how many scenes you will need. They are more swappable than a traditional outl...

#PrepTober for NaNoWriMo 2021

Click this link to hear this blog post as a podcast with your favorite podcasting app!

In this #PrepTober article we talk about three unconventional ways to prepare for NaNoWriMo this year. 

I am not going to have much time to prep for NaNoWriMo this year. In fact, I am not even sure I am going to be trying to reach 50,000 words as my NaNo goal. 

This is partly because of the way I am writing these days, which is consistently about 2000 words per week since I still work a full time job....

Optimize Your Writing Life

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Hello Lovelies and welcome back to the blog.

I recently spent a week on a vacation that was supposed to be a trip to another state but got cancelled due to complications (not the least of which was COVID travel restrictions). Instead of cancelling the vacation altogether, my husband and I decided to take the time off anyway and spend it at home doing whatever we felt like doing during the week.  

Whil...

2021 Q4 Goal Setting

Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog.

It’s a new quarter, which means it’s time to set some new goals, so let’s jump straight in.

Here we are back at the Kanban-style Trello Board. If you’ve been here a while, you’ll already be familiar with this, but for those that aren’t, I use Trello as a digital sort of Kanban board. I still have categories for my tasks, but I don’t use the “to do, doing, done” modifiers. They all just stay on their lists and I modify the cards within them ...

2021 Q3 Goal Recap

Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog. We’re ending out another quarter, so it’s time for another goals recap post. 

If you remember from last time, I set some goals at the beginning of Q3. As a refresher, they looked like this.

Now, my Trello board looks like this.

Let’s go over it in more detail.

Writing – 30/68 Goals Completed – 44%

I didn’t have specific goals lined out for this at the beginning of the quarter. Mainly I wanted to work on my worldbuilding project...