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Month: February 2016

7 Weeks

So about seven weeks ago, coincidentally enough, I blogged about an app called 7 Weeks. It’s supposed to help build habits. So how’s that going? I think I should have invested in the Cattle Prod app. Don’t get me wrong! The 7 Weeks app itself is great. Easy to use, appealing, intuitive…the problem, as always, is me. The free version tracks your habit for the titular 7 Weeks. I paid $1.99 for the pro version, knowing I was going to need more than seven weeks. And after those seven weeks, I can unequivocally say I was right–I needed it. Probably I’m trying for too much at once. I didn’t just stick with the two habits I talked about last time, oh no. Not ME. That would be too easy! I stuck with writing every day. I altered “watch the money” to “update budget spreadsheet.” I added “clean kitchen.” And “at or under calorie goal.” Most days I get one of them (clean the kitchen, generally. It’s the least mentally-challenging). Some days I get two! I’ve even gotten all four once or twice, but definitely not more than that. As I see it, there are a couple reasons for my less-than-stellar performance here: I take on too much. Always. Instead of one habit at a time, I went for four. I’m also doing these while I take a three college classes (two of them only one credit each, but still!) work full-time, and continue my adventure-seeking in the great outdoors. (For…

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Eight-Minute Writing

So I recently discovered Monica Leonelle. She writes fiction and non-fiction. I’ve read several of her non-fiction books, and one of them caught my eye: The 8-Minute Writing Habit: Create a Consistent Writing Habit that Works with Your Busy Lifestyle. This book was life-changing for me. First of all, if you’ve been reading my posts for awhile, you know that I’ve written every day of my life (with a few exceptions) for at least ten years. Eight Minute Writing (the book) focuses on integrating writing into your lifestyle by writing just eight minutes a day. Brilliant, right? Anyone can grab eight minutes a day to pound out some words. Monica suggests doing this several times a day, and eventually upping it to maybe ten minutes, or fifteen. Back when I was struggling with Survivor, my psychological horror novel, in 2007, I wrote 50,000 words of it by writing just fifteen minutes a day. I was having ~issues, and fifteen minutes was a no-pressure, easy solution to the problem. I highly suggest this for anyone who is struggling to find time or struggling period. It removes the expectations and wibbling (something which I engage in frequently) by giving you a clear deadline. Eight minutes and you are done. Note that there are no wordcount goals. This is strictly a time goal, and what you get — whether it’s 50 words or 300 — is fine. But, since I’m already writing every day, I thought about how this might work for my…

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Hey Hey, We Won the Super Bowl

In a break from our normal subject matter here, I’m going to talk about football. You can’t escape it around here these days. You see, we (meaning me, Kit, and the rest of Colorado) won the Super Bowl on Sunday. Well, the Denver Broncos won the Super Bowl. I did very little to help. Super Bowl 50! I don’t want to tell you how old I was when we last won in 1999.

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Co-Writing for Fun and Profit

Didja miss me? Well, too bad…I’m back! Today I’d like to share a bit about Turtleduck Press’s next novel (title and cover art forthcoming in due time). Kit and I have both talked in this space about the fact that we’re co-writing, but we haven’t gone into any detail about the experience…until now. It’s not Kit’s first time co-writing a novel; I’ve done it before too, but not for many many years. And I’ve blogged before about having a major crisis of faith as a writer last year. So I was a little apprehensive about how it would go. In fact, it’s been quite a smooth process — at least as smooth as novel writing ever is! It’s helped immensely to have somebody to bounce ideas off, to trade chapters with (we each wrote one point of view, in alternating chapters), to keep each other motivated. Having two minds to work on the worldbuilding and plotting has not meant that we’ve each done half as much work as on a solo novel, but it’s certainly helped — I think we’ve done a better job on this story than either of us could have on our own. Luckily, we’re on a similar — though not identical — wavelength when it comes to planning. We did a pile of worldbuilding first (it’s a fantasy novel, more or less), then identified our respective characters and wrote some sample chapters. Those went out the window and we started over, with a clearer idea this…

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