Blogging 101, Day Seventeen: Increasing Your Commenting Confidence

What do bloggers crave? Recognition. Bloggers want to know that someone is reading what they’re writing.

What is the best way to show bloggers that you’re reading what they’re writing? Engage. Comment.

If you’re a public blogger, chances are that one of the best parts of blogging for you is when that little notification pops up to let you know that someone has commented on one of your posts. What can be better than knowing that someone has read your post and decided that they just had to say something about it? Consequently, what better way to show your appreciation for your fellow bloggers (and help lead potential readers back to your own blog in the process)?

For beginner bloggers commenting on other peoples’ blogs can feel a little intimidating, and that’s why day seventeen’s assignment is to read six posts written in response to yesterday’s prompt, and leave comments on at least two of them.

I’ve previously mentioned that The Daily Post does daily prompts to keep us writing. The idea behind this assignment is to participate in one of those daily prompts, and then comment on the posts written by other bloggers for that particular prompt. The reason Michelle W. suggests commenting practice in this manner is because it is much easier to comment on a shared experience, and it helps exercise your brain to see how differently other people react to the same topic.

Another excellent way to “increase your commenting confidence” is to participate in blog hops. I’ve never commented so much (or received so many comments) as when I participated in the A to Z Blogging Challenge. Again we see a shared experience bringing people together, starting conversations and eliciting friendships.

So what I’m saying is to get out there, meet people who have similar interests, and start some conversations. Chances are, other bloggers and readers will turn around and do the same thing for you, and boom…community. 🙂

Blogging 101, Day Seven: Start Personalizing

A previous Blogging 101 post focused on choosing a theme for your blog, making sure to try out a bunch of different ones in order to find something that really suits you and your purpose. Day seven’s assignment is to go a little further: create and upload a simple header, background, or both. And if you’ve already done that, try a custom widget.

Personally, I like a blog to look fresh and clean and organized, which is why I’m not a big fan of backgrounds. It’s all about your personal preference, of course, but I find that background images on a page that is then going to be covered in walls of text almost always winds up looking very messy and difficult to look at. The most important thing on your blog is the words, so you don’t want anything distracting away from them.

Headers, on the other hand, can be a very simple and excellent way of distinguishing your blog. The proper image can give a clear, instant impression of what your blog is all about. When I first started this blog I found a stock photo of a blank piece of lined paper with a pen and a pencil laying on top of it. I used Photoshop to overlay the name of the blog and my name, and that was my first header. I liked it because my intent was that anyone who came across my blog would immediately recognize me as a writer, and I thought that the pen and pencil on paper achieved that nicely. A little while ago I came to think that it was actually a bit silly to have a blank piece of paper as the token image for a blog called “No Page Left Blank”, so after a bit of thought I decided on something significantly more personal. I grabbed a few of my notebooks – the ones that I scribble just about everything in when a computer is not available – turned them each to a random page, piled them on top of each other, and snapped a photo. BAM. Instant impression, and one that matches the title of the blog a lot better.

As for the second part of today’s assignment, if you look to the right side of my page you’ll see that I’ve already played with my fair share of custom widgets. WordPress has quite a variety of options that you can play with to customize your blog, and I’ve chosen the ones that I think are the most helpful to my purpose. The first one is simply a photo widget so that everyone can get a glimpse of who I am…remember, people care about you more if they feel like they know you. The second widget down is a link to my Facebook Author Page, something that is becoming quite popular and important to an author platform. The third is an embedded Twitter widget that allows you to follow or tweet directly to me, and also shows a couple of my most recent tweets. Finally, there are a few organizational widgets that allow you to search my blog via archive (by month), category, or search field, and an option to follow my blog via email. All important stuff, in my opinion, but also neat and easy on the eyes. It’s easy to get carried away with widgets and wind up with a messy-looking site, so keep that in mind when choosing which of the many options you want to use.

All in all, the big thing is to make your blog something that you love, while also keeping it useful and uncomplicated. You want people to come across your blog and stay because it looks interesting; you don’t want to scare them off because it took them ten minutes to locate the “leave a comment” link. 😉

Bonus Embarrassment Post, For Your Pleasure

I had to write a second post today for two reasons. First off, I noticed today that I have 199 WordPress followers, so this is an official shout-out for someone else to follow me! Come on, people! Being that close to 200 is killing me! It’s giving me weird little OCD twitches!

Second, I was wandering around on my computer earlier and came across this video forgotten in the bowels of the internet. I just had to share it because what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t embarrass yourself every now and then? Exactly. XD This was my first (and only) ever YouTube video, recorded several years ago just because. Fair warning: the audio is god awful, so please turn down your speakers before starting the vid in order to avoid blowing your eardrums out. And feel free to laugh. If I didn’t expect laughs I wouldn’t bother posting it. 😀

Blogging 101, Day Six: Write to Your Dream Reader

The assignment for day six is all about writing to attract the kinds of readers you want to visit your blog. Michelle W. asks us to “publish a post for your dream reader, and include a new-to-you element in it”. By “new-to-you element”, she means to include an aspect into your post that you haven’t used before, whether that be adding a photo, embedding a video, incorporating a quote, or any number of possible little tricks that you can use to enhance your post. In her original day six post, Michelle gives links to information on how to do all these little extras, so check it out if you’re interested.

Myself, I think that the important part of this assignment is the “publish a post for your dream reader” part. It seems obvious, but is actually something that lots of bloggers mess up. Kristen Lamb often talks about how writers have a tendency to blog about writing – their writing process, what they’re currently working on, the issues they come across as a writer, and so on and so on. In small amounts, this isn’t a particularly bad thing, but when that’s all a writer blogs about it becomes a problem because the only people who are really interested in the writing process are other writers…and for the most part writers aren’t looking for other writers to visit their blog. Writers want readers to visit their blog, to become part of their audience and (hopefully) their fan base.

There are plenty of bloggers out there who blog primarily for their own pleasure, for cathartic reasons, or for other personal uses, but the overwhelming majority of us blog because we have things to say and we really, really want other people to hear those things. And the best way to attract the kind of readers you want is to write your posts specifically for those people. For instance, I’m a huge nerd, and it makes me happy when other huge nerds drop by the blog to chat, so often I’ll talk about nerdy things that I’m into, or use pictures or memes of nerdy stuff to illustrate an unrelated point – just to nerd it up a bit. I also love talking to fellow parents, so I’ll often write posts about my daughter, or parenting in general, usually with a cute or funny story involved, because I want the fun-loving parents, not the cranky buggers (j/k…cranky buggers welcome here as well ^_~).

It took me a while to catch on to this (retrospectively) obvious concept. For the first few months of my blog’s life all I wrote about was writing, and it wasn’t long before I started to burn out. I wondered how I could possibly keep up a blog if this was all I was ever going to talk about. I also wondered why it seemed like no one was reading my blog. In my first six months I think I totaled about ten regular followers, and two of those were my parents. But finally, after discovering Kristen Lamb’s blog and hearing her talk about this exact issue with “writers who blog”, I began to talk more about myself and less about my writing. I began talking about every day things that I thought people might find funny or relatable. I began to give advice to the kinds of people I thought might stumble across my blog. I wrote my thoughts and opinions on lots of different topics, and worded my posts carefully in hopes of attracting a certain caliber of people. When the “A to Z Challenge” came about I decided to write my posts about fictional characters because I thought it would be great to attract some more movie/TV/video-game/comic book-loving people to the blog. All in all, it has been a successful venture.

Instead of writing a new post for this assignment (since I’ve been doing exactly this for well over a year now), I thought that I’d link back to a couple of my most popular posts of all time. All of these were written with a certain group of people in mind, and since they were fairly successful posts, I think that really drives home the point of writing “for your dream reader”. Write for certain types of people, and they will come.

A Day at Kearl Lake is a post I wrote quite a while back, when I first began working out West. It is currently at the top of my “most viewed” pages because tons of people who are just starting a job out West stumble across it in search of information. I wrote the post just to let people back home know what a regular day out on a work camp is like, and I wound up attracting a lot of other random people who were curious about the same.

Aside from my “About Me” page, the next page on my list that has had the most views is Goodbye, Poppy…Love You Forever. I wrote this particular post for the dual purposes of expressing my feelings about my grandfather’s death, and helping to comfort all the family members and friends who were also affected by his passing. It certainly served it’s purpose. Writing the post was extremely cathartic, and so many of my friends and family members dropped by to read it that it has remained in the top five “most viewed” pages for over a year.

I’m Not a Therapist…but I Play One On the Internet was a follow-up to the Kearl Lake post. Several of the people who stumbled across the original Kearl Lake post were women who contacted me because they were concerned about the possibility of their husband/boyfriend cheating on them while on the work camp. After trying to be both honest and comforting to several different women, I decided to write this particular post, whose main point is “you have to have trust to have a happy, healthy relationship”. While I only ever got two people who contacted me as a result of this particular post, it is very near the top of my “most viewed” list, so people are still taking a look at it to this day, and I genuinely hope that it’s helped a few people.

And because I wanted to include something a little more fun in this list, I skipped a couple of posts in the “most viewed” list and picked on that, none-the-less has been pretty well viewed: Tickle Trunk for a New Generation is a step-by-step post about how I “built” a dress-up trunk for my daughter, based on the design of Mr Dress-Up’s Tickle Trunk. Hello, crafty people who stopped by because of this post! Yes, you’re welcome here too!

So, again, the moral is to write for the kind of people you want to visit your blog. And if you’re like me, and you want everyone to visit your blog, just write a little bit about every possible thing. ^_~

500 Posts!

A quick post on this fine Sunday evening to mention that as of yesterday’s A to Z Challenge post, hey…I’ve written 500 blog posts! Would you look at that!

That’s like writing a post a day, every day, for almost a year and a half straight! Since I’ve reached this landmark in just a little over two years, that means that I’ve written approximately one post for every day and a half that I’ve had this blog. Is that not awesome? I think that’s pretty awesome. Here’s to another 500 in the years to come! ❤

We are (no longer) experiencing technical difficulties

I understand that I’m not the type of hotshot blogger who, when they go missing for a day or two, causes a mad panic amongst the internet crowd. Regardless, I’d like to apologize for my sudden disappearance over the past five days. I’m sure you’ll understand why I had a bit of an unscheduled hiatus when my father-in-law suddenly had a heart attack on Thursday (don’t worry, he’s alright now!), followed by a rush to get myself packed and ready to head back out West for the first shift of my new job. I spent the entire day today on a plane and have only just now arrived in the camp at which I’ll be residing for the next two weeks, so certainly you can see why I missed a few post days. But fear not! This camp has what (so far) appears to be rather excellent wi-fi internet, and my bluetooth keyboard is working just as nicely as it ever has, so I’m all set to continue blogging throughout the following shift.

I’m sure that you are all terribly relieved. 🙂

Stay tuned, because regular posts resume tomorrow! 

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 1

Here we are at Week #1. Barring any strange incidents or complications there will be 52 of these posts over the course of 2014, and it is my genuine hope and desire that Accountability Wednesdays will turn out to be less whiny and more filled with actual accomplishment than Accountability Tuesdays were. Unfortunately week #1 of 2014 was marred by the demon cold from hell, but I still have a little bit to report, so let’s move on with it, shall we?

Goal #1: Lose at least ten pounds and become healthier overall.

As mentioned above, the past week was greatly affected by the hell cold that has been afflicting my family since Christmas. My husband has since gotten over it and my daughter is only clinging to a bit of a cough and an occasionally runny nose, but the beginning of this week was the worst for me. I got through the holidays, but by the time the 3rd hit (cruelly, the day I was supposed to head down home for a family party) I was in absolute misery. For two days straight nothing I did could make my body feel any less icy cold (except for the very middle of the night when I would start to sweat like my insides were on fire), and every inch of me ached like I’d been run over by an entire fleet of Mack trucks. I could hardly move, and my playful daughter had absolutely no sympathy.

I’m on the mend now, except for a stubborn cough that refuses to go away, but you can probably understand that I didn’t do much any exercising this week.

On the upside of things I’ve been readopting some good habits, like drinking water throughout the day, and because I was having a hard time eating anything for a few days there, I’ve actually cost a couple of pounds. I started the year at 159.2 lbs, and as of the typing of this post I’m weighing in at 156.6. I know it’s not a healthy weight loss by any means, but I’ll take the little boost in return for a few days of wanting someone to put me out of my misery.

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

I’m realizing now that this is going to be a hard thing to report, but I’ll do the best I can. I was slightly more active on social media this week. I made a point to hop on Twitter a couple of times, and one of those tweets ended up being favorited by someone, so that’s a good sign that someone is still paying attention to me, ha ha. I’ve also been working myself back into reading other writers’ blogs, which took a back-burner during the holidays. I’ll be back to commenting and commiserating in no time.

Also, a friend “shared” one of my blog posts on Facebook the other day which, while not a direct result of my own action, is always nice to see. Please keep sharing, friends! I need all the help I can get!

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

Don’t hit me! I haven’t touched this one this week. Mostly this is attributed to the fact that I’ve been on my own computer a grand total of about two minutes a day lately. But I’m hoping to work on this one this week, before I end up flying back out West for my first shift. There’s really not that much left to do, and I’d really, really like to be done of it and have it sent off to my beta-reader before I head out West, since there’s not much productive I can do via my tablet when I’m out there.

Wish me luck!

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

All things considered, it was a fairly decent week since I lost two days to near-death and all. I am, however, a little disappointed in myself. In order to complete this goal this year I need to write a little less than 10,000 words per week. This week I wrote 4535 words. Every one of those words was for the purpose of this blog. I’m disappointed not only because I didn’t even come halfway to the weekly goal, but also because I realized that it’s been a long time now since I wrote any new fiction. Aside from working on my manuscript, I have a fantasy adventure and a major fan fiction that I could be working on, not to mention things like drabbles, flash fiction, or hell, even morning pages. If I could convince myself to start doing morning pages again I would be in for an extra 5000 or more words each week.

So yeah, there’s work to be done, but we’re only on the first week of the year so I won’t be too hard on myself.

Keep me accountable, ladies and gents! Keep me accountable!

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 34

Fellow bloggers, do you ever peruse the spam section of your comments folder? I’ve been flipping through there lately whilst permanently deleting them, and I’ve got to say it’s quite a riot. The spelling and grammatical errors, the blatant inability to properly speak English, the giant walls of Chinese character text, the ceaseless waves of adds trying to sell me things like Viagra. It’s really quite amusing. That said, thank the makers of WordPress that the spam filter on this site seems to work really, really well. I think if I had to put up with all this stuff popping up in my main comments folder every day I would absolutely lose my mind. 😛

Okay then, let’s get on with it!

Health and Body Image Goal

Last week was the very embodiment of “sitting on the fence”, wavering between healthfulness and the exact opposite of thus. See, last week my husband, our daughter, and I went on a shopping trip. We traveled one province over to Fredericton, New Brunswick and shopped for two days straight…then we drove backwards a little to Moncton and shopped for another day…and then drove all the way back to Halifax and shopped for another day before finally heading home in the late hours of the night. Now the thing about four straight days of shopping is that it involves a lot of walking (healthful), and in our case also a lot of carrying the baby around because she’s a lazy little bugger (healthful to everything except my back). By all rights, by the end of that trip I should have lost about five pounds, that’s how much “exercise” I got. Ah, but then there’s the other part of a four-day shopping trip away from home…fast food. Yeah. I believe we had a healthy breakfast on two of those days, and an actual restaurant supper on one of them. Everything else was Tim Hortons coffee and donuts, Taco Bell Big Box Meals, and A&W Chubby Chicken Wraps. It goes without saying that no, I didn’t lose any weight while I was on this trip.

In other news, however, the leak in our basement that I mentioned in yesterday’s post – along with the overwhelming stench of cat urine that I couldn’t seem to locate the origins of – led me to began scouring down the basement yesterday. I’ve got it clean almost back to the pellet stove, which (you’ll have to trust me on this one) was a good bit of work. I have some more to do throughout this week, but the point is that soon I’ll have my basement back in working order and cleared of all the junk that we’ve been tossing down there, and I’ll be able to start exercising down there again. That’s not to say that I will (I’m a terribly fickle person, you see), but that’s my intention. Those of you who pray, please pray for me to have some motivation, please and thanks.

Editing Goal

This one stands exactly where it stood last week. I’m still transcribing my notebooks (they seriously feel as though they’re never going to end), and through this am also editing as I type. By all rights I should be working on editing my zombie apocalypse since that was the original subject of this goal, but these notebooks are another distraction like the supernatural romance was – I feel like if I don’t get them out of the way I won’t be able to focus on my apocalypse. It’s really quite frustrating. Sometime in the future I have to figure out how to better organize myself. I’m the very stereotype of the scatterbrained writer who can’t keep track of anything they do.

1,000,000 Word Goal

Because of the aforementioned shopping trip, I didn’t exactly have a lot of time to write this week. It’s not an excuse, it’s an explanation. The trip had a purpose, one which we achieved gloriously in my opinion, so that’s all there is to it. Despite this distraction which tore me away from my writing, however, I did manage to pluck out 11418 words. Most of that was morning pages, but there’s a bit of blogging and transcription in there as well.

And with that, I have a mini-goal for myself. My best week yet was somewhere in the range of 24,000. This week I’m going to try to break 30,000. That’s over 4200 words per day. It will be very difficult, I think, but all the transcription I have to do will surely help me. Wish me luck!

Getting to Know Yourself

The third week of The Artist’s Way is about “recovering a sense of power”. This week looks into several concepts. One of these is anger, and how we should use angry feelings toward ourselves (“Oh my god, I’ve gotten so fat!”) to reveal those things in our lives which we need to be focusing on.

Another of the topics is “synchronicity”, which basically refers to great things that happen to us (coincidences, most of us call them) that help us work toward our goals. Most of us ignore these things, (“Sure, I met this awesome writer agent who is really friendly and helpful, but it’s totally a coincidence and she won’t want to read my manuscript.”) because we’re more scared of actually achieving our goals than never achieving them.

And the third topic is shame, which most of us have way too much of. We think poorly of ourselves because of concepts that society forces on us (“Artist’s are just lazy people who don’t want to get a real job.”) and that keeps us from following our dreams and goals for ourselves.

As of the writing of this post I haven’t been able to find the time to work on any of the tasks for this week, but there is one exercise that was in the bulk of the chapter itself that I thought I could share. It’s a series of “finish this sentence” lines that are meant to evoke some thought and emotion into who you are and what is important to you, as well as your feelings about certain concerns and issues that might be blocking your creativity.

The bold part of the sentence is the prompt, and the normal font is my response.

1. My favorite childhood toy was…probably my Super Nintendo. I can think of dozens of other toys that I absolutely loved, but the SNES holds a special place in my heart, along with such games as Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III(VI), and Uniracers (yes, Uniracers…shut up!).

2. My favorite childhood game was…Jailbreak. It goes by other names in different areas, so for clarification it’s basically hide-and-seek in the dark, where “it” sends people to “jail”. If one of the hiding kids is able to get to the “jail” without “it” catching them, he/she can yell “JAILBREAK!” and everyone runs off to hide again.

3. The best movie I ever saw as a kid was…probably the first live-action Ninja Turtles movie. I saw tons of movies as a kid, but I can specifically remember waiting in line at the theater to see this one and I was definitely not disappointed.

4. I don’t do it much but I enjoy…reading. I read more than most people I know, but still not much considering that it’s one of my favorite things to do. I love reading, but it takes up so much time that I don’t have.

5. If I could lighten up a little, I’d let myself…attend a “Write-In” during National Novel Writing Month. “Write-In”s are basically when a group of writers were are participating in NaNoWriMo get together and hang out at a cafe or at someone’s house and just enjoy each others company while trying to write as much as possible. There are a couple in the next town over every year but I never go because it feels like a very un-adult thing to do for some reason.

6. If it weren’t too late, I’d…go away for college. The degree I got has served me well, so the university I attended was fine, but I always regretted not going away just to experience the whole “dorm life” thing.

7. My favorite musical instrument is…the guitar. It has always been a little difficult for me to play since my fingers are so short, but it’s more fun than the piano, and I just love the sound of a good acoustic guitar.

8. The amount of money I spend on treating myself to entertainment each month is…almost non-existent. In the past couple of months I’ve spent a bit of money on video games for the Vita my husband bought me, but normally I don’t really spending anything at all. If you work it out monthly over the course of a year it’s probably less than $10.

9. If I weren’t so stingy with my artist I’d buy her…some craft courses. There are lots of awesome-sounding writing courses on WANA International and Writer’s Digest, but I just can’t bring myself to spend money on my writing when I have no way of knowing if I’ll ever make any back.

10. Taking time out for myself is…almost impossible. When I was working out West I was accounted for 23-hours of the day, and when I’m home I can’t even sneak away for two minutes without the baby hunting me down and wanting something.

11. I am afraid that if I start dreaming…I’ll crash and burn. I’ve been allowing myself a hope and prayer for the past while, but it’s a tenuous grasp. I worry that I’ll put all this effort into something that I never get anything back out of.

12. I secretly enjoy reading…all these cheesy sexy-vampire-novels-that-are-marketed-toward-teenagers that are out these days. Don’t get me wrong, I still like my vampires to be scary-ass monsters that will rip your throat out, but there’s also an inherent charm to the sexy ones, especially if they’re sexy and dangerous.

13. If I had had a perfect childhood I’d have grown up to be…a writer, for sure. It’s what I’ve wanted since the third grade, so if everything had fallen into place perfectly, that’s definitely what I’d be doing today.

14. If it didn’t sound so crazy, I’d write or make a…series of novels based on all of my favorite video games from my childhood. Games like the Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger, the Breath of Fire series, and Secret of Mana all had such amazing story lines, I’ve always thought they deserved to be fleshed out and paid more attention to. I’d love to put 100% of my attention into these things, IF I had any belief that the respective copyright holders would ever allow me to publish them. For now, I’m just spending some of my writing time on the Final Fantasy VI one (a girl’s gotta dream).

15. My parents think artists are…artists? I really don’t know how to answer this one, since I’ve never really asked them. My parents are supportive; whether that reflects their actual attitudes toward artist or not, that’s all I really know.

16. My God thinks artists are…non-existent? I don’t have a God, so I doubt he thinks very much about anything at all.

17. What makes me feel weird about this recovery is…just an overall sense that it’s silly and pointless. I can honestly say that some of the tasks have prompted some “Ah-ha!” moments, but overall I just feel like it’s going to turn out to have been a huge waste of time.

18. Learning to trust myself is probably…one of the harder things I’ve ever tried to do. I might seem confident sometimes, but inwardly I’m pretty sure that I have no real talent and will never succeed in my goals.

19. My most cheer-me-up music is…mostly alternative rock from my younger years. Oddly, even when the lyrics are the exact opposite of “cheer-me-up”, things like the Offspring, GreenDay, and Blink 182 give me a little burst inside. That’s why I have tons of their songs on my phone.

20. My favorite way to dress is…jeans and a tank top. I don’t really like dresses because I hate having to sit properly, and I’m not a huge fan of shorts because I’m not a huge fan of my legs. I prefer tank tops to any other kind of top because they’re cooler (I get overheated strangely easy) and they show off some of the qualities I actually like about my body, like my shoulders and upper back.

So there’s a little piece of me, as per The Artist’s Way’s exercises. Did you learn anything?

What about you? Care to share your answers to some or all of these questions? 🙂

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 33

I’ve recently coined a new phrase that I think will catch on: “Trying to write with a toddler around is like trying to do complex mathematics while covered in puppies.”

Okay, so it’s not terribly clever, but it’s true. For all the parents out there who are trying to take their writing seriously but have young children in the house with you at the same time that you’re trying to work…you’re not alone.

I love my daughter beyond words, but no one with kids can argue with me that trying to work from home with little kids around isn’t like climbing uphill, backwards, wearing four hundred pounds of gear. It’s a little difficult, is what I’m trying to get at.

And with that said, let’s move on to the accountability, shall we?

Health and Body Image Goal

Last week I laughed (digitally) at this one. This week I am in so many stitches that I’m turning blue. I’ve been battling with some major sugar cravings that seem constant and unyielding, and no, I haven’t done any “real” exercise. That said, I’m in the process of cleaning up the basement so that I can start doing my workout videos ago. The only problem with this is that my cats have recently decided that they don’t much care for their litter box. The entire basement smells like cat pee, and I’m at a loss to figure out exactly where the smell is coming from. Pray for me, my friends. I’m gonna need it.

Editing Goal

I haven’t done any editing in the traditional sense, but I have been doing something that I think is just as important. With the hell of several great blogs and some interesting articles on the Writer’s Digest website, I’ve been making some important notes about changes I want to make in my zombie apocalypse novel. I think these changes will really improve the flow of the story and the believability of the characters, so I’d say that’s as good as actually doing some editing, right? Damn right!

1,000,000 Word Goal

Again, this week I didn’t get as much writing in as I was hoping, but my total turned out to be surprisingly high. Between blogging, transcribing, morning pages, and other Artist’s Way exercises, I managed to wrack up a total of 24263 words, which if I’m not mistaken, is my best week yet. I may not reach a million words this year, but I am definitely destroying my previous years’ records.

And that’s that for this week. Ciao!