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Substack: A review
Tag: Wordpress
Writing Journal 2.16.2022: Not the best of numbers, but some clarity on my pace… and a bit more consistency… plus some other news
Welcome again.
Although it doesn’t look like it, I have been getting some blog writing done behind the scenes, yet not published yet. However, I’ve been making more progress. There’s at least three posts that I’m working on in drafts, and they are getting closer to getting done. I had wanted to get them done earlier, but I’ve been busy with a little passion project that I finally got finished up. (That’s the subject of one of those draft blogs. Maybe Friday I’ll post it?)
So, this week. I got more than a little writing done, pretty consistently across the week. The weekend wasn’t total garbage, even though I only wrote 55 words one day. At least it wasn’t zero, right?
I’m also looking to make some adjustments to the number of words I need to shoot for every day. I mentioned previously my goal for the year is 200,000 words in a year, roughly 16,667 words a month on average. I was a little below that monthly average last January, but I’m hoping to make up the difference over the next two months, especially since March is going to be a slightly “longer” month than the others.
Usually, my goal is to get to around 500 words per day. However, I have done some recalculations and realized that if I am going to make this 200,000 word goal with some words to spare, I am going to have to get closer to around 600 words per day.
That’s not a problem. One of the good things about setting a writing goal in advance and working toward it is spot checking how much you are getting done as the year progresses. I can check those stats and see if I have to make adjustments to daily or weekly totals if I get ahead or behind. Now that I have that goal ahead of time, I’m finding it to be a little easier to see where I am relative to that goal and how much I have to do to get there.
Visualization and goal-setting… seems to be working? We’ll have a better idea after a couple of months, likely.
How am I going to get those numbers up? Well, I have a blog about writing, maybe I need to… write a little more than just once a month about how much I’m writing? (Man, talk about insider baseball.) I need to get a little further into the self-publishing area, especially with this book project I’ve had sitting on the sidelines. I want to get more into Canva for design and Substack for writing – it might be a way that I can get paid for writing directly than what is going on now. But I’m also staying here on WordPress because I consider it to be a very intuitive site and not something that I need a lot of programming skill or cash to keep going.
As for last week’s numbers… they were both good and bad. For the first time in a long time, I managed to write at least something every day. Yeah, I did wind up just writing 55 words on one of those days, but I managed to make my minimum daily quota of 500 words.
(Now, however, I know I’ll have to lay on a few extra words every day to get to 200K. Again, not a problem now since I know how much I need to still write.)
Also, I managed to meet that minimum quota of either 500 words a day or 30 minutes of revisions or planning for writing a day every day last week, which isn’t a nothing statistic. After just meeting my daily quotas just 58 percent of the time, I’m going to be gunning for meeting daily quota at least 70 percent of the time. So, an entire week when I match my daily quota one way or another is going to be a big win in my book.
So, here are the weekly stats. And, it turns out all this is a bit over 600 words. Another good day of writing for me, at least.
Writers keep writing and everyone keep safe.
Writing statistics for the week ending 2.12.2022:
+3,425 words written.
Days writing: 7 of 7.
Days revising/planning: 2 of 7 for 60 total minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 7 of 7 days.
Searching… For A Plan?
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A Step Or Two Forward And A Step Back
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Writing Journal 6.14.2020: Happy three-year anniversary on WordPress for me!
Just realized logging onto WordPress for the first time that today is the third anniversary of this page. My first actual post wasn’t that much, but I thought what I considered to be the actual introduction went much better.
Now it’s June 2020 and 292 posts later, I’m still keeping up with the blog. It’s hard for me to think of how I feel about it. I’m very happy that I’ve stuck with it for so long and created a lot of content and writing about writing, even if it’s just talking a little about what I wrote every week.
Pretty soon, I will be blogging from another location, but will keep up with the blog. It has been the way for me to keep as honest of a writer and as consistent of a writer as I have ever been in my life. I’ve been a creative writer and I’ve been sitting in front of the computer doing nothing at all productive, and I know which person I want to be.
Anyway, I’ll post last week’s stats below, as per fashion. I plan to do another LOTR chapter review this week and speed those up. All you writers keep writing and everyone keep safe – COVID-19 isn’t done with you even if you want to be done with it.
+4,513 words written.
Days writing: 4 of 7.
Days revising/planning: 3 of 7 for 90 total minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 5 of 7 days.
More Book Updates, Promotion News, Etc.
Yesterday was a wild day – around 80 visitors to the site just with the little promotional work that I’ve done so far. That plus the 100-plus followers I’ve gotten on WordPress (and others on my other social media pages) has me thinking something could slowly be starting.
So, let me update everyone on a couple of items regarding The Holy Fool and associated items.
- I now have ebook versions of The Holy Fool up and running on some other sites thanks to my publisher, Biblio. They are on Barnes and Noble and Kobo, for starters. I have also updated the “My Books” section of the blog with those links.
- You can also find my book on the Apple app, but for some reason I can’t seem to find a URL link for that. Just search for my name on the Apple book app and you’ll find it.
- I’m hoping to have a better idea of when I will be getting some author’s copies in my hands by sometime this week. I feel good about that, because I have a couple of people close to me wanting some autographed copies. In addition, I want to get some to my local library and have some available for signings, book giveaways, etc. When I know, you’ll know.
- Still educating myself on the Amazon and Goodreads author programs (links to my pages on both sites are on the sidebar of this blog). I have the feeling that I will be able to make a lot of use out of both sites as promotional vehicles and to keep in touch with future fans.
That’s most of the new news bookwise – as time goes on, I’ll continue to keep everyone in the loop.
Just Hit 100 Follows On WordPress
I was impressed when I saw that. Thanks to everyone who’s ever taken the time to follow me here or on my other social media sites.
I try and check out people who follow me whenever I can – I wish I had time to do it more.
For every visitor and follower here who’s ever checked my blog out – thank you.
Remember that I’m releasing #TheHolyFoolLaunch post at noon on Saturday, January 19. Come on over to check it out and maybe buy a copy.
Regarding Social Media
You may or not be aware that I have two Liegois Media sites set up on social networks – A Facebook page and a Twitter page. I talked about it before, but basically both of those pages predated this blog. I got them started up back in the days when I was still in journalism and wanted to have separate pages for contacting people over social media apart from my personal accounts.
That worked out well for a while, but when I left journalism, I still had these pages sitting around, gathering virtual dust for a bit. However, I decided to repurpose them as the locations where I would write about/share articles about writing and writing-related topics. I also wind up sharing more than a few writing memes.
Those pages eventually helped inspire me to set up this blog. I also wind up cross-posting all of my blog posts onto those pages, which is pretty convenient for me. In time, as I approach having a book that people can actually buy, I have the feeling that those might be some of the primary promotional tools that I have at my disposal to do that promotion.
However, my own interest in social media has been wary in the past couple of years. I’ve long been concerned about what I saw as the lack of concern from those companies about online harassment and trolling. Now, the role Facebook played in the recent election and their reaction to it makes me very wary of it, as well.
Despite all that, for the near future, I think that I need to keep those pages to reach out to people. However, I wanted to make an effort to reduce my personal time on those platforms, both to indicate my disappointment with the companies, as well as trying to get rid of the time suck social media can be. If you examine this blog regularly, you can see how good I am at procrastination.
With all of this in mind, I made the decision last week to delete my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram apps from my phone. (I still have my Facebook Messenger and Page apps, as well as my WordPress app). It is amazing how much it has been helpful for me to reduce that screen time from what it was. I thought of that decision as a temporary experiment, but the more I look at it, the more I think I might make that decision permanent.
Anyway, don’t forget to visit my Facebook and Twitter pages. 🤣🤣🤣
[EDIT: April 13, 2019: I eventually put Facebook back on my phone, but I use it far less than I used to. Now I’m more on Reddit. 🤣🤣🤣]
100th Post
I wasn’t quite sure I would make it this far. Remember how it all started?
Well, it got on track after that.
As much as I have claimed to be, or aspire to be, a writer, for a good portion of my life, I don’t believe that I lived up to that claim fairly well. There was a time when I started a blog, several years back, on Blogger. Don’t bother looking for it; I wrote it under an Internet handle, never ID’d myself, and took it down years before my kids ever got into middle school.
As I’ve discussed, consistent writing and myself until very recently have not been close companions. Such was the case with the infamous first blog. I’d post happily every day for a week or two, then just forget about the whole thing for another two weeks. I’d post about every eccentricity that came into my head and got into the bare bones basics of HTML programming to get everything looking nice. And I didn’t even realize that pretty soon there would be a lot of options for plug and play blogging before too long.
I have to say that I like the ease of operations of the WordPress platform for what I do a little more than what Blogger had for me. I like the ease of me being able to cross-post to other social media platforms and its ease of use. I also like being able to track and follow other blogs as well, but I forget if Blogger had anything similar except for RSS readers.(NOTE: If anyone has a suggestion as to whether I should change up the design of the site, let me know. I might keep it this way for a little longer.
I think this blog has become a symbol of the type of focus that I wanted to bring to my writing at the start of this process. I stayed modestly ambitious yet strongly focused on what I wanted this blog to be. I might occasionally spout off on my personal social media about things that bother me on a political level, but I’ve decided to keep this page largely free from politics, although there are a lot of political elements and themes to my books. I’ve kept this dedicated to the writing craft and my journey as a writer, and it has been liberating to try and filter my online presence so that I’m not so much in the muck of the political and cultural combat. That’s even though the main characters of my recent books would certainly have something to say about the issues of the day.
I’ve also stayed consistent with my writing. Even though those weekly writing journals seem to make up a large portion of the past 99 blog entries, they’ve been important in many ways. They have been personal celebrations of how well I was doing on my writing as well as personal postmortems on how things could have gotten better. I said from the beginning that this was as much of a way to track my own progress and output as a writer as it was a way to reach out to other writers, share my thoughts and, eventually, promote my own fiction. Even though sometimes it has only been a weekly blog about what I wrote that week, it was more consistent that any writing I’ve ever done up to this date.
I’m proud of that, and I’m also proud of making it to 100 blogs. I’ll be looking forward to my one-year anniversary on this blog and the next 100 blogs, for starters.
Writing Journal/Random Notes 4.8.2018: A lull before the new action
It was a slog this week. Here it is:
+0 words written.
Days writing: 0 out of 7.
Days revising: 3out of 7 for 300 total minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of revisions): 3 out of 7 days.
Well, I did say I was going to take it easy this week.
Is it good news that I’m just getting antsy if I just take time off? Maybe that’s for the best. I think that I really don’t know what to do with myself when I am not working on a project, which is such a better feeling that just sitting on my butt for years at a time.
So, what am I doing? I read through one person’s work in my writing circles; now I’m going to do another one of those, although that process will take longer. I want to keep poking around on The American Nine, even if I don’t do too much with it at the moment. There’s at least two or three projects I could revive that I still have passion for at various levels.
I want to keep writing, even if it’s rubbish. And that’s a good feeling.
[UPDATED: I also went to my Facebook writing groups to get their input on the question I asked before of whether to count my blogging writing toward my writing totals. General consensus is that it should be counted. So, as of the next writing journal, those totals will go into the count.]
Random Notes!
- Going to get at least another mid-week post out. It’s one of those that’s been hanging around for a while, so I’ll be happy to get it out the chute.
- I think I have social media posts covered until… the end of the month? So, that’s a good feeling.
- I’m dealing with what I think is a pinched nerve in my neck. I might have to consider changing sleeping positions, writing positions, etc. It will be nice when this sorts itself out or my new chiro does.
- I will talk eventually regarding what The Holy Fool’s publication status is. Right now… it appears there’s some movement on that front. As soon as there’s product, you’ll be the first to know, faithful readers.
That’s it for an admittedly boring week! I’ll have more to read about later, promise.