Tag: Writing fiction

I write fiction—it’s how I earn my living—and I like to ramble. Just so you know. Nearly everything I do these days relates in some way to writing and publishing, so most of my posts are here.

You are my Writing Mastermind group

Lynn

Didn’t know that? Oops. :)

I don’t hang with writers, or readers, these days. I hang all alone in my little house (a house that’s far too big when it comes chore time) and I write as much as I can.

I have been aiming for 5,000 words a day for almost 6 months now, but I’ve yet to achieve it on more than a couple of occasions. My usual output is more in the range of 2,000 a day.

Since January (a s.l.o.w. month) I have written 68,614 new words and rewritten in some fashion or another countless more. February on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as slow and of those 68,614 words, 51,396 belonged only to February. I feel like I have hit my stride.

Here’s what it looks like in my spreadsheet.

Fri, 2/1/13 17,218 –
Sat, 2/2/13 17,230 12
Sun, 2/3/13 17,540 310
Mon, 2/4/13 19,973 2,433
Tue, 2/5/13 22,301 2,328
Wed, 2/6/13 24,317 2,016
Thu, 2/7/13 26,803 2,486
Fri, 2/8/13 29,161 2,358
Sat, 2/9/13 31,180 2,019
Sun, 2/10/13 33,225 2,045
Mon, 2/11/13 35,567 2,342
Tue, 2/12/13 37,944 2,377
Wed, 2/13/13 40,790 2,846
Thu, 2/14/13 43,394 2,604
Fri, 2/15/13 44,892 1,498
Sat, 2/16/13 46,040 1,148
Sun, 2/17/13 47,106 1,066
Mon, 2/18/13 48,613 1,507
Tue, 2/19/13 50,098 1,485
Wed, 2/20/13 51,329 1,231
Thu, 2/21/13 53,891 2,562
Fri, 2/22/13 55,008 1,117
Sat, 2/23/13 57,454 2,446
Sun, 2/24/13 59,045 1,591
Mon, 2/25/13 61,244 2,199
Tue, 2/26/13 62,787 1,543
Wed, 2/27/13 66,064 3,277
Thu, 2/28/13 68,614 2,550

Now, why does this matter? Because it’s the most consistent production I’ve had since I started keeping track back in August of 2012. (Not the only time in my life I’ve tracked my daily writing numbers, but the other sheets were YEARS old and out of date.)

Consistency is something I’ve needed to work on for a long time. Finally getting there has been amazing. My experience also says that the more you write, the more you’ll want to write, and the faster and better you’ll get at reaching those daily goals.

I do daily goals because I’m a natural procrastinator. If I set weekly goals, I wouldn’t reach them because the goals are so large that I couldn’t accomplish them in one day. And yes, I already know I would put them off until the last day.

Know thyself: the only way to stomp destructive habits into the ground.

So, Random Person, welcome to my writing mastermind group, whoever you are. :)

Letting Go

Lynn

So, my collection of websites continues to shrink as I refuse to renew any that (1) aren’t earning enough to be profitable or (2) bore me. That said, I have purchased 5 new domain names this year in pursuit of my other business. So.

Soon, it will be time for a reorganization of epic proportions. I keep hanging on to the sites that are earning, even though the earnings are stagnant in the best cases, disappearing in the worst, now that I’m not putting any work into any of them.

I’ve moved on. It’s time I let a few things go. :)

Ugh. eHarlequin Affiliate Program Ending

Lynn

Well that’s a bummer. I use the eHarlequin affiliate program to generate income for a few sites I have. They were about 5% of my income last year, and I just got the news today that the program was closing effective May 10, 2012. That doesn’t bother me as much as it probably should, but the main site I use them on is a site I don’t actively work on any longer. Haven’t in a couple of years.

Still, if I want to get them off the site and replace the links with other links that might still earn me a few dollars, it’s going to mean changing thousands of links. Yes, that’s right. The site has about 3,000 pages and a large number of them have links to eHarlequin.

I really wish they’d given me more notice because this isn’t really what I had wanted to do with my weekend.

Footprints and Your <head>

Lynn

Ah, so I was looking at some stuff this last week and realized I had let a few things slip by me when it comes to site footprints. (Notably, not footprint, which would imply how large my site is and how much space it takes up on my hosting plan, which is not what I’m getting at here at ALL.)

Of course, there are the things you can’t control, such as tracking ids and publisher code. However, whenever possible, I try to use a different id or code for every site I own, just because I’m like that. Sure, I link a lot of my stuff together because it’s all relevant, but not all of it, because it just doesn’t share a topic or market and it makes no sense to do so (or I want to hide it from prying eyes—whose eyes those might be, I will not say—but I have a passion for several online fandoms and I don’t particularly want everyone to know that I squee! and woot! every other sentence, and that when it comes to these things, I am not quite as mature as my age would imply. ;-)

Anyway, my point is that there are just some things you can’t eliminate, such as if you use certain contextual ad code on your sites. It’s against the rules to have more than one account unless you create independent businesses and I am too cheap to do that. Don’t want to file the tax returns and don’t want to apply for the requisite federal id numbers. One tax return is quite enough, thank you very much.

So, my next work day is going to be spent consolidating and eliminating such codes from any and all sites that don’t earn enough to make it worthwhile to have such code on them.

And I might tidy up a few other things while I’m at it. Footprints are messy and I don’t particularly enjoy mopping up the mess but it must be done.

If you use WordPress on a lot of sites, check your <head> space. You might be using the same theme and thinking that it’s okay because you made your sites look different… BUT unless you’ve edited the html code, or created a child theme with a unique name, you probably haven’t made as much of a dent in those footprints as you think you have. Bots don’t see the end result, they see the code. :-)

This is also part of my push for saying bye-bye to WordPress and hello to static HTML (again). The control you have over output and the individuality you can give every site is a huge plus. Biggest mistake I ever made was converting almost every site I had to WordPress, not the least of why is because it takes twice as long to go back to HTML as it did to go to WP. Ah, well. Live and learn.

Site Focus Redux

Lynn2 Comments

LOL. I wrote this… And of course, I immediately started thinking about what topic I would pursue if I could honestly make money from anything I enjoyed learning about. Geology popped into my head immediately. That’s one of my few regrets in life, changing my major in college from geology to accounting. I mean, what the heck was I thinking at the time?

I’m not obsessed with geology, but I am fascinated by natural disasters of a geological nature like earthquakes and volcanoes. In fact, I once started writing a novel of fiction about the possibility of a super-eruption at Yellowstone. I even did some research. LOL. Famous author Harry Turtledove has officially beat me to the punch though, so I guess that’s okay. The world doesn’t need two. ;-)

I could devote some time to writing about and collecting news around the topic of geology and natural disasters without much effort spent to motivate myself.

And that IS a problem I have with a lot of the stuff I write currently. It’s just plain drudgery, not much better than the job I have that I’m no longer happy working.

I swear, I almost bought a domain for this before I came up on the brick wall of having to pick a domain name for this unnamed, insane project that would suck up too much of my time when I need not another 10 year website project, but something that would pay dividends much more quickly. Oops.

Sometimes I hate inspiration.

Listening to: Gary Allan – Life Ain’t Always Beautiful; “Weird Al” Yankovic – Party in the CIA (Parody of Party in the USA); George Strait – Fool Hearted Memory