WIP - Work in Progeess - New Year's Goal Update


The Word Count Notes App. It's great.
Screenshot of a scene from The Sheriff's Magic Summer Jail Break.

We are almost to the half-way point of the year. My children have one week left of school. Then they are all going to be home... oh my. 

My goal was to publish 22 books this year. 

Twelve Arcana Glen Major Arcana novels (50,000 - 60,000 words each)

Ten Arcana Glen holiday novellas (20,000 - 30,000 words each)

Two more novels of the epic fantasy The Unfinished Song series (100,000 - 120,000 words each)

I am on track so far to do this. I've now either published or put up for Pre-Order six (6) novels,  six (6) novellas, and one (1) Unfinished Song epic novel.

I like to have a "pipeline" or projects in various stages of completion. Here's my current pipeline:

Brainstorming: The Arcana Glen Royal Courts series

Writing: The Sheriff's Magic Summer Jail Break

Editing: Death & the Detective

Cover Art / Tarot Cards: The Demon & the Dryad

Preparing for Beta Readers: Maze, The Unfinished Song, Book 9

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It's good that so far I have met my deadlines, but there's room for improvement. I'd rather be be editing and definitely writing about six months AHEAD of my publishing schedule. Instead, I've only managed to do that for The Unfinished Song. The novels are doing okay, but on the novellas, I've really been scrambling, barely finishing the writing, never mind editing, right before the month the novella is supposed to come out! Argh! 

That's too stressful. I had played with the idea of writing 12 novellas instead of 10, but, given I wasn't able to get ahead, I'll stick with my original plan.

To do all of this, I have to write about 5000 words a day, and edit 5000 words a day. That's pretty tough, especially if I also write blog posts like this.

To help me boost my productivity, I use things like Dictating the writing bits of my novel. (Although I pay for this with tougher editing.) After experimenting with a bunch of programs, I decided Notes, on my iPhone, was the best. It was also the cheapest, since my phone came with it.

However, after using it for more than a year, I discovered I did want one more thing that Notes didn't do: an ongoing wordcount. If I am going to write a 1000 scene, I need to have some idea when I'm hitting the mark. And when I'm NOT. 

I searched and found a program that's even better than Notes. It's basically... Notes with a Word Count.

Pictured is a screenshot of this App. I highly recommend it if you want to dictate or even thumb type. I've done both. I dictate when I take walks, and I thumbtype when I'm sitting at home with the family in the evenings. I sneak in a few more hundred words. Otherwise, I would just be wasting time on some dumb social media site, so it's not only boosts my productivity, it keeps me out of trouble. Ha.







 



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