Tara Maya's Tales

A Boyd's rainforest dragon ( Hypsilurus boydii ) These are my personal tips for NaNoWriMo. You know the drill. Take only what works. Remember when your teacher told you to write a report on gladiolas that had to be ten pages long, so you changed the margins to 2 inches and the font to fourteen point Gils Sans Ultra Bold and BINGO you had a ten page paper? Yeah, you really fooled her! She never saw that trick before, you sly fox. But guess what, you can’t fool yourself. You know that page count doesn’t mean squat, so stop calculating how much you’re writing every day by page count. Page count is easily manipulated; it changes based on a million factors. There’s an entire profession devoted to manipulating page count, called a typesetter. What doesn’t change is word count. Different genres have different ideal word counts. A children’s chapter book is about 6,000 words. A Young Adult novel or a category romance is about 75,000 words. An adult thrill...

Trying to Find The Right Words by Lardacil When you hear that some writers can hit 10,000 words a day, not just once or twice, but regularly, there are two responses you could have. 1. Hate them. Throwing a pity party for yourself that you just weren't born with as much talent, luck, time or black magic as they were also goes here. Excuses, envy, disbelief. None of these responses will help you. What response will help you? 2. Learn from them. So I've gathered the best How To Write 10,000 words a day here to read and study and emulate. Top billing goes to Rachel Aaron. This woman is my hero. ( Her novels are great too .) If you haven't read her blog post How To Write 10,000 Words , you should. Here's the heart: Side 1: Knowledge, or Know What You're Writing Before You Write It ... If you want to write faster, the first step is to know what you're writing before you write it. I'm not even talking about macro plot stuff, I mean workin...

Writing daily can help you lose weight. No, I am totally serious. I know it seems counter-intuitive, because, after all, you are sitting around on your buhunkus, and, if you are like me, tempted to eat snacks while you write. But writing each day takes willpower. Learning to discipline yourself to write can have a positive impact on the rest of your life. Willpower is like a muscle . This has a downside and an upside. The downside is that it can become exhausted, which means that you can find yourself more susceptible to temptation. The upside is that by exercising your will every day--for instance, by writing daily, if you a writer--you can improve not just your ability to write, but also strengthen you willpower in other areas, like dieting. Heidi Halvorson, a researcher on willpower, writes: So if you want to build more willpower, start by picking an activity (or avoiding one) that fits with your life and your goals – anything that requires you to override an impulse or d...