My latest short story "The Night the Lights Came On"

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

1 Month of Writing Everyday

It's already March 1st tomorrow!!! How the heck did those first two months of 2017 already go by? I am trying to finish a novel and I've discovered an amazing truth. I think I discovered it a long time ago and probably even blogged about it, but it's this. When people say to write every day they are giving you the best advice. Even if you're only able to write for five minutes! I usually write in chunks of an hour or more whenever I happen to stumble upon free time. This means I don't actually write very often. Because of this, every time I do write I need to remind myself of where I was in my story. I found out while traveling last weekend that writing every day gives you one major advantage. You can pick up right where you left off the day before because it's still fresh in your mind.

Write Everyday even if it's just for a few minutes!


We drove from our hometown of Spokane Washington to Portland Oregon. Fresh off of six plus hours of driving I crashed for a little while on the hotel bed next to my wife. It was so nice to rest. I had written the day before but didn't expect to get any writing done on this trip. I pulled out my phone and brought up the latest chapter I was working on. Then, for like 15 minutes, I busted out a ton of words. They just flowed. It was so awesome! I didn't get a ton of writing done, but I guarantee that I will get more words down per month if I get in the habit of writing everyday than if I write when large chunks of time find me. So join me in my goal of writing everyday this March!

I'm going to try and make this calendar RED!


Thursday, February 9, 2017

Back From Vacation, Back to Writing


The picture above is one I took with my iPhone of a beautiful beach cove looking out into the Pacific Ocean in San Diego. I was just on vacation in SanDiego for about a week. I didn't get any writing done then as we were going nonstop from morning till night. It was a lot of fun. I love my family. The other pic below is of some awesome sea lions at La Jolla Cove in San Diego. While we were in seventy-degree weather it was dumping snow back at home. It was nice to get away for a while.

Now that I'm back my novel "Ghost Hunting Realtor" is coming along. The little meter in the upper right of this website is slowly filling up as I write more chapters. If you want to be an Alpha Reader feel free to check out the first draft of the novel as I post it chapter by chapter over at Wattpad. I do go through and give each chapter an edit, but now that I've finally learned story structure I'm not needing to go back and fix the story. Just the grammar and the way I describe things here and there. I also find a lot of funny typos made from using speech to text to write. I use my iPhone to transcribe my speech into text on the fly. It works surprisingly well but sometimes makes for some interesting word mix-ups. It's an incredibly fast way to write, though! Way faster than typing. I still prefer typing but speech to text is the fastest way to write and produces great dialog I can't seem to get on the keyboard. 



We also go to visit Legoland! That was really fun. I... er uh I mean - our kids had a lot of fun seeing all the amazing stuff made out of legos :) It was a fun trip to remember. Now I'm back shoveling snow and slapping words onto the screen to get the first draft of my novel written. I hope 2017 is treating you well. Thanks for stopping by!