Day 3 of Writing Every Day In March

Note: I'm posting this a day late because my wife and I stayed up way too late with some awesome friends playing a board game called Power Grid. It was so fun! Totally worth it but we went straight to bed once they left so I didn't have time to post my update for Day 3. Here's a pic of our fun:

Yesterday I wrote, well I'm not really sure how many words, but it was a good little pile of them. It was over 500 but I'm not really sure how many. It was another writing session that happened during my commute home with speech to text on my iPhone. I don't think I e mentioned that's how I do a lot of my writing. I prefer writing on a keyboard but speech to text is the fastest way to get words on the screen. It also is a great way to write dialogue. Since you're speaking the words they just come out a lot more natural than when you're typing. One more red x on the calendar!

Day 2 of Writing Every Day In March

Yesterday I wrote about 850 words. I had another nice long stretch on my commute home. That's still not a ton of words for a day but it is about 350 more words than Day 1. I have chapter 21 finished and most of chapter 22. I'm not writing a ton of words, but so far I have managed to write every day and I'm really happy about that.

When I finish the 25th chapter of the novel I will be halfway done with it. Wouldn't it be cool if I could finish my novel this month? That is my goal. With that said, I should probably figure out what my word count for each day needs to be and try and hit that. I have 28 days left in the month and about 28 chapters so I would have to write a chapter a day. I try to shoot for 1,000-word chapters but they usually end up being a little more than that.

I think I will do that. One chapter a day, but I'm still not going to beat myself up for days with only a couple hundred words. Even if I only write a little bit, but do it every day, I'll still have more words at the end of the week.

Two days in a row isn't much of a streak, but it's a great place to start! I can't wait to see this calendar full of red xs. I will be super bummed if there is even one day that ends up blank. My goal is to not let that happen. Even if you're coming in a couple days late, join me! Start your own calendar and paint it red!

Day 1 of Writing Every Day In March

Yesterday I wrote about 500 words. I did it in fits and spurts, but had one pretty good session on my commute home. 500 words isn't a lot, but I'm totally happy with it. I'm done feeling bad about writing less than a certain number of words on a day that I planned to write, because now I plan to write every day.

Easily Attainable Goals

I heard this guy, on a podcast or somewhere, who studied will power came up with an interesting plan for getting in shape. He took something that he was already in the habit of, brushing his teeth, and used that to spark a new habit of doing push-ups. He was smart about it though and tricked himself in a cool way. He knew that if he set out to do like 50 push-ups that he would probably fail or not even start the first one. So he had the easily attainable goal of doing just five push-ups every time he brushed his teeth. He found that he would always do the push-ups because he knew he could do five, but also that once he got to five he would just keep going. So he would end up doing way more than five push-ups, but if his goal had been more he might not have started. Pretty powerful stuff that really worked.

It seems like with anything in life just getting started is the hardest thing. So I've always wanted to be a writer who writes every day, but it just seemed impossible. I could never find the time. That's why at first I was trying to have a goal of writing just 250 words every day. It seemed pretty attainable to me. I still couldn't keep it up consistently, though. Now my goal is just to write every day. It's OK if I can only write for three minutes and get 150 words down. At least I wrote that day. I have found that the times where I have started to write with the knowledge that it might only be for a few minutes it ends up being a writing session where I get a lot more words down that I thought I would. So I am very proud of my 500 words that I wrote yesterday. I plan to write more than that today, but my goal is just to write today. I've heard that it's really good to have a word count you try to reach every day and I'm hoping I get there someday, but for now I'm just committing to writing every day.

I'd love to hear how you're doing in the comments. Thanks for stopping by!

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!

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!