Writing update July 2022

 

Hi everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve done a writing update, so I thought I would jump on and write away update on how my writing is going because a lot has happened since my last one.

Where to start is going to be the tricky bit. I think I’m going to start with project hybrid. I have almost finished editing the book. There are only five more days of editing, and then the read-through I have sent it away to 2 different agents, which marks 4 agents in total the book has been sent to The first two declined the book because it wasn’t what they were looking for at the moment but I’m waiting to hear back from the two newest agents.

project endometriosis is being rewritten because a lot has changed with research and also my personal life so I’ve decided to completely re-write the book with the original draft being the basis of the structure  

other than that I’m only working on one other book and that is project gang and I’m really excited ants definitely a different one from my normal writing style but I’m really enjoying writing it I’m doing it for nanowrimo July 2022 and I’m already 3000 words into the first manuscript.

How have you guys booked been going let me know in the comments I am excited for you guys to check in and let me know.

how to speed up the blog process

 I know running a blog can be hard work when all you want to be doing is getting back and writing, but it is an essential part of promoting yourself and your work, but the question comes can you speed up the process on how you write a blog? And if so, how do you do it?

The answer is yes; you can speed up the blog writing process. It takes me less than ten minutes to write a blog post which is insane. That doesn’t count into any time I have to research, though. 

The second question is a bit harder, but I’m going to do my best to explain how I do it. 

Obviously, the first step is if it needs some time to research, I do that first and take notes. I then open up the word document on my phone, whatever that may be. For instance, I use Google Docs, but you could use anything 

I then turn on voice to text and just speak my blog post. It takes a lot less time, and from there, all I simply have to do is make a blog graphic edit my work and make sure it makes sense less than 10 minutes for a 500 to 1000-word blog post, which is a lot quicker than if I was to write it all by hand and do the research at the same time I like to research when my daughter goes to bed and then when I’m walking her around because she’s in a bad mood and just wants cuddles I then make my blog post

Which says more time for writing and editing my novels and of Las

Which says more time for writing and editing my novels and novellas.

How do you speed up your blog writing process? Let me know in the comments, and I hope I’ll see you guys for the next blog post

My typical writing routine

 

Now that I have a child to also take care of my typical writing routine has changed a lot very quickly and while I’m still trying to juggle everything I almost have it down packed. 

Each week I focus on a different thing but I only ever have two books on the go. 

One week I will be editing one book and the next week I am writing a different book but I now refuse to change which book I’m writing or editing until the previous book is done. 

If I get writers block I take a week off and then the next week I look into agents and a plan of how to publish before diving back into editing. 

I try and write or edit for thirty minutes a day, typically this is once baby goes to sleep before I follow but sometimes I will use speech to text on my phone on the writing weeks to get more words quickly while I’m doing housework. 

When I have to edit things get harder but I am doing a lot on my phone right now so I have Grammarly installed on my phone to help me edit on the go. 

I try and brainstorm when I am in the car and I have nothing better to do while I sit passenger. 

This routine doesn’t work all the time and I can’t wait for it to be more consistent so I can really concur my writing but for now this is what I’m left with and that’s okay. 

Ways to find me online

I have been getting asked questions recently about the best way to follow what I have going on at the moment and I thought what better time to make this blog post. 

I have a range of social media you can follow me on

My linktrees hold all my information in one place:

https://linktr.ee/phoesrules

https://linktr.ee/Beautyqueensbeautys

To hear about my writing the best places to go are. 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PhoebeM.C.Author

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/phoesrules

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phoebe_m.c/

Blog: https://phoebe-mc.blogspot.com/

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/713VkYcY6p7BVeDLUDbhFF?si=o5DcSPN9SH-f9XEb8WD4qg

If you want to see more of my day to day life the best place for that is my 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phoesrules

And 

Tiktok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZSdjKjnsB/

For YouTube related things. 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/youtubesbeautyqueen/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/beautyqueen145

Interview with a book character

Today I decided to give you an inside look at one of my WIP characters with an interview. 

This character is from my WIP titled project hideaway

 1. What is your name?

My name is Anastasia, but I go by Anna.

2. How old are you?

I am twenty human years old but I am really 60.

3. Where were you born?

I was born in a small village called crescent which was wiped out when I was eight years old. 

4. What did your father and mother do for a living?

My father was a slaughterman for one of the local farmers and my mother was a stay at home mum. 

5. Were you well off? Middle class? Impoverished?

We were neither impoverished nor middle class; we did okay for ourselves but couldn’t say we lived any sort of luxurious life. 

6. Do you have siblings? If so, what are their names and ages?

I had an older sister named Camilla who would passed away from illness when she was fifteen. 

7. Where do you fall in the birth order? The oldest, youngest? 

I am the youngest. 

8. Which one of you is your mother’s favourite? 

Camilla was my mother's favourite. 

9. Why?

She was always the golden child and the most intelligent if only she could see me now. 

10. How did you feel about that?

I wasn’t too happy about it, I went out of my way to try and impress my mother but it never worked which was my downfall. 

11. When you were a child, what was one thing you could always be sure of?

When I was younger I could always be sure that I could get away with anything I wanted because no one paid attention to me; not my family or the town. 

12. What was something you were never sure of?

I was never sure if I would ever be noticed by someone until I was ten years old when I was noticed by Jacob. 

13. Where did you grow up? Is this a place you’d go back to now? Or avoid?

I grew up in the town over from Crescent called moonlight I would avoid moonlight at all costs now because if I ever went back I would be stoned. 

14. Do you still have friends there? Or family?

Everyone from my past died a long time ago. 

15. How did you do in school? 

I never actually went to school, I was told I didn’t need to because I would never get anywhere in life but once I grew up and got away from my family I started to teach myself everything I needed to know. 

16. What was your favourite subject?

I loved to learn math it was my favourite thing to learn once I started to teach myself things I needed to know to survive with the ever-changing world. 

17. What was your greatest talent?

My greatest talent is running, I’m like a lightning bolt in the night you see me one second and the next I’m gone. 

18. What did you do badly?

I was never one for art. 

19. What is your life like at the moment?

My life at the moment is something I have pride in, I built myself up over the years to be someone I am happy with. 

How to stay active online while having time for your books.

Staying active between writing and your social media can be extremely stressful, especially if you are a mother like me or working full time and writing, and this is just the thing you do in your spare time for extra money or time to yourself. 

It has been extremely difficult for me to be able to keep up with social media and my books. But I’m going to let you in on my secret on how I manage to update my Twitter six times a day, upload three blog posts a month, make numerous Instagram posts and stories a day, and my weekly YouTube videos while still having enough time for my daughter, housework and writing/ editing my books. 

The first thing to remember is we all have the same 24 hours in a day, and I just make sure that I use mine wisely with the limited time in that 24 hours I get.

Every month I make a note on my phone which outlines everything I have to do in the month. Appointments, what post is going up when on my different Instagrams, every YouTube video I have to film, edit and upload, and every single Twitter post. 

To do this, I put it into sections. The first section is YouTube with the date that it has to be uploaded by and the video title. 

The next section is Twitter. I put every single date of the month in and then under it I write my Twitter posts out for the month. I then write what I’m going to post on my writer's Instagram and on which days and then my main Instagram and the posts I post on my Facebook pages which there are four a month. 

Once everything is planned out, I go on to Twitter online, not the app. the one downfall with Twitter is you cannot schedule tweets on the app. You can only do it on the website. 

I then copy and paste every single post I’m going to make for the month onto Twitter and schedule it for the day I have planned, and just select a random time for each one. 

 I will occasionally have something like a retweet planned or something like an update about my day for them what I do as I go into my phone calendar and put it in for what time I want to do it and then every night before going to bed, I check my calendar and if I have a retweet or an update about my day I then put it in the back my mind to remember to do it the next day which takes a lot of work out if I only have to do it say five times a month.  Every night I also reply to the tweets that I get through the day. I also like every single comment, even if it’s very time-consuming, but that’s okay because my daughter takes an hour to get to sleep on me, so that’s my time to reply to comments and all that kind of stuff across my social media. 

Throughout the month, once I have the plan, I take all the photos from my Instagram, and then I use the Facebook suite app because my Instagrams are linked to Facebook pages.  I schedule all my posts that way, including what I’m going to be posting on the Facebook pages themselves.  You can schedule stories, but I don’t. I just do three stories a day on my main Instagram. I like to get them out in the mornings so that I don’t have to worry about them for the rest of the day. They are just part of my life; if I go for a walk, I take a photo, dishes, I take a picture, I just take whatever I’m doing, and I don’t really care too much, but I have noticed that stories have improved my engagement. 

Now that’s all done and scheduled, I don’t have to worry about posting anything other than whatever I need to on the day for stories, TikTok's, which are pre-filmed, and then the occasional Twitter post. So for the rest of the month, I just write and edit my book each day.  I don’t put pressure on myself if I can’t get it done. I don’t push myself, but I make sure to write my blog posts first because it is the most important part, and then I can focus on the rest. 

I do a week of writing and a week of editing to keep it separate, and each week is working on a different book until it’s finished, so at the moment, I am editing my endometriosis story and writing one of my love stories. 

It can be hard work, but most months have 30 or 31 days except for February.  But having only 30 to 31 days to get everything done is really easy, and I can get everything done in 15 days. I only spend maybe 10 minutes on it each day, so the rest of the time, I have plenty of time for writing or whatever I need to do when my child is allowing me to while still enjoying time with my child and getting all the housework that needs to be done and me most crucial time you can’t neglect yourself in this if you are then you need to take a stand back from social media because it can ruin your life if you let it. 

I hope you enjoy this blog post. Let me know how you keep up with all your responsibilities and comments, so other people for who my method might not work have different ideas. In the writing community, we value our work, but it can be time-consuming. 

I hope you have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you next month for a fantastic blog post. 

How I did with my 2021 goals

Back in 2020, I made a list of everything I wanted to achieve by the end of 2021 to do with my writing, and I decided to come back and look at how well I did with my goals. A lot has changed since I made these goals, I spent a lot of 2021 pregnant and then had a baby to care for, so I had to do my best to achieve what I could. the goals I had set were:

1. Finish writing and editing my books from 2020
2. Publish Three books
3. Write 200k by march (June at the latest)
4. write a total of 500k in the year
5. get at least ten sales on Wrongful Love
6. upload at least one blog post a month on writing blog
7. keep twitter and writing page up to date on my work
8. upload twice a month minimum on Wattpad to get more exposure.
9. Make my writing blog more appealing to readers.

I will now go more in-depth over each goal with how I did.

1.) Finish writing and editing my books from 2020: I had started and been working on a lot of books in 2020 and I knew I wouldn't be able to write and edit twelve projects especially since seven were part of different series; so instead I made a list of all the books I did want to finish in 2021 and decided to completely finish my hybrid trilogy (Project Curse, Project Choice and Project Hybrid) I also wanted to finish Project sisters, Project Endo, Project Hope, Project Love and my short story collection.

I was able to finish writing Project Curse, get half way though editing project hybrid and endo and got a few thousand more words on project hope & love.

While trying to finish my short story collection I started to wonder what the rush was; I started that project because every now and then I would get a short story idea and I wanted a place to put them. so I had to decide if I just shared them online or just kept slowly writing stories as they came to me until one day I had enough short stories to publish a whole book. In the end I decided to just wait to write it and instead focus on my other projects. 

2.) Publish Three books: This was going to be one of the hardest ones and I knew it. I had been trying to get my trilogy taken on by an agent since 2020 with no luck and I had no idea how I could publish three books when only one of my projects I had planned to self publish and after the disaster with wrongful love and everything going on in my life that was added stress I didn't want to deal with.

In the end, I decided to scrab this whole goal and instead just focus on my family and writing and editing so that come 2022 I would have more time to try and deal with it.

3.) Write 200k by march (June at the latest): this definitely did not happen. by the end of March, I had managed to write 18,942 words which was way under what I had wanted. up until April, I had been barely writing and I knew there was no way I would manage to write an extra 181,058 words in three months and I was right because at the end of June I had only written a total of 50,000 words.

4.) Write a total of 500k in the year: Because I had failed so badly by the halfway mark I knew I wasn't going to make it to 500k especially since in this last half of the year I would have a baby to look after and my writing was to be put on the back burner. It's not the end of 2021 yet but I don't plan on doing much more writing this year but I did manage to finish the year off with 150,000 words.

5.) Get at least ten sales on Wrongful Love: It's hard to make it as a self-published author no matter how much discounted sales I had on my book, how many hours I spent advertising over the year it seemed impossible to get any sales. by April 15th I hadn't gotten one actual person to buy my book. But by December 31 2021 I had sold three copies of wrongful love and even had a review. 

6.) Upload at least one blog post a month on writing blog: I passed this one with flying colours. I posted a minimum of once a month here on my writing blog and this month alone I will have posted three times by the start of 2022.

7.) Keep twitter and writing page up to date on my work: This I definitely passed. I was keeping twitter and my facebook page updated weekly on what was going on from word sprints to just general parts of my books looking for advice. 

8.) Upload twice a month minimum on Wattpad to get more exposure: I definitely failed at this goal but that was because I slowly started to realize that sometimes the books I think won't make good books for publishing can and will be a good book even as a short story. I still did upload a bit just not as much as I wanted to.

9.) Make my writing blog more appealing to readers: I wasn't sure how I was going to even know I had done this. I made sure I was writing better blog posts which definitely made me feel better about my work but how I was to know if it was more appealing to you guys, the readers.

I decided to look at my 2020 stats and then compare at the end of 2021 to see if views were up which would give me a good idea if people were drawn to my blog more so now than before.

In 2020 I had 0 followers, 0 comments and 624 views across my blog.

In 2021 I had 0 followers, 0 comments and 525 views