I am struggling to catch up with my word count goal for the month of July. As I’m visiting a friend for the weekend, I only have four days to write 16,000 words. Will I manage it? Probably not, but I hope to get as much done as possible. I have rough notes for today’s blog post and no time to complete it. Instead, I leave you with a timely cartoon by Inkygirl:

I know I’m procrastinating when I spend the best part of an hour shopping for doll accessories. I can’t even shove this into the “creative avoidance” category. It’s pure and utter time wasting, not to mention hard on the bank balance. I somehow managed to order a buggy/stroller/whatever-the-heck-you-call-it-in-your-country for my daughter’s doll. Seriously. A fricking doll’s buggy!

Then I spent/wasted another hour looking up current clothing fashions. It’s been so long since I shopped in a CITY where there’s VARIETY that I no longer know what’s “In” and what’s “Out”. Our local town has an Esprit shop, and….well, that’s pretty much it. I do have a legitimate excuse for the fashion research, though: I need to clothe my characters. *cough”

Having shopped for toys and clothes, I made the oh-so-logical leap to elliptical trainers. I’ve picked out the one I want for Christmas. I even ran it by C, who approved its purchase. He might have been half asleep at the time this conversation took place, but I’m interpreting it as a “Yes”.

I know I’m procrastinating when I feel a sudden urge to clean. I clean because I have to, not because I get any joy out of the process. An urgent desire to clean is generally indicative of wanting to avoid doing whatever it is I really should be doing.

A more entertaining method of creative avoidance is baking. I love making cakes. I also love eating them. There’s something therapeutic about the whole process.

Anyway, I have 302 words to go until I reach my daily word count goal. Sadly, this post doesn’t count.

What do you do when you procrastinate? Clean? Bake? Engage in a spot of retail therapy?

If any of you follow authors on Twitter, you may have seen them refer to something called Write or Die.

Write or Die is software which is designed to make writers more productive. You can decide how many words you want to write in a specific amount of time.

There are three modes to choose from. Depending on the one you opt for, there are various consequences which will befall you if you don’t type fast enough to keep up the pace necessary to meet your goal.

Gentle Mode: This gives you a reminder to keep writing if you’re falling behind, but doesn’t include annoying sounds.

Normal Mode: Failure to keep up the pace will result in annoying sounds being played at you until you start writing again. There are various warning sounds to choose from, including ‘Air Raid’, ‘Evil Violins’ and my personal favourite (not), ‘Alarm Clock from Hell’.

Kamikaze Mode: If you stop writing, Write or Die will start eating your words. Literally.

Apparently, Write or Die can also tell if you cheat, as I discovered when I created this screen shot. I simply copied and pasted the following nonsense text, and the screen turned red and started yelling at me. Not very friendly!

As the title of this post indicates, I have a love/hate relationship with this software.

On the positive side, I find it enormously helpful on days when I’ve failed to meet my word count goal. I fire it up and force myself to type like crazy for a half hour or so.

It is fantastic for increasing productivity, especially in full screen mode. Procrastination and time-wasting activities such as checking my emails or Twitter are less straight forward than when I use Word. Seeing my daily word count stats soar is a wonderful feeling, and sets me up for another day of writing.

The downside of the Write or Die method is that quantity is not synonymous with quality. The chunks of text I’ve written with Write or Die are a mixed bag. Some are so atrocious that they’re unusable. No amount of editing can salvage them. Others are quite good, and don’t require too much tweaking before I add them to my current WIP.

I find Write or Die useless for writing dialogue. It takes too long to add the necessary punctuation. In any case, I generally write dialogue at a slow pace. It can be useful for writing short, descriptive pieces of text, or for scribbling my thoughts or goals for a particular scene, and then inserting the dialogue later.

Write or Die is seductive. Seeing my word count soar gives me a definite buzz. However, this can quickly turn to frustration when what I’ve written turns out to be crap. A high word count means nothing if the text produced is unusable.

If you’re a writer, have you tried Write or Die? Or simply set a clock and typed like crazy until the alarm went off? Does this method work for you?

If you’re not a writer, have you found ways to increase your productivity when writing emails/blog posts/academic papers, etc.? Do you find that the speed at which you write has an adverse effect on the quality of the work you produce?

How quickly do you judge a book? After one page? One chapter? Fifty pages?

I pose these questions out of interest as both a reader and a writer. My critique partner and I recently discussed the necessity for punchy opening lines and hooks in the first few pages of a story. She’d received some feedback on her WIP from a beta reader, and the message she got was that her opening wasn’t compelling enough to make an editor want to keep turning the pages. I disagreed with the beta reader, but I have to admit that my critique partner’s revised beginning is stronger.

This incident, plus my intention to enter a few writing contests, got me thinking about how quickly readers judge a book. Most RWA chapter contests call for the first three chapters of an unpublished author’s WIP. Every Saturday, Dear Author features the first page of an anonymous author’s story, and invite blog visitors to critique it. Can you judge a book on its first page? On its first three chapters? If so, what can you say with absolute certainty at that point in the story?

Let’s take the first page scenario: Looking at the various pages featured on Dear Author, it’s fair to say that I can judge a person’s grasp of grammar and spelling based on the first page, or at least have a fair impression of it. I can also say whether or not the initial paragraphs indicate that this is the type of story I’d like to read. What I can’t say is how I relate to the characters; whether or not the plot is original; or how well the story is paced and structured.

Reading the first three chapters gives me a more informed impression of a writer’s style and of the story which they wish to tell. On the other hand, I’ve read countless books which got off to a slow start, but ultimately earned a place on my Keeper shelf. In the case of several of my favourite Georgette Heyer titles, for example, it took me a couple of chapters to get into the story. Ditto a couple of the Mary Stewart books which I raved about on the blog earlier this year.

This leads me to the conclusion that the modern writing style is all about opening hooks and punchy beginnings. I realise that editors receive thousands of submissions every year. In order to stand out from the crowd, a writer needs to grab their attention early on. However, I’m not convinced that this necessarily leads to better books on the market. Jo Goodman is one writer who probably wouldn’t make it out of the slush pile today were she to submit her work for the very first time. And yet I love her slow, contemplative style of writing.

What do you think? Can you judge a book on its first page? On its first couple of chapters? If so, what can you say with certainty about the author’s writing style, story, characters, and so on?

♥ I read four books this week. One was a ‘C’ and the others were all in the ‘B’ range. It was hard to decide which was my favourite, but the one which left the deepest impression on me was Home by Morning by Alexis Harrington. My review will be up on Tuesday. Edited to Add: Home by Morning is available as an ebook at Smashwords.

♥ I’m pleased to say that my progress for the Book in 3 Months challenge was very good this week. I’ve written just over 7,000 words so far, and I hope to squeeze in another 1,000 this afternoon. My current total word count is 17, 253. I still have two months in which to meet my 60-65K goal. Unfortunately, I also had to cut about 2,500 words from my WIP. Some of the progress I made this week involved rewriting parts of earlier chapters to reflect some changes I made to the plot. I hate shedding text, but the plot changes definitely make the story stronger.

♥ I spent/wasted a lot of time setting up my author website. When it’s got content – and looks better – I’ll link to it.

♥ Rike Horstmann has a timely (for me) post at the All About Romance blog. She asks: Has the Ebook Reader Changed My Reading Habits? My answer in brief: “Yes!” I read more and I tend to have more than one book on the go at any given time. I never used to do that.

♥ Keishon has a great post on female mystery authors at Just Another Crime Fiction Blog.

♥ In response to Magdalen’s guest post on her first love, Pandle, Katiebabs wrote about her first love, Toni the Cabbage Patch Kid.

♥ OK, that’s all folks. If you’re American, have a Happy 4th of July. If you’re not, I hope you’re having as nice weather as we are. This is where I’ll be spending my Sunday afternoon:

Enjoy your Sunday!

I’m the midst of a reading slump at the moment. There’s no particular reason for it. I have an abundance of books I’m looking forward to reading sitting on my TBR shelves, yet I can’t seem to get into any of them.

I’ve been using the time I usually set aside for reading to increase my writing output. I’ve tentatively committed myself to Inkygirl’s 1000 Words a Day Challenge. Yeah, I realize “tentatively committed” is an oxymoron. Basically, it’s what I hope to achieve six days per week.

If you get a chance, check out Inkygirl’s site. She has some cool comic strips and tips for writers.

What do you do if you find yourself in a reading slump?

I’m over at Romancing the Blog today, talking about surviving my first NaNoWriMo. I’m hoping to post a couple of mini reviews tomorrow – if I get them finished in time!

In the meantime, enjoy your Tuesday.

This blog post title was stolen from Chris Baty’s NaNoWriMo manual which gives advice on preparing for and surviving the 30-day writing frenzy.

I hadn’t originally intended to blog about my NaNoWriMo experience as I see Monkey Bear Reviews as a place to discuss the books I read, not my writing aspirations. However, several considerations caused me to change my mind. First and foremost, I’m spending so much time writing that I’m reading even less than usual. Less reading means fewer reviews. Secondly, I’m not blog hopping as much as I normally do, and am therefore blissfully unaware of any and all RomLand kerfuffles. (If you know of any, please don’t inform me. I’m enjoying my temporary bubble of contentment.) Last but not least, it’s been brought to my attention that some of you are actually interested in reading about my writing woes. So I’ve decided to do a weekly update on my NaNoWriMo progress. At the very least, it will be a good motivator to keep going.

I’m the Queen of the Plotters. Before I begin a new book, I have my entire story mapped out, my synopsis polished to perfection, my characters have been interviewed and all their idiosyncrasies recorded in elaborate detail. Once I’ve all that time planning, things frequently don’t flow as they should. I get disconcerted by characters not behaving as I’d intended them to. Plotlines meander in  unexpected directions. Generally by the time I reach the halfway point, I’ve spent hours agonising over the correct placement of commas and other minutae that I’m totally burned out. The result? Yet another unfinished manuscript.

NaNoWriMo is a completely different approach. The idea is quantity over quality and the goal is to write at least 50,000 words in 30 days. Some participants spend the month of October planning their novel in detail, much as I described my usual method above. Others sit down on the 1st of November and just start writing. I compromised. I spent Saturday the 31st of October thinking about the story I’d like to tell and the characters in it. I did Alicia Rasley’s excellent writing prep worksheet ‘Outline Your Novel in 30 mins’, and that was the extent of my preparation.

It’s the end of the fourth day of the challenge. So far, I’ve written 10,649. That’s pretty good going but I know I won’t have time to write as much after my mother goes home (she’s visiting us at the moment). In order to meet the daily minimum of 1,667 words, I set my clock to get up a couple of hours before the kids. So far, I’ve managed to stick to this regime, even though it’s killing me to get up so early. I am decidedly not a morning person!

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for early starts, I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I manage to get done. However, producing such a quantity of material in such a short space of time makes for a very rough draft. I’m sure much of it is drivel. I’m tempted to go back and highlight some of the worst prose purple, purely for my own amusement.

If you’re participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo, I’d love to hear how you’re getting on. If you haven’t been bitten by the writing bug, please tell me what books you’re looking forward to in December because my list is pretty sparse.

This post is a means by which to propel me into writing action. I’ve been writing romance for several years. I even have a couple of woeful manuscripts to my name, including an anatomically incorrect Mills & Boon novel which I co-wrote in my teens.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had less time to devote to writing and I need to get back into a routine. One of my reasons for starting this blog was to curb my tendency to over edit. I’m a perfectionist by nature and I’d gotten into the habit of over editing and over analyzing each and every page of whatever project I was currently working on. The result: several abandoned manuscripts and a serious crisis of confidence.

When I heard about the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I thought it would be the perfect opportunity for me to get my writing mojo back on track. The idea of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000-word novel between the 1st and the 30th of November. This means an output of around 1,667 words per day. In order to achieve such a goal, I won’t have time to do any editing until the month is over. (This is not stated in the official guidelines, but it is my rule for myself.) This will in all likelihood result in a spectacularly crappy book, but at least it will be a book with a beginning, a middle, and – most importantly – an END! As Nora Roberts famously put it: “You can’t fix a blank page.”

So what does this mean for the blog? I currently have a self-imposed schedule of 5-6 posts per week. Throughout the month of November, I plan to reduce this to 3-4. Perhaps I’ll manage to stick to my usual schedule, plus write 1,667 words per day, but I doubt it.

If anyone would like to submit a guest post or review to be published in November, please e-mail me at sarah at monkeybearreviews.com, or via my contact form. With the notable exception of spammers, I’m open to submissions from everyone, so please don’t feel shy if you aren’t a blogger.

For those interested, here’s a link to my incredibly uninspired and uninformative NaNo profile.

Happy Halloween!