Sep 26, 2024
My goal for the next twelve months is to write an average of 1,000 words per day. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but life gets busy from time to time and it might not always be possible to write.
I have done my best to minimise the number of days where I won’t be able to write at all by being flexible about the tools I use, but that might not be enough. A few occasions when I might not write during the next few months:
Christmas Day: I don’t know what we will do, but this is the one day of the year when I’m unlikely to be the first person to wake up. I might snatch a few minutes here and there during the day, but I don’t want to be absent from my family.
New Year’s Day: This is also Tamzin’s birthday, so I’m unlikely to find time to sit down and write anything.
Moving House: We are decorating the house in order to sell it and move early next year. I’ve done enough house moves now to know that it’s going to disrupt my writing.
Holidays: If everything goes according to plan (and it never does) then next year, after we’ve moved, we are planning to go to Disney Land in Paris. As far as writing goes, holidays are as disruptive as moving house, so I doubt I will get to do much, if anything, while I’m away.
There are probably going to be other disruptions as well, but I think it should be okay.
Like I said, I’m aiming for an average of 1,000 words a day to hit 365,000 words over the entire year. That means it doesn’t really matter if I write 2,000 words one day, and then nothing the following day, because I will still average 1,000 words on each of those days.
Although I am going to be aiming for 1,000 words every day, I’m never going to hit exactly that number. Instead, I’m expecting to go somewhere over it most days. And even if it’s only a couple of hundred words a day, that still means that every five days I will have built up my average enough that I can bank a whole day when I won’t be able to write.
As far as reporting that, my plan is to keep a tally in a spreadsheet and each daily blog post will have the current status at the bottom, like this:
Words written today:
Words written total:
Plus / Minus target:
That should show where I am overall and hopefully mean that on those days when my writing is disrupted, I don’t fall far behind and can actually enjoy my time without worrying about it.
Sep 25, 2024
As I have been preparing for my short story challenge, I have been thinking through the process of what tools I am going to use. There may be some changes here and there, but this is what I expect to start off with on Monday:
Goodnotes: I am not sure I will do any planning for these short stories, but if I feel the need, then I will do so on my iPad mini using Goodnotes 5.
Ulysses: The writing itself will be done in Ulysses, which I can access on my Mac, iPhone and iPad. That will give me the flexibility to pick up a few extra words during the day if I don’t quite meet my daily target in the morning. As well as allow me to write and publish these blog posts.
Pro-Writing Aid: Although Ulysses has built in editing tools, I paid for PWA a couple of years ago and like the process there more. Recently it has been adding more A.I. features, which I don’t use, but if they take over everything, then I may have to reconsider my options. I like it mainly for changing my regular English spelling to US English spelling.
Vellum: For formatting the eBooks themselves. This was an expensive purchase a few years ago, but I’m still getting updates and it makes what used to be a painful process very easy.
Acorn: I haven’t used this image editor much, so it is the thing most likely to change. This will be where I make book covers.
That’s about all of it, really. None of those are affiliate links, by the way.
Sep 24, 2024
A.I., or LLMs, are probably here to stay and are going to have a massive impact on publishing and most other industries. Tech companies are investing enormous sums of money and once beloved events are putting their feet in it and losing the goodwill of people who once loved them. The technology is advancing at an impressive rate and in a short time, what we have now is going to feel like a child’s toy. So now seems like a good time to have opinions about this stuff.
First off, given the number of generated images on this website, you might assume that I’m all in on A.I. It’s a fair guess given the evidence, and when I did all of it, I probably assumed I would be too. But that turns out not to be the case and one thing I’m going to be doing during my writing challenge is removing all A.I. generated content from my website. So stake in the ground time: I am not in favour of A.I. generated content.
When GPT 4 was released, I tried it out, made some things, and it was fun. I made images of characters I was writing about, made the headers and logos on the website, I even tried using it to write some stories and that was… interesting. It certainly boosted “my” word count to new heights, but it wasn’t fun. Sure, I could look at it and congratulate myself for “writing” so much, but it didn’t feel like writing and that’s a problem when the main reason I have always had for writing is because I enjoy it.
It was easy enough to make that decision for myself and my work: there will be no A.I. because it detracts from my enjoyment of writing. It gets a lot more difficult to draw lines around using it for other things.
A.I. Generated Images
This falls into (at least) two categories:
- Images I generate myself
- Images other people generate
It’s easier to say that I will not generate images myself and instead hire artists to do it. But what if they use A.I. generated images? Am I going to tell an artist what they can and can’t do?
The Quality Conundrum
As things currently stand, it’s relatively simple to point out a piece of writing or artwork that has been generated by A.I. They have a look about them. But we are in the infancy of these new tools and it seems reasonable to expect that one day the content created by A.I. will be indistinguishable from work created by a human. What happens then?
One day I think it will be possible for a reader to go on Amazon and type in things they like in a story and have a unique book generated for them that ticks all those boxes. It will be their ideal book and no human will have been involved. I think they will enjoy that book.
The same will probably be true of films and other mediums.
Trying to prevent that future feels like attempting to stand in front of a tidal wave and barely factors into my decision making now. Apart from the fact I’ve decided that I don’t want to ride that wave. It seems inevitable, but that doesn’t mean I have to contribute to it.
There are a lot of things that I can’t prevent that I choose not to take part in. This is just another one to add to that long list.
What my decision really comes down to is my enjoyment of the writing process. I don’t have any illusions about success. The only thing I am entitled to is the work, and with that in mind, shouldn’t I want to make the work as enjoyable as possible?
What it comes down to
With writing I have decided not to use A.I. because I enjoy the process less when doing so. With other forms of A.I. I have decided not to use it because I have decided I don’t want to contribute to the inevitable future where a shared culture no longer exists.
Sep 23, 2024
It has been over three years since I last published a new story. Everything I’ve published in the last few years has either been a re-release of an existing story, or something that I had finished previously. I finished my most recent release, The Long Winter, over ten years ago.
I haven’t really stopped writing during that time and maybe a couple of things got as far as a finished first draft, but nothing went further and most things didn’t even get that far. I made plans, worked on projects, even wrote about some of them here, but nothing progressed, nothing actually got finished.
There are reasons for this. It has been an incredibly difficult few years for our family, but not finishing stories has been bugging me. I don’t like it. I don’t really feel like I’m living if I’m not writing, and as I have come to realise that I’m not finishing what I’m starting, it’s become increasingly difficult to convince myself it’s a good idea to start a story.
Which is where this challenge comes in.
Over the next year, I am going to write 52 short stories and publish them all. That’s one short story a week.
Which is a bit of an over-simplification of what I’m planning, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Effectively, what I am going to do is spend an entire year finishing stories. That is what I want to get out of this challenge; to return to being the type of person who finishes the stories I start.
The slightly longer version of the challenge is that I am basing this on the average short story being around 5,000 words long, so my daily challenge will actually be to write 1,000 words. That gives me 2,000 extra words a week for stories that require more space. There are a few other things involved as well, like editing, designing covers, formatting, etc., which I have accounted for so that I can publish an average of 5,000 words every week.
Normally I release books on all platforms, but for the sake of this challenge, I am going to be releasing on Kindle Unlimited. Later on, when I put them into collections, I will release wide, or if I change my mind during the challenge.
Another element of this challenge is accountability. That is why you are going to see a lot more blog posts from me. I am going to be writing here every day, even if it is only to let you know what my word count for the day is. Although, hopefully I can add a bit more than that!
The fiction part of the challenge kicks off next Monday (30th September). The blogging starts now as I put things in place and get ready. I’m looking forward to getting started and to finally getting over the hurdle of finishing what I start.
May 2, 2024
The whole reason I started writing stories is because it is fun. Little five year old James laying on the floor with his Ghostbuster’s notebook and pencil wasn’t making up stories because he wanted to make money, run a business, post about it on social media and all the other stuff that comes along with being an independent author. The only reason that little guy did anything was because he thought it was fun.
It’s easy to lose sight of that, and I’m certainly guilty of doing so, from time to time. I get so focused on the metrics, on fine tuning my processes, on being as productive as possible that I forget the simple pleasure of sitting down and making up a story out of thin air.
When that happens, you inevitably get bogged down, the whole thing starts to feel like a slog, like hard work. Which I think comes through in the story. If I’m not enjoying writing it, is anyone going to enjoy reading it? I can’t see how they would.
I started writing because it was fun, and most days it still is fun, but I need to get better at recognising when I’m sliding into not fun and do what I can to pull myself out of it. There’s no point writing if you don’t enjoy it.
I’m sure there are other things that we started off doing because they were fun, but turned them into hard work. I don’t know why. Part of me wants to blame it on the culture of side hustles and the nature of capitalism, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. Maybe people are just wired this way?
