OK day today—but most importantly, POWER HOUR on Saturday. I am doing a makeup session on Saturday, so thanks to everyone for their understanding. Same time. I’ll email my mailing list later in the week with the news as well.
For reading, I continued the TMNT comic. Pretty good issues that I read today.
For data analysis, both my programmers sent me drafts of macro codes. One for Excel, one for Word.
The Excel macros are sales macros that I need to slice and dice my sales reports into a common format that I can feed into Microsoft Access. I then export a master file from Access that I can pivot and run reports from. It contains all sales I’ve ever made, for every retailer, and is immensely helpful. The developer is working on some enhancements to my KDP macro, a new Ingram Spark and Findaway Voices macro, as well as some fixes to my Draft2Digital and ACX macro that reflect recent changes the retailers made to their sales reports. The developer is doing a great job and should be done tomorrow or Friday.
One of the Word macros is for my dictation. It’s a minor enhancement that will help the macro run smoother and more accurately.
The other Word macro is something I thought of a few days ago—it inserts horizontal lines in the manuscript. Booooooring…but very helpful.
For example, I’ve been using the Lester Dent plot method for my short stories, but I’ve modified it. Instead of 1500 word quarters that Dent recommends, I use 1200. This means that I can divide the story into four 1200-word parts, and each of those parts is three 400 words divisions. I often know where I am in a story (or where I need to be) by simply counting the words. That tells me how I’m doing. This macro simply inserts a horizontal line every 400 words so I know my progress.
For example, if I’m writing an opening, and it goes really long, the existence of the line tells me that I need to launch into the story. The opposite is also true—if I’m writing a scene that is wrapping up but the line is further down the page, it probably means I need a little more in the scene.
This is just a suggestion, not a rule. Mostly, it helps me understand where I am in the story.
The macro inserts horizontal lines and also deletes them as if they never existed.
My next idea for a macro is one that automatically preps a manuscript according to the Shunn Manuscript Format. One click and your Word file is ready for magazine submission…pretty cool.
For marketing, I did a webinar for Writer’s Digest today on Banishing Writer’s Block Forever. It was a great group, and I enjoyed the presentation a lot. I talked about many of the techniques I cover in Be a Writing Machine, and several of the attendees found it useful. It was a 90-minute presentation, and I’m glad to have it behind me.
For production, I’m sitting at 1200 words so far today, but I have a lot of writing time left. I intend to hit my quota today come hell or high water. As you can see below, my numbers as slipping downward in a very bad way, and it’s time to turn that ship around if I want to have a chance at writing 1 million words over the next year. FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION!!!!
And for folks asking about the Power Hour—I’ll know tomorrow if I’m going to have it on Saturday. I’ll announce it tomorrow as well as on my socials and mailing list officially.
Have a good night.
YTD Word Count: 208,450
Plan: 1,252,000
Words Left to Write 1,043,550
Words Over/-Under Plan: 4,950
Days Ahead/-Behind: 1.80
Projected Annual Word Count: 1,028,166
Projected Decade Word Count: 10,281,655
Deadline: 12/31/2023
Days to Go Until 12/31/23: 417
Word Count Average: 2,817
