So-so day today. Someone asked about my R.A.M.P. categories and what they mean, so here’s a refresh of it.
Every day, I have four categories that I try to be productive in. I follow the acronym R.A.M.P.
Read is for reading. Any day I read one chapter of a book is a good day.
A is for data analysis. Any day I use data to glean insights into my business is another good day.
M is for marketing.
P is for production of words.
So, I measure my days by the following question: what did I do to R.A.M.P up my career today?
Some days, I’ll make progress in every area. Others, I may only make progress in one or two. But no matter what I’m doing, each of these areas is helping me get to where I want to go.
So, for today…no reading or data analysis unfortunately.
For marketing, I’ve been taking a class on book cover design. Hat tip to one of my subscribers who told me about a course offered through Neo Stock. It is fantastic. Quite affordable to (about $136 US—you’ll be hard pressed to find a better value, honestly). The course is a bit awkward in that you have to download the videos to your computer to watch them, so you can’t exactly consume them on the go, but the content is gold. It focuses on the 20% activities that pro designers use 80% of the time. And man, is it a game-changer. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.
Today, I’ve been practicing getting comfortable with the pen tool in Photoshop. I managed to cut a model from a background today and got pretty good results. I am going to take my time with the pen tool until I am completely comfortable with all the features and keyboard shortcuts. It’s that important.
I also watched some videos on the Refine Edge tool, which is needed to cut out hair from a background. Between that and the pen tool, those are two key features.
Why is this important for me? For starters, if I want to use AI art, I need to be able to cut the models out of the background and port them over to a different background. It’s a fundamental skill that I need to master.
Anyway, that’s lots of marketing work I did today. I’m feeling really good about my progress and think that I’m weeks away from getting up and running designing my own covers, which will be a major game changer for me.
For production, I started a new short story today, but I only got about 1200 words in. And then I lost the last 700 due to a glitch with my voice recorder (it was completely my fault, won’t happen again). So I’m going to have to start tomorrow playing catchup. I’m still giving myself credit for the words though because I said some pretty good stuff on the walk. Just too bad it didn’t get captured. LOL
Have a good night.
YTD Word Count: 94,100
Plan: 1,252,000
Words Over/-Under Plan: 11,600
Days Ahead/-Behind: 4.22
Projected Annual Word Count: 1,407,000
Projected Decade Word Count: 14,070,000
Deadline 12/31/2023
Days to Go Until 12/31/23: 461
Word Count Average: 3,137
Average Pulp Speed: 1.9
