McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Accountability, author's timecard, word count written, feeling lonely out there?
Rachel Udin:
--- Quote from: Starbeam on September 14, 2010, 11:42:19 PM ---Something to add about wordpress and hosting--a lot of hosts will be set up so that they can automatically install it for you. Something like two clicks of a couple buttons, and done. Wordpress also lets you set up a blog on their site, but it's limited in what you can do compared to installing it on the host. And the pricing on webhosts-from what I've seen, a lot of em have unlimited bandwidth/storage for about $10/month. Cheaper if you do 6 or 12 month plans. I've been looking at domain registrars lately, and I've actually not seen too many that are under $10/year. At least none that look reputable. Another good idea is to listen to the Writing Excuses podcast on branding yourself. Basically says to put up a website that fits you. My example for that would be my own site--it's sorta amateurish looking, but if it were too polished and professional, it wouldn't fit me. And it has lots of stars. ;D
--- End quote ---
Godaddy.com is about 10 dollars a year.
Sometimes there are specials for 8 dollars a year, etc on websites--registrars are not important. What's important is your hosting. Most registrars you can get the domain cheap and then transfer it around aat will and get cheap registration that way. It's quick and painless.
The worst thing that can happen is that a registrar locks your account, but then you can get ICANN to lodge a complaint, which came about after Pepsi sued a large registrar and won.
Wordpress, you can set into a shell pretty easily with one line of PHP and a little deleting.
http://www.racheludin.com/ <-- that is set up into a shell. It's a basic PHP insert line.
That means I can use the template for other subpages as well.
I pay 60 dollars a year. Shared hosting, but they have lots of servers. And unlimited bandwidth, database, storage and domains. They don't do multi-access subdomains automatically, but you can get it set up with a little hassle and no charge.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Kali on September 18, 2010, 04:26:48 PM ---A good feeling, when you edit, pare stuff down, fix other things, and find out you came out ahead in word count.
--- End quote ---
A fair bit of my editing on this pass is going to be "thing X works in a way that is totally obvious to POV character so she would never think to explain it, but it needs more clues in there so the reader gets what's going on", which is probably why it's getting longer. This is really one of the downsides of a single first-person POV; the Scylla of leaving vital stuff out so the reader is puzzled, and the Charybdis of stopping to explain in ways that totally break the integrity of the viewpoint. As the first volume in a projected series, I really have gone to some lengths to construct situations and settings where she has to explain or at least think about the basics of where she's from, what she does and how she thinks; the later ones, in settings more alien to her, may make it even harder to get that in, on a "person from culture A writing memoir of culture B for assumed readers in culture A being read by readers in culture C" level. (I can't actually believe in a first-person narrative that is not explicitly written within the fictional world, and for a good reason.)
meg_evonne:
I'm derelict in my duty, here. Let's see... Did my YA print copy read, waiting to change the word doc with errors that I missed. I just don't have that razor eye. I ALWAYS miss something. Scares the you-know-what out of me, since a know that an editor with a really fast, sharp mind would never miss--any of them. Still haven't mailed in to the publishing house editor, but I'm also not going to wait on sending out five queries on it. Researching agents is harder than researching for a historical piece... *sigh*
My short story from the U of IA (1650) or so, is off to my editor friend for my annual Zoetrope All Story contest. I never plan on winning, of course, however I consider it my year in writing craft statement of how far I've come and what I've learned this past year. It will then go to the U of IA Anthology for inclusion in their CD.
A wonderful new YA character (12-yr old) this time is taking shape, along with a nifty plot. Not fantasy, not sci-fi, just a wonderful dealing with life, the death of an adoptive father, a grieving mother. It will follow a pure and simple 'hero's journey' format. Not 100% sure that's my next project, but it is weighing in heavily against my other project ideas in my file. It is nice to sic my mind on fresh ideas though. I've been editing so long, that I thought my muse had taken a hike in protest and disgust.
Kali:
Good luck with the Zoetrope entry, Meg. :) And isn't it nice to exercise a whole different part of your writing brain? By the time I was done my rough draft, I couldn't wait to edit. Then I edited. And edited. And re-edited. And now I'm writing again... which is making my editor nervous. So I use my writerly brain on the new rough, and then give my inner editor something to do by reading a few pages in the MS.
After giving myself only a little break, I have indeed begun work on the next thing. I snowflaked some of it, but it's hard to convince myself that that's actual work. I do like that it helped me finalize some vague plot notions, but it was time for me to dive in. I'm not keeping up my 2k/day word count that I had been using to finish up the last story, but I am going at around 1.5k/day for now. 1.5 is a nice minimum for me, it's just enough to feel like I got something done, but not so much that I feel like I'll never make the end when the words aren't coming. And when I get the 'feel' for this story a little more, I'll bump my wordcount back up to 2k.
That's a minimum, of course. Anytime I feel like going over, I let myself. I just don't force it if it's not there.
Tomorrow, the plan is to try and rough out a synopsis, but it'll be short on details, even for a synopsis, because I don't know all the details. Still, I feel I should get down what I do have just so it feels a little more... I dunno, official.
During my break, I also got my website set up. Sort of. I'm not advertising it yet 'cause it's still rough and tumble and there's hardly anything on it. I'm also setting up Thursdays as "Blogging Day" during which I'll make a post about the week's past writing activities and the plan for the next week. So that'll be something to do tomorrow, too.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
through pass on the remaining fifteen chapters, fixing the small things; squeezed an extra 500 words out of it.
Five specific things left to do; a major rewrite of two chapters, a new ending, two medium-sized things to put in and one medium-sized thing to cut, because the detail in question is possibly a major point in a later story, so I want on reflection to leave it a much smaller detail now, that will work as part of the background rather than leaping out as Significant, because leaping out as Significant and not resolving is bad, and the extra novel's-worth-o-stuff it would take to resolve it also does not fit here.
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