Day 17 - Guest Post by Leah Ashton

Leah Ashton won Mills & Boon's 'New Voices' competition in 2010 and her book 'Secrets & Speed Dating' debuts in October 2011. During 50/30 she'll be busy writing the second book in her contract.

The Procrastinator’s Guide to 50ks in 30 Days

I am a terrible procrastinator. The worst, quite possibly. But I have written a 50K book in 30 days – and that book will be my debut novel for Harlequin Mills & Boon in September. And if I – a writer who will find absolutely anything to do, other than actually write – can do that, than other procrastinators can too. I promise!


I’ve attempted 50k30days before, and failed dismally. It even took me four years to finish my first manuscript! So what changed this time? How was I magically cured of this dreadful procrastination curse?


Well, sadly – I’m still a procrastinator. Procrastination, I’m pretty sure, is here to stay. But now I have tools to deal with it. I cannot promise that what worked for me will work for you, and I can promise that nothing I’m about to say is particularly ground breaking. But it worked for me, so well that the word count I’m capable of achieving when I follow these steps still shocks me.


So here it its…

Leah Ashton’s Anti-Procrastination Toolkit

1. Erase the guilt
So you’re a procrastinator. Everyone around you is more productive and diligent than you (or so it seems!). Cue hours of self-flagellation. Or – acknowledge that you are what you are, and find techniques that allow
you to up your word count regardless. Feeling guilty won’t put words onto paper – so what’s the point?

2. Give yourself a real deadline
I would love to be one of those people who can’t bear a day without writing, but…well… I’m not. So, I need a deadline to get my butt in the seat. And it needs to be a real one, not just “I will write 10K by the end of
the month”, it needs to be a deadline with consequences if I fail. Prior to publication, my deadlines were planned around writing competitions. So if I didn’t hit my deadline, I couldn’t enter.
So, give yourself a deadline, with a real consequence. Find a writing competition with an entry date in early July. Sign up for a pitch at the conference. Anything – but make sure there is a consequence other than, “oh well.”


3. Have a plan (or even a plot)
I used to think I was a seat-of-my-pantser, resulting in the euphoric dashing off of an effortless chapter one, and chapter two and… then……nothing. I know this will be controversial with confirmed pantsers, but I strongly recommend at least a sketch of your plot. Just a vague plan of where you’re going and the main turning points along the journey. Why?
Well, nothing triggers a serious procrastination session for me than a blank page and absolutely no idea where I’m going. Reduce the risk of finding yourself with terrifying nothingness ahead of you and plan. Your plan is your safety net – and besides, you can always ignore it!

4. Remove yourself from temptation
What do you do when you procrastinate? Do you read? Watch TV? Surf the Internet? Whatever it is, get yourself away from it. Be dramatic if you have to – go write at a café, have someone physically remove your TV from your house, give your modem to your husband and tell him he is not under any circumstances to give it back. You get the idea?
Obviously this is for confirmed procrastinators like me – if will power is enough for you, then that is awesome, but if not, do whatever you have to do. The Internet is my vice, and I’ve been known to lock my Internet dongle in my car, or alternatively I use a really nifty program called Freedom (www.macfreedom.com - available for Mac and PC), which cost $10 and will block the Internet for up to 8 hours – and the only way to get it back is to re-boot your computer. If it’s just some sites that suck the time out of your day, look into browser add-ons like Google Chrome’s StayFocusd or Firefox’s LeechBlock. Both will either block a site totally, or give you a maximum time limit per day.

5. Write with your friends
The discovery of sprints (where you write for 30 minutes or an hour with a friend, and then report back with your word count) was a breakthrough for me. I am a slow writer, so I never had super impressive word counts, but knowing I had to report in with my word count was super motivating.
Make sure you check into the Sprint Sessions in the RWA Chatroom throughout 50Ks in 30 Days, or follow along on Twitter. And if you can’t write with your friends? Well…

6. Sit down, and start typing
It’s hardly surprising, but the reality is if you sit down every day, without any distractions, and simply write a word, followed by another word, and then another – your word count will go up. Sometimes the idea of writing X number of words can be so overwhelming that starting seems impossible. But when you do start, and regardless if the words flow or are squeezed out painfully – as long as you’ll keep writing, you’ll hit your
word count. And once you start doing it day after day – well, before you know it – you would have written a book. Or 50Ks in 30 days!


There you have it – my procrastinator’s guide to 50Ks in 30 days. Please let me know if you reach into my toolkit – I’d love to know if it helps you, too. And as I’m also looking for new weapons to slay the procrastination beast – what tips have I missed that help you?

Day 16 - Working out of the mid-month slump

Exert your talents, and distinguish yourself, and don't think of retiring from the world, 

until the world will be sorry that you retire. - Samuel Johnson

You've been pushing yourself hard for over two weeks now. Even if you feel you could have done more, you have made the time to write more than you usually would - and that can be really, really tiring. 

I've seen it a lot during NaNo - it's happened to me during NaNo - the mid-month slump. There's such a long way to go, you're never going to get there and you're tired. 

The best advice I can give you is this: don't stop writing. Don't take a few days off. It's like sitting down after a day of cleaning when you've still got more to go. It's doubly hard to get back up again and keep going. 

Picture the goal. Take a couple of hours to have a bath, watch a movie, maybe even see some of those people you live with whose names you're starting to have trouble remembering. But then get some words on the page - even if it's only a couple of hundred, or a hundred, or twenty-five. 

It's only two weeks to go! You can do it! 

Day 15 - Halfway Point!

If you're going through hell - keep going. 

- Winston Churchill

Day 14 - Our own expectations

Be not afraid of going slowly, be only afraid of standing still. 

- Chinese Proverb

It's so easy to look at the past and say "I could have done better. I SHOULD have done better. I should have written more, or made more time for editing." After all, it's going to take forever to get where we want to go if we don't make optimal use of our time, right? 

Regret and perfectionism can be a bigger drain on our productivity than pretty much anything else. Personally, I struggle to retain a sense of proportion - I've written x many words, which is x more words than I would have written otherwise. Still, it's not what I expected from myself. 

Writing is like life. It's messy, imperfect, full of unfulfilled potential (everyone has that one scene that was just so perfect in their head) and layered with excitement, regret, drudgery and bursts of inspiration. It may not go the way we want all the time, but if you do the best you can during the good times, the bad times can only ever drag you down so far. 

Best of luck for the coming week! 

Day 10 - Guest Post by Emily May!

Today's Guest Post is by romance author Emily May, or perhaps romantic fantasy author Emily Gee. Whatever the name, Emily has seen some brilliant success, with her Regency novel "The Unmasking of a Lady" making the finals in several competions including the National Readers' Choice Awards and the RWA's Romance Book of the Year Awards 2011.

I'm a slow writer.  My happy word count per day is about 1000 words--usually written laboriously over many, many hours. But 1000 words a day is a little too slow when I have deadlines to meet!

Last year I started doing two things that helped me to increase my word count and achieve my writing goals a little more easily. Both are quite simple. They may work for you ... or they may not.

First, I wrote the following sentence on a piece of paper and put it on my keyboard each night, so that I saw it first thing in the morning.

"Take a few minutes at the beginning of each day to set goals."

Each morning I sat down and read that sentence and thought about my goal--"Today I am going to write 1500 words"--and set it firmly in my mind.

(I know, 500 extra words per day doesn't sound like a lot--but it adds up! A 90 000 word first draft takes 60 days, instead of 90--that's a whole month less!)

Second, because 1500 words is a daunting amount for me and can easily drag out over eight or more hours, I wrote down my goal in little chunks, like this, on a scrap of paper:

  1500 words

100 600 1100
200 700 1200
300 800 1300
400 900 1400
500 1000 1500
 

And then I started writing, not focussing on the end goal, but on the mini goals instead. 1500 words was impossibly far away, but 100 words was easy, and then 200, and 300. And with each mini goal I crossed off, I got a nice little boost. I could SEE that I was blasting through my mini goals, which made me feel more positive about my writing, and that in turn made the words come more easily. 

Incredibly, there were days when I reached 1500 words by lunchtime! (A miracle for me.) So then I'd write out more increments of 100 and keep working. Several times I passed 2000 before my brain shut down, and once I even passed 2500!

So there they are, my two little strategies for upping my word count. I hope they work for you too!

Day 9 - The Writing Habit

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. - Aristotle

I try and write every day. Sometimes I only do 100 words, sometimes I do a couple of thousand. More often than I would like, I don't write anything at all. And sometimes, as an unpublished author, it's difficult for me sometimes to truly believe it when I tell people I am "a writer". 

After all, what is a writer without a published book?

That's where trying to write everyday comes in. Writers write. After all, lots of people have published books who I would not necessarily consider as writers. (Did you know Sharon Osbourne wrote a novel??) Publication is a goal, but it's not what defines us. 

We're writers, after all. What defines us is what we do repeatedly. We write. 

Get going people! 

Day 8 - Questions and Cute Kitty Pictures

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer--and if so, why?

- Bennett Cerf