Hello everyone. It is day 12 of the 28-day writing challenge. I am glad you’re joining me. I want to report on the activities of the day.
Day 12 vlog.
Chapter 13
Today, I did get chapter 13 done. Some of you may be wondering why it was taking me so long to complete chapter 13. Basically, it was based on a book that was giving me new information, so it’s having to take some time to digest some of the material from that book.
Are you making progress?
More than likely the book you’re writing will be similar to the rest of my book; information that just comes out of my own experience, background, and study. I have plenty of information. It was just a matter of organizing that information.
Chapter 13 was completely new material to me, While it is very similar to some of the principles that I had studied before, some of the material was new so I wanted to get a better grasp on it before I moved on.
The Importance of Chapter Plans
I did get that chapter plan done. The nice thing is once the plan is done, the writing of the rough draft in the free flow stage becomes much easier. So I just set my timer for five minutes and I wrote nine sections of material in 45 minutes and I got that done.
Since this chapter took me two days longer than usual, I’m playing catch up. But I had already sketched out the number of chapters that were remaining. They started out with chapter eight and ended up with chapter 16. As I mentioned, I just finished chapter 13.
Mind Maps
What I did was come up with a mind map for the remaining three chapters. Those mind maps will be the foundation for the writing plan. It’s not the complete writing plan but it will give me the nine to 12 items that I would want. that and so,
Sample mind map
A mind map is just cartoon bubbles that start with a topic in the middle and related topics coming out to the side. You can see mine in the video above. So out of what I had been planning to do from the beginning, I was able to come up with a mindmap for these chapters. It was relatively easy for me.
Now tomorrow I’ll go ahead and flesh those out to where I have a list of questions and a list of trigger words or phrases that will remind me of the answers to those questions. Then I will just finish writing the book and those five minutes segments.
Extra Help is Available
Writing is fun. My last book is called “How to Write a Book in 28 Days or Less Without Stressing Yourself to Death.” The key is to get the book plan. Once you have that then the rest of it is fun and easy. Of course, it will not be the final result but you will have something tangible and you will know that you can finish the book.
Valuable information
I’ll spend the rest of the month polishing.
Another thing that I need to do now is to start to consider what I want to cover to look like. That’s something else that I’ll be working on. and so I will be working on
If you haven’t already, you might want to go to Amazon and pick up the book, “How to Write a Book in 28 Days or Less Without Stressing Yourself to Death.” Right now, (2/2/2022) the book is half-price for both the Kindle version and the paperback version. So just click on the link above and check it out!
if you’d like more writing tips, you can go to my blog.
This has been day 12 of the 28-day writing challenge. I hope you’re having a good day. Until next time, I want you to remember YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!
Welcome everyone to day 11 of the 28-day writing challenge. Today I was called into work. There’s a place where I do some part-time on-call work, so my time today was taken up was more than usual, which happens sometimes.
Day 11 vlog
My time writing today was spent doing more work on the blueprint and the writing plan for chapter 13. I have taken longer on the writing plan for this chapter than usual, so it seems like getting behind.
Actually, I’m just something that I would normally do more of later; after the initial rough draft was done. I do feel that I will be able to get caught up again.
Back and Forth
This seems to be a pattern here. I get a day behind and then get caught up; although now I’m probably a day and a half behind on the writing goals. But on the planning goals, I’m doing well, so I’m confident that I will get caught up again.
Don’t get discouraged if you fall behind.
I think that I might have the rough draft of the new chapters for this book done by Thursday. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Then after that, I will put in my older material for chapters one through seven. I may decide to rearrange the order of chapters later, we’ll see.
But that’s pretty exciting! By Thursday, I would have written up to chapter 16, which is the last chapter that I have planned for the book. Then Friday, and perhaps the next writing day, which would be Monday- day 15, I would have all those previous chapters copied over into the new document.
What is a Book?
To be clear, my definition of a “book” in this case is the rough draft and the first round of editing done. After that, it is just however much more polishing you want to do to keep making your book better. But by this point (the 28 days), you have an adequate book. In many cases, you have an excellent book and one that perhaps is ready to be published.
You can write a book!
So anyway, after day 15 I have another 13 days to be able to work more on this book and to keep polishing it and keep planning some things, At some point, I need to start working on a cover, and I will let you follow me along in that process.
Well, it’s always good to talk with you. I hope that you have a good day. Remember, YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!
Welcome to day ten of the 28-day writing challenge: Headings and subheadings Today I am working on blueprinting chapter 13 and creating headings and subheadings.
Day 10 Vlog
Today I was writing on something that I had purchased a book for and I hadn’t read the whole book. I was looking through it to refresh my thoughts on what I was talking about, and it has some interesting thoughts in it. So I spent some time doing that.
Generating Interest
Then I came up with headings and subheadings. I spent more time on that than I usually would in a rough draft. I was trying to come up with what I think would be headings that might create some curiosity as to what I’m going to be writing about.
Use headings & subheadings to generate interest
What I’ve been doing: up until this point I generally had nine items that I wrote about, and later on, I would put the headings and subheadings between those.
Another way of doing it is to start with the headings and subheadings and that’s what I have started on today.
An Example from My Writing
The title of this chapter is “Valuing Your Spouse Brings Victory Over Fear and Shame: How Every Couple Can Improve Their Marriage Without Talking About It.” Hopefully, that will create some interest.
Heading One: Wives Are In For a Big Surprise When Husbands Apply the Valuing Technique Subheading One: The Wife’s Secret Fear of Being Alone Subheading Two: Overcome Mistakes That Contribute to Your Wife’s Fear- Secrets Every Husband Should Discover Subheading Three: How Being Valued Combats Your Wife’s Fear-The Survival Guide Every Husband Needs Heading Two: Husbands Are In For A Big Surprise When Wives Apply the Valuing Technique. Subheading One: The Husband’s Secret Fear of the Shame of Failure. Heading Two: Overcome Mistakes That Contribute to Your Husband’s Fear of Failure and Shame-Secrets Every Wife Should Discover Subheading Three: How Being Valued Combats Your Husband’s Fear of Failure and Shame-The Survival Guide Ever Wife Needs Heading Three: This New Improve-Your-Marriage-Without-Talking-About-It Technique is Almost Too Good To Be True Subheading One: New Discoveries in How Connectedness Beats Communication. Subheading Two: Reflections On the Problem of Trying to Improve Your Marriage by Talking Subheading Three: Secrets to Improving Your Marriage in Four and A Half Minutes A Day
Take time to write daily
Something Different for Today
I don’t just have a rough draft of those like I normally would, I did spend some time on them. Later on I’ll do that for the other chapters that I’ve done, but I just changed things up today. So I haven’t gotten this chapter written yet. But that’s my start on chapter 13.
I hope you have a great day or a great evening. whatever time it is that you see this. Remember, YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!
Welcome everyone to day nine of the 28-day writing challenge. Over the course of 28 days, I’m writing another book. If you are writing a book yourself, maybe you’re following along with me and you are performing some of the daily tasks yourself. If not, you may just be wanting to see how I’m doing on this journey. I am trying to write a book in 28 days or less, without stressing myself to death. So far I’m succeeding at doing that, although a couple days it started to get a little bit stressful.
Day 9 Vlog
But today, I am happy to report to you that I am caught up! When I was talking to you last, I may have been a little bit mixed up but maybe I was caught up then. Or maybe I wrote another chapter after I got through talking with you. I don’t really remember which way it was. All I know is that today, I am caught up.
I’m making progress.
The only thing is I don’t have the next chapter blueprinted ahead of time, but I am caught up in the writing goals for this week. So I’m excited about that.
More About the Software
I told you yesterday that I was experimenting with using LilySpeech and LibreOffice. I am still really happy with those two pieces of software. The amazing thing is that they are both free. And they have such high quality so I’m quite excited about that.
I was having to get used to dictating again, that process is different than using your fingers to do the writing. So today I’ve come upon a solution. I found out that I could get the same number of words in three minutes of speaking as I could in five minutes of typing. That was good.
The dictation is working out very well.
However, it was a little bit difficult. I found myself pausing a lot, and I wasn’t happy with how that was working. So I figured out that I was doing the dictation within three minutes.
So I tried another experiment. I set the timer for two minutes and practiced what I wanted to talk about. When the two minutes were up. I added another minute to the timer, set it again, and then I actually did the dictation. That worked much better and it was much smoother. I think there will be less editing in the future. Right now, the software is serving me very well and I’m quite pleased with it. (Bonus, I’m not getting carpal tunnel from doing all of that typing.)
Mini-Breaks
Since I was doing some of my typing tonight after regular business hours and I wanted to spend some time with my wife, I did two five-minute segments and then I would take a break. I walked around the house trying to get my 10,000 steps in for the day. I’d go to about 500 steps, and then sit down and try to find a piece of a puzzle that my wife and I are working on. Most of the time I was successful but not always.
Take mini-breaks.
This has been great. It was a way to write a book without stressing myself to death.
Well, I hope you have a great weekend and I will see you on Monday. That will be for day ten of the 28-day writing challenge. I hope you’re enjoying watching the struggles and joys. Thankfully, there have been more joys than struggles so far. Remember, YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!
Welcome everyone to day eight of the 28-day writing challenge. Today I’m talking about Libre Office and Lily speech and about getting nearly caught up.
Day 8 Vlog
Today I was able to finish chapters nine and 10 and that’s getting me nearly caught up, I think; at least I’m not further behind. I also blueprinted ahead with chapter 11, so I should be ready to go with that.
LibreOffice
I want to tell you about two types of very useful free software. One of them is called LibreOffice. I got a new Dell computer(Optiplex 7010) for Christmas and it has an online version of Microsoft Word. I wasn’t happy with it because it is always saving it to OneDrive, and I had my files organized in other places. So I thought I would download LibreOffice. I did some research on it and I found out that it is made by the same company as openoffice.org which I liked in the past.
An alternative to Word
Now I have LibreOffice and so far I’m enjoying it just as well as my previous desktop version of Microsoft Word. The word processing program in LibreOffice is called “writer.”
Lily Speech
I also found another piece of free software that is called LilySpeech. I plugged in a microphone and headset, and I’m able to speak my book.
I am pleasantly surprised by LilySpeech’s accuracy. It claims to have 95% accuracy, and I would just subjectively say that that’s pretty close.
I have to get used to dictating again, which I have done in the past. I have previously used a very well-known program called Dragon Naturally Speaking and it is a very good voice-to-text program. But I am quite impressed with this free software.
Dictating your book can save time
My computer has a Windows-based operating system. I don’t believe LilySpeech is compatible with a Mac. But considering it is free it’s amazing.
So anyway, I’ve done that and did the last chapter that I mentioned, chapter ten, and I did that using the software, I already had the headset and microphone because I had used that for Dragon Naturally Speaking in the past.
In fact, I am able to set my timer for three minutes instead of five minutes now. That’s how quickly you can talk and the LilySpeech can recognize it. In the past, some software t would not recognize the speech fast enough to make it as worthwhile as this is. This program is really worthwhile.
I highly recommend that to you, especially if you get writer’s cramp easily.
In Summary
So those are my recommendations when thinking about writing a book and talking about investing in that software. Although, it’s free so the investment is zero…as long as whatever you’re downloading doesn’t mess up your computer files.
You can reach your goals.
Anyway, that is day eight of the 28-day writing challenge I hope that you remember that YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!
Hello, everyone, welcome to day seven of the 28-day writing challenge. Well, today I got the next chapter, number 9, done for the book I am working on. I still have 2 questions to answer for that chapter. I need to do more research.
As I mentioned, you can, if you have your book blueprinted out, start on any chapter you want to, or even parts of a chapter.
Vlog for day 7
Research Codes
I’ve mentioned before that one of the ways that you can handle taming your research is to use certain codes. What I mean by that is you can research and research and research and never get started writing.
When you come to the point where you need to get started writing you will come to items that will need further research or that you may need to corroborate to make sure that your facts are right.
Tools to help with research
One of the ways of handling that is to put special symbols like three asterisks (***) together. Then when you do a search and replace you can just go to those areas where the *** and you can put in your new information.
I’ve been told that the letters T and K right next to each other don’t appear in any words in the English language. I haven’t really checked that out myself. But since I’ve tried it I’ve not run across any so it’s easy to just go and put in the “TK” in an area where you need to do some research.
Don’t stop right there when you’re on a roll, especially if you’re using this faster writing method. Just put in your code there. You may put XXX, or ***, or TK. Then when you’re ready, search for that and it will take you right to the spot where you need to put in the information.
If you do your research this way, it becomes very targeted and relevant research because you are searching for specific information instead of getting tons of information that you may not use.
So using research codes is a little tip for you as you’re doing this.
There’s Still Time
I’m still one day behind, but I think that I will get back on track. Am I the eternal optimist? I don’t know. If I’m the eternal optimist, that means that won’t ever get back on track. But as a realist, I probably will be back on track before the end of this week.
Still in this race!
How about you? How’s it going for you? Have you planned out your book? Have you figured out how long you want your book to be as a starting point? Have you figured out some chapter titles for your book? Have you gone further than that and perhaps made some outlines for your book? Have you come up with some headings to put in for your chapters?
Maybe you have gone through those blog posts that I recommended and followed the method that I’m using where you come up with 12 to 18 ideas. You then eliminate three of those ideas, put the ideas in the best order, then turn each idea into a statement or a question, and finally turn all of your statements into questions.
If you use that method, you will end up with anywhere from nine to 15 questions. Then, you need at least three “trigger words” to remind you of the answers to each of your questions. What happens if you don’t use all of your trigger words? Well, if it triggered you to be on a roll, it doesn’t matter. You’re the only one that knows what those trigger words were, anyway, although I do try to use them all.
Hello, everyone. This is day six of the 28-day writing challenge. I’m excited because today I wrote the first chapter of the book that I am currently working on! Well, my “first” chapter is actually chapter eight.
Video for day 6
If you do the blueprinting that we talked about before and you have it done for your whole book, you can really start on any chapter that you want to. In my case, I’m starting on chapter eight because I have the material for chapters one through seven from blog posts and a previous book that I had written. I’m taking some of the chapters out of that. I can do that because I own the copyright.
You can write a book!
So I got chapter eight done today, and also the blueprint for chapter nine. Now my goal was to get chapter 8 or chapters eight and nine written today and the blueprints for chapters nine and 10. So you can see I’m still about a day behind my personal goals, but I think that I will be able to catch up.
There is Time to Catch Up!
Since we are not including Saturdays and Sundays in the 28 days, I could catch up on the weekends when needed. But, even though I seem to be a day behind, I’m still excited about what I did accomplish.
The Timer Method
I was able to write this chapter today, in 45 minutes. You may ask, “How did you do that?” Well, I used my magic timer. I have two timers. One of them is bigger with red. That’s the one you see most of the time. I have a smaller one and I set it for five minutes, I look at my blueprint, and I answered the question, and I keep writing for five minutes. When the time’s up, I put an ellipsis (…) and I go to the next one.
The use of a timer can help you reach your goals.
If I get through more quickly, I just force myself to write and throw in more material. Sometimes it is surprising what does come to mind whenever that happens. Doing it that way is how I have the chapter done so quickly.
Now I have chapter nine blueprinted. I ended up with nine questions for chapter nine, so I’m very confident that I’ll be able to write chapter nine in 45 minutes also.
Using the timer is very motivating when you are trying to get your rough draft done. Now, this obviously is not the finished product. Later in the challenge, probably around day 10, I will show you how I will be working with that.
The Word-Count Method
Some of you are not wired that way, and you’ll have to do it a different way, You would have to figure out the number of words per day that you want to write. So the timer is the constant way I’m doing it and the number of words would be your constant way of doing it. If you use the word count method, your daily writing time may vary.
So I’m one day behind but I’m still ahead enough to be able to write the next chapter when it comes to blueprinting. So I’m excited about that.
Comparing the Two
I talked about the use of a timer and timed writing to get your chapter done as opposed to the number of words. Well, that is sort of like TV production. You can have taped TV production and you have live TV production. The advantage of the taped TV production is that you can edit and edit and edit and it can take forever. When you do live, it is what it is and when the program is over you are through and you get to go home.
Different writing styles can be like TV production
Now in some of those cases, there’s a lot of post-production work that goes on to improve the quality of the program. Whatever the time is, the time the program is over with and that’s why I liked the time of writing a rough draft.
Well, I hope this has been encouraging to you. I hope you’ve planned out your next step and maybe started figuring it out. Keep watching me as I go through my joys and maybe some struggles of getting this one done. Remember YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!
Welcome to day five of our 28-day book writing challenge. I’m just checking in with you today. Some of you may be writing books along with me. Others of you may just be watching the journey as I go along.
Day 5 video
If you remember, the last time I talked to you, I was a little bit behind. So I want to tell you what’s going on now This is day five. Normally I would be writing my first chapter today, but what I did instead was some catching up.
Review
I had mentioned last time that I had done some research and some brainstorming. So I had the notes from some of the best-selling books, and also two pages of brainstorming. Then I went through and grouped similar items together.
Today’s Progress
Today what I did was go through and title those groups. As I was titling the groups I saw some that were quite similar. And so I came up with similar titles. And I saw that those would make suitable chapters for the rest of my book. So I did that.
My journey on the 28-day writing challenge.
Then I came around and I put the titles in the best order for me. List and where I came up with the names of the titles and then I had rearranged the order that I wanted and then one more change.
I started with chapter eight because I already had enough information for the first seven chapters. So when I started numbering these today, I numbered them chapters eight through chapter 16. The last change that I made was I had a title for chapter 16 called “Valuing Combats Fear and Shame” and then I had another chapter called “Valuing Makes Marriage Enjoyable.” I decided to switch those two so the last chapter would have a little more positive title.
Chapter Titles
Here are the chapter titles that I have come up with: Chapter 8: Valuing Produces Trust (I changed that to Relates to) Chapter 9: Valuing Encourages Both Husband and Wife Chapter 10: Valuing Recognizes Each Other’s Love Languages Chapter 11: Valuing Enhances Motivation Chapter 12: Valuing Can Affair-Proof Your Marriage Chapter 13: Valuing Combats Fear and Shame Chapter 14: Valuing Gives Children Security Chapter 15: Valuing Shows Gratitude Chapter 16: Valuing Makes Marriage Enjoyable
Chapter Plan
Next, I started working on the chapter writing plan for each of the chapters, and I came up with 12 ideas for chapter eight. If you studied those blog posts (www.randysblogs.com) that I talked about last time, which started on January 25, and they ended on March 2, the advice was to come up with anywhere from 12 to 18 ideas for your chapter.
So for Chapter 8, I came up with 12 ideas. Then I did what I was supposed to do and eliminated three. This just stimulates your brain and causes you to think and sometimes you can combine ideas. This also helps you get rid of some of the weaker ideas that you had.
So I eliminated three. In this case, I actually eliminated three of them, and I didn’t combine any. That left me with nine chapter ideas. Then, beside them I put numbers, arranging them in the best order for me and hopefully, for my readers.
Next, I turned those ideas into questions. For each question, I came up with three trigger words or phrases that would stimulate my brain into thinking about how to answer each of those questions.
Trigger Words and Phrases
Ask yourself questions to find ideas for your chapters
So here is the chapter outline writing plan for chapter eight “Valuing Relates to Trust”: 1. When does building trust start? As a child Before marriage Early in marriage 2. Why is feeling trusted important to men? Men don’t like to feel like failures Motivated Reciprocal 3. Why does trusting her husband build the wife’s security? Affair Alone Provision 4. How does seeing your spouse come through for you build trust? Brings closer Confidence Happiness 5. How does being on the same page about money relate to trust? Eliminates fear Being OK with some spending Giving 6. Why is risk-taking important and how will trust help? Sometimes your job involves risk-taking. Sometimes delving into ministry involves risk-taking. You can trust God 7. How does the trust that comes from being valued help when both of you are going to be in an area where you’re around the opposite sex? Relaxed Free Not jealous 8. How do policies about not being alone with members of the opposite sex build trust? No opportunity Stop before starting It can be difficult 9. Why will it take extra effort to restore trust if it has been broken in a marriage? Betrayal Again Fear
Free-Flow Writing
This is the secret to free-flow writing. I simply read the question, look at the trigger words, start the timer for five minutes and write as quickly as I can, answering those questions using those trigger words as prompts. If I get finished early, I’ll just force myself to keep writing.
Free-flow writing made easy
In the editing stage, I’ll probably get rid of some of that, but sometimes you get really good ideas when you force yourself to keep writing. If I fall short, I’ll just put an ellipsis (…) there and I will finish it later on in the editing stage. So that’s where we’re going with this.
I haven’t written chapter 8 yet, but I’m ready to go with that and I’m motivated. For tomorrow, I’m going to start coming up with 12 to 18 ideas for each of the other chapters and I’m going to start coming up with the writing plans for each chapter. But I especially want to do writing plans for chapters nine and ten. I if I do not write chapter eight tonight, then tomorrow my goal is to write chapter eight and chapter nine and if that happens, at that point, I will be caught up.
How’s it going for you? Leave some comments and let me know what you’re doing. What’s your idea for your book? How far are along are you getting? Do you have some questions?
Well, I hope you have a great day and until the next time in the 28-day writing challenge, I encourage you to remember YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK.
Welcome to day four of the 28-day book writing challenge. I have to confess that I did not get everything done that I wanted to get done today.
6-Figure Writing and Blog Post Suggestion
I want to tell you about something you can find on this blog, which is randycarney.comorrandysblogs.com Either one will get you to the same place. If you go to the top of the page, you will see a tab that says “Writing,” and there’s a down arrow beside it. If you hover over that you will see “Six-Figure Writing” pop up. If you click on that, it will take you to a page about a course that you can get that will give you weekly lessons for writing.
Now if you go back one page and click on “Writing” again, go to the bottom of the page and click the arrow to the right to go back to about 3 pages. The best way to find the posts I’m talking about is to look for the dates. I’m recommending the blog posts from January 25 through March 2.
Suggested reading
They all talk about how you can come up with a writing plan for your book. They will tell you how to have a plan for each chapter in your book. I did not get that far along yet this time. If you are doing this 28 days following along you’ll have to do as I do. You will either have to spend more time one day beyond just the writing to catch up and finish out to writing plan.
But you need to at least get the first chapter planned out. Then Monday, whenever you write that chapter, you’ll spend a little extra time getting chapters two and three at least planned out. Or if you just have extra time or you could spend an extra hour and knock out a bunch of those chapter plans. How to do is found on the blog posts from January 25 through March 2. I would encourage you to go and read all of those, take notes, and get a grasp of how this is going to work.
My Progress
I would like to have had my whole book blueprinted out from here. A blueprint is just a chapter writing plan. But on this 28-day challenge, the goal is to be able to work about 75 to 90 minutes a day. Some days it will take two hours, some days you might have to have some catch-up days.
The Schedule
A rundown of the schedule
We’re not writing 28 consecutive days in this challenge. We are doing four days as the first week, and then we will have four weeks of five days in the week. In other words, we started on Tuesday, January 18, 2022. So we have four days the first week. I’m not counting Saturdays and Sundays. So then the next four weeks we will have 20 days (5 days a week) so that will be 24 days, and then the last week will be another four days and that will finish up our 28 days. Not consecutive. I’ll be taking Sundays off and I’m going to be using Saturday for a catch-up and you can do that too. If you’re following along and you’re trying to do this, I pray that things are going well for you.
Heading into Day Four
So yesterday I talked about surveying the top 10 books in your category. I did the category of marriage in general and then I got more specific and I was surprised that when I typed in “valuing your spouse,” I did come up with several books. That phrase wasn’t in the title, but there were quite a few that were relevant to what I was talking about. So that was very good.
Brainstorming & Grouping Ideas
What I’m attempting to do today is brainstorm. I came up with the research from those books, I made notes from the table of contents, and I put in some quotes. Then after I did that, I came up with two pages of just brainstorming. So, we did the brainstorming,
Find a brainstorming method that works for you.
For today I was able to survey nine books. I wrote down chapter titles that stood out to me and a quote or two that were interesting to me. Then as I already mentioned, I brainstormed and filled up two more pages of ideas.
After that, I grouped those ideas using symbols (as I talked about on day 3), putting the ideas that were similar together putting a symbol by those ideas. I put a triangle by a number of ideas that were similar. Then I put a square beside a number of ideas that were similar, I put a checkmark by ideas that were similar. I did that until I got all the way through my list. I did have some that were outliers that didn’t fit into groups.
Chapter Length
So I could easily come up with ideas for about 10 more chapters. As I said I already had seven chapters. So this would make the book about 170 pages long. If I followed the strict way of doing this the older way of coming up with 10 pages per chapter.
However, as I’ve mentioned, the new idea is that books are shorter than they were in the past and that’s what is preferred by readers. So if I allow the chapters to be six to 10 pages long, the final result we can have somewhere between 130 and 170 pages.
That’s quite encouraging because I wondered if I would be able to even come up with the 100 or 120 that I was shooting for, to begin with.
Chapter Titles
Tomorrow I will be coming up with the chapter titles, and then a list of ideas that go with each chapter. (This is a summary of what you will find in those suggested blog posts) I will come up with keep putting ideas down until I get 12 to 18 ideas, then I will eliminate three. That means I will end up doing nine to 15 ideas to do the chapter plan.
Chapter ideas
I arrange those ideas in the best order and then turn each of those ideas into to a statement, a question, or a sentence. Having done that, then I go through the list again, and I make all of the ideas questions. Then I will write down three trigger words or ideas that will remind me of the answers to the question.
That takes some time, and it’s probably more than the allotted 75 to 90 minutes. But once it is done, it just makes everything else flow together so much more easily so I will be glad to spend the extra time either tomorrow or just extra minutes in the day.
Next Week
Next week is when I get started in earnest because I’m going to write my first new chapter. If you recall, I already have seven chapters, which I will tweak somewhat but I will be starting my first full chapter Monday.
That would possibly be the first chapter of your book.
So, I encourage you to go look at those six or seven blog posts from January 25. through March 2. That will show you what I’m attempting to do today and tomorrow and maybe for a few extra hours next week.
But once that outline, that plan is done then the rest of the time will just be spent spending 75 to 90 minutes on getting those things done. If I do shorter chapters it might just be 60 minutes on those. If you read the blog posts, you’ll better understand what I’m talking about.
Today’s Wrap-Up
Remember if you don’t already have a timer, I would highly recommend using one because it really works. It’s what worked for me; even in the brainstorming. You can spend hours and hours and be all over the place and the timer helps to narrow things down for you. You can always add things later. But it helped me to narrow things down.
I came up with 10 groups, although I haven’t named those groups yet, because they’re all very similar. Those could be for 10 more chapters as I look at it more closely. I may combine some of those and figure out which ones to eliminate.
That’s all for today. I hope you have a great day and remember: YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!
Welcome back to day two of the 28-day writing challenge! I’m inviting you to join me as I begin work on my next book. I wonder if you have decided to get a start on your own book during this challenge. Either way, you can do it with me or you can just watch as I go through the process. Let’s see how we will do with this 28-day writing challenge-Day 2 project.
This third one that I’m working on now is the “V” in the acronym “LOVING”. I had previously written a book called “The Loving Way to a Successful Marriage” and “LOVING” is an acrostic. So leaving is the L, overcoming is the O, and valuing is the V.
So I’m going to be talking about valuing each other and also having the same values in your marriage and what benefit there is to that.
Where to Find Content
Build a blueprint for your book
In my book “How to Write a Book in 28 Days or Less Without Stressing Yourself to Death”, I talked about one way of setting a blueprint for your book. I also talked about two other ways of writing a book and one of them has to do with speaking your book, so I have been speaking some blog posts. I may be able to do some more of those as I go along. I also talked about using previous things that a person had written.
So in my first book, I had four chapters in the section that had to do with valuing, so I have four chapters under my belt already. Then looking through the blog posts that I’ve done so far that relate to this, I think I can come up with three more chapters and just tweak those. I spoke those out to a general audience and applied those more generally. I’ll need to adjust them a bit to apply them more specifically. That gives me three more chapters. So now I have a total of seven chapters up to this point.
Book Length
What I’ve encouraged you to do is to figure out a target goal for your book. How many pages would you want it to be? I recommend your book be between 100 and 200 pages. It can be as low as 90 and go as high as 250 without stressing yourself to death. I decided to shoot for 125 for this book. Shorter books seem to be a trend. People like shorter books so they can get the information and be able to read them more quickly. Some of the longer books, people don’t finish. I hope this one, at 125 pages, would be one that could be finished easily. I decided to aim for 12 chapters.
Do Some Research
Searching for ideas
What have you come up with? What are you thinking about? If you’re trying to figure out the number of chapters, I suggest you look at similar books in your genre. Go to Amazon and look for the bestsellers in your category and see how many chapters and how many pages there are. I haven’t felt the need to do that this time, but if you’re new to writing, I strongly suggest you give this a try.
Also, looking at those titles and looking at the title chapters (we’ll talk more about that later) can be helpful, too.
Tomorrow I want to help you come up with the outline and blueprint for your book. We will do several sessions of brainstorming to be able to figure that out. In my case, I’m encouraged that I already have essentially seven chapters as a foundation. So I’m thinking that somewhere around five more chapters. That’s the encouraging thing for me: I will not need that full 28 days for the writing part of this particular book–if all goes well.
Information Gathering
I would like to do a survey for this book. I did that in the last book, “From Mountains to Molehills: Overcoming and Celebrating Your Differences in Marriage”, and it was very helpful. I would like to do that again for this book, so I’m going to go to Survey Monkey and create a survey. I would be glad for some of you to take that survey and of course, your results are anonymous.
Now the survey is not such a large sample as a scientific survey would be, but the advantage is that such a survey is very current and up to date. I’m looking forward to doing the survey.
Wrapping it Up
So by now, I would hope that you would have a working title. It doesn’t have to be set in stone. It doesn’t have to sound interesting to you. Just get to the title–what you’re writing about. My working title is “Valuing Your Spouse”. Of course, I want to come up with something more interesting before I finally publish this book, but that’s what I’m using for now.
So, come up with a working title. Figure out the number of pages you might be shooting for. If it looks like it’s less than 100 I would suggest you raise it up to 100 or 90 at the very least. If you have way over 250, you might want to consider cutting that down a little bit.
The number of chapters: generally a good number would be 10 to 20. Now it can be 21 or 22 or even up to 25. I guess you could go down as low as nine or eight. But, generally, you want somewhere between 10 and 20 chapters. If not you might want to rethink that a little bit.
Homework
Tomorrow we will go into that in more depth and I will give you more information about how you can do that. Also, I’ll tell you some of the things that I’m going to do with that too.
Homework
If you want to do something before tomorrow, go to those best-selling books on Amazon that relate to your topic, and look at all those on the first page. I usually go with the top 10. Just do some research and some looking around. When you do that, you may get some ideas for chapters of your own. Of course, you want to put those in your own words. The exact words in the exact order are copyrightable, but you can get some ideas. Ideas are not copyrightable. It is the expression of those ideas that you can claim copyright to.
That’s all for this session. I’ll see you next time. Remember: YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!
