Tag: writing nonfiction

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the things that’s mentioned in “How to Write a Book in 28 Days or Less Without Stressing Yourself to Death” is speaking your book. In that instance, I was referring to having your book transcribed, but this is a great alternative!

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.

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.

Anyway, that is day eight of the 28-day writing challenge I hope that you remember that 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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

My Current Project

I’m writing a new book on marriage. married. I have two previous books on the topic. The first one is “21 Ways the Principle of Leaving Will Benefit Your Marriage: Why You Should Apply This Shocking Key to Marital Bliss.” Then the second one is “From Mountains to Molehills: Overcoming and Celebrating Your Differences in Marriage.”

Some Background

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

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

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.

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!

Welcome to day one of the 28-day writing challenge. I have written a book “How to Write a Book in 28 Days or Less Without Stressing Yourself to Death”. Now, I’m inviting you to either create your own book and see if we can get it done in 28 days or you can just follow along with me as I write my next book. I am excited to begin the 28-day writing challenge ~ Day 1.

My next book is going to be a follow-up of the book “From Mountains to Molehills: Overcoming and Celebrating Your Differences in Marriage”. Actually, there’s a precursor to that. It is a book called “The Loving Way to A Successful Marriage: Six Keys to Marital Bliss” That book is now out of print. That book is divided into six parts. After the first book, I decided I wanted to do a series of books on marriage. So what I’m doing is taking each part and making a book out of each part of this original book. That’s my plan, anyway.

In this 28-day writing challenge, the first three days are going to be kind of vague for you if you’re just starting out writing your book. These first three days can all kind of run together.

Build a Foundation

Now, in my case, I have the foundation, around 40 pages. The first part of the original book was “Leaving: The Most Important Move You Can Make in Your Marriage”. Part two was “Overcoming: The Most Important Commitment You Can Make in Your Marriage”. That’s where the book “From Mountains to Molehills” came from.

The next section, part three, is “Valuing: The Most Important Attitude You Can Have in Your Marriage”. Leaving, overcoming, and valuing are the first three keys in the book “Six Keys to Marital Bliss”, and each one of those relates to the acronym “LOVING.” So, “The Loving Way to a Successful Marriage” will be the complete series..

So the first one is leaving, the second one is overcoming, and the third one is valuing each other. So I have valuing as the topic for part three (which is now book three).

My Process

Talking about valuing, what I wanted started on page 87 in the original book. In this, I talked about how men and women think. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about when I give speaking engagements. It also includes a section on having similar values. That section talks about how society’s thought patterns have influenced our marriages.

Part four is going to be “Intimacy: The Most Important Connection You Can Make in Your Marriage”. That will be the next book.

This book starts on page 87 and goes through page 120. So I have 37 pages as a foundation for my book. (I said 57 pages in the video. Ha! Math is not my strong point.)

In “How to Write a Book in 28 Days or Less” there are three different methods that are mentioned in writing that book. One of them is how to use your previous writing or previous blog posts and things like that. So in the book “The Loving Way to a Successful Marriage,” I have a section that’s related to valuing and that’s the foundation for my next book.

I have several blog posts that I’ve done in relation to that topic and I have also preached two or three sermons that would relate. Now the sermons are of course related to a wider audience than just married couples but I’m going to take those blog posts and hone them down more specifically to the idea of marriage.

So that’s how I’m starting. What you need to do in these first three days is to figure out a working title for your book. This does not have to be the final title, but your idea, your topic, your working title. Are you going to be pulling together things that you have done before or are you going to start from scratch? Another thing that we need to figure out is how long do we want our book to be? I recommend anywhere from 100 to 200 pages.

Since I already have 37 pages, I need at least 60 more pages. (Again, I am having to adjust the math from what I said in the video. That would be six or seven chapters if I were to write 10-page chapters. That’s how I’m getting started.

First Steps

What you need to do is come up with your working idea. Do you already have an idea of major divisions that would be chapters for your book? If you do then you are in good shape. If not, then you need to come up with what you think would be the chapters that you would have in your book.

So, the challenge today and tomorrow is to come up with ideas for anywhere from five to 20 chapters you would want to create for your book. If you’re doing fiction, then again you would want to figure out how many chapters you would want. You would probably want at least 20 chapters for your fiction book. So figure that out.

That’s how I’m getting started. . Have a great day. Remember, YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!