Week 4 of 52—done!
I’m feeling pretty accomplished because of sticking to this for 4 straight weeks, and I got way more done than I thought I would.
From Last Week
Next week I am planning to do my reading in the mornings Mon-Thu, and take Friday for further unpacking the WPP stack courses, and I want to start going through Publishing Mastermind Course again. But, I’m also expecting to be pretty tired after this week, so if only reading gets done, that’ll be fine by me.
I haven’t been consistent with the reading in the morning after I finished the first book on Monday—I’m still trying to find a way to fit everything I want to do in my morning routine. However, other than reading, I have put in about 4.5 hours of work this week into market research and/or studying the craft, which I’m pleased with.
Reading
I finished reading The Song of the Marked and I’ll definitely be moving on to the next book in that series. A detailed review is on my Goodreads profile, but, here I have to say I was pretty encouraged by seeing that in tone, PoV, and character work, I seem to be on a good path, because although the storylines couldn’t be more different, I think even the current draft of Fateweaver 1 could fit really well into the fantasy romance landscape. And my mind is swirling with ideas already on what to revise and how.
Write Publish Profit 5.0
This week I dug a little deeper into the courses and went through two of them—Revision Hell: Polishing Your Manuscript for Profit by Candace Havens, and Writing the Continuing Series by Susan Palmquist.
The first one is a pretty good overview of things to pay attention to when revising, although there was no new information in it for me, but, I’ve already been through said revision hell 4-5 times, so that’s no surprise. For anyone who isn’t an editor, though, it will probably be very helpful.
The other course I didn’t get much value out of, as it was based on the instructor’s personal experience with writing her own series, and the advice was at the same time too general and too focused on what worked for her, which is no guarantee it would work for anyone else. I could see it being helpful to someone who’s never plotted before, but otherwise, your time is better spent elsewhere.
After these two courses, I’ve kinda been turned off of going through the rest of them in the WPP 5.0 stack, since most of them seem to be covering the very basics of writing and publishing. However, I did see something else in it that might be useful.
The Novel Factory
There is a coupon for 12-month free access to The Novel Factory within the stack, though only for the Basic membership. I wanted to check out the free 31-day trial first before redeeming it because I figured, I already have Plottr + Scrivener and I wouldn’t change that combo unless it was for something much better.
And damn, The Novel Factory has some pretty nice bells and whistles. I haven’t played around with it that much yet, so I don’t know how its plotting + planning tools compare to the combined power of Plottr and Scrivener, but I love that it’s all centralized, that it has writing statistics, an extremely intricate character bible and sooo many other things.
So I wondered, initially, how come I’ve never heard any writers raving about this program. But then I looked at their pricing, and yikes, it became clear. $75/year for a Basic license that only allows you to have one novel within the program. If we’re looking at the next plan which allows for unlimited novels, it’s $198/year (plus I’m not sure how far the 500MB of storage would get you if you’re a worldbuilder, so the most expensive plan with 5GB of storage might be a necessity, and that’s $600/year).
The program is set up so that it’s beneficial to writers who are only just starting out, but what new writer or an author with a fledgling business has $200 or even $75 extra per year to drop on a writing software when there are so many cheaper alternatives out there, and so many other essential things you need to pay for first? Not me, that’s for sure. I have to prioritize the purchases that will build my author platform and help me find readers. Covers, website, promos, etc. are all more important than my ease of writing, since I already have a working system. Maybe in a couple of years I can reconsider it, but by then, I might already be too used to whatever system I have going. Though I’ll give the free trial a chance and see if it can become something I can’t live without.
Next Week’s Outlook and Goals
I’ll prioritize reading for one more week on Mon-Thu, and on Friday I’ll be doing plotting prep—going through all my files, separating the plot ideas from established facts, and checking out The Novel Factory’s plotting function.
If it’s good and it makes the process easier from how it’s been so far, I might stick to the program through the 12-month membership I got from the WPP 5.0 stack.
That’s all for this week! I’m looking forward to July where I really plan to get cracking on Fateweaver.
Love,
Jane
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