Post #258 May 24 2021 “Facebook, YouTube and Emails, Oh My! Finding the Time to Write” I am currently writing the first draft of my next title in The Farpool Stories, called The Farpool: Plague. I anticipate being able to upload this on or before Labor Day 2021. After that, I’ll take some time to prepare for the next title in this series. I like to have a little time to relax and decompress between projects. Which brings to mind a question every writer asks: how do you find time to write? I want to address what works for me in this post. Primarily, finding time to write is an issue of motivation. What motivates you? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What keeps you up at night, mulling over possibilities and options? I know a fellow named Tom. He’s not a writer but he’s surely one of the busiest people I know. Multi-tasking is his middle name. He drives full time for Lyft. He attends daily to a wife who has a serious disease. For years, he attended nearly daily to an aging father in declining health, now in a nursing home. Oh, and he’s also president of our Sunday School class. How does Tom even find time to breathe? Here are my rules for being able to carve out time to do something like write. 1. Make it a daily thing. Pick a time. Stick with it. Writing should be like exercising. Even like flossing your teeth. You do these things because you know you should and you like the results. As a writer, I enjoy seeing the pages mount up. I always print what I’ve written that day. As the pile gets taller, I feel some pride and sense of accomplishment at seeing that. I get a bit of a rush…by God, I’m a writer! Here’s the proof! But the most important thing is to pick a time and a place and stay with it. Preferably every day. Make it like brushing your teeth or showering. If I don’t put down 3-5 pages a day (and I give myself plenty of time off as needed), I just don’t feel right. 2. Set a goal. I’ve alluded to 3-5 pages a day for my own schedule. That’s 15 to 20 pages a week. Assuming a genre novel is around 200-250 pages, that means you can have the satisfaction of completing a draft in about 3 ½ months. Does that mean the job is done? No, of course not. There’s still editing, re-writing, cleaning up the prose, marketing stuff, etc. But it does mean you can bang out maybe 2+ books a year. That’s a clearer path to success than waiting for the muse to strike. Take my advice: don’t wait for the muse. Blast ahead and put words down on paper. Even if you have to edit them later. 3. Give yourself permission to slide a little but feel bad when you do so. Glory in the guilt. This may be controversial, but in my experience, we live in a feel-good time and if you have worked out a schedule and a discipline that works for you, and you don’t do it, you’ll feel bad when you’re not doing something writerly every day. If and when that happens, you’ve climbed an important motivational hill. You’ve made putting words so much a part of your daily living that you can’t envision a day when you’re not doing it. I have become so good at motivating myself that occasionally, I find it hard to turn myself off. That can be bad too because it can lead to burnout. But remember: nobody’s making you do this. You have to make yourself do it. And one way to accomplish this, is to understand what motivates you to do something hard and isolating and not always initially rewarding. Hopefully, the results later will be what motivates you but everyone is different. Examine what works for you, set up a schedule and stick to it. 4. Keep a record and celebrate meeting your goals. When I finished The Farpool: Union, I gave myself a few days off and then we went to the beach. My kind of reward. When your work is (finally) done, reward yourself. Have lunch with friends. Buy a bunch of books. Go see a movie. Hike in the mountains. Whatever is rewarding. And then get back to work. In between works, I make myself spend a few hours in the office every day. I might be developing outlines for a new story, developing character bios, researching or just day-dreaming. But I always go back to my schedule and begin the process all over again. And when I see the downloads mounting up my author’s dashboard on Smashwords, that’s pretty good motivation for me to continue, because it means somebody out there thinks enough of my work to download it. Finding time to write is really about knowing yourself, as (I believe) Socrates once said. Writing is a solitary art. Only you can motivate yourself. Motivation theorists tell us that it’s the rewards at the end that provide a lot of motivation. If you believe Maslow’s theories, then that puts writing somewhere around love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization. That’s good enough for me. The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 31, 2021. See you then, Phil B.

Post #257 May 17 2021 “Excerpt from The Farpool: Plague” At the beginning of April 2021, I re-started my original series The Farpool Stories. The new title is called The Farpool: Plague. So far, so good. I intend to make this available for download on or before Labor Day (September 6, 2021). Look for it. Most of the characters are new but the storyline picks up from the last Farpool story, The Farpool: Union. Below is an excerpt from this story: Chapter 1 Wright Memorial Hospital Scotland Beach, FL July 3, 2195 (Friday) Death would be a relief, Cory Everett thought, as he watched his wife Leah struggling underneath the bioshield. What was left of Leah was a shriveled, emaciated, bruised, convulsing skeleton of bloody skin and bone, consumed with late-stage effects of the Purple, an infection of unknown origin that had been sweeping the world in a global crisis for several years now. Her prognosis was grim, as there was no vaccine or cure of medbotic intervention that seemed to work. Nanoscale medbots had been suffused throughout her body for months now, yet the Purple bacteriomechs had been able to defeat or blunt them in every session they had tried. Cory closed his eyes, willing the imagery to go back to that closet in the back of his mind reserved for monsters and nightmares. He heard a door hiss open and looked around. It was Dr. Evan Wilshire. Wilshire was clad in a Level 4 biosuit, his helmet off. He carried a small capsule in one hand. Two technicians came in too. Cory knew them as Max and Elayne. “We’re going to try another session this morning,” Wilshire announced. As he explained what would be happening, Max and Elayne positioned the AMAD unit next to Leah’s bed, hooked up some tubes and lines and prepared to drop the shield. “We’ve been working with the Lab to tweak AMAD,” Wilshire told them. “New effectors, new probes, lots of new gear. It’s worked well in lab tests and simulations.” Cory glanced at the skeptical faces of his son Reuben and daughter Jessica. He knew AMAD was the Autonomous Medical Assembler/Disassembler. “Can it really make a difference now, Doc? Is there any real hope?” Wilshire forced an optimistic smile he didn’t really feel, for the truth was that Purple was an aggressive bacteriomech and every attempt they had tried with AMAD had failed miserably. “Cory, there’s always room for hope. We want to try everything that has a reasonable chance of working.” “Of course.” Wilshire always tried to be upbeat in sessions like this, even when there really was no reason to hope. “Let’s give it a shot, okay? You’ll all have to leave now. Go back to the waiting room. Have a doughnut and coffee. Let us do what we can here.” “Of course. I think we’ll just go to the chapel…and pray.” Max helped them through the door with a sympathetic smile. After the three of them were gone, he sealed the door, which hissed in response and snugged down his own helmet. Wilshire and Elayne did the same. Elayne then spent the next few minutes readying the AMAD cart while Max dropped the bioshield. A spray of light around the bed flashed. Wilshire loaded the new and improved bots into a nearby port on the cart. Finally, Elayne announced, "Okay, Dr. Wilshire… she patted down the incision she had just made in the side of Leah's skull. "Subject's prepped and ready." Max handed Wilshire the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment chamber. "Steady even suction, Doctor. AMAD ready to fly?" Elayne came back, "Ready in all respects." "Vascular grid?" "Tracking now. We'll be able to follow the master just fine. I'll replicate once we're through the blood-brain barrier." "Watch for capillary flow," said Max. "When her capillaries narrow, your speed will increase. And viscosity will stay up." "Like slogging through molasses. AMAD's inerted and stable…ready for insertion." The insertion went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the replicant master into Leah's capillary network at high pressure. Wilshire got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes' run on its propulsors brought the Autonomous Medical Assembler/Disassembler to a dense fibrous mat of capillary tissues. The image soon appeared on Wilshire's IC panel. "Ready for transit," he told Max. "Cytometric probing now. I can force these cell membranes open any time." Max used AMAD's acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam ahead, probing for weak spots. "There, right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that's a lipid duct, I'd bet a hundred bucks. Let’s try there, this time.” Wilshire steered AMAD into the vascular cleft of the membrane. He twisted his right-hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot himself forward. Seconds later, AMAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance. The plasma was a heavy viscous fluid. Wilshire tweaked up the propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid. "Ventral tegmentum, guys. Just past the mesoencephalic nucleus. Looks like we're in." Wilshire navigated AMAD through the interstices of Leah's brain for the better part of an hour. He had programmed the assembler to send an alarm when it encountered any kind of unnatural activity…especially assembler maneuvering or replication. If there were any remnants of Purple left in her brain, he wanted to be ready. "Hopefully, the last treatment finished them off," he muttered to himself. At 1824 hours, AMAD sent the alarm. The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of dissolved molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodium molecules darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Wilshire studied readouts from AMAD's sounder…something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter. Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, narrow with a globe structure at one end…and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility…triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as AMAD closed in…. Max let out a whoop. "Will you look at that?" Elayne came closer, squinted at the vague, fuzzy outlines on the screen. "It’s Purple, all right. A whole colony of them. A welcoming committee, it would appear. Come to see what we're about." So that’s an excerpt from the first chapter. Look for The Farpool: Plague on or about Labor Day this year. The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 24. See you then. Phil B.

Post #256 May 10 2021 “Water Clans of Seome: Writing about Alien Cultures” One of the greatest challenges as a writer of science fiction, and at the same time, one of the joys, is writing about alien cultures. In my own recent series of sf novels The Farpool Stories, I describe a marine civilization of intelligent, sentient creatures who have created an entire civilization below the waves of the ocean planet Seome. The series involves stories of how the Seomish people interact with each other and with humans. Every sf writer approaches worldbuilding a slightly different way. In my case, I wrote a novel called The Shores of Seome many years ago (which mutated into The Farpool) and in the process created a lot of background for this world and its inhabitants. In fact, I created an Appendix containing much of this material and stuck it at the end of The Farpool. Writing a story about aliens and setting it on an alien world is a real juggling act. You want to convey a true sense of alienness without turning off the reader. You don’t want to write an encyclopedia or something like National Geographic. You still have to have a compelling story and somehow work in enough alien details to transport the reader to this other world and its people and bring them to life for the reader. In my case, I created background encompassing the following areas and then wrote extensive notes to give my background some depth. When and where I could, I worked this background bit by bit into the story. I even hit on the plot device of having a sort of universal translator called an echopod, which had some encyclopedia functions. When the human characters needed to know something and an info dump was unavoidable, I had the aliens tell them to trigger the echopod and it would spit out material from my background. As long as I didn’t overdo this, it seemed to work pretty well. I tried to keep these passages to less than half a page. Here are the categories I tried to develop pretty extensive background for: 1. The language with key words and concepts and a few notes about grammar 2. Maps (entire globe and by quadrant) 3. Description of the world itself as a planet 4. The major cities and settlements and their key features 5. The physiology of the Seomish (remember, these are talking fish) 6. The biology of Seome (other plants and animals) 7. Theology and First Things of the Seomish people 8. The Hierarchies: Government, Politics and Organizations 9. Commerce, Industry, Crafts, Trades, Science and Technology 10. Communications and formal relations between the Kels (tribes or clans) 11. Education and training 12. Entertainment and recreation, diversions and amusements 13. Home life and intra-kel relations 14. The Kels (tribes or water clans): their history, key details, etc 15. More detailed description of one kel including cuisine, history, architecture 16. A brief chronology of Seomish civilization 17. An historical timeline and key events, notes on timekeeping 18. Seomish rituals and customs Was this a lot of work? It was and most of it was done 40 years ago. I never tried, in writing the actual stories, to get all of this into the story. But by having it as background, the detail dictates some aspects of the story, such as how events might unfold one way versus another way, always in keeping with the background. This kind of detail is like a crutch in that I can always look up how one of my characters might do something and I can be consistent across a number of stories in how I describe things. An echopod in The Farpool works the same as an echopod in The Farpool: Convergence. And sometimes having this level of background will suggest obvious plot developments and natural conflicts that can be used. It even triggered me to pick up the series this year and outline three more Farpool stories. One of the greatest mistakes as an author is to try to get all of your background into the story, at the expense of the story. Story comes before everything else. I have found that a little background goes a long way. If you do your job right as a storyteller, you’ll find the reader more than willing to help out by filling in some details with their own imaginations, even if you didn’t supply the details. In fact, many readers prefer that since it engages their faculties even more…adding to their enjoyment of the story. Give your readers enough detail, well described, believable and internally consistent, to transport them to your alien world and then let the natural conflicts and the characters carry the story. You’ll even find that once in a while, something will crop up in the story that you never expected, something lurking just below the surface of your feverish brain, that is triggered by a background detail you worked out months before. At that point, you say wow! And then put it in and pat yourself on the back for having thought that up. It was all because you were steeped in the alien culture from the beginning. Maybe it is like working for National Geographic. The next post to The Word Shed will come on May 17 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post #255 May 3, 2021 “When Your Aliens are Too Alien” Some years ago, I was about halfway through my last Johnny Winger novel (Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin) and it looked like I may have written myself into a corner. In this last episode of Tales of the Quantum Corps, Winger had become a disassembled swarm of nanobots, what I have termed an ‘angel’ in previous books. The deconstruction occurred in the previous novel (Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary). Now, I had to tell the story of what it was like to be a cloud of bots no bigger than atoms, a cloud that could form simulations of human beings and just about any imaginable physical structure. I may have made my main character a bit too alien. Writing a story about someone who is so different from you and me is stretching my descriptive and story-telling abilities. On the one hand, I wanted to accurately describe what it was like for Winger to be an angel. I wanted to describe it in ways a human reader could understand, so out of necessity, I used a lot of analogies and a lot of “it’s kind of like this—“text. Winger himself struggled to put his experience into words, often drawing on things he remembered from his former life as a ‘single-configuration being,” even from childhood. There are a lot of guidelines on creating believable aliens in science fiction stories. Johnny Winger is not intended as an alien but the effect is the same. One writer, Veronica Sicoe, did a blog post I saw on 7 aspects about aliens you shouldn’t ignore…here’s an excerpt… If you want to write sci-fi, or even if you’re just a curious reader, there are a handful of screwy aspects about aliens that you need to watch out for. So here’s where it’s at. 1. Aliens should be alien If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you can call it Rakumph all you want, it’s still an ‘f…ing’ duck. Giving creatures fancy names and changing their color doesn’t make them alien. If you’re on an alien planet that has purple skies, three moons and something else than oxygen floating around, you can bet your dog’s chewbone all creatures will be completely different than on Earth. Different chemistry > different environment > different evolution of life. Don’t strap a funny costume on a donkey and call it a fearsome Sharzahkrath. That’s just lazy worldbuilding. 2. Aliens aren’t humans in rubber costumes Humanoids? Really? You think the whole universe is populated by humans with wrinkly foreheads or an extra tit? Come on! Hollywood resorted to humanoid aliens because it’s cheaper to stuff an actor into a costume than to build a whole alien from scratch. As a fiction writer, you’re not limited by a production budget. Go wild! Go freakishly inhumanly outrageously alien and stun the wits out of your readers. 3. Aliens have their own history Maybe they never had a war on their planet; maybe they’ve always viewed both (or all three?) sexes equally; maybe they make art out of living creatures and eat their elder in annual festive rituals. Alien creatures will have alien–as in unfamiliar–societies and hence a very different history. They might have evolved from fungi and still reproduce through spores, each female spawning 10,000 young every three and a half cycles, who knows, but this would greatly affect their entire history, don’t you think? 4. If they were smart enough to fly to Earth, they probably know your butthole is not the most interesting part of your body Aliens that come all this way to abduct people and stick probes up their bums must be retarded. We’d be invaded by morons who got kicked out of their own society for shaming their ancestors. Why in the name of Planet Shmurp would they go there? To learn the secrets of our race? 5. Aliens that are naturally telepathic won’t even grasp the concept of language Humans have developed language because there was no other direct way to communicate. If an alien race is naturally telepathic, they will never have developed language. That has huge implications! No language means no words to describe things, no symbols to represent experiences, and no written signs either. They would be absolutely unable to grasp the concept of language, let alone learn it. Your human characters will never be able to communicate with such aliens in any simple way, because even if the telepaths could to tap into your thoughts, they won’t understand them. We think in words, we think in describable concepts, we think in relations that make sense in our language-dominated sense of reality. An alien that has never felt the need to name a thing, simply won’t understand us. 6. Aliens that can’t hold a tool won’t invent space ships Space faring slugs? Highly technological fish-like creatures? How the hell did they come up with buttons if they don’t have hands? How would they have felt the need for tools if they have no possibility to grasp them? How did they weld metal or shape a console if they can’t even hold a screwdriver? Think a bit about this one before you put such nonsense on paper. And this one…very important. 7. Aliens are subject to the same laws of physics as we are Unless you’re writing about converging dimensions, which would make it fantasy not science-fiction in my opinion—but that’s an entirely different debate (read: stay tuned for more)—your alien races will be subject to the same basic universal laws of physics as we are, like gravity, electricity, the laws of movement and so on. If you throw an alien down the well, he will fall down not float upwards. If you ram a fist into his face, he will budge (unless he weighs ten tons, in which case you’d better get the hell out of there fast). My predicament as a story-teller was how to describe the living experience of a being who is a loose collection of atoms surrounding a processor that can organize that collection into just about any form you can imagine. This being (Johnny Winger) experienced things like Brownian motion and van der Waals forces that are so far beyond your and my thinking that words were hard to find. In the next post to The Word Shed, on May 10, I’ll delve into how science fiction writers describe such alien experiences in ways that make you think you’re actually there. See you May 10. Phil B.

Post #254 April 26, 2021 “Copy, Paste and Modify?” Two weeks ago, I started the first draft of a new novel. It’s called The Farpool: Plague and it’s a continuation of my original The Farpool Stories. In this novel, I have been making liberal use of text and story elements from the earlier tales. In other words, I’ve been doing copy, paste and modifying things I’ve already written. Reusing text from previous stories, not all of them Farpool related. I do have over 60 stories online, with an approximate word count of nearly 5 million words. Surely, it’s okay to steal from myself to move a new story along by re-using old text? To answer this question, I’ve listed the pros (Yes) and cons (No) of this move below. You can decide for yourself whether I should be doing this. YES: 1. I don’t want to re-invent the wheel. If there is an existing scene that might work in a new story with some modifications, why not use it? 2. Copying and pasting with modifications can increase my productivity, literally, the number of pages I can complete in a day. 3. Often, I’ve found that only basic modifications are needed 4. When I do this, the effort sometimes suggests additional plot elements or complications that I hadn’t considered. 5. Re-using from earlier tales in my original series helps with continuity. NO: 1. The reader may have seen and read this text before. Re-using old text and re-purposing it could end up confusing a reader, if they recall it from somewhere else. 2. The modifications may turn out to be extensive. The new scene could be easier if I just write it fresh. 3. Writing a new scene from scratch can keep your head and your literary engine engaged and mentally in the story better. This is often underappreciated as a tool for getting pages and stories done. I have a host of tips and tricks for keeping my head in the game, like ending a day’s writing right in the middle of a sentence so as to jigger my brain back into the story universe the next day by the necessity of completing the sentence. Try it. It works. 4. Text copied and pasted and modified from another story may have unintended or unexpected effects on a reader’s understanding of your current story. The tone may be just enough different, or jarring enough to cause the reader to step back and say “Whoa…what’s happened here?” If this causes the reader to suspend their belief in the story universe, then you’re losing the reader and you never want to do anything to cause that. Ultimately, re-using old text in a new story is a judgment call. Your call should be based on… 1. The time and effort required 2. Analyzing and balancing the Yes and No factors highlighted above. 3. Doing what’s best to create an engaging and compelling story 4. An understanding that writers sometimes get a little too enamored with their own words, to the detriment of the greater story. Don’t fall into that trap. If the old text works in a new story or can be made to work, do it. Otherwise, write it new. The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 3, 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post #253 April 19 2021 “Continuity in Series Fiction” This post covers a subject that is a little more technical and specific than many of my earlier posts. The issue today is stated in the title: how do I deal with continuity when telling a continuing series of stories. Should I even worry about this? What the hell is continuity anyway? One good definition is this: continuity is consistency of plot, characters, settings and other details in a story. Why worry about this? In series fiction, which I have done a lot of, there are three reasons why you should worry about continuity. 1. Believability and credibility. Imagine James Bond ordering a martini that wasn’t ‘shaken not stirred.’ If you write stories with characters that continue from one tale to another, you don’t want Bob to have blond hair in one story and green hair in the next. Flub-ups like that can destroy the connection that the reader makes with the author and damage the verisimilitude (resemblance to the truth) that every storyteller depends on. 2. Familiarity. If you’ve had any kind of success with a series (as an example, the five novels in my series The Farpool Stories have collectively garnered nearly 6600 downloads), you want your readers to feel comfortable with the characters and the settings and plot details if you are adding additional stories to the series (I’m doing this with The Farpool Stories). Being familiar with some of the details from earlier in the series takes some of the cognitive workload off the reader. It’s been said that some of the most successful series are infinite variations on the same theme. Another word for this is formula. Why have they been so successful? Familiarity, especially if your heroes are particularly engaging and likeable and readers can identify with them, is one reason. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to tell a crackling good story too. 3. Early success. I have had several pretty successful series (Tales of the Quantum Corps, Quantum Troopers, Time Jumpers, The Farpool Stories). You don’t necessarily want to mess with success. Maybe just tweak it a little. Sometimes, early success can seem like a straitjacket and you want to breathe a little as an artist. That’s okay. Just remember to attend to the needs and details of story continuity or you’ll lose some of those loyal readers. I’m in the middle of writing the first of three follow-on stories in my series The Farpool Stories. How do I (and or you) go about maintaining continuity in such an endeavor? 1. From the start, I made the decision to review all previous stories in this series. I re-read everything. This helped me get my head back into the story universe I had already created. It also had the secondary benefit of suggesting plot twists and turns I could craft onto my new stories. I even re-read all the character bios and details of settings, to help this process. This has worked well. 2. I had to decide how much my main characters had changed or grown. I saw some of this change in the original five stories. How far should I carry this change? Should I introduce new characters? How are they related to the original characters? What kind of trajectory of change do I envision for the main characters? Consider all these factors when attending to series continuity. 3. Keep copious notes on details. I have dozens of files, even paper notebooks, on all kinds of details involved in The Farpool Stories. Which details should I change or update? Which remain unchanged? Know your details, inside and out. Don’t describe a tropical island one way in Story 1 and a completely different way in Story 5, unless there is a good reason for that change. In series fiction, continuing details populate all the stories and readers notice inconsistencies. Plus your chance of making laughable errors goes up with each new tale. 4. Consider reprising earlier plot scenes. I do this a lot, to avoid re-inventing the wheel and to help maintain consistency. Often, when writing a scene, there will be an earlier scene that is similar. Don’t be afraid to copy and paste, but be sure to modify the new scene to make it fit the new story. You may feel that readers will grow tired of seeing scenes they have read before, slightly updated. While this is undoubtedly true, readers also appreciate familiarity at least as much. And remember, no matter how much you change or update details, and no matter how much current scenes resemble earlier ones, you still have to tell a complete and engaging story anyway. 5. Finally, consider the time frame of your new stories. Do the new ones occur in time right after the end of the original stories? Years or centuries later? This one aspect will affect a lot of what you decide regarding points 1-4 above. In the case of me re-starting The Farpool Stories, my main character in the first of the new tales is actually a granddaughter of my original heroes in the first five stories. The time frame made that necessary, but it also opened up new possibilities. Dealing with and respecting the needs of continuity in series fiction is a balancing act. You’re juggling the need to respect what has gone before and the reader’s desire for some familiarity in order to get into the story with the need to tell a fresh and engaging story in a compelling way. Maybe that’s why they call writing and storytelling an art. The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 26, 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post #252 April 12 2021 “Kickstarting the Motivation Engine” Every writer needs to attend to his or her own motivation. There must be a million motivational tricks you can use to get going and write that story, article, essay or poem. Recently, I found a website called masterclass.com, which offered the following tips for motivating yourself to get going on that best-seller. 1. Set writing goals. If you want to complete a novel but are intimidated by the thought of writing 65,000 words, set goals that are easier to tackle. Give yourself a minimum daily word count you need to reach. At the end of each writing session, record your word count in a writing diary. If you’re blogging, set an analytical goal of how many people you want to reach with your next post. Goal setting is a good strategy for getting to work. 2. Set deadlines. There’s no better motivator than a deadline. Look at your calendar and set a due date for each chapter of your book and a completed first draft. This will light the fire and force you to put the time in every day. If it helps, pretend this is for a client. 3. Write now, edit later. An essential part of creative writing is to just get your story down. When the words are flowing, don’t stop to edit. You’ll forget your thoughts and ideas and you’ll lose momentum. Get the story down first. You can go back and edit later. 4. Find the perfect writing space. Find a spot where you do your best writing. Make sure it’s away from distractions. Turn off the TV and put away your phone. Some people find music helps their state of mind when they write. Try it, but if it’s more distraction than inspiration, keep it off. 5. Remember that the journey is the destination. The thought of writing an entire novel can be overwhelming and paralyzing. Try focusing on the writing process rather than your ultimate goal. Be in the present and enjoy the experience of writing. 6. Commit to a regular writing time. Getting into a writing habit is easier when you use time management skills and schedule a specific time to write every single day. Honor the appointment like you would any other meeting, and show up at your computer at the time you set aside, no matter what. 7. Change your thought processes. Procrastination gets the best of every writer, but bestsellers don’t write themselves. Remind yourself that the only way to become a better writer is to sit down and write. Strengthen that will power to keep temptations at bay. Stop saying, “I’ll write tomorrow,” and instead commit to writing today. 8. Join a writing group. Sometimes, writing for yourself is simply not enough motivation. Join a writing group that meets regularly so you are accountable to other people to turn in what you write. Your peers can also be a great resource for free writing advice. Join NaNoWriMo—National November Writing Month. Every year, on November 1st, people around the world commit to writing 50,000 words over the course of the month. 9. Take five. If you have writer’s block, step away from your writing routine. Go for a walk or a jog. Sometimes just getting exercise helps open the creative floodgates. If that doesn’t work, come back to it the next day. Watch TV or listen to podcasts. Tapping into other creative outlets might trigger an idea. When inspiration hits, get back to your keyboard and start typing. 10. Switch up your setting. Changing where you work can get you out of a creative rut, give you a new perspective, and kickstart your writing motivation. Get out of the house, away from your desk, and sit in a coffee shop or a library every once in a while. You might even find writing inspiration by people-watching. 11. Switch directions. When you stall out during the middle of a writing project, change what you’re working on. Switching to a new writing style can refresh your thoughts. If you’re tired of novel writing, work on a short story. If you’re a blogger, try writing blog entries or a guest post for another website. If you just need a short break, head on over to social media and write a creative tweet. Sometimes you just need to switch directions and force your brain to think of something else before you get started again. 12. Try writing prompts. A fun way to find motivation is to use writing prompts to ignite a story idea. Prompts are most often a short text passage that a writer uses as fuel to launch into a bigger story. You can also use a real-life writing prompt simply by recalling a moment from earlier in your day. Story prompts are easy to find online, but you can also be inspired by reading a newspaper or magazine to mine for inspiration. 13. Reward yourself. Using bribery for a little motivation now and then never hurts. Promise yourself a sweet treat, a cup of coffee, or some little reward for reaching milestones throughout your writing session. 14. Read a book. If you’re having a hard time finding motivation, pick up something to read. If you’re writing fiction, try a non-fiction book. Reading will turn off your creative engine and give your mind a rest. Absorbing the work of other authors can also serve as a source of inspiration and motivation for your own writing. 15. Remember why you started writing. Remember why you started writing in the first place and refocus on the story you set out to tell. Visualize your idea as a completed novel with characters and a world you created. Imagine the feeling of accomplishment when you finish. Then, sit back down and start typing. Motivational tricks are as varied as writers are. It also helps for me to realize that I’m a firmly obsessive/compulsive person. But, after I read this piece, I realized I actually do quite a lot of these things myself. Only one person can write that story you’ve had percolating in your head for the last six months. And if you don’t write it, the world will never have a chance to appreciate your genius as an artist. Get cracking. The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 19. See you then. Phil B.