Andrew Jones’ Blog

This is the second time I’ve written this post! It looks like I must have forgotten to save the first one, and since I wrote it directly into the Wordpress editor… I basically wasted half an hour of my life, which I really don’t like doing! Obvious lesson to learn there!

So after writing my first novel using the method described in Cris Baty’s book No Plot? No Problem! (the NaNoWriMo method), then trying to edit it the following month during NaNoEdMo - and I’ve still not finished editing it! I wrote a script for Script Frenzy (2008) - which I’ve not quite finished (but did pass 100 pages, therefore ‘won’) I am now starting another novel!

This time I’m hoping to get over the pain of major editing by using a different method - as described in Karen Wiesner’s book First Draft in 30 Days.

This time you plan everything first, using the planning worksheets to produce a detailed plot outline which can then be turned into a nearly final draft!

So far it’s taken me two weeks to do the first six days… The trouble being that you really need to have thought about the plot and characters in some detail before you start the process, and I hadn’t. Also I’ve been doing other things - Internet Marketing training programs, looking for a day job and going to interviews and generally loosing focus! On all of these things!

So I’ll post more about this later.

cheers for now,

Andy.

This is just a very short note to say that although I am making progress on my new novel, using the Karen Wiesner method, progress has been slow. I’ve now got most of the forms filled in, the initial planning stages, and have started writing some scenes.

That’s it for now!

Cheers,

Andy.

I’ve now finished the Coaching course! The product I decided to produce, for better or for worse, was Simply Insomnia a short eBook covering the basics of behavioral methods of helping you get to sleep. Check my Insomnia category in this blog for info on insomnia, tips, and a brief post about the book.

Sadly I haven’t had any sales or even traffic so far… so if you’re reading this, click the lick… go on… go on… go on… you know you want to!

I’ve written several articles and submitted them via Submit Your Article, but I’ve had trouble fining and posting to forums, and also there’s a lot of competition out there, more than I thought there was originally… so next time I need to do more niche research!

I’ll keep plugging away, but obviously it’s slow progress and other things are distracting me!

Cheers for now,

Andy

Having ‘finished’ my first novel using the NaNoWriMo method described in No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days I then had problems when I came to the editing stage (using the NaNoEdMo - National Novel Editing Month process)

For this reason I decided to try using an alternate approach, as detailed in First Draft in 30 Days by Karen Wiesner. This is a much more technical way of writing a novel - building up detail stage by stage until you have everything you need, in the correct sequence and with all the discrepancies ironed out before you start writing your manuscript.

I started reading the book on the 8th of May and began filling in worksheets three days later, but since then it’s been slow progress!

It’s been slow partly because I’m reading the book as I go along, and I’m having difficulty motivating myself  (I may have mentioned that I’m kind of lazy) - but also because Karen Wiesen seems to assume that you’ve already thought a lot about your story, know who the main characters are and what the overall plot is in some detail, and probably have quite a few freehand notes already. She says that she has many stories on the back boiler, slowly building detail until she decides to actually start writing them - she makes notes and files them over a period of years. Whereas my new novel is an idea I did have a couple of years ago, but it hadn’t got beyond a couple of scenes and characters. The reason I chose this plot was because it had similarities to my first novel, so it would be easier to compare the processes between the two methods and then decide which I preferred.

So I have now made nearly all my rough notes and done some of the research, so the next step is to start on the formatted plot outline, filling in details from the previous worksheets to produce a (hopefully!) coherent plot outline from which the writing can begin! I’ve taken about 45 days to do 15 days of Karen’s method - so at this rate it may not get finished until the end of July!

Cheers for now,

Andy

I haven’t yet made a penny online, but already (or should that be finally got around to…) I need to set up a spreadsheet to keep track of what I’m doing and thereby/also show what I need to keep doing. Well, it’s a first stab at it anyway!

It’s just a simple Excel spreadsheet with a few worksheets/tabs as follows:

Tab1/my blog apj
Date Entered | Posting Date | type | site | cat | Posting Title

Tab2/simplyInsomnia
Date Entered | Posting Date | type | site | cat | Posting Title

Tab3/articles
Date | cat | product | Site(s)/via SYA* | Article Title(s)
*SubmitYourArticle

Note 2 things -

1. you can set a posting date for a WordPress blog that’s different from the date of entering the post, either forward or back - so you can enter a post today, but postpone it’s ‘release’ until a few days later, so that you can enter several at one sitting, then have them appear spread over the coming week.
2. SubmitYourArticle.com has a new optional (and at no extra cost) submission facility to allow submission of more unique articles spread across the article directories they submit to: so if you choose to use it (for a particular article submission) you can enter several versions of the title, first paragraph, various sentences and the resource box - which SYA will mix together for the various submissions to give many unique ‘different’ articles based on the original. I tried using it because it seemed like a good idea, it did take longer for the submission though, maybe an extra 30+ minutes. Since it had already taken me several hours to set up my SYA account (including the logons for several article sites requiring separate IDs) and re-rewriting the article again (to get it down to under 800 words) it seemed worthwhile trying to get the most return on my time (and SYA subscription) investment!

Anyway, I’ve populated my spreadsheet with my actions so far - 41 actions (setting up this blog, lots of blog posts and 3 article submissions - 2 separate ones and the SYA submission, which supposedly goes out to many many article directories) The next step is to add future actions, so that I keep posting regular blog and forum posts, articles and create new products!

Cheers for now,

Andy

My two current projects - the the John Thornhill Coaching Program and Lee Mcintyre’s Free Marketing Classroom/Internship Program (details on his blog) have been progressing slowly due to two reasons…

I’ve been lazy! So I haven’t progressed the Simply Insomnia eBook until the last few days. And Lee has delayed the release of week 4 of his internship course due to some glitch.

However… I have just finished revamping the eBook and uploaded it (again!) and written a couple of taster articles - which I’ve just started submitting… so let’s see if that produces any traffic. I have not yet resorted to the article submission software/service approach, as I’m being stingy (no current income!) So the submission is going slowly - it took me about two hours to submit the first two to one site due to having to keep reformatting etc. - but that should get easier as I now have them reformatted and as I get more practice. Also my laptop seems to have slowed down quite a lot.

(update 9th May - I decided to use  Submit YOUR Article for further articles, as otherwise it’s going to take days just to submit each article to a couple of dozen sites… They’ve now got a new option when submitting to let you reword various parts of an article to allow it to be submitted in a number of different forms - to increase the number of ‘unique’ occurences - which should improve search results etc. Maybe I’ll do a posting on how it works sometime… though their help pages are good anyway)

So, I’m now looking forward to my first product sale, ever!

Cheers for now,

Andy

Hi!

I have had periodic problems with insomnia for as long as I can remember!

It’s an insidious problem that affects all aspects of your life when you suffer from it - it takes the positive edge off everything, leaving you tired and listless, irritable and with poor concentration and memory. I have often suffered with week long bouts of the condition, occurring probably two or three times a year - not counting times when I just stay up too late or wake up with a bad stomach due to drink or spicy food (I also suffer from Acid Reflux)

A few statistics about insomnia:

30-40% of people report insomnia each year

10-15% of people reporting insomnia say they have chronic insomnia

So a while ago I started compiling a short guide to the simple things that one can do to help reduce insomnia - just everyday things that anyone can do without using drugs. There’s nothing earth shattering in there, and not really anything new… I read a couple of eBooks, and  spent hours surfing for information, then took the good stuff and made what I think is a concise* (hopefully) well written eBook of my own!

Find it here: http://www.simplyinsomnia.com (sales page) Cheers, and good sleeping!

Andy.

*One eBook I read covered the information but was not only very repetitive (same things in several sections) but also badly worded, as though English wasn’t the author’s first language - and it was an EXE file, which I don’t like. Mine’s a PDF.

Okay, I missed posting last week!

But since it’s the day before the end, and by this week-end just gone (26/27 April) I’d got to 95 pages… well that’s what Celtx Print Preview said anyway… I was going to leave it until I finished… but that leaves the question of finished the month or finished the script?

Well, I have past the 100 pages now, and when you validate in the Script Frenzy site - if it’s happy you’ve past 100 pages, it declares you a Winner! So it seems like the time to write a post about it!

I haven’t finished the script yet (I may well post that once it’s done and I’m happy with it, but don’t hold your breath - it’s a big step to let people see your writings when it’s a whole big fiction script!) - and I do plan to finish it, hopefully very soon (like the next week or so!), but it’s nearly there… So what’s the point of this post apart from that?

The ‘validation’ needed the script in PDF format, and to get it there from Celtx, I had to export it as a text file, import it to a word processor then export it again as a PDF… Since Word doesn’t have PDF as an output format, I had to use Open Office which does have the PDF output option, and it’s FREE (at http://download.openoffice.org/) - now here’s the fun part… I only tried this yesterday, and when you paste the text into the word processor it’s only 87 pages!!! With two days to go!!!

So I’ve just spent most of the day writing more scenes for the script! Another 22 pages! If I’d written at that rate for the last 28 days I’d have, let’s see… (gets calculator going)… 638 pages! Anyway, I went through the conversion process and it validated it okay, and declared me a winner! The first time I’ve won anything for my writing - and no, you don’t get a ‘real’ prize - a publishing contract or any money - but it’s still very satisfying (even more so once I actually finish the script/story itself!) - You do get an e-certificate thingy though, and can use their ‘winner’ jpgs - see below.

So that’s my third writing project:

1. NaNoWriMo novel in 30 days (Feb, 2008 - done on my own, rather than for the proper November event)
2. NaNoEdMo edit a novel in 30 days (March 2008 - ‘Won’ as I scraped through on the 50 hour target, but haven’t finished editing yet)
3. Script Frenzy 2008 - 100 page(s of) script in 30 days (April 2008, not quite finished the script yet, but got past the 100 page mark!)

Now I’m reading up on how to get published - as in physically, on paper, by a ‘proper’ publisher… I’ll do a post about that if it ever happens!

So now I just need to get back to doing some Internet Marketing! If I don’t start another writing project… though maybe I should finish one first!

Cheers for now,

Andy. … Oh Yeah!

OK, in my search for information on how to cure my insomnia problem, I’ve found a few statistics (see below) - it’s not much but it’s a start, so I thought I’d post it separately just for fun and to practice my Excel graphing!

30-40% of people report insomnia each year

10-15% of people reporting insomnia say they have chronic insomnia.

and in graph form!

I’ll add more statistics on insomnia if and when I come across them.

Cheers for now,

Andy

Hi!

I haven’t been keeping up to date reporting where I’m up to because it’s been a bit confused!

I’ve looked at several affiliate money-making products before, and not been impressed - I have a couple more to look at but at the moment I’m concentrating on the eBook business plans - from John Thornhill and Lee McIntyre.

I’ve been doing the John Thornhill Coaching Program and Lee Mcintyre’s Free Marketing Classroom/Internship Program (details on his blog) On John’s Coaching Program I’ve got as far as setting everything up for selling a short eBook about coping with insomnia (Insomnia a Simple Guide) and should be getting to driving traffic to that during the next week or so.

Lee’s Internship has just released the third weeks tasks, they’re supposed to take about ten hours, two hours per task most times - but on several I’ve taken well over that! So the Internship tasks are kind of a strain. The first tasks were keyword searching etc., but since then have been to do with writing blog posts and reviews for Lee’s products - so he’s getting something for his effort, while we learn how to publicise sites and products… the pace is quite a strain, considering the time required.

Although time is now at a premium for me, I still want to look at affiliate marketing (of other people’s products), as the set and forget approach is more appealing than the constant product development and release approach from John and Lee’s models. Also the eBay ban on eBook sales makes the previous model defunct, I’m still uncertain what the new model will be for getting traffic to the sales page… that may be explain in Johns Coaching program this week - so far I’ve seen the suggestion elsewhere that selling something on CD is the way around it, and there may be easy ways to do this automatically - otherwise you’d spend all your time cutting and posting CDs which is NOT an attractive prospect!

That’s all for now.

Cheers,

Andy.