Another Lesson I’ve Learned as an Author

Writing is a skill that one can learn. Like anything else in life, it takes practice. It’s said you need to write a million words to master writing. I’ve written over a million words, and I’m still learning.

 

Saturday Sleuths Book Club

I’ll be presenting and signing books at the Saturday Sleuths Book Club at Book Carnival Bookstore 348 S. Tustin, Orange, CA, June 15 at 9:30 AM.

Lessons Learned as an Author Continued Again

Another lesson I’ve learned as an author is that there are many different ways to write. When I started writing at the age of 56, I came across a book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s an excellent book on creativity. Julia has a technique called Morning Pages which is to write three hand written pages first thing in the morning. These pages can be anything: your journal, a shopping list or whatever and are a way to get the creative juices flowing for the day. I modified her concept and would review where I left off in my current manuscript and write three handwritten pages of the story first thing in the morning. When I came home from my day job, I’d put those three pages into the computer, editing along the way. This produced two typed pages a day. If you do the arithmetic, in 150 days I’d have a rough draft for a 300-page novel. In fact, this is the way I wrote my first four published novels. Then when I retired in 2007, I modified my approach and wrote each morning directly into the computer. I wrote every morning except if I was doing an event or had a family activity. Doing this until we moved back to Southern California in 2015, I completed a number of manuscripts, some of which have been published. Since then, I have been primarily in editing mode and now have twenty-two published books with more to come.