I got this idea from reading about it somewhere else.
Basically, you tell me what you'd like me to write about in a comment below. You can suggest a topic, or ask me a question, and I'll write something about it. No question is too big or too small. Share in the comments below and I'll get started!
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Monday, April 28, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
It's time to step outside the wire
I'm going to be taking the plunge over the next few days and will be establishing a premium mailing list with weekly updates planned to "help you make better choices to create a better life for yourself".
I was reading a blog post this morning that really inspired me. It was a guest post by Tom Morkes on Jeff Goins' blog and called What war taught me about writing.
Tom was comparing being a writer to being in the army. Interesting comparison, but what was inspirational were these particular quotes:
After reading the article I was inspired to 'go outside the wire'. Like a soldier risking their life every day they step outside the wire, the least I could do was step up my writing and put myself out there where I'm vulnerable.
One thing led to another and I found that Tom Morkes is also a heavy proponent of the Pay What You Want method of receiving payment for services or products.
I've seen this model in use before, and I've seen others using similar models for their eBooks and downloadable courses, as well as subscription models for premium articles.
I decided to 'go outside the wire' and start my own premium mailing list for substantially better material than what I'm currently doing.
I know what I'm capable of, because I've been there before. With my Thinking Wisely website in 2012 I was doing articles that were designed to help people make better choices. It worked out very well, but the articles were being published for free, and I was pushing an article a day.
I learned from that experience, and what I learned is that writing quality articles of that nature every single day is incredibly difficult, to the point that I burnt out after about 4 months of it. But in that time I'd written over 100 articles.
This time around I'm going to be writing one article per week, and spend my time during that week making sure the article is of exceptional quality.
It's going to be called Join The Journey (if you have any ideas of your own about what it could be called, please add them to the comments below), and invite people to join me in this journey we share, to support me with their subscription, and to receive premium content that's never going to be available on my blog - at a price that anyone can afford.
The subscription will be offered at a minimum of $1 per month. Cheap! It should allow anyone and everyone to sign up for it. Subscribers can pay more if they want to, and it's my hope that they do, but it will be worthwhile for me to just get people subscribing, even if it's for $1 a month.
The onus will be on me to create the best writing I can, to justify the money people are spending on me, and to also provide an incentive for people to increase the value of their subscription in exchange for the high quality material I'll be producing.
I need to 'go outside the wire', or 'step outside my comfort zones' if I'm going to achieve the successes that I want to achieve. If want to be a paid writer then I have to start being a paid writer. This is a good start.
I hope you'll join me in my journey when I start offering the premium subscription within the next few days.
I was reading a blog post this morning that really inspired me. It was a guest post by Tom Morkes on Jeff Goins' blog and called What war taught me about writing.
Tom was comparing being a writer to being in the army. Interesting comparison, but what was inspirational were these particular quotes:
"But unless you write – unless you publish – those who need your work are left without your contribution to the world.
In a very real way, the people depending on your work need you to be vulnerable and exposed on a daily basis. Your job, as a writer, is to go outside the wire and publish your work."
---
"Take risks daily: write and publish stuff that matters for the people who matter."
---
"Three simple but powerful lessons:
1. Go outside the wire and publish your work.
2. Take risks daily with your writing.
3. Remember why you do what you do."
After reading the article I was inspired to 'go outside the wire'. Like a soldier risking their life every day they step outside the wire, the least I could do was step up my writing and put myself out there where I'm vulnerable.
One thing led to another and I found that Tom Morkes is also a heavy proponent of the Pay What You Want method of receiving payment for services or products.
I've seen this model in use before, and I've seen others using similar models for their eBooks and downloadable courses, as well as subscription models for premium articles.
I decided to 'go outside the wire' and start my own premium mailing list for substantially better material than what I'm currently doing.
I know what I'm capable of, because I've been there before. With my Thinking Wisely website in 2012 I was doing articles that were designed to help people make better choices. It worked out very well, but the articles were being published for free, and I was pushing an article a day.
I learned from that experience, and what I learned is that writing quality articles of that nature every single day is incredibly difficult, to the point that I burnt out after about 4 months of it. But in that time I'd written over 100 articles.
This time around I'm going to be writing one article per week, and spend my time during that week making sure the article is of exceptional quality.
It's going to be called Join The Journey (if you have any ideas of your own about what it could be called, please add them to the comments below), and invite people to join me in this journey we share, to support me with their subscription, and to receive premium content that's never going to be available on my blog - at a price that anyone can afford.
The subscription will be offered at a minimum of $1 per month. Cheap! It should allow anyone and everyone to sign up for it. Subscribers can pay more if they want to, and it's my hope that they do, but it will be worthwhile for me to just get people subscribing, even if it's for $1 a month.
The onus will be on me to create the best writing I can, to justify the money people are spending on me, and to also provide an incentive for people to increase the value of their subscription in exchange for the high quality material I'll be producing.
I need to 'go outside the wire', or 'step outside my comfort zones' if I'm going to achieve the successes that I want to achieve. If want to be a paid writer then I have to start being a paid writer. This is a good start.
I hope you'll join me in my journey when I start offering the premium subscription within the next few days.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
I have a writing disorder too!
One of the annoying and frustrating things I've had to deal with in my life is an inability to use the pen when writing. You see, I've always found that my writing is ridiculously atrocious when I'm using a pen.
It's like, I know what I'm going to write - I can even see it in my head. But as I put pen to paper and start writing, what my hands write is occasionally different to what's in my head. The end result is a lot of crossed out words, and frustration about my inability to write properly.
I have no issues with using the keyboard on a computer, because it's easier to backspace when making a correction than it is to correct handwritten notes. But the writing thing has always been annoying and perplexing.
Perplexing because it never made sense to me why I'd think of the word 'happen' but my hand would write 'harness', and I'd be like, "What the fucking fuck?!" and then I'd scribble it out and write it again.
That sounds extreme, I know, but it happens a lot more than you might think. Most of the time I just make spelling errors, which is annoying 'cause my mind knows how to spell, but my hand apparently doesn't. But when I actually write entirely different words to what I actually want to write, that's just a level of weirdness I never understood.
I'm writing about this today because I've been doing some software testing work this past week or so (helping out a friend with his workplace's testing requirements for just a couple weeks), and I've had to do a lot of writing of script errors and bugs.
Now, most of my note-taking over the past few years has been on laptops, entirely because my writing sucks, so I've adapted how I write to what works better for me. But this software testing has required me to write notes on script errors and bugs that I've found, occasionally going into some detail to provide relevant information.
Today, after some particularly annoying instances that's just been the latest in a long series of annoying instances on a daily basis over this past week, I decided to see what I could find out about this from Google.
At first I didn't know what I was looking for. I didn't know what the right questions were. I kept on finding articles and blog posts on how I could be a better author.
But eventually I found something that was somewhat relevant, and I began following a trail. What I ended up with was that I suffer from something called Dysgraphia or Written Expression Disorder.
Oh, great. Another disorder of some kind!
But anyway, what fascinated me about this is that this is mostly related to people who suffer from Autism or Aspergers Syndrome.
That's definitely me. I can read fine, and I can spell pretty damn good too. In my head, that is. Writing it out on paper, however, is a mighty pain in the ass.
The issue it talks about with fine motor skills was something I was already aware of with Aspergers. I've been clumsy all of my life, inept at physical sports and activities (it surprised me how good I was at martial arts, though, back in my wilder youth).
That article also mentions a number of symptoms of Dysgraphia, one of which is:
Yep, absolutely. I guess putting down the wrong words or spelling them incorrectly applies to that.
This research has been helpful for me though. Now I know that the reason I suck at writing with a pen is because of a 'written expression disorder' related to having Aspergers.
At least I can type properly.
It's like, I know what I'm going to write - I can even see it in my head. But as I put pen to paper and start writing, what my hands write is occasionally different to what's in my head. The end result is a lot of crossed out words, and frustration about my inability to write properly.
I have no issues with using the keyboard on a computer, because it's easier to backspace when making a correction than it is to correct handwritten notes. But the writing thing has always been annoying and perplexing.
Perplexing because it never made sense to me why I'd think of the word 'happen' but my hand would write 'harness', and I'd be like, "What the fucking fuck?!" and then I'd scribble it out and write it again.
That sounds extreme, I know, but it happens a lot more than you might think. Most of the time I just make spelling errors, which is annoying 'cause my mind knows how to spell, but my hand apparently doesn't. But when I actually write entirely different words to what I actually want to write, that's just a level of weirdness I never understood.
I'm writing about this today because I've been doing some software testing work this past week or so (helping out a friend with his workplace's testing requirements for just a couple weeks), and I've had to do a lot of writing of script errors and bugs.
Now, most of my note-taking over the past few years has been on laptops, entirely because my writing sucks, so I've adapted how I write to what works better for me. But this software testing has required me to write notes on script errors and bugs that I've found, occasionally going into some detail to provide relevant information.
Today, after some particularly annoying instances that's just been the latest in a long series of annoying instances on a daily basis over this past week, I decided to see what I could find out about this from Google.
At first I didn't know what I was looking for. I didn't know what the right questions were. I kept on finding articles and blog posts on how I could be a better author.
But eventually I found something that was somewhat relevant, and I began following a trail. What I ended up with was that I suffer from something called Dysgraphia or Written Expression Disorder.
Oh, great. Another disorder of some kind!
But anyway, what fascinated me about this is that this is mostly related to people who suffer from Autism or Aspergers Syndrome.
Some children with autism or Asperger's syndrome also have dysgraphia, or written expression disorder. This learning disability impacts a child's ability to write and spell without affecting their reading ability. Many people with dysgraphia have higher than average IQ and are able to write but may have problems with fine motor skills and coordination.
That's definitely me. I can read fine, and I can spell pretty damn good too. In my head, that is. Writing it out on paper, however, is a mighty pain in the ass.
The issue it talks about with fine motor skills was something I was already aware of with Aspergers. I've been clumsy all of my life, inept at physical sports and activities (it surprised me how good I was at martial arts, though, back in my wilder youth).
That article also mentions a number of symptoms of Dysgraphia, one of which is:
Problems organizing thoughts on paper
Yep, absolutely. I guess putting down the wrong words or spelling them incorrectly applies to that.
This research has been helpful for me though. Now I know that the reason I suck at writing with a pen is because of a 'written expression disorder' related to having Aspergers.
At least I can type properly.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
I'm going to take a break
But not a break from writing - just a break from the urge to write every single day.
I've got a lot of other stuff going on at the moment, and I'm aware that my daily writing is taking a bit of a beating as a result.
So instead of stressing about it, I'll just give myself permission to ease up on it.
It's entirely possible I'll still continue with a post a day - especially if I have something I want to write about - but this permission allows me to just write when I feel like writing, or to write much less than 500 words a day.
When things settle down a bit again, I'll get back into the daily discipline of writing at least 500 words.
Until then, just sit back, relax, and enjoy the silence.
I've got a lot of other stuff going on at the moment, and I'm aware that my daily writing is taking a bit of a beating as a result.
So instead of stressing about it, I'll just give myself permission to ease up on it.
It's entirely possible I'll still continue with a post a day - especially if I have something I want to write about - but this permission allows me to just write when I feel like writing, or to write much less than 500 words a day.
When things settle down a bit again, I'll get back into the daily discipline of writing at least 500 words.
Until then, just sit back, relax, and enjoy the silence.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Some more changes are coming
[Disclaimer: this is a technical post. You can ignore this one if you don't care about blog setups and DNS stuff.]
Just when you thought things had settled down a bit, I up and change them again.
While I've been working on my new website (that I talked about here), I was doing some testing. I decided to test a Wordpress setup on a VPS and compare its loading speed to the Wordpress setup on my normal host provider. What I found amazed me.
But first, let me take you back to when I decided to use Ghost instead of Wordpress, and some of the reasons why I did that:
And...
Well, I take it all back.
My feelings about Wordpress at the time were very much based on various points of frustration, mostly around the time it took for the site to load, followed by the fact I was unable to restore my Wordpress backup.
From You wouldn't believe what I've gone through:
I got excited with playing with something new, and I went with it. It was further moved along when the Wordpress backup was corrupted and I couldn't restore my blog and needed to urgently develop another solution. Using Ghost was the most appropriate solution at the time.
However, my testing this past couple have days has given me a different perspective on the speed of Wordpress.
I setup a fresh Wordpress install on my old host provider's server. With no content it took about 5 seconds to load. Then I got an idea.
I setup a fresh Wordpress install on my VPS (virtual private server), and with no content it took about 1 second to load.
The Wordpress installation on the VPS gave me the same loading speed as the Ghost blog.
This surprised me greatly!
So after doing a lot more testing, using ping and tracert tools online to check ping returns and the number of server 'hops' between my location here in Australia and the two locations in America (my old hosting provider and the VPS provider), the evidence was conclusive.
Using the VPS to self-host a Wordpress blog would be very much faster than using my old hosting provider. Not only that, the speed of Wordpress was comparable to the speed of the Ghost blog.
This changed things for me.
After a couple months of using Ghost now, some of the things I don't like about it is that it doesn't allow posts to be searched or gathered according to Category or Tags. Ghost also doesn't have any Search functionality. And the last thing I don't like about it is that the simplicity of the Markdown language for content formatting is too simplistic for my needs.
So I've spent today setting up a new Wordpress installation of THIS blog on a VPS, and finding a good theme to use, and then configuring it according to my needs. Here's a small screenshot of it so far:
It's still a work in progress, but I'm enjoying the process.
But I have another challenge....
Because Ghost is so new, there's extremely limited functionality for exporting content. The developers created a means of importing content from other blogs, including Wordpress, so I was able to easily import all my content into Ghost when I set it up.
But there's NO functionality to export content from Ghost to other platforms. There's no conversations anywhere about doing this. It's like no one has even considered someone might want to move away from Ghost...
Since the original Wordpress content was corrupted, I'm going to have to manually recreate the content from Ghost, putting it into the new Wordpress setup. One post at a time.
Oh, joy.
But it's not too bad. It's giving me a chance to redo the categorisation, and also to get rid of old content that I don't want any more.
Anti-feminism will be disappearing from this blog.
All my anti-feminist stuff is going to be deleted. It's no longer going to be a part of this blog, and I won't be writing any more for this blog in future, either.
Instead, I'll transfer all that content to another dedicated blog for that purpose.
I can hear the sighs of relief from some of you already!
But of course, if any of you still want to read what I write with regards to the anti-feminist stuff, just send me an email and I'll add you to the appropriate mailing list when I set it up. (Thank you for your interest and support!)
In closing
I will be making sure there's no break in availability between this blog and the new blog. When all the content is transferred to the new Wordpress blog, and everything is set up as it needs to be, I'll do a simple DNS change of the A Record so that the alansjourney.com domain points to the new server. It should happen in an instant.
I've already got nameservers setup for the new blog, so there won't be any need to propogate changes over 1-2 days.
It's a lot of fun knowing how to make things work nice and smoothly - but I had to go through a lot of frustrating annoyance to get there! But for me, that's the best way.
Just when you thought things had settled down a bit, I up and change them again.
While I've been working on my new website (that I talked about here), I was doing some testing. I decided to test a Wordpress setup on a VPS and compare its loading speed to the Wordpress setup on my normal host provider. What I found amazed me.
But first, let me take you back to when I decided to use Ghost instead of Wordpress, and some of the reasons why I did that:
Wordpress was taking 10 seconds to load a page - and longer if more people were visiting - Ghost takes only a second or two...
And...
...there's just too much 'bloat' in Wordpress.Too many features, too many functions, and too much of a reliance on a database for my liking.
Well, I take it all back.
My feelings about Wordpress at the time were very much based on various points of frustration, mostly around the time it took for the site to load, followed by the fact I was unable to restore my Wordpress backup.
From You wouldn't believe what I've gone through:
...I found out that I had a third problem. Installing Ghost via Softaculous onto an Apache server was beset with problems, and unless you had direct admin access to the Apache server to do some really complicated things, it wasn't going to happen. (I didn't have that access.) Ghost really needed to be installed on a Unix/Linux server.
Ok, no problem, I thought. Since I can't install Ghost onto the same server that I'd installed Wordpress, then I'll just restore Wordpress and explore other options later. And that's when I ran into the fourth problem.
The Wordpress backup had corrupted and the blog could not be restored.
I got excited with playing with something new, and I went with it. It was further moved along when the Wordpress backup was corrupted and I couldn't restore my blog and needed to urgently develop another solution. Using Ghost was the most appropriate solution at the time.
However, my testing this past couple have days has given me a different perspective on the speed of Wordpress.
I setup a fresh Wordpress install on my old host provider's server. With no content it took about 5 seconds to load. Then I got an idea.
I setup a fresh Wordpress install on my VPS (virtual private server), and with no content it took about 1 second to load.
The Wordpress installation on the VPS gave me the same loading speed as the Ghost blog.
This surprised me greatly!
So after doing a lot more testing, using ping and tracert tools online to check ping returns and the number of server 'hops' between my location here in Australia and the two locations in America (my old hosting provider and the VPS provider), the evidence was conclusive.
Using the VPS to self-host a Wordpress blog would be very much faster than using my old hosting provider. Not only that, the speed of Wordpress was comparable to the speed of the Ghost blog.
This changed things for me.
After a couple months of using Ghost now, some of the things I don't like about it is that it doesn't allow posts to be searched or gathered according to Category or Tags. Ghost also doesn't have any Search functionality. And the last thing I don't like about it is that the simplicity of the Markdown language for content formatting is too simplistic for my needs.
So I've spent today setting up a new Wordpress installation of THIS blog on a VPS, and finding a good theme to use, and then configuring it according to my needs. Here's a small screenshot of it so far:
It's still a work in progress, but I'm enjoying the process.
But I have another challenge....
Because Ghost is so new, there's extremely limited functionality for exporting content. The developers created a means of importing content from other blogs, including Wordpress, so I was able to easily import all my content into Ghost when I set it up.
But there's NO functionality to export content from Ghost to other platforms. There's no conversations anywhere about doing this. It's like no one has even considered someone might want to move away from Ghost...
Since the original Wordpress content was corrupted, I'm going to have to manually recreate the content from Ghost, putting it into the new Wordpress setup. One post at a time.
Oh, joy.
But it's not too bad. It's giving me a chance to redo the categorisation, and also to get rid of old content that I don't want any more.
Anti-feminism will be disappearing from this blog.
All my anti-feminist stuff is going to be deleted. It's no longer going to be a part of this blog, and I won't be writing any more for this blog in future, either.
Instead, I'll transfer all that content to another dedicated blog for that purpose.
I can hear the sighs of relief from some of you already!
But of course, if any of you still want to read what I write with regards to the anti-feminist stuff, just send me an email and I'll add you to the appropriate mailing list when I set it up. (Thank you for your interest and support!)
In closing
I will be making sure there's no break in availability between this blog and the new blog. When all the content is transferred to the new Wordpress blog, and everything is set up as it needs to be, I'll do a simple DNS change of the A Record so that the alansjourney.com domain points to the new server. It should happen in an instant.
I've already got nameservers setup for the new blog, so there won't be any need to propogate changes over 1-2 days.
It's a lot of fun knowing how to make things work nice and smoothly - but I had to go through a lot of frustrating annoyance to get there! But for me, that's the best way.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
An eBook is coming
I woke up this morning with an idea on my mind, and as a result I've spent all day putting the idea into an eBook. I'll edit it over the next day or so and then publish it.
I'm going to use it as an incentive. If visitors to this site sign up to my mailing list, I'll give them the eBook as a free gift.
All of my current mailing list subscribers will be able to get a copy. Maybe they'll even be able to provide me with some feedback and help me improve it for future versions.
I'm not sure how well it'll be received, but I think it will be reflective of what this site is all about, as well as what I want to present to the world.
I'm excited about it!
At the beginning of this year I wrote 6 Predictions For My Life In 2014, and one of the predictions was:
Even though I predicted that I'd have 3 eBooks available over the 12 months of 2014, I'm thinking that it's going to be achievable to make that one eBook per month.
I like that idea.
But I've got a question for you.
Is there anything that I've written on this blog that you would like me to turn into an eBook? Anything you'd like me to write more of? I'm open to suggestions.
I'm going to use it as an incentive. If visitors to this site sign up to my mailing list, I'll give them the eBook as a free gift.
All of my current mailing list subscribers will be able to get a copy. Maybe they'll even be able to provide me with some feedback and help me improve it for future versions.
I'm not sure how well it'll be received, but I think it will be reflective of what this site is all about, as well as what I want to present to the world.
I'm excited about it!
At the beginning of this year I wrote 6 Predictions For My Life In 2014, and one of the predictions was:
I will have 3 eBooks available for people to purchase.
To have 3 eBooks available in 12 months, I'll aim for 1 eBook per every 4 months.
Even though I predicted that I'd have 3 eBooks available over the 12 months of 2014, I'm thinking that it's going to be achievable to make that one eBook per month.
I like that idea.
But I've got a question for you.
Is there anything that I've written on this blog that you would like me to turn into an eBook? Anything you'd like me to write more of? I'm open to suggestions.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Experimenting with a new writing style
Some of the common 'how to write' suggestions I've seen here and there over the years, scattered around the internet, has been to 'write to one person'. Write as if you're writing a letter to someone. Make it personal. Make it about you and the one person you're writing to.
So I'm going to be experimenting with that. I'm going to write for a while as if I'm writing to a friend, and see where it takes me.
It could be a bit challenging though. Which friend do I write to? Well, that probably depends on the topic I'm writing about. Different people in my life relate to different topics, so I'll think of each of them when I write about a topic relative to them.
To be honest, I don't think it'll be too much different to how I've already been writing so far. Some of my best articles in the past have been originally written to friends in emails, which I then thought was awesome enough to put on my blog, and so I did.
The difference will be that I'm going to try and make it a bit more personal. I'll be thinking about YOU when I write it. Whoever you are, I'll be writing to you.
I think that I've proven to myself over the past couple of months that I can write about lots of different topics on a daily basis, consistently, of at least 500 words a day. I'm pretty excited about how easy that's become for me.
What I think I'm doing now is stepping up a bit. Stretching the comfort zone, and exploring other ways of writing. I might find something that works better for me, or I might find that it just doesn't. But it might lead to yet another style that I experiment with instead. It's all part of the journey.
I did that years ago. I remember exploring a style of writing that was as if it was a conversation between myself and a friend, and I would explore a topic through the written conversation. It was like writing a conversation between two people in a fiction book, but the conversation had a meaning that I wanted to present.
I ended up giving up, because putting a meaningful article into a written conversation made the posts about 5 times longer than they would have been if it was just an article. I enjoyed writing them, but people didn't enjoy reading them. So I discontinued that experiment after only 3 or 4 attempts.
Maybe this will be similar. But I have to try it to find out.
So I'm going to be experimenting with that. I'm going to write for a while as if I'm writing to a friend, and see where it takes me.
It could be a bit challenging though. Which friend do I write to? Well, that probably depends on the topic I'm writing about. Different people in my life relate to different topics, so I'll think of each of them when I write about a topic relative to them.
To be honest, I don't think it'll be too much different to how I've already been writing so far. Some of my best articles in the past have been originally written to friends in emails, which I then thought was awesome enough to put on my blog, and so I did.
The difference will be that I'm going to try and make it a bit more personal. I'll be thinking about YOU when I write it. Whoever you are, I'll be writing to you.
I think that I've proven to myself over the past couple of months that I can write about lots of different topics on a daily basis, consistently, of at least 500 words a day. I'm pretty excited about how easy that's become for me.
What I think I'm doing now is stepping up a bit. Stretching the comfort zone, and exploring other ways of writing. I might find something that works better for me, or I might find that it just doesn't. But it might lead to yet another style that I experiment with instead. It's all part of the journey.
I did that years ago. I remember exploring a style of writing that was as if it was a conversation between myself and a friend, and I would explore a topic through the written conversation. It was like writing a conversation between two people in a fiction book, but the conversation had a meaning that I wanted to present.
I ended up giving up, because putting a meaningful article into a written conversation made the posts about 5 times longer than they would have been if it was just an article. I enjoyed writing them, but people didn't enjoy reading them. So I discontinued that experiment after only 3 or 4 attempts.
Maybe this will be similar. But I have to try it to find out.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
The Writer's Manifesto
I am a writer, and this is my manifesto.
I write to explore the inner workings of my mind, and to share what I learn from my life and my experiences with others.
I am tired of ignoring my true calling and my special talents for the sake of conformity and pleasing others, in a world where so many people are afraid to live their dreams.
My purpose in life is to write in ways that help others find the courage to make better choices for their lives, to bring about their success as much as I bring about my own.
The world is constantly changing, and those of us who don't change with it will be left behind. I write to help others change too. I want people to join me, rather than be left behind.
Today I embrace my most inner desires to be creative, authentic, admired and notoriously brave with what I choose to write.
I am now defining and choosing my life purpose as a writer and I will choose activities and opportunities in my life that are aligned with that purpose.
I am ready and open to follow the paths of success which are unfolding in front of me at this very moment.
As I write these words, the right people and the right circumstances are shifting to recognise my passion and ingenuity, as the universe itself conspires to bring me the perfect opportunities for wealth, happiness, peace and freedom.
I will not be deviated from my passion for writing and self-expression. And I will not shrink when people diminish or laugh at my writing and my ambitions.
I am a deserving, admired and successful writer.
So it is, and so it will be.
Saturday, January 11, 2014
9 Steps to Becoming a Successful Writer
There's billions of web pages out there, written by millions of people who have something to say, all of them thinking it would be great to become a successful writer. Their work is important to them, and they want their work to be important to others too. But over time they get discouraged, because their writing isn't getting the attention they wanted or the audience they expected. They give up. As the years pass they'll remember with sadness about their failed attempts at writing, and wonder if things could have been different.
Yes, things could very well have been different.
This post started when I found a few posts yesterday in my 'saved for later' archive about how to be a better writer. I started reading them this morning, thinking that I'd use them as reference material for my own post about how to be a better writer.
But as I was reading them, I realised something. They all say the same things. And their words started to blur together and I got bored. And I realised that this post I'm writing now will say the same thing too.
Everything that can be written has already been written.
So I closed the tabs of those other posts and deleted the bookmarks. I don't need their words. I'll use my own. And this leads us to the first tip.
1. Don't worry about writing things that have already been written
It doesn't matter that you want to write about a topic others have already written about. Those topics haven't been written with your unique perspective based on your own unique observations and experiences in life. No one else in the world can write about anything quite like how you can write about it. No one else has your life's experiences or the thoughts in your mind that shape your use of these words.
If you have something you want to write about, just start writing. Be original in what you write about. Be informative, entertaining, enlightening, funny... Be whatever is natural to you.
2. Give people answers to YOUR questions
People are looking for answers to their questions. That's why Google, Bing and Yahoo! are popular search engines. Every time a search engine is used, someone is asking a question and they're looking for answers. The only reason people will come to your website is because their search for answers has led them to you.
Write about what you've learned. Write about the questions you've had and the answers you've found. Write about how others can apply your answers to their own life, so they can achieve similar outcomes to you.
What you write will be discovered by people who are searching for answers to the same questions. They'll instantly connect with you because they'll see that they're not alone in their search. You've written about how you share their pain or their frustration, and you've found answers to their questions that have resulted in successful outcomes for you, and which might result in successful outcomes for them too. They'll love you for sharing your journey and your achievements with them, and they'll be inspired to share your writing with others too.
3. Make the time
One of the biggest issues most aspiring writers have is finding the time to write. They might have a busy career as well as a busy family, and by the end of the day they're completely and absolutely exhausted. All they can do is watch an hour of TV at the end of the night before collapsing into bed and hopefully getting enough sleep to give them energy to make it through another day tomorrow. Or they might have a very busy lifestyle that leaves them with no time for writing, even though they'd really like to find the time.
It's about priorities. If you want to make writing your priority, then you'll make the time to write.
Don't watch TV at the end of the day. Write instead. If you're too tired to write at the end of the day, then don't watch TV and go to bed an hour earlier. Wake up the next morning an hour earlier at 5am before anyone else is up and spend an hour writing in the early hours of the morning.
If you do have the time but you've got bad habits or distracting hobbies that are preventing you from writing, then make careful and conscious decisions about your priorities in life. If other things are just more important to you than writing, then let go of your desire to be a writer. Stop beating yourself up about it. It's just not important enough to you. Maybe in a few years it will be, but until then, enjoy your life for what it is now. It might be that the experiences you're enjoying now can lend themselves to creating better writing material in the future.
However, if you decide that writing is more important than the distractions you have, then you absolutely must let go of those distractions. Like me, you might decide to stop using Facebook so that you can have more time to write. Or you might stop playing that computer game so often. Or you might spend a few hours less with your drinking buddies each week so you can have more time to write.
If something is important to you, you'll make the time for it. Just work out what you can do less of, so that you can spend that extra time doing more writing.
4. Write every single day
This definitely leads on from making the time. Don't make the time once a month, or once a week - it suggests you're not really serious about it.Make the time at least once a day.
If you want to be successful at writing, you have to be serious about writing.
Write every day. Write a few times a day. Write at least 250 words a day until you develop the habit of writing every day, and then decide if you want to write 500 words a day. Or 1000 words a day.
Or, like me, you can throw yourself into the deep end and start writing 1000 words a day for 30 days until it becomes a habit, and then you can decide if you want to write less or keep it up.
But write every single day. You won't become successful at writing until you put a LOT of effort into practicing it.
5. Learn how to create more interest in your writing
It's no good writing every day if no one is finding and reading what you write. So to become successful you really have to start looking into how you can improve not only your writing, but also how you're delivering your writing, and how people can find it.
To that end you need to do the following:
- have your own website or blog to store your writing
- read other people's writing every day, see how they write, what makes it interesting or compelling, and what you can learn from their work
- learn how to write titles that suggest 'the answers to your questions are in here'
- make your first paragraph a compelling 'hook' to catch people and make them want to read the rest of your article or post
- learn 'search engine optimization' (SEO) techniques to use relevant keywords and phrases to help your writing get on to the first page of searches about your topic, making it easier for people to find
- integrate sharing functionality to encourage people to share your work with others in their favourite social networks
- engage with your readers who leave comments, being friendly and supportive
- take note of what people are searching for when they come to your site, and if it's aligned with what you're interested in writing about, then do more of those topics
- encourage visitors to join a mailing list to receive your updates in their Inbox
The more people you can get to find and be interested in your writing and engage with you, the more chances you'll have of building a loyal and ever-expanding audience. The bigger your audience, the more chances you have of becoming 'a successful writer', because many of those people may want you to write for them too.
6. Seek opportunities to be paid to write for other people
Once you start becoming comfortable with:
- writing in your own unique way
- about how you've resolved questions unique to you
- while making it a priority in your life
- and doing it every single day
- in ways that are growing your audience
...then you're ready to start working on building monetary value in your writing.
It's all well and good to write for free, for nothing but the joy of it, but if you want to be successful then you have to build value into your writing. You have to make your writing so good that people will be happy to pay you for it.
The only way to do that is to start putting yourself out there to find clients who will pay you for your writing. You'll have to start off small, and you'll have very little confidence in people actually paying you for your writing, but they're out there, looking for writers to write for them.
Take advantage of opportunities that come your way, or seek opportunities by signing up to websites like fiverr, oDesk, eLance, etc ec. Become a freelance writer, web content developer, ghost writer, whatever you want. Just put yourself out there on these sites (and there are many others out there) so that you're offering your writing to people in exchange for money.
The reason for this is that you'll be forced to improve your writing so that more people are happier to pay you for it. You'll be forcing yourself to learn more about writing, and you'll practice more, so that you'll get better feedback on your profiles about how wonderful you are, so that you'll get more clients, so that you can receive more money for your work. Your confidence will increase, and the benefit will be a significant and speedy improvement in the quality of your writing.
Don't limit yourself to just writing blog posts for people, but also write articles, short stories, even novels if the opportunity presents itself. Focus on something that you're knowledgable about. Become a technical writer for software development websites, or an article writer for moms and babies websites, or a fiction ghostwriter for Star Trek novels. Whatever you have knowledge of, that you're intersted in and passionate about - there are people that will want to pay you for your words.
You can also consider writing eBooks to sell on your website, or to your mailing list subscribers, or even to Amazon so people can buy and read on their Kindles. Some of your articles can be turned into free giveaways to encourage people to sign up to your mailing list. You can also have a free mailing list for your post updates, and a 'premium' mailing list for people to pay you for receiving articles or information that will be of direct value to them, of a higher quality than what you put on your site for free.
There are many options and opportunities that can become available to you over time, once you develop your skills, your experience, and your 'portfolio' (or archive) of work. It's all entirely up to you, how much you learn, and how much you promote yourself.
Your work has value. People will pay you for it. But you have to learn how to present it in ways that they'll be willing to pay you for.
By the way, if you do a Google search for 'ways of making money from writing', you'll get about 2.95 BILLION results. It seems to be a question that a lot of people want answers to, so there's no end of resources you can find that will help you find how to make money from your writing. I'll even do a post about it myself in the near future, because not a single one of those 2.95 billion results will be the same as how I'll write about it (see #1 above).
7. Don't ever give up.
For everything you aspire to achieving in life, as long as it's achievable the only reason you would fail to achieve it is if you give up.
"We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." - Winston Churchill, British PM, World War 2
Don't ever give up on your writing. Keep going. Work through the frustrations, the self-doubt and the insecurities you feel about what you're doing. Ignore the naysayers around you (or in your own mind) who say you won't succeed, because they tried years ago and they didn't succeed so they gave up and they think the same will be true for you. Their life is not your life. They failed because they gave up. Don't you ever give up.
8. Quit your day job when your writing income covers your weekly expenses
You don't need your writing to be earning you as much as your day job pays you, you just need it be consistently covering your weekly expenses. Once you reach that point, you no longer need your day job.
By this stage, you've managed to build your income only from the time you've been able to devote to it outside of your normal daily responsibilities and your normal day job. Your 'part time' writing has now become something that can replace your day job as your primary source of income.
Of course, you can still keep your day job if you want to, but if you let it go you'll suddenly have a spare 8 hours a day - imagine all that spare time you can put into your writing to expand upon it and even increase your income even further.
9. Enjoy your success
You're a successful writer now. Your primary source of income comes from your writing. You're doing it for love and, surprisingly, you're receiving an income from it! You have more time in your life to give to other things that are important to you, and you're not tied down to a 'day job' that you hate. You're 'location independent' and can travel while still being able to write on your laptop from anywhere in the world if you want to.
Congratulations! Well done. I applaud you for becoming a succcessful writer. It took a lot of hard work, time and dedication to get to this point. You deserve it.
Disclaimer: I'm not a successful writer yet, but I'm working on it, and this article pretty much outlines how I intend becoming successful. In writing about what's important for me and how I intend going about things, while also providing answers for other people at the same time.
“We teach best what we most need to learn.” - Richard Bach
Friday, January 10, 2014
The quandaries of online work
I'm really just starting out as an online writer (or 'web content developer' as I'm enjoying calling myself now), but I'm already seeing some of the interesting challenges with promoting my services through a variety of different locations.
I received some work via fiverr.com today, which is the site that inspired me to provide 'direct to client' services instead of having them keep 20% of my income. But I haven't closed my account with them or anything, so when I got this extra work I was faced with a quandary.
Do I want to continue doing work through a site that I don't like, for my own reasons, or is 80% of something better than 100% of nothing?
After debating it with myself, I came to an agreement with myself that it certainly would be better to get 80% of something rather than 100% of nothing.
So it's great that I'm still getting work through fiverr.com. It's also great that I'm offering services direct to clients. Doing it directly to the client is better for me, but it's nice having the extra sources adding to the total.
It helped me come to an understanding with myself, to get past certain morals that can get in the way, and even expand upon those different sources, signing up with different sites to get writing work through as many as I can.
The more the merrier!
I need to get as much work as I can, from as many different locations as I can, to maximise my potential income from this venture I'm engaging in.
I also realised tonight that being out of work and finding it difficult to get a 'day job' at the moment is forcing me to chase my dreams.
When I wrote my predictions for my life in 2014, #1 was:
My plan is moving forward.
I received some work via fiverr.com today, which is the site that inspired me to provide 'direct to client' services instead of having them keep 20% of my income. But I haven't closed my account with them or anything, so when I got this extra work I was faced with a quandary.
Do I want to continue doing work through a site that I don't like, for my own reasons, or is 80% of something better than 100% of nothing?
After debating it with myself, I came to an agreement with myself that it certainly would be better to get 80% of something rather than 100% of nothing.
So it's great that I'm still getting work through fiverr.com. It's also great that I'm offering services direct to clients. Doing it directly to the client is better for me, but it's nice having the extra sources adding to the total.
It helped me come to an understanding with myself, to get past certain morals that can get in the way, and even expand upon those different sources, signing up with different sites to get writing work through as many as I can.
The more the merrier!
I need to get as much work as I can, from as many different locations as I can, to maximise my potential income from this venture I'm engaging in.
I also realised tonight that being out of work and finding it difficult to get a 'day job' at the moment is forcing me to chase my dreams.
When I wrote my predictions for my life in 2014, #1 was:
I'll be earning a minimum of $500 a week from paid online writing.
My plan is moving forward.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Saving articles over the years
I was browsing my 'saved for later' articles in Feedly, which is what I use since Google Reader was switched off in July of 2013. Thankfully, all the RSS feeds and 'saved for later' articles I'd saved over the years were transferred over from Google Reader into Feedly, which I'm very grateful for.
Just as a side note - Feedly is awesome. You should use it too. (Maybe I'll do another post in the near future about why you should use it too...)
Anyway, to continue...
I was just browsing some of my recent saves this morning, when I wondered how far back they go.
I was surprised to see that they go all the way back to 2007. I have articles that I've 'saved for later' dating back 7 years. Lots of articles.
The reason I saved them was because, when I read them at the time, they made me feel like writing about them in some fashion, or writing a post somewhat unrelated but inspired by them. But for 99% of these 'saved for later' articles, I never got around to following up on them.
So they've stayed there, residing in my 'saved for later' archive in Google Reader over the years. And then when Reader died and was taken up by Feedly, they were all transferred over. Nice!
I really should go through them and read them, one by one. Unsave the ones that are no longer relevant, and keep the ones that are.
They'll be a good source of inspiration when I need something to write about.
Assuming I don't forget about them for another 7 years....
Just as a side note - Feedly is awesome. You should use it too. (Maybe I'll do another post in the near future about why you should use it too...)
Anyway, to continue...
I was just browsing some of my recent saves this morning, when I wondered how far back they go.
I was surprised to see that they go all the way back to 2007. I have articles that I've 'saved for later' dating back 7 years. Lots of articles.
The reason I saved them was because, when I read them at the time, they made me feel like writing about them in some fashion, or writing a post somewhat unrelated but inspired by them. But for 99% of these 'saved for later' articles, I never got around to following up on them.
So they've stayed there, residing in my 'saved for later' archive in Google Reader over the years. And then when Reader died and was taken up by Feedly, they were all transferred over. Nice!
I really should go through them and read them, one by one. Unsave the ones that are no longer relevant, and keep the ones that are.
They'll be a good source of inspiration when I need something to write about.
Assuming I don't forget about them for another 7 years....
Monday, January 6, 2014
Less is more
I've been experimenting over the past couple months with writing 1000 words a day. I found that I didn't like that, feeling it was too long. So I dropped it to a minimum of 500 words a day. That felt a lot better.
Sometimes I write more than that, like my most recent post, Find the D/s balance in relationships, a nice 2,375 words.
But as I write, and as I read and learn more about writing, I'm feeling that the concept of 'less is more' is a much better one than 'try to write hundreds or thousands of words and hope to keep people interested...'
I've also found that sometimes I just want to write a few sentences, or a paragraph or two, but I discourage myself with the fact they're not the minimum 500 words, so I avoid writing them.
But what if they become some of my best and most discussed posts? What if the beauty and the quality is also in the simplicity?
I was just reading this post, 5 Quick-Start Tips To Help Improve Your Writing, and #2 talked about 'keep it short'. It led to this post, The 400 word promise, which led to The beauty of small.
This point is probably the most applicable for me:
I know that I'm not a lazy blogger, but I also know many of my readers are busy readers. The longer a post is, the less chance there is that they'll read all of it.
I also know that this is part of the reason for writing 500 or 1000 word posts every day - to improve my writing so that it's compelling and encourages the reader to keep reading.
But what if they just don't have the time? What if they just want the message without all the fluff?
These are questions I ask myself as I write every day. I want to become a better writer, but is a minimum of 500 words every day the only way?
I don't think so. In fact, I knew it wasn't 'the way' even when I started. It's just a methodology, a style, a pattern of behaviour designed to encourage and enforce better writing on a regular basis.
One of the things I don't ever want to do is force myself into a corner with just one way of doing things, and end up being blind to other ways. I don't want to lose interest in my writing because I restrict myself.
And I've realised today that I don't want to prevent the beauty that can come from simplicity by forcing myself to choose complex instead.
So I'm once again changing my rules. I can do that, 'cause I'm in the one in charge here.
This is about my journey, and my writing is a journey. It's going to change over time.
I've always liked the idea of choosing simplicity. I like the idea of improving my writing too, so this 'evolution' of how I want to do things is going to be as follows:
I'll write whatever the hell I want, however long I want it. And I'll write more than one post a day, if I feel like it.
And now this post is 563 words. That's funny.
Sometimes I write more than that, like my most recent post, Find the D/s balance in relationships, a nice 2,375 words.
But as I write, and as I read and learn more about writing, I'm feeling that the concept of 'less is more' is a much better one than 'try to write hundreds or thousands of words and hope to keep people interested...'
I've also found that sometimes I just want to write a few sentences, or a paragraph or two, but I discourage myself with the fact they're not the minimum 500 words, so I avoid writing them.
But what if they become some of my best and most discussed posts? What if the beauty and the quality is also in the simplicity?
I was just reading this post, 5 Quick-Start Tips To Help Improve Your Writing, and #2 talked about 'keep it short'. It led to this post, The 400 word promise, which led to The beauty of small.
This point is probably the most applicable for me:
Smaller posts don’t take as much time to write or read, which is good for a lazy blogger. And a busy reader.
I know that I'm not a lazy blogger, but I also know many of my readers are busy readers. The longer a post is, the less chance there is that they'll read all of it.
I also know that this is part of the reason for writing 500 or 1000 word posts every day - to improve my writing so that it's compelling and encourages the reader to keep reading.
But what if they just don't have the time? What if they just want the message without all the fluff?
These are questions I ask myself as I write every day. I want to become a better writer, but is a minimum of 500 words every day the only way?
I don't think so. In fact, I knew it wasn't 'the way' even when I started. It's just a methodology, a style, a pattern of behaviour designed to encourage and enforce better writing on a regular basis.
One of the things I don't ever want to do is force myself into a corner with just one way of doing things, and end up being blind to other ways. I don't want to lose interest in my writing because I restrict myself.
And I've realised today that I don't want to prevent the beauty that can come from simplicity by forcing myself to choose complex instead.
So I'm once again changing my rules. I can do that, 'cause I'm in the one in charge here.
This is about my journey, and my writing is a journey. It's going to change over time.
I've always liked the idea of choosing simplicity. I like the idea of improving my writing too, so this 'evolution' of how I want to do things is going to be as follows:
I'll write whatever the hell I want, however long I want it. And I'll write more than one post a day, if I feel like it.
And now this post is 563 words. That's funny.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
6 Predictions for my life in 2014
It's still New Year's Eve as I write this. It's almost 10pm and I'm sitting in bed with the laptop. I don't even have a drink with me. All my friends are doing their own thing this evening, so it's just me and my wife. One of my friends was going to come over for some drinks, but he hasn't shown up or texted to let me know what's going on.
So I'm sitting in bed writing to you instead.
Both my wife and I are introverts and proud of it, so if either of us have a choice, then we prefer the quiet, peaceful, calm choice.
While it's great to spend time with friends, if there's no friends to spend time with then we find it's also great to just spend time by ourselves; either doing something together, or doing our own things independently, or doing our own things together. Like right now.
It's New Year's Eve and she's watching Chinese TV shows over the internet on her laptop. And I'm writing to you.
I've already written my obligatory new year's eve post, Goodbye 2013, hello 2014, but I wanted to write something else. I wanted to write about my predictions for this coming year for me, which I intend to review at the end of 2014.
I believe that our life's experiences are based on our thoughts leading to actions, leading to outcomes. So I also believe that if we spend time with our thoughts, working out what we want to act upon, then we can dictate outcomes with a better degree of accuracy than if we act without thinking.
So I want to make 2014 a more thoughtful, determined year, and I'm starting now by putting into motion the thoughts that will lead to actions, which I plan on leading to outcomes.
My wife thinks these are my New Year's Resolutions. Maybe she's right. But I still prefer to treat them as predictions of my desired outcomes for 2014.
These are the outcomes that I predict I will achieve by the end of 2014:
Outcome 1: I'll be earning a minimum of $500 a week from paid online writing.
I say 'minimum' because I don't want to limit my prediction. The sky's the limit!
I've already started earning a bit of money from content writing for website developers, helping them create website content for their clients. I have one company I've started working with here in Canberra (a few weeks ago), and I started talking to another company today, based in Sydney. They're both seeking to provide websites for clients, and they need someone who's good at writing content to flesh out website pages for those clients. That's where I come in.
My thinking is that as long as I continue doing what I've started, and seeking more and more opportunities to build upon what I'm doing, that I'll see this prediction come true.
Outcome 2: I will have 3 eBooks available for people to purchase.
To have 3 eBooks available in 12 months, I'll aim for 1 eBook per every 4 months.
What will they be about? I expect they'll be related to the theme of this blog - my journey in life.
Outcome 3: I will have a baby [boy? girl?] and my family life will begin.
One of the things I don't want to do is have children as a result of an accidental pregnancy. Now that we're married, my wife and I are planning to have our first child in the next 12 months. We think twins would be a great outcome, but we plan on having no more than two children, with at most a 2 year break between them.
Outcome 4: I will have travelled to New Zealand for our honeymoon, as well as to China for a holiday.
Due to 2013 being a particularly tough year, we haven't been able to afford a honeymoon. So we're looking forward to being able to go to New Zealand for our honeymoon in 2014.
I used to live there for a period, from 2000 to 2007. It's the most beautiful country on Earth, and I want to take my wife to see it and appreciate its beauty as much as I do. She loves Lord of the Rings as well as The Hobbit, so she already has her own motivations for seeing the country.
Her parents are in China, and we both want to go there not just to see them, but to see more of the country. She wants to show me around her home, and I want to see more of one of the most fascinating countries in the world. We'll go to Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
Outcome 5: I will have written a minimum of 200,000 words for the year.
With my intention to write at least 500 words a day, that's at least 182,500 words over 365 days. With some extra words from those 1000 word posts I'll still continue to do (this one is at 810 words right now), as well as the eBooks I'll be writing, I think 200,000 words is quite a reasonable outcome over a 12 month period.
With an average book being over 40,000 words, it means I'll have written enough for 5 books...
Outcome 6: I will have a plan for how I can travel around the world, with a family, while earning money from the internet, while disabled.
That's my ultimate goal right now: to travel the world, despite my disability, while being able to afford such a life with money earned from internet businesses, and having a wife and children along for the ride.
Others do it, so I'm sure I can too.
Remember, this outcome is simply to have a plan in place. For me, that requires a lot of research into how I can make it happen, and then writing it out in a way that I can make it happen for me, while making sure that all requirements are also in place to make it happen.
Once that's done, I think 2015 will be a very interesting year indeed.
What about you? What are your predictions - or resolutions - for your life in 2014?
As a final note
I like to believe that what we do on New Year's Eve sets the tone for what we do in the following year.
Tonight I've written over 1000 words with this post so far, and I've finished at 11:45pm. I strongly feel that this has set a wonderfully positive foundation for what I'll be doing over the next 12 months.
My darling wife has to work tomorrow, so she's already gone to sleep.
This isn't us, but it's almost exactly like this exact moment. :)
I'm going to have a shower and join her. We'll sleep blissfully into the new year.
All the best to you and your loved ones for 2014. I wish you all the very best.
So I'm sitting in bed writing to you instead.
Both my wife and I are introverts and proud of it, so if either of us have a choice, then we prefer the quiet, peaceful, calm choice.
While it's great to spend time with friends, if there's no friends to spend time with then we find it's also great to just spend time by ourselves; either doing something together, or doing our own things independently, or doing our own things together. Like right now.
It's New Year's Eve and she's watching Chinese TV shows over the internet on her laptop. And I'm writing to you.
I've already written my obligatory new year's eve post, Goodbye 2013, hello 2014, but I wanted to write something else. I wanted to write about my predictions for this coming year for me, which I intend to review at the end of 2014.
I believe that our life's experiences are based on our thoughts leading to actions, leading to outcomes. So I also believe that if we spend time with our thoughts, working out what we want to act upon, then we can dictate outcomes with a better degree of accuracy than if we act without thinking.
So I want to make 2014 a more thoughtful, determined year, and I'm starting now by putting into motion the thoughts that will lead to actions, which I plan on leading to outcomes.
My wife thinks these are my New Year's Resolutions. Maybe she's right. But I still prefer to treat them as predictions of my desired outcomes for 2014.
These are the outcomes that I predict I will achieve by the end of 2014:
Outcome 1: I'll be earning a minimum of $500 a week from paid online writing.
I say 'minimum' because I don't want to limit my prediction. The sky's the limit!
I've already started earning a bit of money from content writing for website developers, helping them create website content for their clients. I have one company I've started working with here in Canberra (a few weeks ago), and I started talking to another company today, based in Sydney. They're both seeking to provide websites for clients, and they need someone who's good at writing content to flesh out website pages for those clients. That's where I come in.
My thinking is that as long as I continue doing what I've started, and seeking more and more opportunities to build upon what I'm doing, that I'll see this prediction come true.
Outcome 2: I will have 3 eBooks available for people to purchase.
To have 3 eBooks available in 12 months, I'll aim for 1 eBook per every 4 months.
What will they be about? I expect they'll be related to the theme of this blog - my journey in life.
Outcome 3: I will have a baby [boy? girl?] and my family life will begin.
One of the things I don't want to do is have children as a result of an accidental pregnancy. Now that we're married, my wife and I are planning to have our first child in the next 12 months. We think twins would be a great outcome, but we plan on having no more than two children, with at most a 2 year break between them.
Outcome 4: I will have travelled to New Zealand for our honeymoon, as well as to China for a holiday.
Due to 2013 being a particularly tough year, we haven't been able to afford a honeymoon. So we're looking forward to being able to go to New Zealand for our honeymoon in 2014.
I used to live there for a period, from 2000 to 2007. It's the most beautiful country on Earth, and I want to take my wife to see it and appreciate its beauty as much as I do. She loves Lord of the Rings as well as The Hobbit, so she already has her own motivations for seeing the country.
Her parents are in China, and we both want to go there not just to see them, but to see more of the country. She wants to show me around her home, and I want to see more of one of the most fascinating countries in the world. We'll go to Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
Outcome 5: I will have written a minimum of 200,000 words for the year.
With my intention to write at least 500 words a day, that's at least 182,500 words over 365 days. With some extra words from those 1000 word posts I'll still continue to do (this one is at 810 words right now), as well as the eBooks I'll be writing, I think 200,000 words is quite a reasonable outcome over a 12 month period.
With an average book being over 40,000 words, it means I'll have written enough for 5 books...
Outcome 6: I will have a plan for how I can travel around the world, with a family, while earning money from the internet, while disabled.
That's my ultimate goal right now: to travel the world, despite my disability, while being able to afford such a life with money earned from internet businesses, and having a wife and children along for the ride.
Others do it, so I'm sure I can too.
Remember, this outcome is simply to have a plan in place. For me, that requires a lot of research into how I can make it happen, and then writing it out in a way that I can make it happen for me, while making sure that all requirements are also in place to make it happen.
Once that's done, I think 2015 will be a very interesting year indeed.
What about you? What are your predictions - or resolutions - for your life in 2014?
As a final note
I like to believe that what we do on New Year's Eve sets the tone for what we do in the following year.
Tonight I've written over 1000 words with this post so far, and I've finished at 11:45pm. I strongly feel that this has set a wonderfully positive foundation for what I'll be doing over the next 12 months.
My darling wife has to work tomorrow, so she's already gone to sleep.
This isn't us, but it's almost exactly like this exact moment. :)
I'm going to have a shower and join her. We'll sleep blissfully into the new year.
All the best to you and your loved ones for 2014. I wish you all the very best.
Friday, December 27, 2013
Improving my life with Google+
After disconnecting from Facebook the other day, I redesigned this blog's sidebar to the left so that Facebook Likes are no longer an option. Since I'm not active there, there's no point promoting it...
Instead, I enhanced my Google+ badge, but pointing it to my personal profile on G+ instead of my page. I decided that I'll be integrating this blog as myself on G+, rather than as a separate page.
This is all about me, personal, raw... and I'm going to keep it that way.
I also spent some time today going through the past month's activity on my stream and catching up on everyone that's active, and unfollowing those who aren't sharing anything of value to me any more.
We all change as we go through our life experiences, and what's of value to us one day will become of no value at all another day, months or years down the track. Who we are changes over time.
As Doctor Who said to me last night, in the 2013 Christmas Special:
I remember who I used to be, back when some of the people I was following on G+ were of interest to me. But I'm different now, and what I'm interested in reading now is different too.
So some people got dropped, others remained. Interestingly, one of those I unfollowed had over 2 million followers. It made me pause - if they had so many followers, surely they had so much of value? But I took another look through their personal stream and thought, 'Nope. Not at all.' And happily unfollowed them.
My stream of updates that I'm seeing is now a lot tidier to me, and a lot more focused on the things that actually interest me.
It's good to be who I am today.
We all change
My journey in life is also about my changes in life. As I have new experiences, they change me. Every day, in every way, I change, bit by bit.
I endeavour to make sure those changes are positive and worthwhile.
As I say to my wife when she complains about something she wants me to change - will it improve me, or my life, or our relationship? If it doesn't fit into those parameters, then I don't see any need for me to make a change that she wants. We'll talk about it, and work through why such a change is important to her, but I'm not going to change who I am just on a whim, even if it's my wife's whim.
If something is not improving me, my life or my relationship with my wife, then I'm not likely to see the value of maintaining it or adopting it into my life.
And the same for social media.
It's why I left Facebook. It wasn't making me a better person, and it wasn't making my life better, and it wasn't improving my relationship. So why bother with it?
If something is not helping you, then it's probably hindering you.
Better to remove it from your life to make room for other things that can be more helpful for you.
My interaction with Google+ is helping me improve my life, because it's giving me a greater audience to provide me with feedback and insight about things that are important to me.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell.
As someone that wants to improve my writing and my potential audience, Google+ is far better for me than Facebook.
After I quit Facebook, someone asked me, "How does g+ differ from Facebook in the essential time sapping though?" I replied with:
Since then, I've worked out that removing Facebook as a time waster has allowed me to focus on G+ as a means of improving my life, in ways that Facebook never can.
I'm happy with that.
Instead, I enhanced my Google+ badge, but pointing it to my personal profile on G+ instead of my page. I decided that I'll be integrating this blog as myself on G+, rather than as a separate page.
This is all about me, personal, raw... and I'm going to keep it that way.
I also spent some time today going through the past month's activity on my stream and catching up on everyone that's active, and unfollowing those who aren't sharing anything of value to me any more.
We all change as we go through our life experiences, and what's of value to us one day will become of no value at all another day, months or years down the track. Who we are changes over time.
As Doctor Who said to me last night, in the 2013 Christmas Special:
"...times change, and so must I… We all change. When you think about it, we are all different people, all through our lives and that’s okay, that’s good! You've gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be."
I remember who I used to be, back when some of the people I was following on G+ were of interest to me. But I'm different now, and what I'm interested in reading now is different too.
So some people got dropped, others remained. Interestingly, one of those I unfollowed had over 2 million followers. It made me pause - if they had so many followers, surely they had so much of value? But I took another look through their personal stream and thought, 'Nope. Not at all.' And happily unfollowed them.
My stream of updates that I'm seeing is now a lot tidier to me, and a lot more focused on the things that actually interest me.
It's good to be who I am today.
We all change
My journey in life is also about my changes in life. As I have new experiences, they change me. Every day, in every way, I change, bit by bit.
I endeavour to make sure those changes are positive and worthwhile.
As I say to my wife when she complains about something she wants me to change - will it improve me, or my life, or our relationship? If it doesn't fit into those parameters, then I don't see any need for me to make a change that she wants. We'll talk about it, and work through why such a change is important to her, but I'm not going to change who I am just on a whim, even if it's my wife's whim.
If something is not improving me, my life or my relationship with my wife, then I'm not likely to see the value of maintaining it or adopting it into my life.
And the same for social media.
It's why I left Facebook. It wasn't making me a better person, and it wasn't making my life better, and it wasn't improving my relationship. So why bother with it?
If something is not helping you, then it's probably hindering you.
Better to remove it from your life to make room for other things that can be more helpful for you.
My interaction with Google+ is helping me improve my life, because it's giving me a greater audience to provide me with feedback and insight about things that are important to me.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell.
As someone that wants to improve my writing and my potential audience, Google+ is far better for me than Facebook.
After I quit Facebook, someone asked me, "How does g+ differ from Facebook in the essential time sapping though?" I replied with:
not much, but 1) there's more quality content on here than on Facebook, and 2) if there's 3 timewasters in your life, reducing one of them at least gives you back a third more time :)
Since then, I've worked out that removing Facebook as a time waster has allowed me to focus on G+ as a means of improving my life, in ways that Facebook never can.
I'm happy with that.
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Be gentle with yourself
This society we live in is very goal and results oriented. Look around you and you'll see deadlines, objectives, incentives and rewards. Sitting back and taking it easy is often frowned upon. People will tell you that you need to work hard to achieve your goals. If you're taking it easy, then you must be lazy, or something's wrong with you. But all of that is true only if you believe it is.
I began a writing project in early 2012 that included setting deadlines and goals for myself around a single topic. Then I spent time looking at the results so that I could measure the effectiveness of what I was doing against the goals and deadlines I had.
But that really wasn't working for me, not to mention just writing about a single topic, so I started to move away from doing that. The pressure of those deadlines was taking away my enjoyment of what I was doing. Instead of enjoying the writing and allowing my writing to come to me when I was inspired to do so, I was working to a deadline and forcing myself to find inspiration.
After a few months of this I ended up realising I needed to take a break.
What I really needed to take a break from was the expectations I was placing upon myself. I needed to stop thinking I should work to deadlines and objectives, and I needed to return to just enjoying the progression of my life.
Sometimes you just need to do what you feel like doing, instead of what you feel you have to do.
If you have a desire to do something, you should. Even if it feels like it's taking you away from the direction you originally want to go, you should definitely do it. Especially if you think it will be enjoyable and rewarding for you.
When you're doing things that your heart and mind just isn't into, and you feel like you could be doing something better - you're absolutely right. You really could be doing something better with your time, something that you're more interested in, that'll bring you more enjoyment.
Take a break from what's leaving you bored and unfulfilled, and do what interests you instead. Even if it's a distraction, like a game, you should do it. Don't beat yourself up about getting distracted from what you think you should be doing.
Be careful about procrastination though. You don't want to distract yourself by sabotaging your own efforts.
If your instincts are strongly telling you to take a break, follow your instincts. And when you do, you'll be refreshed and recharged by it. Let yourself do it for as long as you feel is right for you - however long that might be! You'll know when the time is right to go back to what you needed to be distracted from.
Be gentle on yourself. Don't believe the hype about objectives and deadlines in your personal life. Let yourself do something different when you feel like you should.
Go for a drive, play a game, read a book, see a movie, write a story, spend time with friends and family, have a bubble bath, meditate, talk to an animal, hug a tree, go for a swim, take a holiday, climb a mountain...
Whatever is in your heart, let yourself do it. And do it for as long as you feel you need to.
You might be surprised where it'll take you.
I began a writing project in early 2012 that included setting deadlines and goals for myself around a single topic. Then I spent time looking at the results so that I could measure the effectiveness of what I was doing against the goals and deadlines I had.
But that really wasn't working for me, not to mention just writing about a single topic, so I started to move away from doing that. The pressure of those deadlines was taking away my enjoyment of what I was doing. Instead of enjoying the writing and allowing my writing to come to me when I was inspired to do so, I was working to a deadline and forcing myself to find inspiration.
After a few months of this I ended up realising I needed to take a break.
What I really needed to take a break from was the expectations I was placing upon myself. I needed to stop thinking I should work to deadlines and objectives, and I needed to return to just enjoying the progression of my life.
Sometimes you just need to do what you feel like doing, instead of what you feel you have to do.
If you have a desire to do something, you should. Even if it feels like it's taking you away from the direction you originally want to go, you should definitely do it. Especially if you think it will be enjoyable and rewarding for you.
When you're doing things that your heart and mind just isn't into, and you feel like you could be doing something better - you're absolutely right. You really could be doing something better with your time, something that you're more interested in, that'll bring you more enjoyment.
Take a break from what's leaving you bored and unfulfilled, and do what interests you instead. Even if it's a distraction, like a game, you should do it. Don't beat yourself up about getting distracted from what you think you should be doing.
Be careful about procrastination though. You don't want to distract yourself by sabotaging your own efforts.
If your instincts are strongly telling you to take a break, follow your instincts. And when you do, you'll be refreshed and recharged by it. Let yourself do it for as long as you feel is right for you - however long that might be! You'll know when the time is right to go back to what you needed to be distracted from.
Be gentle on yourself. Don't believe the hype about objectives and deadlines in your personal life. Let yourself do something different when you feel like you should.
Go for a drive, play a game, read a book, see a movie, write a story, spend time with friends and family, have a bubble bath, meditate, talk to an animal, hug a tree, go for a swim, take a holiday, climb a mountain...
Whatever is in your heart, let yourself do it. And do it for as long as you feel you need to.
You might be surprised where it'll take you.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
An update on writing 1000 words every day
Writing 1000 words a day has been, to put it mildly, a struggle. It's because I'm somewhat of a perfectionist; I know I can't be PERFECT with my writing, but I always try to make it the best I think it can be. As a result, I spend more time on it than maybe I should, or I find it difficult to even find something interesting to write about in the first place.
I don't want it to be a stream of rubbish that has nothing of interest to anyone reading it, because ultimately, every bit of writing on this site is a reflection of me. I know that I'm going to be judged by whichever post a visitor happens to be reading. Whether it's about being anti-feminist, or about travel, politics, technology or just about life - it's sharing to the reader what my thoughts, feelings and beliefs are about those topics, and every article or post on this site is a window into my soul, into the very essence of who I am.
All readers will judge me on what they read. They'll judge me as knowing what I'm talking about, or not knowing. They'll judge me as being insightful or ignorant. They'll find interest in my writing, or they'll want to move on as fast as they can, to find something else more worthwhile for them.
One of my goals with writing is to become better. I WANT to be judged, but I also want feedback. I want people to tell me what they liked or didn't like about what they read; I want them to tell me what they want to see more of, or what they don't want to see. I want to know what part of my writing inspires people to do something more with their lives, or whether it just depresses or irritates them.
Writing 1000 words a day is part of that journey I'm on, to improve my ability to write, and to improve the content that I write.
But it's still a struggle. I know it's supposed to be. I know that if I burn through the struggle, it will become easier, and what I write will become more and more compelling over time. And that's what I'm counting on.
But in the meantime, I don't want to force you to navigate through all the rubbish of my mind, like this poor fellow:
Writing 1000 words a day is going to result in some of it being complete and utter rubbish. It won't make any sense, it won't be compelling, and it won't be interesting. Readers will read it and think to themselves, 'What the hell was he thinking?'
I'm not even sure I know how to let myself be happy with rubbish coming out of my fingers and onto the keyboard, into your mind. I'm not comfortable with you, the reader, receiving rubbish from me, the writer. I'm not comfortable with your judgements being negative, even though I know I can't please everyone all the time, so there's no point trying.
But still, I try.
506 words - that's how many I've written just now. I've reached the halfway point. Must keep going....
I didn't know when I started down this path of writing 1000 words a day what that actually meant. I found out after a week of doing it that 1000 words is actually 4 A4 pages of handwriting. Every day, I write 4-page essay about something.
Many people that try to do this, end up failing. End up giving up, or even shortening it. I did some research today about the different lengths of daily writing that people do, and that people recommend, and there's no real hard rules about it. Different people have different opinions about how much you should write every day.
Stephen King advocates 2000 words a day, but then he would - he doesn't do anything else with his time other than write.
Hmmm... Maybe that's the point. You see, I do other things with my time during the day, and then struggle with 1000 words. Maybe if I did nothing else but write, then it would be a lot easier for me.
That's probably true with anything, don't you think? If you could focus on it all day and every day, then it would very quickly become something easier to do.
So part of my own struggle is in finding the discipline within myself to not only write 1000 words a day, but to also make sure I spend all day doing it.
When I was doing something similar last year - but without the 1000 word minimum - I was forcing myself to write any number of words every day, but on a single topic. Doing this without any breaks was difficult, and got boring. It wasn't interesting enough, and I couldn't think up how to write about the same topic day after day, in different ways.
At least with different topics, I can find some variety, mix it up occasionally, and keep things somewhat interesting.
Which leads me to the 1000 words....
One of the things I'm acutely aware of is that most readers don't have the time or the interest in reading four pages of content on a daily basis, especially if some of the topics are of little interest, or even offensive.
Yes, I know that some of what I write is offensive to some people, but I'd like to refer you back to my earlier comment about not trying to please everyone all the time!
So I'm thinking of dropping the word limit. Instead of 1000 words a day, I'm thinking that I should make it only 500 words a day as the minimum, with no maximum limit. So if I feel like writing 1000 words - or even 2000 words if they come easily enough - then I can. But otherwise, I'm just going to focus on a minimum of 500 words.
The reason? Simply to assist with my motivation.
I had a break yesterday, where I didn't publish anything overnight. I just felt like having a break. I didn't want to stress myself into writing 1000 words because I absolutely didn't feel like it. So I took a break, and got back into it again today.
So that's my update on writing 1000 words. I hope you enjoyed it, and understanding a bit more of the thinking behind my journey with this.
Also, if you have any tips that you would like to recommend, please don't hesitate in leaving a comment. I'm completely open to any tips you'd feel happy to give me!
I don't want it to be a stream of rubbish that has nothing of interest to anyone reading it, because ultimately, every bit of writing on this site is a reflection of me. I know that I'm going to be judged by whichever post a visitor happens to be reading. Whether it's about being anti-feminist, or about travel, politics, technology or just about life - it's sharing to the reader what my thoughts, feelings and beliefs are about those topics, and every article or post on this site is a window into my soul, into the very essence of who I am.
All readers will judge me on what they read. They'll judge me as knowing what I'm talking about, or not knowing. They'll judge me as being insightful or ignorant. They'll find interest in my writing, or they'll want to move on as fast as they can, to find something else more worthwhile for them.
One of my goals with writing is to become better. I WANT to be judged, but I also want feedback. I want people to tell me what they liked or didn't like about what they read; I want them to tell me what they want to see more of, or what they don't want to see. I want to know what part of my writing inspires people to do something more with their lives, or whether it just depresses or irritates them.
Writing 1000 words a day is part of that journey I'm on, to improve my ability to write, and to improve the content that I write.
But it's still a struggle. I know it's supposed to be. I know that if I burn through the struggle, it will become easier, and what I write will become more and more compelling over time. And that's what I'm counting on.
But in the meantime, I don't want to force you to navigate through all the rubbish of my mind, like this poor fellow:
Writing 1000 words a day is going to result in some of it being complete and utter rubbish. It won't make any sense, it won't be compelling, and it won't be interesting. Readers will read it and think to themselves, 'What the hell was he thinking?'
I'm not even sure I know how to let myself be happy with rubbish coming out of my fingers and onto the keyboard, into your mind. I'm not comfortable with you, the reader, receiving rubbish from me, the writer. I'm not comfortable with your judgements being negative, even though I know I can't please everyone all the time, so there's no point trying.
But still, I try.
506 words - that's how many I've written just now. I've reached the halfway point. Must keep going....
I didn't know when I started down this path of writing 1000 words a day what that actually meant. I found out after a week of doing it that 1000 words is actually 4 A4 pages of handwriting. Every day, I write 4-page essay about something.
Many people that try to do this, end up failing. End up giving up, or even shortening it. I did some research today about the different lengths of daily writing that people do, and that people recommend, and there's no real hard rules about it. Different people have different opinions about how much you should write every day.
Stephen King advocates 2000 words a day, but then he would - he doesn't do anything else with his time other than write.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. - Stephen King
Hmmm... Maybe that's the point. You see, I do other things with my time during the day, and then struggle with 1000 words. Maybe if I did nothing else but write, then it would be a lot easier for me.
That's probably true with anything, don't you think? If you could focus on it all day and every day, then it would very quickly become something easier to do.
So part of my own struggle is in finding the discipline within myself to not only write 1000 words a day, but to also make sure I spend all day doing it.
When I was doing something similar last year - but without the 1000 word minimum - I was forcing myself to write any number of words every day, but on a single topic. Doing this without any breaks was difficult, and got boring. It wasn't interesting enough, and I couldn't think up how to write about the same topic day after day, in different ways.
At least with different topics, I can find some variety, mix it up occasionally, and keep things somewhat interesting.
Which leads me to the 1000 words....
One of the things I'm acutely aware of is that most readers don't have the time or the interest in reading four pages of content on a daily basis, especially if some of the topics are of little interest, or even offensive.
Yes, I know that some of what I write is offensive to some people, but I'd like to refer you back to my earlier comment about not trying to please everyone all the time!
So I'm thinking of dropping the word limit. Instead of 1000 words a day, I'm thinking that I should make it only 500 words a day as the minimum, with no maximum limit. So if I feel like writing 1000 words - or even 2000 words if they come easily enough - then I can. But otherwise, I'm just going to focus on a minimum of 500 words.
The reason? Simply to assist with my motivation.
I had a break yesterday, where I didn't publish anything overnight. I just felt like having a break. I didn't want to stress myself into writing 1000 words because I absolutely didn't feel like it. So I took a break, and got back into it again today.
So that's my update on writing 1000 words. I hope you enjoyed it, and understanding a bit more of the thinking behind my journey with this.
Also, if you have any tips that you would like to recommend, please don't hesitate in leaving a comment. I'm completely open to any tips you'd feel happy to give me!
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Changing my life with 1000 words a day
I was just reading this article over at Medium.com called How writing 1000 words a day changed my life, and it made me wonder if doing the same would change my own life. I can imagine how those changes might be worthwhile.
I tried something similar at the beginning of 2012. I started a new blog called Think Wisely (now gone), and my goal was to write a blog post a day on thinking wisely. I didn't have any minimum word limits, I just had a post a day as my goal. I kept it up for about 4 months before I ran out of steam and couldn't find anything more to write about. But that was relating to just a single topic.
One of the reasons I started this Alans Journey blog was to write about allthe different topics that interested me, instead of just one topic. (You can see the different topics via the menu up the top of the page.) I know a lot of people out there write what they think others want them to write, or what they think would help them make the most money. Some of them can be really good at that, but not me. If I'm not being authentic, or true to myself, then I'm absolutely not comfortable doing it.
I felt like it would be better for me to just write about my thoughts, feelings, opinions, observations and insights about whatever topic interested me at the time. I felt like it would be more comfortable for me.
And I was right. It was more comfortable, and it was more interesting for me. But it wasn't a post a day. It was what I felt like writing about, when I felt like writing. But a thousand words a day, every day? That's pretty huge.
Yes, I'm practicing! This particular post is going to be a thousand words, and will be about writing posts of a thousand words.
Writing a thousand words a day is going to be huge. Huger than huge. That's 30,000 words a month. That could even become a book a month. And you know what? That's exactly one of the reasons I'm interested in doing this exercise.
I've had a goal for a long time to be a writer. I blog, I write, I think about writing all the time, all with the purpose of moving me onwards to my goal of actually making some money from my writing, so that I can give up my 'day job' and focus on my writing job. I can do it, I know I can!
I also know that most of what I write is going to be absolute rubbish. That's just the nature of things. But along the way, there's going to be some absolute gems produced too. And a lot of what I write will inspire more writing, and the gems might inspire some books, and along the way I might even become somewhat popular.
That's important to me, because I won't get any income from this until I become popular enough that enough people will be happy to pay me enough money that I can focus entirely on my writing.
My wife asked me last night, "Think about what you can do that will allow us to live in China." In my mind I could already see that the answer was writing. If I can earn money from my writing, then I can live anywhere in the world.
And the very next day - today - I come upon an article that tells me how my life will change if I write 1,000 words a day. So I got excited, and immediately decided that I needed to take up this challenge that the universe is giving me, to help me change my life.
There's going to be some rambling involved in my writing as I flesh it out. I'm ok with that! It's going to take a while for me to find my 'voice', that part of me that speaks (writes?) clearly and succinctly about the topic I want to discuss, without any rambling, and completely focused. I don't know how long that will take, but I'll get there eventually.
Developing the 1,000 word habit
In the already forementioned article, How writing 1000 words a day changed my life, there's a number of tips on how to develop the habit. You can read the article for more information about the tips, but I wanted to discuss them for myself.
Using Activation Energy
Interestingly, I've often already used part of this tip, where I write something before going to bed, so that when I wake up the next morning I can continue on from where I left off. Having it sitting there on my screen when I sit down at my computer in the morning has been a perfect way of being inspired to continue writing on that topic that interested me the night before.
Dealing with Writer's Block
This was something I ended up struggling with when I was in the end days of writing for Think Wisely. I couldn't think of anything else to write about! His tip of 'write whatever you're thinking and don't stop until you've got 1,000 words' is a very good tip, and will be made even easier with so many topics in this blog to think about.
The willingness to create garbage
Oh, I'm willing! I know that from garbage can come some awesome results. It's about maintaining consistency along the way.
What do you want to read about?
I know this blog and my writing is for me, and I'll be writing about the topics that I'm interested in. But I'm also curious about what YOU are interested in. What kinds of topics would you like to see more of? If you tell me what you'd like to see more of, in line with what I've already written (check the Topics list above), then I can write for both me and you at the same time. Win-win! That's always a good thing.
And now we come to the end of this post, and I've done 1,024 words. Woohoo! This could be easier than I thought...
I tried something similar at the beginning of 2012. I started a new blog called Think Wisely (now gone), and my goal was to write a blog post a day on thinking wisely. I didn't have any minimum word limits, I just had a post a day as my goal. I kept it up for about 4 months before I ran out of steam and couldn't find anything more to write about. But that was relating to just a single topic.
One of the reasons I started this Alans Journey blog was to write about allthe different topics that interested me, instead of just one topic. (You can see the different topics via the menu up the top of the page.) I know a lot of people out there write what they think others want them to write, or what they think would help them make the most money. Some of them can be really good at that, but not me. If I'm not being authentic, or true to myself, then I'm absolutely not comfortable doing it.
I felt like it would be better for me to just write about my thoughts, feelings, opinions, observations and insights about whatever topic interested me at the time. I felt like it would be more comfortable for me.
And I was right. It was more comfortable, and it was more interesting for me. But it wasn't a post a day. It was what I felt like writing about, when I felt like writing. But a thousand words a day, every day? That's pretty huge.
Yes, I'm practicing! This particular post is going to be a thousand words, and will be about writing posts of a thousand words.
Writing a thousand words a day is going to be huge. Huger than huge. That's 30,000 words a month. That could even become a book a month. And you know what? That's exactly one of the reasons I'm interested in doing this exercise.
I've had a goal for a long time to be a writer. I blog, I write, I think about writing all the time, all with the purpose of moving me onwards to my goal of actually making some money from my writing, so that I can give up my 'day job' and focus on my writing job. I can do it, I know I can!
I also know that most of what I write is going to be absolute rubbish. That's just the nature of things. But along the way, there's going to be some absolute gems produced too. And a lot of what I write will inspire more writing, and the gems might inspire some books, and along the way I might even become somewhat popular.
That's important to me, because I won't get any income from this until I become popular enough that enough people will be happy to pay me enough money that I can focus entirely on my writing.
My wife asked me last night, "Think about what you can do that will allow us to live in China." In my mind I could already see that the answer was writing. If I can earn money from my writing, then I can live anywhere in the world.
And the very next day - today - I come upon an article that tells me how my life will change if I write 1,000 words a day. So I got excited, and immediately decided that I needed to take up this challenge that the universe is giving me, to help me change my life.
There's going to be some rambling involved in my writing as I flesh it out. I'm ok with that! It's going to take a while for me to find my 'voice', that part of me that speaks (writes?) clearly and succinctly about the topic I want to discuss, without any rambling, and completely focused. I don't know how long that will take, but I'll get there eventually.
Developing the 1,000 word habit
In the already forementioned article, How writing 1000 words a day changed my life, there's a number of tips on how to develop the habit. You can read the article for more information about the tips, but I wanted to discuss them for myself.
Using Activation Energy
Interestingly, I've often already used part of this tip, where I write something before going to bed, so that when I wake up the next morning I can continue on from where I left off. Having it sitting there on my screen when I sit down at my computer in the morning has been a perfect way of being inspired to continue writing on that topic that interested me the night before.
Dealing with Writer's Block
This was something I ended up struggling with when I was in the end days of writing for Think Wisely. I couldn't think of anything else to write about! His tip of 'write whatever you're thinking and don't stop until you've got 1,000 words' is a very good tip, and will be made even easier with so many topics in this blog to think about.
The willingness to create garbage
Oh, I'm willing! I know that from garbage can come some awesome results. It's about maintaining consistency along the way.
What do you want to read about?
I know this blog and my writing is for me, and I'll be writing about the topics that I'm interested in. But I'm also curious about what YOU are interested in. What kinds of topics would you like to see more of? If you tell me what you'd like to see more of, in line with what I've already written (check the Topics list above), then I can write for both me and you at the same time. Win-win! That's always a good thing.
And now we come to the end of this post, and I've done 1,024 words. Woohoo! This could be easier than I thought...
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Writing daily? Right...
Funny. My last post was 'Why you should write every day'. And here it is, two weeks later, and I'm thinking, 'Oh yeh, that's right.. I was going to write daily, wasn't I...'
The best laid plans of mice and men, as they say.
Almost a couple weeks ago I finished working for Lockheed Martin Australia. After 9 months and three contract extensions, they decided they didn't need my services any more. This was a shame, because I quite enjoyed working there, but as a contractor I know I'm only around for as long as the money and the projects last.
Since then I've been enjoying a bit of a holiday, applying for new roles, but mostly just chilling out. I've been exploring a couple of personal projects which has occupied my time, mainly setting up a website where I can explore some creative writing, and changing my computer experiences from Windows 8 to Linux Mint.
I do enjoy playing with new things and learning new things about them.
I found some photos I took over xmas/new year of my holiday around parts of Australia. I'm going to have to get off my ass and process them, and then publish them with a few stories around them. That's my task for next week.
The best laid plans of mice and men, as they say.
Almost a couple weeks ago I finished working for Lockheed Martin Australia. After 9 months and three contract extensions, they decided they didn't need my services any more. This was a shame, because I quite enjoyed working there, but as a contractor I know I'm only around for as long as the money and the projects last.
Since then I've been enjoying a bit of a holiday, applying for new roles, but mostly just chilling out. I've been exploring a couple of personal projects which has occupied my time, mainly setting up a website where I can explore some creative writing, and changing my computer experiences from Windows 8 to Linux Mint.
I do enjoy playing with new things and learning new things about them.
I found some photos I took over xmas/new year of my holiday around parts of Australia. I'm going to have to get off my ass and process them, and then publish them with a few stories around them. That's my task for next week.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Why you should write every day
I was reading a post about why you should write daily, and I was thinking about it for my own blog.
Over a year ago I used to write daily articles for another blog I had. I did it every day, without fail, for about 4 months before I started to do them every few days, and then every week, every couple weeks... and eventually I stopped altogether after about the 6-7 months mark.
I stopped because the topic (wisdom in daily life) wasn't getting any better for me. I was losing focus and inspiration on writing new articles for the topic.
I decided to get back into writing in an old style of writing I used to do, which worked well for me, and seems to be working well for me now.
Write what I want to write, based on my interests and passions, when I want to write.
So while writing every day is certainly worthwhile as an exercise, you really need to have an excellent focus and understanding of what you're writing, and why you're writing.
If you don't, you might just find yourself trying to push shit uphill, and I'm sure you can imagine how messy that's likely to get.
But what about you?
Do you already write every day, on a topic that you're passionate about? Do you have any tips of your own about how others can write every day? Maybe you'd like to share your site with me and my other readers? Please link your blog below in a comment.
Or would you like to write every day? What would you write about? Why would you like to write about it?
I'd love your feedback and thoughts in the comments below.
Over a year ago I used to write daily articles for another blog I had. I did it every day, without fail, for about 4 months before I started to do them every few days, and then every week, every couple weeks... and eventually I stopped altogether after about the 6-7 months mark.
I stopped because the topic (wisdom in daily life) wasn't getting any better for me. I was losing focus and inspiration on writing new articles for the topic.
I decided to get back into writing in an old style of writing I used to do, which worked well for me, and seems to be working well for me now.
Write what I want to write, based on my interests and passions, when I want to write.
So while writing every day is certainly worthwhile as an exercise, you really need to have an excellent focus and understanding of what you're writing, and why you're writing.
If you don't, you might just find yourself trying to push shit uphill, and I'm sure you can imagine how messy that's likely to get.
But what about you?
Do you already write every day, on a topic that you're passionate about? Do you have any tips of your own about how others can write every day? Maybe you'd like to share your site with me and my other readers? Please link your blog below in a comment.
Or would you like to write every day? What would you write about? Why would you like to write about it?
I'd love your feedback and thoughts in the comments below.
Friday, February 22, 2013
12 Reasons Why I Should Sell E-books
I'm looking to make me some money from the internet. I hear that ebooks are the way to go, so I'll be working on some original content from past articles that I've done, bringing them together in ebooks.Here's a few reasons why I should be doing this right now:
- Selling ebooks means my earning potential becomes unlimited. They're always available for people to buy. I will no longer need to exchange my time for money.
- Each ebook becomes a new 'product', creating a new income stream. I can have multiple income streams instead of just one.
- It costs me nothing to 'manufacture' an ebook, it's purely a digital product. I don't have to spend money on materials when selling them. It's 100% profit.
- The market is the entire world, and the audience is everywhere.
- I'm adding value to people's lives. My ebooks will give them solutions and information that they're willing to pay for.
- Leverage is an important factor. The internet is a huge leverage tool in its own right. Advertising and affiliate marketing allows others to sell my ebooks for me.
- It costs practically nothing to set up.
- You spend the time on creating an ebook and then spend no more time on it once it's 'out there', and it keeps on making money for me. 9. I can work from home. 10. I can make sure my ebook business is fully automated, so that people can buy and download my ebooks without me doing anything.
- Having published ebooks helps establish me as an expert in my niche, whatever that might be.
- I can create an ebook and then have it available for sale to the whole world in less than a day. That's pretty amazing! 13. I can do write and publish ebooks in my spare time, while still maintaining a day job. Anything I earn will be a nice bonus.
- When my ebooks become popular and earn me enough money to quit the day job, I'll have all the spare time I could possibly want, with the ebooks earning money without me needing to be 'working'.
- If I want more money, I write more ebooks!
I better get started now!
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