In Today’s Journal
* Humorous Quote of the Day
* Read. The. Comments.
* Writing During a Vacation…
* About Draft2Digital
* Guest Posts Welcome
* The Numbers
Humorous Quote of the Day
“God please give me patience. Because if you give me strength, I’m going to need bail money.” Senator John Kennedy, Louisiana
Read. The. Comments.
If you care either way about writing and the future of publishing at Amazon and elsewhere, I recommend you read the comments on yesterday’s post.
They constitute a whole other post. Thanks to everyone for commenting.
To read them, click here, then scroll down to “Discussion about this post.”
Writing During a Vacation and Getting Ideas
This is a guest post by Balázs Jámbor
I was on vacation with my family at the start of the year: five days in Italy, a different country and culture than mine [Hungary], with no speaking of the language.
We were at the south part of Italy, at the sea, in a little town. We took long walks, ate good meals, and had a wonderful time together. And I wrote a short story, which I didn’t think I would manage.
When I travel with my family, of course my family is my top priority. But there were few times when I still could take my Freewrite device and write.
- When I woke up earlier than the others, I caught 10-20 minutes.
- When they were getting ready for dinner, and I was already done so I got another 10 minutes.
- While they did other things, I had 20 minutes of writing.
- And in the evenings, I managed to have 10-15 minutes before sleeping. That was the only time I asked for their permission. After playing with them, my family members tolerated my passion.
It seems like only a little time for writing. But hey, if I catch each of them every day that would mean an hour per day and five hours per week!
As I write this, I can tell you I wrote about 3500 words. That’s 3 hours of writing, so I didn’t even use all of my time.
The trick was to be flexible. I couldn’t track my whole day to check where time is to write. But when the opportunity came, I put my fingers on my keyboard and wrote one sentence after the other. And it was refreshing.
It is refreshing to fill up with new experiences and write about them. I didn’t continue the short stories on the list waiting for me at home, but I decided to try new things. I just started to type what I saw on the first day and… There was no stop.
How many story ideas are there on a vacation like this! Talking with people you would have never met otherwise. Eating new dishes. Looking around in a different country. How many games to play!
What if I stopped here and stayed? What if I could fly with the seagulls? What if I jumped into those huge waves? Or what if…?
What is that person doing on the shadowed seat of the park? How is the only bookstore of the town different than the bookstores in Hungary?
What if I didn’t come back to my accommodation? Where would I go? Would I get lost?
Many things make it possible to turn your experiences into short stories or long stories or both. I had more than five ideas when I first sat down to write. I went with only one of them, and I wrote 3,500 words of fiction in the end.
Only one question is there in the end: How much do you want to write? There is no problem if you want to take five days from writing and practicing. But if you don’t, there are possibilities.
*
Thanks, Balázs!
About Draft2Digital
Especially after yesterday’s post (and comments) about the sneak attack on writers by Amazon, I thought I should mention this:
If your books are Amazon exclusive, and if you don’t yet have an account with the aggregator Draft2Digital, right now might be an excellent time to set up an account.
In fact, if you want to upload to only one platform, I recommend uploading to D2D instead of Amazon. At least your books will be widely distributed.
But either way, you might also want to take a look at D2D’s YouTube Channel for a ton of good information.
Guest Posts Welcome
If there’s a writing or publishing topic you know well, consider sharing that knowledge with others by writing a guest post for TNDJ.
Note: I will not entertain posts that encourage the fear-based myths of fiction writing: outlining/plotting, rewriting X number of times, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Why? Because writers can find that stuff literally anywhere else on the internet, at conferences, in critique and writing groups, etc. But anything else is welcome.
You don’t have to write about writing into the dark either. You can write about what works for you in your genre, your typical day as a writer, where you get ideas, what or whom you recommend for publishing (and why), and any number of other topics.
If you’re in doubt about whether your topic would make a good guest post for TNDJ, I welcome queries at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. Any editing I do on your post will be necessary and light.
Also, I’d be happy to link to your website, Amazon or Facebook (etc.) page, to books you want to promote, and so on. (Please provide the URLs. I can turn them into links.)
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 400
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 400
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for January………………………… XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for January.…………………… 14000
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 14000
2026 consumable words………………… 14000
2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29