Writers

2017 Writing Recap | 2018 Goals

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ Leave a comment

Greetings, writers!
It is time for me to do my annual writing recap and announce some writerly goals for the upcoming year! This year has been pretty crazy, so…

Let’s see what I accomplished!

I had three writing goals for 2017:
◦Finish the rewrite of Scarred Flawless and have it ready for beta readers by January.
I’m calling this one a success! I had the rewrite, (I had to put it in third person instead of first), finished by April, and I should be finished with the last round of edits tonight! I still have to export it from Scrivener and make sure everything is formatted correctly, but I technically accomplished my original goal. I hope to be starting the beta reader process in the next couple of weeks.
◦Outline Fractured Faith, (the sequel to Scarred Flawless).
I sort of accomplished this? Kind of? Okay not really! I have a few scenes written that I know I want to include, a big-picture plot, and a rough summary, but I do not have an official scene-by-scene outline.
◦Write five short stories.
I technically did this. I finished the first drafts of five short stories, but only two of them got edited because I turned them in for class work. The other three are in some random folder that I will probably never find again.

Writing Goals for 2018

I only have three writing goals for 2018 as well because… three is a magic number! They are:
◦Finish the beta reader process for Scarred Flawless and start seeking publication for it. insert terrified emoji
◦Outline Fractured Faith because I didn’t do it last year!
◦Outline my new novel idea that is currently under the working title, “Nevermore Forever”. I haven’t talked about this much because it was literally a tiny spark of an idea until two nights ago, but I will have a post up on it soon!

Reading Goals for 2018

◦Read a minimum of thirty books. That was my goal for 2017, and it didn’t happen, so I’m trying again!
◦Keep up with writing book reviews instead of getting eight reviews behind like I am now.
◦Actually use Goodreads. I have a terrible habit of not updating Goodreads for months at a time and then spamming the feeds of my followers with a million updates at once. It would be really nice if I could end that this year!

What are your goals?

If you have writerly goals of your own, let me know what they are in the comments, or drop me a link to your own blog post! Also, if you’re interested in beta reading Scarred Flawless, keep an eye on my blog and Twitter feed because I will be posting updates.

Beautiful Books 2017 | How’s the writing going?

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ 3 Comments

Beautiful Books is a writing link-up created by Cait @ Paper Fury. Today’s topic is, “How’s the writing going”?

  1. Overall, how is your mental state, and how is your novel going?
    My mental state is pretty frazzled at the moment. It is day five of NaNoWriMo 2017, and I have 1057 new words to my name. That isn’t even the recommended word count for day one… Because of this pathetic excuse for a day five word count, I have switched my goal around a little bit. Instead of trying to edit Scarred Flawless and draft 50K words of the sequal, I have made my primary goal to finish editing Scarred Flawless. This is WAY more important to me than drafting a new thing right now because I want to have it in the hands of beta readers by January. Therefore, I’ll be counting every thirty minutes of editing as one thousand words for NaNo this year.

  2. What’s your first sentence (or paragraph)?
    The Counsel Hall was no place for the innocent or kind at heart. So much innocent blood had been spilled upon the tiles that it was a wonder the floor was white instead of scarlet. Niko Devereaux had watched every drop of that innocent blood spill a thousand times over, and sometimes the presence of the unseen in the Great Room was so strong that it was difficult to tell what was tangible and what was non-corporeal.

  3. Who’s your current favorite character in your novel?
    The proper answer here is, “Please don’t make me pick a favorite fictional child”, but I’ll be honest… Niko is my favorite.

  4. What do you love about your novel so far?
    I LOVE my characters! The characters actually came to me before the plot, so they were extremely well-developed before I even started writing.

  5. Have you made any hilarious typos or other mistakes?
    I haven’t made any hilarious typos myself, but autocorrect did a number on my first draft! I didn’t realize it was on, and for some reason it insisted that my main characters name should be, “Nero Develop”, instead of Niko Devereaux. Let’s just say I spent some quality time with the find-and-replace feature before I did my first read through… 🙂

  6. What is your favorite to write: beginning, middle, or end — and why?
    Beginnings are my happy place! Nothing has to make a ton of sense in the beginning because the rest of the story is there to explain things, but middles and ends require logic! I don’t like it when writing and logic collide!

  7. What are your writing habits? Is there a specific snack you eat? Do you listen to music? What time of day do you write best? Feel free to show us a picture of your writing space!
    I don’t eat while I write because food and keyboards should never mix, but I do drink coffee or tea depending on what I’m up for that day. I do listen to music while I write, )you can click here to view my Scarred Flawless playlist on youTube). I write best either late at night or early in the morning when no one else is awake.

  8. How private are you about your novel while you’re writing? Do you need a cheer squad or do you work alone (like, ahem, Batman)?
    No one gets to know about my writing except my closest writerly friends until the first round of edits are over.

  9. What keeps you writing even when it’s hard?
    Other people did it, so I can do it too!

  10. What are your top 3 pieces of writing advice?
    ◦Don’t chase after any shiny new ideas unless you are absolutely sure that your current project isn’t going anywhere. You’ll never get anything published if you don’t stick with something.
    ◦Write about something you are passionate about. If you love something, you’ll probably also enjoy writing about it.
    ◦Writing has no rules; don’t let anybody tell you otherwise!

My NaNoWriMo2017 Bullet Journal

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ Leave a comment

Happy Halloween/NaNoWriMo Eve! This is kind of last minute, but I thought I would share five of my favorite NaNoWriMo bullet journal spreads.
*If you are unfamiliar with the bullet journal system, click here for a video that will explain it better than I can.

Unfortunately I can’t show you pretty pictures like most of the bullet journalers on Instagram because all of my spreads are in braille, and the vast majority of you couldn’t read them. However, I will do my best to describe the spreads well enough for you to actually understand what I’m talking about… 🙂

  1. The Monthly Spread:
    This is basically a staple of all bullet journals, not just writing ones. I don’t typically use the monthly spread when I’m planning for a normal month, but I do during November. This is so that I can easily see what weeks are going to be insanely busy and what weeks are going to be basically free. If I’m going to have a crazy week, I make sure to cover for it in the week prior.

  2. The Word Count Tracker:
    This is a table consisting of three columns: day, word count, and damage control. Along the left-hand side, I list the 30 days of November. In the word count column, I write the word count I achieved for that particular day. In the damage control column, I write the number of words that I need to write the next day in order to fix any damage I did the day before.
    The recommended word count per day to win NaNoWriMo is 1667. Although it is possible to win NaNoWriMo by not writing on the week days and doing nothing but writing on the weekends, (I have done this), it is MUCH easier if you stick to a daily goal of somewhere around 1667 words per day. Hence the word count tracker!

  3. The daily spread:
    For me, this spread is literally just a todo list. Basically, these pages consist of checklists of everything I have to do before I can write. Without these pages, I would get completely sucked into NaNoWriMo, and important things like homework and algebra tests would be forgotten.

  4. The Inspiration Spread:
    This page consists of a list of things that inspire me to write my novel. The majority of WriMos, (including myself), tend to get sick of whatever they’re working on half way through the month and move onto a shiny new idea. This is bad, because you will never finish anything if you don’t stick with something. Also, if you were excited enough about an idea to decide to do it for NaNo, it’s probably pretty good, and you should probably stick with it! My inspiration pages usually consist of things like…
    ◦I love my characters!
    ◦My plot is super exciting!
    ◦These characters have a story to tell, and it’s my job to put it on paper.
    ◦The world needs my novel!!!!

  5. The playlist Spread:
    Most of you probably know by now that I make a playlist for everything I start. I can’t rite in silence, and if I’m going to listen to music while writing, it should totally be stuff that pertains to my story! Putting the playlist on shuffle and listening to a few songs is usually enough to get me in the writing zone, but sometimes I need a little extra help to get into the mindset to write certain scenes. So… I list all of the super important scenes that may be tough to write and associate each of them with a song so that I can listen to that song in order to get in the mindset to write that scene.

Beautiful People | Author Writing Process Edition

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ Leave a comment

Beautiful People is a writing link-up created by Cait @ Paper Fury. This month’s topic is your writerly process!

  1. How do you decide which project to work on?
    I always write the thing that I want to read most. Usually this is the project that I’ve thought out the most and at least somewhat outlined, but sometimes it’s a completely new project that I know very little about but already love.

  2. How long does it usually take you to finish a project?
    That depends on the project… I can usually do a short story in a month. Novels take about a year, (with three months of drafting and nine months of cleaning up the mess that I call a draft).

  3. Do you have any routines to put you in the writing mood?
    I always diffuse peppermint oil when I’m writing because it helps me focus, and I usually listen to either my project playlist or nature sounds.

  4. What time of day do you write best?
    Either really late at night or really early in the morning… what is sleep?

  5. Are there any authors you think you have a similar style to?
    Ummm… no. My style is my own, just like every other author’s style is their own. I honestly think that you could give three different authors the same prompt and ask them to write a story, and they would come up with completely different stories because everybody’s brain works differently!

  6. Why did you start writing, and why do you keep writing?
    I started writing because I loved reading and telling stories, and I just never stopped. It’s so much of a habit to write every day now that it feels weird to not write in a day! I’ll keep writing as long as I have stories to tell, and I’ll probably cry if I ever run out of stories!

  7. What’s the hardest thing you’ve written?
    Definitely my Shaman Novel! The number one piece of advice that you’ll hear as a writer is, “Write what you know”. I personally think that this “rule” is idiotic and hardly ever follow it, but it does have a tiny bit of value. When I started writing my Shaman Novel, I stepped off a cliff into the deep blue unknown, and that was the most terrifying moment of my writerly life! It’s one thing to create a magic system, world, characters, plot, and fantastical creatures out of your imagination, but it’s a completely different thing to combine fantasy and psychology when you know absolutely nothing about the psychological disorders at hand! Speaking from hours of experience here… Google is a writer’s best friend!

  8. Is there a project you want to tackle someday but you don’t feel ready yet?
    Nope! Now that I’ve written two drafts of my Shaman Novel, I can write anything!

  9. What writing goals did you make for 2017 and how are they going?
    Uhhhh… I’ll just skip this question! Just kidding… My main goal for 2017 was to have my Shaman Novel ready for beta readers by June, and clearly that did not happen! I have world building woes, ok?! Cut me some slack here! I still gotta name some fictional countries!

  10. Describe your writing process in 3 words or a gif!
    I absolutely positively despise gifs because gif + screen reader = BAD! So… here are my three words: messy, incoherent, somewhat insane. That turned into four words, but I’m calling it good!

Writing Up Wednesday #5 | The Craft of Writing–How do you learn?

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ 1 Comment

Writing Up Wednesday is a writing link-up created by Lizzy @ The Bent Bookworm. This week’s topic is “The craft of writing,” or more specifically, “How do you learn the craft of writing?”

I honestly don’t make a conscious effort to study the writing craft unless I need to research a specific aspect of it for my story. I don’t plan to take professional writing classes, and I usually don’t go out of my way to read writerly text books. Studying the craft is just something that comes naturally to me through reading a wide range of books, writing book reviews, and connecting with other writers via blogging, youTube, and Twitter. I feel like this is more beneficial than making a conscious effort to study the craft because it allows me to take the advice I like and discard the rest without being boxed in by “professional” rules. Also, by filling my social media feeds with writerly stuff, I can actually justify opening Twitter and youTube! 😉
Here’s a quick list of some people that I’ve learned from:

My Favorite Writerly youTubers

■Shaelin Bishop
■Emma Lederman
■The Y.A. Word Nerds
■Vivien Reis
■Jenna Moreci
■Natalia Leigh
■Burgess Taylor
■Kim Chance
■Coffee Reading Writing

Awesome Writerly Bloggers

■Shaelin Bishop
■Emma Lederman
■A Writer’s Path
■National Novel Writing Month
■Fiction University
■Better Novel Project

Getting the Most Out of Camp NaNoWriMo 2017

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ Leave a comment

Camp NaNoWriMo is here!!!!! If you have no idea what that is, head on over to campnanowrimo.org to learn more! If you’re looking for some last minute advice before you start your journey, stick around!

  1. Make sure that your Camp NaNoWriMo goal is actually achievable! If you set a goal that you’ll never reach due to your schedule in April, you’ll probably give up half way through and end up regretting it later. However, if you set a goal that pushes you a bit but makes sense with your schedule, you might surprise yourself and exceed it! Also, you can now choose to set your goal in pages or hours instead of just words, so there’s really nothing stopping you from setting your goal however you want! My goal is currently 150 hours of editing for my Shaman Novel. That seems pretty small when you do the math and convert it to days, but I know that the last two months of school are going to be a whirlwind of semester projects, therefore I made sure to set my goal according to what I thought I could accomplish. I should definitely be able to hit that, and I can always raise it if I realize I’m going to blow it out of the water.
  2. Organize your outline! Trust me… It is NOT fun to sit down on April 1st and go, “I have no idea where anything is in this Scrivener project!” Even if you don’t use complicated Scrivener templates to organize your projects, make sure that you know the location of all of the information that is necessary for you to write your story!
  3. Decide how you plan to back up your project. You really do NOT want to loose any of your precious writing due to a technological failure or a lost notebook! Personally, I dump all of my Scrivener projects into a Scrivener folder in Dropbox, which backs up everything to the cloud and syncs everything to the Scrivener IOS app. Also, don’t just trust the cloud to keep everything safe for you! Put those precious writing files on a flash drive, an SD card, an external hard drive… whatever you’ve got!
  4. Schedule stuff around your chosen writing time. You need to plan your writing time just like you’d plan anything else because if you don’t, it might not happen! You should either pick a time each day and dedicate it specifically for writing, or pick a day or two out of each week and write like the wind on those days!
  5. Be active on Twitter and in your Camp NaNo cabins! Some of you are probably going, “Being active on Twitter is NOT conducive to a good writing session!” But it is if you follow the right people! Go to the @NaNoWordSprints page! Do NOT scroll through your timeline! Do NOT check your notifications! You WILL get writing done because lots of other people will be on that page writing with you!

Awesome Gifts for Writers

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ 5 Comments

It’s Christmas time!!! I gotta admit that I’ve been in a bit of a “bah humbugish” mood lately because of school and a small plague, (aka this stupid cold), but I’m coming around now that it’s December and it actually feels like winter around here. Anyway… Rambling aside… I thought I’d compile a list of bookish and writerly Christmas gifts! This list is in no particular order; it’s either things that I’ve received/bought myself in the past or have on my wish list this year.

Cheyenne’s Bookish And Writerly Gift Guide:

•Notebooks, journals, cool paper, etc…
While we writerly types tend to do the majority of our official novel drafting by keyboard rather than pen, we still gotta have our cool paper and journals for scribbled notes and ideas! I am currently obsessed with traveler’s notebooks, which are awesome because you can have multiple notebooks in one leather journal cover! And maybe the leather cover makes me feel like a fancy writer person… I think I probably totally killed that image by saying “writer person…” If you still have no idea what a traveler’s notebook is after reading the introduction, (linked above), I’d be happy to do an introduction/review/much better explanation than this is turning out to be of how I use mine when I can breathe through my nose!
•Fancy pens! (Blind writers can either substitute a slate and stylus or send me horrified emojies in the comments for daring to use such in today’s age as they’ve been doing on twitter.)
This one is pretty self-explanatory. Ya gotta have a cool writing utensil to write in that fancy journal.
•Books!
This one goes for both writers and your typical bookworms. You could even get really innovative and give a writer a book about writing! I’m currently inthralled in Tarot For Writers if you don’t wanna have to search.
•Cool bookmarks
Writers like shiny things. We really like shiny things that we can apply to books or writing. Bookmarks are perfect, and bookmarks for traveler’s notebooks usually have dangling charms that make pretty noises and make writers like myself very happy! Or maybe I might be very easily amused???
•Writerly clothing
Did you immediately conjure up a picture of a professor looking guy in an ink-stained leather jacket, or was that just me? If you didn’t, that’s totally fine, because I’m not talking about that! Writers like to be comfy, and you can find lots of writerly T-shirts. Seriously! Just Google it! I mean Google, “Writerly T-shirts,” not, “IT.” I currently own several writerly T-shirts, (thank you, Mom and Grandparents, for the writerly birthday gifts), my favorite of which says, “Please do not annoy the writer. She may put you in a book and kill you!” It also has a raised up fountain pen and dagger on it, probably because I text the dagger emoji way too often… No, I’m not crazy; it’s just my angry emoji!
•Writerly jewelry.
This might vary for different writers, (depending on whether they like jewelry or not), but I have a couple of things that I wear whenever I sit down to write. My jewelry isn’t specifically writerly, and honestly I don’t know when, why, or how I started wearing it for writing, but I usually have my peridot ring, my copper Triskelion ring, and my angel wing locket necklace when I sit down to write. However, if you Google, “Writer jewelry,” you’ll get some more specific writer things! I recently watched a youTube video by Emmalederman about writerly gifts, and she has a ring with the names of her characters engraved on it. Here is her video if you wanna check it out…

•iTunes/Amazon/Barnes & Noble gift cards.
If you reeeeeeeally don’t wanna go out of your way to find your writerly friend a gift, this’ll do the trick! I promise they will find something from one of the stores above!

Share your writerly wish list?

Did I miss anything? Is there anything cool on your bookish or writerly wish list? I’d also love to know what books you want, (because my TBR only consists of 52 books at the moment.) 😜