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On Being Motivated

everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. the good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. most people don_t see any.- orson scott

Have you ever gotten that giddy feeling when you were working on something and you can’t stop thinking about it?


That’s how I feel pretty much every day and it’s not just one thing I’m working that gets me excited, it’s like a whole bunch of things.

  1. Short Stories are getting edited

  2. Deciding on how to make my covers

  3. Learning about formatting ebooks

  4. Writing my newsletters

  5. Learning about different self-publishing programs

  6. Starting a new story (!!!)

As I get my shorts back from my editor, I look through and see the changes she suggests and I’m super glad to have her work with me. I realize I do make a lot of tense mistakes and it’s nice to have someone be able to point that out to me. It also helps me as a writer to be able to recognize those errors. It might take me a while, but I hope that it will become easier to notice soon.


I’m publishing my books as an e-book first so I’ve been trying to work on designs for the cover. I have a few mock ups made for “We Don’t Talk About That”, but I wanted to use an original photo instead of stock one. I have a friend of mine whom I met through one of the films I worked on give me a few samples of his work to use. I’m super blessed to have friends that are willing to help me along the way.


A fellow indie author, V.S. Holmes, sent me to this website to learn how to format a book using Word. You can download one of their templates or follow the instructions on how to format it yourself. I followed the instructions because I genuinely wanted to know what the specs were. It was a fun, yet daunting experience. I’m happy that I was able to work it out on my own and now feel confident enough to be able to format my books.


P.S. V.S. Holmes just released a new book so go to the website I linked above and check it out! 


I’ve been researching on a lot of the different self-publishing things since last year, so I definitely have an idea where I’m going to go. As I discover things I’ll be posting a lot of “how to’s” or maybe just my general thoughts on how the process is going. Right now I’m looking at Draft2Digital and IngramSpark. I was thinking of just doing Amazon, but I’d want a wider reach, especially because people use different readers nowadays.


I keep saying this, but things really are coming together. This gets me pumped to wake up every day.


Let me know what motivates you to work on your projects every day in the comments.


Thanks for reading!


-Emi

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