Tag: creative writing

Posted in updates, Writing

Readjusting & Optimism

Posted on by Kassandra Carrillo

One week down, one more to go.

It’s that time of the year again when school is right around the corner, and the workdays are filled with training and setting up the classroom. Let’s not forget waking four hours before I’m used to waking up. I find myself trying not to sleep at 9 pm. Not to mention, I have one more week of training before school starts.

Most importantly, my writing schedule has been thrown out the window.

It mainly has to do with the fact that I’m not editing anymore, and I’m still writing the last book of a trilogy. But I also know I’ve been busy and tired. I still write on the days I need to, but I don’t write as much. Definitely feeling it today since I’m catching up on the word count for the week.

Moving forward, I’ll stick to writing two chapters a week instead of one. So, Monday through Wednesday/Thursday is one chapter, and Thursday/ Friday to Sunday is another. This new schedule will only be until I get feedback from my beta readers. Luckily, some friends and family wanted to be beta readers for my book.

This past week, I compiled a list of agents with my genre AND started on my query letter. I’m not excited to start writing the synopsis, BUT I do want to wait for my beta readers as well in case I need to fix plot holes or consistency issues, etc.

Overall, I’m excited to start the next step of becoming a published author. While the road is long and full of potential roadblocks, I feel like I’m making progress.

Posted in updates, Writing

Accomplishing Goals

Posted on by Kassandra Carrillo

The end of my summer vacation brings excellent news. Sure, I go back to work in two days, but I managed to finish one of my goals this summer. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without proper time management and the writing schedule I set up all those weeks ago.

I’ve finished editing a novel I’ve been working on for a while. Overall, I believe my book is finished. I’ve been looking for a couple of beta readers now and I have two so far. Possibly three. I’m thinking maybe five beta readers to start with is a good number.

The beta readers can finish reading the book by September. Having a deadline of three to four weeks isn’t bad. While not everyone reads at the same pace, it’s a realistic goal. In the meantime, I’ll keep building my agent list to query and definitely make sure my query letter is perfect. I think that’s going to be the hard part. Writing the query letter and even the synopsis will be difficult.

Either way, I’m excited to start this part of the journey. If all goes well, I can send out my query letters before agents start closing for the holidays. Wish me luck.

Posted in updates, Writing

Back from Vacation

Posted on by Kassandra Carrillo

It’s been about two weeks since my last post and boy, has it been busy.

The five hour drive back home wasn’t bad. The heat definitely didn’t make it any better. We went shopping the next day before going to the beach and a water park the next two days. Luckily, I didn’t get sunburned unlike my family. I’m sure they’re still peeling even now despite wearing sunscreen.

My cats were not happy with me when I picked them up. Of course, they changed their minds when it was time for dinner and I fed them. My first cat, Princess, drooled when I petted her and held her in general. I definitely felt guilty for leaving her with the sitter. My second cat, Olive, didn’t seem too upset with my absence, but she has definitely been very cuddly lately.

It wasn’t all fun and games, however. There’s some family drama going on that (thankfully), my immediate family isn’t involved in, but it still put a damper on things. We also had a death in the family, a cousin. Been supporting his family this past week. I didn’t know him very well and it’d been years since we last saw each other. Despite that, it hurts. All I can do is be there for his family and for his parents.

Everything affected my writing schedule, but I know it wasn’t because of laziness or procrastination. Unexpected things happen and we have to roll with the punches. Sometimes, they can be good. Sometimes, they can be bad. All we can do is keep moving forward.

Posted in updates, Writing

My Writing Schedule – An update

Posted on by Kassandra Carrillo

Recently, I discovered a writing schedule for myself where three or four days out of the week would go towards editing/ rewriting chapters of one of the novels I was working on. The other days would be reserved for writing a new chapter for the second novel I’ve been working on. This only worked because I decided to limit myself to only focus on two novels. Having multiple projects at one time is not helpful to the completion of any projects. Plus, it helps that the projects are from the same novel series.

This past week, I’ve followed the writing schedule I set for myself and found two things that I’ve noticed.

First, while I usually aim to editing one chapter a day, it came to my attention that sometimes I want to do more. I had to remind myself that it was okay to work on two chapters a day instead. Limiting myself wasn’t the aim here.

Second, I’m having a little trouble with the writing portion of the week. I don’t necessarily have a word count for the day, and that hasn’t been an issue before. Mostly, I think it has to do with my plotting where I didn’t plan all the details and only focused on the major points. That can be taken care of easily.

Five hundred words or more is what I think is a good amount for the day. The novel I’m writing is an online novel so word count works differently. Three thousands words a chapter is pushing it for an online platform.

In general, I’d like to say that this writing schedule definitely works for me. Switching between editing and writing makes me feel a lot more productive. There are days where I don’t work as much as the others, but I don’t feel like I’m being lazy. Taking breaks is important too. Burning out or making this feel like a chore won’t be helpful in the long run.

Next week, I’ll be going on vacation. I haven’t decided if I’m going to take a break from writing and editing in general, but I’ll still take my laptop to do a little work just in case.

Posted in Writing

My Writing Schedule

Posted on by Kassandra Carrillo

Like most writers, I often struggle with having more than one project on my mind. Usually I take it a step forward and start writing said other project without finishing the first one. This cycle continues over and over again and I feel like I never get anything done.

I’ve been struggling with this dilemma for a long time. I always dreamed of “making it as a writer”, but I could never get past “I need a decent job to support myself”. While the latter is true, I feel like I haven’t’ done enough to follow that dream of “making it as a writer”. It’s not like I’m blaming anything or anyone for that. Teaching takes a lot of hours of the day during the school year. And yet, it sort of feels like it’s also an excuse?

With all those thoughts, I’ve finally buckled down on myself this month. If I wanted my writing career to go anywhere, I needed to start making some changes. I limited myself to two stories I can work on. Everything else needed to wait. The first one, is a novel that is in the midst of being written. At least, one chapter a week since I’m posting it on Wattpad first. The second one is a story that I’m editing/rewriting. So, one story to write and one story to edit.

With that in mind, I needed to figure out how much time I could dedicate to each story. Now, I can’t say what or how it finally clicked for me. To be honest, I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out. It now seems so simple. I know my writing habits and how I like to procrastinate on certain things.

Even though there’s only seven days in a week, I decided to divide the week. You’d think that would be an easy thing for me to figure out, but apparently it wasn’t. The simplest things are always the hardest. So, I decided to dedicate the first three to four days of the week, editing three chapters of one story. The rest of the days are dedicated to writing. Of course, this only works when I have the plot details ready for that story.

Needless to say, I tried it this past week and it worked. However, it’s more than doing it. It also came with the discipline of knowing what I needed to do and executing it. Discipline played a huge role in keeping to the schedule. I stayed up late one day to make sure I got more writing done.

As it stands, if I can follow this schedule for the next two to three weeks, then I will know that it works for me.

At least with this, it won’t make writing a chore and I’ll have more fun with it. Maybe in the near future, I will start on the first step of “making it as a writer”.