Articles

You’ve found my portfolio of articles.  I write on a variety of subjects, including the business and craft of writing, health, remote online work, and more.

How to Move Forward with Your Writing Even If in Fractional Increments

by Cindy Rae

Experts talk about writing every day, or having a writing goal per week, or even praise writers who work the job as close to full-time as they can get.

Yet, so many of us struggling as writers fit our writing into fractions of time throughout a season of life, around kids, chores, full-time jobs, crises, tragedy, and trauma.

Is it possible to become a successful writer when your time spent writing is scattered over various minutes stolen here and there in a demanding life?

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Writers: the Audience of Your Business Plan?

by Cindy Rae

Who is the intended audience of your business plan?

Well, if you’re an established writer like Brandon Sanderson, L.E. Modesitt, or David Weber, and you have a business plan, the intended audience may include investors, publishers, fellow writers, employees… Of course, I’m guessing, as I remain unpublished.

While I hope you benefit indirectly from my business plan via this series, my business plan is primarily for my own benefit.

Look out for the next in the series where I discuss how my business plan benefits me in becoming a published novelist.

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Back to Work: Part 1

by Cindy Rae

Thinking Outside the Box

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us;
And confirm for us the work of our hands;
Yes, confirm the work of our hands.

Psalm 90:17

Introduction

Re-entering the workforce can seem daunting. But, take heart – God is with you.

More options than ever before exist to work remotely, working from home or elsewhere.

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Plotting vs. Pantsing: The Tension Between Overkill with Moving Forward

by Cindy Rae

Certain writers fall securely into the plotter camp, while others write off-the-cuff. I jump back and forth between camps. And, at times, it’s wearying.

With Salvage, I’m really trying to plan my scenes more than before. I’m using a free airtable account to track my scene data, but it’s possible that it’s moving from useful planning to overkill.

So, just to dive in and write new scenes seems a little like wandering in a field of corn on a dark night (I come from a long line of Iowa corn farmers, and I live in Nebraska; the simile works for me).

Yet, after a certain level of planning and scene data, it’s like wandering through a very crowded cereal aisle, trying to figure out what take off the shelf.

So, I’m spending too much time trying to get the scene data just as I want it, and too little time moving Salvage forward.

What’s the right balance?

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Business Plan Overview

by Cindy Rae

Will this post help you with the business side of writing?

Despite my oh-so-limited time to spend on anything writing related, I am treating my writing as a business. I’ve had a business plan from the beginning. Not a professional, capture-venture-capital kind of business plan, but a comprehensive guide to my own efforts to be successful. It’s an ever-evolving document as I flesh out details.

This is the first in a series of posts about my business plan. Hope it helps!

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Writing a Novel and Writing Code Share…

by Cindy Rae

…an astounding ambiguity with terminology.  You’d think, as long as writing has been around, those in the publishing industry would have agreed to standard definitions, a standard vocabulary.  Not so.

And, surprisingly, neither has the software industry.  Software being considered more of a science, one would expect practitioners to have agreed on common terms.  Yet, even what title you call one who codes, develops, and engineers software varies: software engineer, programmer, software developer, systems engineer, systems analyst, and many more.

So, with those who read a book in draft form one can have critiquers, alpha-readers, beta-readers, writing partners, mentors, development editors, line-by-line editors, and more.

One might argue that each of these titles connotes a different flavor of responsibility, but the lines are definitely blurred.