Learn (the blog!)

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2*0*4 Lifestyle: A Planner for Living

“Love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.” from Luke 10:27

We are not simple human beings. We are heart and soul, mind and body. We are circles of love and caring, spiritual endeavors, curious intellectuals, and physical movement.

The  2 * 0 * 4 planner is designed to transform your life by melding the four circles of our life.

  • Your heart will celebrate deepening relationships.
  • Your soul will be inspired to come closer to God.
  • Your mind will be sharper and clearer.
  • Your body will strive toward its own ideal weight.

How can a simple planner do all this?  The key is double-pronged:  following the two-page weekly spread and committing to the core of the 2*0*4 Lifestyle.

Scientific studies tell us that 21 days is necessary to break a habit, and 66 days are necessary to form a habit. Habits demand commitment. Commitments can be maintained through daily focus ~ the weekly planner.

2*0*4 will equip you with weekly reminders for diet, water intake, and movement. Here are sample pages.

At six-week and seasonal intervals are opportunities to commit to goals to strengthen your relationships, pursue quiet contemplation or peaceful prayers, build your mind, and develop your body.

Any transformation requires a time commitment, and challenges confront our devotion to change. Schedule your changes, plan for special events, take lists when shopping, and climb over the struggles that interfere with your devotion to transform. If you fall off track with any element, just climb back on with a re-commitment to change.

At the end of a committed year of the 2 * 0 * 4 Lifestyle, we guarantee that your life will have transformed for the better.

Open the planner and find ~

* The Raison d’Etre: explaining the purpose of the lifestyle and providing assistance with necessary diet changes–feast and fast, eating real food and avoiding bad fats and sugars.

* The Yearly Pre-Set, a goal-setting exercise for Heart, Soul, Mind, and Body. Accomplishments to Achieve creates lists in each area for you to consider throughout the year.

* Seasonal Pre-Set then Re-Sets, reviewing previous victories and challenges, specific goal setting, anticipated challenges, and obligations to come.

* The weekly spread, undated, with a panel for reflecting over the week, daily gratitude and meditation, upcoming goals, an inspirational quotation, and a place to note your weekly weigh-in.

* At the six-week mark is a new retrospection and prospectus, considering challenges and new ideas about your goals. After the first two six-week marks, you will encounter progress meters for these goals.

* Calendars of important dates from 2019 to 2023.

* Notes and Looking Ahead pages, Gifts and Wish List, and My Lists:  films, restaurants, books, tech, places, hikes, music, and vacation spots.

What other planner combines heart and soul, mind and body?  Make the decision to live a whole life with 2*0*4.

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Plot ~ All Writers Need to Know

From September to December, The Write Focus podcast will focus on Plot.

Everything to do with Plot.

Freytag’s Pyramid and the Beats.

Plot Points and Pinch Points and the Complex Plot Structure.

Three-Act … or Four-Act Structure.

Shakespeare’s Structure.

And the best Structure of All, the most adaptable to every writer’s needs, able to be stripped down to the basics or built into cycles for epic length.

We cover it all, every Wednesday as the year cools into autumn and winter.

Information comes from our host M.A. Lee’s guidebook Discovering Your Plot, with assistance from Edie Roones and Remi Black.

What do writers want from plot?

What do writers need from plot?

As wordsmiths, we writers know that want and need are two different words.

  • The want is a circumstance that we writers can control. We want plot specifics to help us craft story and exceed reader expectations.
  • The need is a circumstance of obligations from reader expectations of story. While readers may want the comfort of the genre elements (the tropes), they also wish to have their interest and curiosity piqued.

Can we writers deliver on the expectations and the surprises in order to please our readers?

That’s the involved question that our series based on Discovering Your Plot hopes to answer.

Join us.

How to Find Us

 

Listen on your favorite podcast site: from Apple to YouTube, Spotify and Podbean (my favs), Google Play, Amazon Music / Audible, Samsung and Player FM, Podcaster, the rivals iHeart and Tune-in, and too many to list.

Here are links to the easiest podcast services. Find our green logo and follow.

My favorite podcast is Podbean. https://eden5695.podbean.com/

YouTube direct link to the last playlist on Branding: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXi3M_aM-d7L4OtDk2Bde7LDwQ2l7K8NE 

Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-write-focus/id1546738740%20

Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4fMwknmfJhkJxQvaaLQ3Gm?si=ffeb71ed17c3409d

Amazon/Audible https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/062ecc60-d61c-432a-ad99-8234c1044ef1

ListenNotes https://lnns.co/y_Jg5rpaMNo

Google https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2VkZW41Njk1L2ZlZWQueG1s

Tune-in https://tunein.com/podcasts/p1608565/

The Write Focus presents information on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

For up-to-date links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

 

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Defeat Writer’s Block

Don’t fear the great *unmentioned unmentionable* for writers. cover by Emily R. Dunn

Let’s DEFEAT WRITER’S BLOCK.

How do we defeat Writer’s Block?

  • Strategies to tackle that monster.
  • Advice from other 15 best-selling writers.
  • Detailed explanations to start doing now!

This book comes direct from The Write Focus podcast and its host M.A. Lee.

Suffering every writer’s serious malady of writer’s block?

We may say the mantra “Writer’s Block doesn’t exist”, but something more than simple disruptions and distractions can interfere with our writing, creating insurmountable walls.

The Write Focus analyzes the three most common types and offers solutions to Overcome and Defeat this monster looming over the writer’s desk.

The best solution, though, is Leo Tolstoy’s mantra: No days without lines :: Nulla dies sine linea. Make that your own mantra.

Published August 8.

Ebook from Worldwide Distributors like Kobo, B&N, and more:  Find it here.

Ebook and Paperback from amazing Amazon: Also on preorder, available on the 8th.

Audiobook also available (although some distributors may not have the book available for 30 days from publication. Ah well.).

Available Now: Storytel / https://www.storytel.com/se/sv/books/defeat-writers-block-think-like-a-pro-writer-6-8875896 

and Libro /  https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798988473985

Coming Soon to Apple, Audible, Chirp, Kobo, and more!

created by Emily R. Dunn
Audiobook and Ebook publishing in the Summer as part of the Summer Writing Challenge.

Chapters

  1. Introduction
  2. Overcoming Type 1: Refusal, easy to defeat
  3. Overcoming Type 2: Procrastination, difficult
  4. Overcoming Type 3: Inertia, the worst
  5. Pro Writers’ Advice, part A ~ 5 best-selling writers speak on writer’s block and how they defeated it
  6. Pro Writers’ Advice, part B ~ 6 best-sellers talk about writer’s block and strategies
  7. How One Pro Writer Defeated the Monster ~ Erle Stanley Gardner and his strategies
  8. More Techniques from Erle Stanley Gardner
  9. Avoid These Mistakes, part A ~ offered by Judy Delton
  10. Avoid These Mistakes, part B ~ more to avoid from J. Delton
  11. Mary Stewart on Writing Flow ~ shared by her in her novel The Stormy Petrel
  12. Storyteller and Story Teacher ~ Kate Wilhelm’s remembrances on writing barriers
  13. Burnham Talks Block ~ Sophie Burnham devotes a chapter to writer’s block in her book On Writing
  14. Whitney’s Solutions ~ America’s first great writer of romantic suspense, Phyllis A. Whitney shares many techniques in her book Guide to Fiction Writing

The book comes from the series of the same name on the podcast The Write Focus, hosted by M.A. Lee with the assistance of Edie Roones and Remi Black. The podcast is a presentation of Writers’ Ink Books.

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3 Planners for Writers

Why do Writers Need Planners?

I’m not just promoting 3 Planners here. I have a reason for creating each one.

The #1 guarantee of continual writing success is tracking your progress, with all the successes recorded. We writers have a tendency to focus on our current problems and set-backs.

While every publication is a major success, the daily grind often has us thinking we’re back-pedaling rather than advancing. Tracking our minor successes and checking off our benchmark goals provides us with the incentives we need to keep working.

Cover by Deranged Doctor Design

The Basic Planner: a Word-Count Focus

What helps writers achieve those two goals? For speed, we need to concentrate our mental energies on writing daily. For the long haul, we need to know our projects, current and next and future. When we focus on speed and longevity, we write more than we ever have before.

Word Trekker accomplishes these goals by advance planning for our projects and tracking our words daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.

Any hikers out there? This planner is for you. Match those words to the step-count for the Triple Crown of Hiking.

  • Pacific Crest Trial > 2,650 miles
  • Continental Divide Trail > 3,100 miles
  • Appalachian Trial > 2,193
  • AT international extension into Canada 1,319 >> 2, 193 with 1,319 = 3,512

One hiking mile = 100 words. As hikers venture along each trail, they trek from state to state. Setting the Triple Crown of Hiking as a writing goal keeps us going through the year.

Much less than $1 a month, this 6 x 9 planner helps you work toward One Million Words in a Year. Click the link to discover more.

Cover by Deranged Doctor Design

Think in Projects Rather than Words?

Plan those writing goals. Nest the projects; hatch as you achieve them. Celebrate victories; analyze challenges. Soar with Success with the Writing Nest.

Long-term goals are easy to set. Breaking the long-term goals into short-term goals helps us slog through the slow times. Those slow slogs can lead us to think we’re not achieving, yet a simple record will keep us motivated to continue on.

Where can we keep that record of achievements, short-term and long-term? A daily system that builds to mid-term benchmarks and seasonal achievements. That system should help us not only record our achievements but also set our long-term and short-term goals.

Sized 8 x 10, this undated planner (priced for $1 a month) lets us start anytime, taking breaks between projects or powering through the year. Click for more info.

cover by Deranged Doctor Design for Writers Ink Books
Cover by Deranged Doctor Design

The Planner for Newbies

Want to make writing a commitment rather than a hobby? Striving for professional publication rather than wannabe status? The Think/Pro planner helps make the conversion from newbie to writing pro.

$1 a month, this undated planner tracks word counts and healthy habits, offers creativity tips and tax tips, offers progress meters for projects and a weekly inspirational quote from a major writer.

In addition to the weekly spread with a Top 3 Task List are Monthly Reviews & Previews and Seasonal & Yearly Planning pages.

The Monthly Review has a Productivity Tracker and a Progress Meter as well as places to jot down Business Contacts and Expenses. Seasonal Previews ask you to polish the nuts and bolts of your projected words per week and sharpen up the time remaining before your deadline.  At the end of every month, the planner offers a record for victories as well as upcoming challenges.

Time to change “Seize the Day” into “Seize the Dream.”  For success, we need to Think/Pro.  This 8 x 10 planner will help.

 

 

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Celebrate a Book Birthday!

On this day in 2017, M.A. Lee published Old Geeky Greeks, third in the Think like a Pro Writer series.

We published with one cover. At the end of 2019, as part of the year-long updates to the entire Think like a Pro Writer series, our cover designers Deranged Doctor Design came up with this wonderful cover.

Here’s information for this book. Click the link to Amazon to purchase.

What do these have in common?

Atonement. I, Robot. The 13th Warrior. The Hobbit. Jurassic Park, in all its iterations.

Harry Potter. Ironman. Perseus. Dudley Dooright. Macbeth.

5 Stages of the Hero and the Monster. Blood tragedies. The scariest woman in all literature. Hubris.

These oddly-matched items all have origins in the ancient Greeks and Romans.

The first storytellers discovered many ways to intrigue and thrill their audiences.  They laid strong foundations for what worked and what didn’t work. Their techniques are still used, re-packaged as exclusive insights, glittery infographics, three-point seminars, and Wham-Pow webinars urging modern writers to Buy Now!

Old Geeky Greeks: Write Stories with Ancient Techniques presents these techniques in a clear, organized method for writers.

Chapters in OGG cover understanding characters, plot requirements and the oldest plot formula (the Blood or Revenge Tragedy), and such concepts as in medias res and dulce et utile and more, all to solve the sticky problem of audience expectations.

The bright minds of Classical Antiquity first explored that problem, and the answers that they developed are applicable in this age of the internet, special effects, and infographics.

Save yourself the hours spent at seminars and in webinars or scanning social media. Spend that time writing—and study the Old Geeky Greeks at your leisure. Whether writing novels or plays, blogs or non-fiction, poems and songs, this guidebook offers information to improve your writing.

Old Geeky Greeks is a seminar in book form, 28,000 words of time-proven techniques.

Writer M.A. Lee has published 25-plus titles under various pen names since she began self-publishing in 2015. She has over 30 years of experience in guiding college and high school students as they examined, analyzed, and applied these techniques.

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Wish I’d Known ~ About Podcasting and Writing

Wish I'd Known image created by Emily Dunn
stock photo from MS

We don’t often take the time to look back, to do a retrospection, a look at What I’d Wish I’d Known before ever starting. We track our accomplishments. Then we diligently write down the small steps that take us to our short-term goals and on to our long-term ones.

If we’re good little bunnies, we check our Master Plan once a year. We should rewrite it every third or fifth or seventh year. I can’t imagine a 10-year Master Plan. After my first five-year plan, I had to drop back from five to three because my plans change so much. I get new information. I clarify my goals I shove things forward that I wasn’t able to accomplish when I first envisioned them through rosy-colored glasses.

Even so—when we do stop and look back, we should consider all we’ve gained, all we’ve learned, and share that with others. Advice along the lines of “Wish I’d Known”.

We have a two-episode Retrospective, first on Podcasting, especially since many people are exploring podcasting as a new endeavor, on May 15. Then on May 22, the Retrospective focuses on Writing.

Decisions. Regrets. We cover them all.

Link to the audio of the May 15 episode: https://eden5695.podbean.com/e/520-wish-id-known-a-podcasting-retrospective/?token=002359eb986dd8adc7af0ec72855c8d2

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Writing Short Stories ~ the Presentation

Here’s the powerpoint for my “Writing Short Stories” presentation to the SinC Smoking Guns on Writing Short Stories with Lester Dent’s plot formula. (This is what those attending the meeting would have seen while I rattled about the other information. IDK if the computer crash was a benefit or not.)

Scroll to the bottom to open the pdf document. You have permission to print.

The slide show is very bare bones.

If you would like to hear how I related the plot formula to four popular songs, then here’s a link to the first podcast episode on Writing Short Stories.  It’s a four-part series that aired in May of 2022.

In that series, I did breakdown the  plot formula for short stories in detail.

These narrative songs use Dent’s short story formula, a big surprise when I realized the connection of the plot formula to poetry. The four songs on the podcast, in order, are

  • Simon and Garfunkel’s “America”
  • Garth Brooks’ “The Thunder Rolls”
  • Carly Simon’s “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”
  • Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff, the Magic Dragon”.

The Write Focus podcast is available on Podbean, Apple, Google Play, Samsung, Spotify, YouTube, and many more podcast distributors.

Writing Short Stories Presentation