Part 3: Daydreaming for Encouragement.
If daydreaming for ideas is the writer’s bread and butter, daydreaming for encouragement is the writer’s heartbeat. If a writer loses heart, the ideas won’t matter. The writer quits.
If you want to be a published writer, your daydreams for seeing your book on the shelves will have to sustain you for [...]

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Last week I talked about how to manage expectations and stress, how meeting your expectations makes you happy and not meeting them makes you unhappy. My expectations about the quality of my writing are pushing me to improve fairly consistently. I feel good about that. But my expectations about making a career of my writing [...]

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          One of my favorite quotes is what Teddy Roosevelt has to say about critics.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit [...]

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Routines for Writers is pleased to welcome Janice Elsheimer as our special guest every Tuesday in November. While we’re all busily writing away, Janice will give us tips and ideas for increasing our creativity. Please join us in thanking Janice for being with us this month!
After my first book was published, I experienced post-partum depression. [...]

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I’m close to being settled in my new home. Close enough that I finally made the time to find and print the file of notes on the story I might work on during NaNo. Yay! I’m the kind of person who gets a lot of mileage out of encouragement, though, so I have been staying [...]

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Do you wonder why we write so much about not writing and not working and not finishing? It’s the reason we started this blog in the first place (one year ago! Happy Anniversary to us!). We write to you about not writing because that seems to be the biggest problem the three of us have [...]

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See this smiley face? Doesn’t it look like it’s trying too hard to look happy, almost like it’s gritting its teeth to keep the happy face going?
Yeah. That’s me during week two of NaNo. I’m feeling positive. Really. Excited even. Honest. Despite the fact that I’m supposed to have written 20,000 words by the end [...]

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Never compare yourself or your output to another writer. You’re moving forward every single day and accomplishing something. That is productive.
 
Whether or not you completed an outline before you started the NaNoWriMo challenge, or you only have only a partial outline or guideline to work with, the act of writing can produce magical results. [...]

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