Day 162: Audio Book

Today, I worked on the 2nd recording for The Post-College Guide to Happiness and it's been a really exciting process so far. I realize that most professional audio book folks probably take months to perfect every word possible, I'm trying to do it in three sessions since I'm funding it all myself. I really hope that people love the book, love my voice and think highly about the effort I've put in :).

In the writing world, I worked on a blog tour post about happiness and the wisdom of sticking to your skills. I've also got a character writing post to put up and I continued my work on the writing prompts book. Off to watch the Voice!

Day 160: Jeremy Lin

I'm definitely excited about the emergence of one Jeremy Lin. I got to watch my first few highlights of him last night as the Knicks held on against an angry Los Angeles Lakers team. I've got a little bit of Linsanity going on, as the kids like to say. I think it's awesome to see someone come up from the bench, literally from the Development League and kick some butt. I have no idea if he's for real or not, but I hope that Jeremy Lin continues to be a force for at least the rest of the season.

Today, I've hit a nice little milestone. I've written 400,000+ words toward my blogs and books since September. I'm about to release my 2nd book of the challenge, with seven more on the way shortly after that (re-releasing some of my writing prompts into workbooks and journals for those of you just checking in). My huge and potentially unattainable goal is to hit 100 books sold per day by June. Last month I hit around 35 books per day and this month I'm still over 30 a day so far. Releasing books that could all be major sellers for me in the next month will hopefully build some big momentum by June. I will continue to believe in and embrace this seemingly ludicrous goal, which will help me pay off my credit card debt. Hey, if Jeremy Lin can put up 38 on Kobe, I can sell 3,000 books in a month. Totally :).

In my writing on this fine Saturday, I worked on the new prompts book, wrote a blog tour post about thinking and happiness and I posted a character writing prompts post about knights and warriors. Happy rest of the weekend everybody. Keep on keeping on, Jeremy Lin!

If you are interested in finding out more about my work, check out my author page on Amazon, on which you can check out all of my books. If you have a book blog, I'm currently looking to do a blog tour starting later this year. Feel free to contact me at my Build Creative Writing Ideas website. Thanks!

Day 112: X-Mas X-ing

So far so good on a wonderful Christmas Day with the West family. As I did on Thanksgiving Day with my family, I got up excessively early this morning to get most of my writing completed. After finishing 2,000 out of 2,500 words, I was able to open a plethora of wonderful gifts. What I'm most grateful for this year, however, is the fact that I've been able to stick with this challenge all the way through December 25th :). I even wrote a post about being a grateful writer on my website today. I also worked on the living in the future book.

I gave out a few copies of my happiness book as a gift to some people this year and thus far it has been very well received. I have no idea if people will read it, but those who have opened it up seem to be pretty happy with what they've gotten! Maybe by next Christmas, I can get a ton of strangers to open the book up as a present as well :). Sounds like a good goal!

Happy Christmas everybody!

Day 87: Whistle While You Work

One of the things I'm loving about this writing challenge is that I've integrated housework (which I don't often like doing) and writing for hours at a time (which I've typically not had the patience for) and I've turned it into something I look forward to every day. One of the areas of my life I'd love to use this concept on in the future is with the marketing of my books. I've been very fortunate to have spread the word of my 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts book far and wide and I've sold over 6,000 copies of it from various sources. I have not been as successful with my other books and I know deep down that my Happiness book could be a big hit. I just need to get the word out to everyone and their mother.

The big thing that I really want to happen is to get it very much in the public eye by May, since that will be the time that hundreds of thousands of students are graduating from college, which is the perfect demographic for the book. I haven't figured it all out yet, but I'm going to try my best to make marketing a fun and productive part of my day.

On the writing front today, I worked on some character writing prompts about animal lovers and outdoorsy folk. I also wrote a post of kindergarten writing prompts. Onward to another day of writing fun!

Day 66: Happiness

How has this writing challenge contributed to my overall level of happiness?

This is an important question to ask for several reasons. First of all, as someone who has written a book about happiness, I should make sure that what I'm doing at any given time is contributing positively to my levels of joy. Secondly, since the first book I wrote on the challenge was that happiness book, how well it represents the subject is worth looking at to see if I'm keeping my quality up as well as my quantity. Thirdly, I think that other people on writing challenges such as NaNoWriMo should know if they can maintain their general happiness while working on something as difficult as a novel.

I'm proud to say that this challenge has contributed very well to my happiness during the last two months. While it has caused some issues socially and there have been days in which I've felt like collapsing on the couch for a few days, overall, I am feeling happier compared to a few months ago. I knew at that time that I needed something to keep me focused and to keep me excited about writing. Even though I know that writing is a major part of my life purpose, I still needed to set a goal for myself that would be challenging and this idea of writing 2,500 words a day for 365 days straight has fit the bill.

Today, I continued to work on the young-adultish fantasy novel, and I'm very glad to be giving it a second go in a full-length version. I'm able to flesh out some characters more and I've had a great time seeing how they get from point A to point B in a much more complex tale. I also wrote a blog post today focusing on quotes about happiness, which provides some context to several amazing quotes on the subject of joy.

Day 14: Bleach and Football

I love getting up early on Sundays to write, though on this particular day, it took a few false starts until I finally got my work completed on the happiness book. I'm over 30,000 words in and I may be close to finished once I reach around 40,000. Still haven't decided what book to work on next...

Today, Amy and I are cleaning the apartment to get ready for our move to a bigger apartment down the street on October 1st. This meant inhaling a lot of bleach and throwing away bags and bags of trash. This may end up being the most organized move of my life; all because of this lovely, productive lady.

Also, there is football, which is a wondrous thing. Go Eagles!

Didn't quite get to all 45 posts yesterday, but 27 blog posts in one day of over 10,000 words of content is not half bad, even if it's reprinted from my book :). Should finish the last 18 today!

Day 13: 45 posts?

Here we are on day 13 of my ridiculous writing crusade and I've decided to post 45 blog posts on my writing blog today. Am I insane?

Well, not completely. The last couple of days I realized that I should be taking advantage of the fact that I have an entire book worth of elementary school writing prompts. Especially since my first grade and second grade writing prompt pages are the highest trafficked on the website.

I had already posted 50 prompts from the book as a sample and I decided to go all in and post the other 450, leading to 45 blog posts with a little introduction to each. I hope that this idea will increase my blog traffic astronomically after a few months and that it will add to my advertising revenue as well.

In the book today, which I worked on while eating a scone at Caribou Coffee, I played around with my chapter on education. Happy weekend!

Day 12: 25,000 words!

While I passed 25,000 words in total on day 10, today I passed 25,000 words in the happiness book, which is so exciting! I have a feeling that the book will be somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 words in total.

There are a few wonderful projects I have coming up this year during my 365 days of writing, though I believe the next will be the sequel to my book 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts, 1,000 Character Writing Prompts. It won't be as hard to write as the happiness book, so it'll give me a bit of a respite before I take on more difficult projects later on in the year.

Today, I also working a post about stepping up in life and not letting excuses get in the way of living the life you want to lead.

Day 9: Making Money

I have been fortunate enough to be able to make almost my entire living off of my creative pursuits. As a result, I've written a blog post today about making money in hopes that it can give other creative folks a bit of guidance.

In the happiness book today, I wrote about connecting with people as opposed to spending all your alone time on your phone, MP3 player or your tablet computer. The best part about working on this book is that it reminds me of some of the positive habits I've neglected as of late and it allows me to reinstate them as part of my life.

Studies have shown that researching happiness actually increases your levels of happiness. I'm glad to say that I'm a statistic in this respect!

Day 6: Love and Relaxation

Today in the happiness book I took a break from the chapter on work and wrote about love. It's so amazing to think that only a few years ago, my girlfriend and I used to fight all the time. Nowadays, because of the happiness and togetherness exercises we've practiced, our fights take up less than 1 percent of our time together.

I'm so glad to be able to share that with everybody once the book comes out.

I also wrote about why writers and other creative people need to take a chill pill every once in a while to complete their most relaxed, effective work. Thanks for stopping by!

Day 5: Enthusiasm

Today on my blog, I've written a blog post on the writings of Frank Bettger a former baseball player who become an expert salesman using enthusiasm.

It's funny that just writing about something can make you want to directly apply it to your life (I hope that doesn't happen if I ever write about manure). Think about how your day-to-day world could change if you applied enthusiasm to your job, your friendships, your family and your financial situation.

We often give a hard time to folks to have such verve and energy about all aspects of their lives. We think they're "on something" when in fact they might be "on to something" about how to live life. Food for thought.

I also pushed through another bit of the happiness book and now I have over 10,000 words written!

Day 4: Standing Up For Yourself

In all of my lackluster days of de-motivational laziness the last few months, I neglected to do something. I didn't stand up for myself.

I let myself wallow in mild depression and I didn't fight for the creative person I am inside. That's part of what this 365 day writing quest is about. I'm fighting for myself to survive creatively.

In the happiness book, I worked on giving some blissful brain exercises my own Bryan twist and on the blog I wrote about the self publishing stigma that some authors must fight against when putting their work out there.

If you aren't getting the results you want in life, stand up for yourself and kick your lazy self's butt into gear!

Day 3: Feeling It

It was a few years ago when I first came up with the idea for The Post-College Guide to Happiness, but I never actually sat down and wrote it. There are plenty of notes in various pads of paper somewhere in the apartment, and while notes are fantastic, they don't get you in the zone of what you're writing.

Today, I started feeling it. I remembered why I wanted to write this book and how it might be able to help lots of people. Very exciting stuff!

I also wrote a post about script writing tips on my blog. Day 3 of the challenge is feeling mighty fine right now. Mighty fine.