New and improved pages & an invitation to track your writer’s resolutions.

During Christmas vacation, I succumbed to a New Year-driven frenzy of tidying and fussing over my blog.

I tweaked my backstory (about) page, and created a sidebar graphic that links to it. Notice that it prominently features my name. The name I’m planning to publish under. The name that potential readers will need to remember when they want to buy my book. Thank you, Kristin Lamb – author of We Are Not Alone – for making me realize that my platform needs to be branded with my name. (Yep, I did some reading over vacation too.)

Click here for updated information about this blog and me — including a sampler list of my favorite posts.

*

If you tour my freshly scrubbed blog, you’ll see all sorts of small changes. For example, thanks to more of Kristen’s advice, I took a deep breath and joined Twitter. Which I really don’t get yet. But I will. Let me know if you’re already out there, so I can follow you. You can find me @RRudeParanormal.

I also have a YouTube channel all to myself. Go to http://www.youtube.com/user/RRudeParanormalist to view a little video snippet of me talking to a tree, which you haven’t seen. (Unless you followed the link I posted at The Paranormalist on Facebook – where I’m resolved to posting some little “bit ‘o creepiness” most every day from now on.)

Probably the most exciting thing I did during vacation is this:

I made a sidebar link for this too —>

*

Part of the process was determining the rough equivalent of  NaNoWriMo when one is trying to develop an ongoing writing career, (as opposed to to simply getting 50,000 words written.) Looking at those numbers sobered me. The following chunk of text comes at the end of the WrMoProg Homepage, but I thought I’d share it here too.

***

If you look at the WrMoProg Challenge button/badge, you will see I worked up some numbers that might be equivalent to a successful NaNoWriMo stint. Because writing speed varies so much, I made my best guess as to the amount of time writing a manuscript page takes.

My numbers are otherwise based on this equation:
Word count: based on 25 lines per page in Courier New 12 pt. averages approximately 250 words per page. 20 pages, an average chapter,=25,000 (sic); 200 pages=50,000. Most books are between 50 and 100,000 words long. Publishers estimate by pages, including the white space. A computer count of 50,000 words may be 65,000 in publishers’ terms.
–Daphne Clair/Laurey Bright

So, here are some additional factoids to help you set your writing goals:

• Full time writer = 40 hours per week / 160 hours per month
• Half-time writer = 20 hours per week / 80 hours per month
• Average non-fiction book = 50,000 – 85,000 words = 200 – 340 hours
• Average novel = 50,000 – 110,000 words = 200 – 440 hours
• Ideal FIRST novel = 80,000 – 100,000 = 320 – 400 hours
• Average Novella (good for e-books) = 20,000 – 50,000 = 80 – 200 hours
• Average short story = 1000 – 7500 words = 4 – 30 hours