How to Do NaNoWriMo Next Month

  We are all super-busy. We all have too much on our plates. We are all one bad day away from crying in the supermarket because they don't have our favorite brand of potato chips. It happens. Life is overwhelming. Life is busy. So, taking on such a project, 50,000 words in 30 days, on top of all your other responsibilities, is no small task.
    But it's worth it. If you're a writer, or want to be, the novel is the ultimate achievement. Publishable or not, published or not, a single creative work of that magnitude is something to be proud of. But how to do it?  How can you possibly find the time to write a novel when you have so much other stuff to do?
For the why, read 5 Reasons to Do NaNoWriMo Next Month.

Here's how, in 5 steps.

1. Say YES. 
   You can't write a novel if you don't say yes to writing one in the first place. This means telling everybody you know that you're writing it. Tweeting, Facebooking, calling up old friends, new friends, grandparents, or whoever, and telling the entire world that you are saying yes to your dream of writing a novel.
2. Start planning.
   You need an idea. It doesn't have to be a big idea. It doesn't have to be sexy or action-packed or literary genius. It just needs to be an idea that you can tell a 50,000 word story about. That may seem like a tall order, but if you choose something interesting, something you can have fun with, it's not as tall as it seems. You can do a mind map (big bubbles on a piece of notebook paper with characters names and bits of plot steps or backstory, connected with squiggly lines), you can write an outline (I.A.1.a.i.), or you can just take your idea and run with it. It's up to you.
3. Start writing!
   When November 1 arrives (and not a moment before--honor system!), get your butt in gear. Rehearse upcoming scenes in the shower. Write while you eat breakfast. Skip your television shows, or write while you watch. Plan your next big scene on the drive home (in your head, of course--don't write and drive!). Wherever you have to steal a few minutes to write your book, do it. That's the only way you're going to finish if your schedule is especially tight.  
4. Keep writing! 
   Yeah, it's not that original, but it's necessary. Once you get going, you might feel tempted to give up. Don't do it. Keep writing. If you fall behind schedule--NaNo time asks for an average of 1,667 words a day--DON'T PANIC. Use your weekends to your full advantage. You can find time to catch yourself up. Snow day? Use it to write! Come down with the flu? Bring your laptop to bed and write. Whatever you have to do, this contest will teach you to use your time well if nothing else!
5. Use the NaNo resources.
   NaNo offers a TON of resources to participants: inspirational and motivational emails called pep talks from your local municipal liaisons and guest writers; forums for writers based on various topics, genres, and locations; write-ins organized by the liaisons; videos, blogs, and tips from writers around the world to help you keep your novel going. With their help, you can power through and get your 50,000 words. 

    It is possible to write 50,000 words in a month. I've done it 3 times, and thousands more do it every year. I'm a little nervous for the first time this year because I have never been working on so many writing-related projects at the same time, but I still think I've got it in me to go for number 4. I may have to cut back temporarily on blogging (including Insistent and Persistent), TV, Twitter, and Triberr--my biggest time-sucks--but I think I can still do it. And you can too.

YOU wrote it all night long! 

Sign up at www.NaNoWriMo.org and get going on your novel!

Back to the Future: Part 2

If your blogroll is
that long, do everyone
a favor and put it on
its own page!

  Yesterday, I started enumerating some of the issues I found in a number of blogs that I had visited, looking for people to review my book. The list and explanation came out so long that I broke it into two posts: here's part 2:

3) Layout problems were incredible. Lots of these bloggers have sidebars that keep going and going and going and going down the page, sometimes far beyond the end of the posts they display on their home page. Now, this particular issue is really easy to do because sites like Blogger and WordPress let you add as many sidebar items as you want, but that doesn't mean you should get carried away. Not all of that junk needs to be on a sidebar, which is something that a visitor sees on EVERY SINGLE PAGE of your site.

    Case in point, this one on the left. See where the red ad is. That's the end of the content on this page. I spray-painted over the names and face of the author to be nice and protect them from being the known object of ridicule, but seriously, if your blog roll is that long (it took me 3 or 4 screenshots to get the entire page from top to bottom), put it on its own separate page, not in your sidebar.

    Not only were the sidebars excessively long in some cases, many blogs also had photos and widgets that stuck out over the edges of the sidebar area. This is a rookie mistake. Many new bloggers only check out the "administrative"/back-end of the site where they create posts and set up the layout on their own, so they don't realize that stuff is going to look different on the "front-end" of the site that visitors see.

    Usually, if a blogger is really focused on making their site a place people want to stay and read posts, they start previewing posts and checking how the site looks on the front-end when they make changes or want to add a new widget. I would venture that many of these bloggers hadn't seen the front-end of their blog in months if not longer.

    Another point, don't do the thing where your page just keeps loading older posts as a person scrolls down. People hate how Facebook does it because it always loses your place, and it drives me nuts because you can never find out what's in the footer. An archive is completely sufficient for people to view your older posts. Nobody is actually going to read all 214 of your posts in order in one go. 

4) Layout problems lead to load time issues. What's load time? It's how long it takes a web browser to display your site from the time someone clicks a link to the time the page and all its bells and whistles finish displaying. If you're running twenty tabs on your browser at once, this is going to slow down any web page. But if all those sites have a ton of photos, Javascript, and 3rd party applications running on them, it's going to slow down the load times even more.

    For example, if you open 20 tabs on Craigslist, you're not going to have much trouble with load time. Most pages are comprised of basic HTML and text. But if you try to open a bunch of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Pinterest, Chipotle, HBOGo, etc. that have auto-reload functionality, Flash or Javascript code, or lots of (especially high-resolution) photos, all at once, they're all gonna take their sweet time loading.

    And some may not load correctly because the browser is so bogged down trying to open all the pages with complex code on them that not all the requests to the server are completed. When this happens, you end up with a site that has gaping holes where photos or widgets should be, marked by X's, blank boxes, or half-loaded pictures. 

    Nobody wants this. Especially not your readers. Worse than that, especially for new visitors, if the page doesn't load fast enough, they might leave before it finishes and decide not to come back.

    You know what else slows down page-speed/load time? THIRD PARTY APPLICATIONS/WIDGETS/PHOTOS. This means your "Networked Blogs" widgets, your Flickr/Photobucket slideshows, GetGlue widgets, or ANYTHING you got the code for on another website to add to your site. Even if it's an image link from another site. Every time somebody visits your website, these applications and widgets have to send a request to these third party/external servers to find the information that populates them. Because the web browser is now sending requests to several different servers at the same time, it takes longer for all of them to respond.

    This is not to say you need to get rid of all the third party functionality on your site. Just use them in moderation. Try them and see how long it takes for your page to open. If it's more than 3 to 5 seconds, it may not be worth it. I use third party functionality on my blog, but most of my widgets are native to Blogger or are images I uploaded myself. Images are usually not a big drag on load time unless you have a LOT of them or unless they are all being pulled in from external websites.

Summing Up:

    For me, I look at these kind of issues two ways: 1) long, disorganized sidebars, links and content show you really have a lot to share, and you want to show off your appreciation for readers, fellow bloggers, etc. On the other, if these issues are really bad, e.g. it takes me longer than about half a minute (including load time!) to find what I'm looking for due to either bad navigation/organization or slow page speeds, it kind of ruins your site for me. You might have a lot of great information to share, but I'm not going to stay on your site long enough to find out because your site is an eyesore or tests my patience taking too long to load. I am on my computer enough as it is that I don't want to have to spend more time waiting for all your third party apps or gigantic headers to load. I've got other things to do.
    The only reason I stuck around long enough on most of these sites is because I was on a mission. I wanted to find people in the writing/book community to begin relationships with in the hopes of promoting my book. So I was patient. If I had been a reader looking for reviews on a book I wanted to read, I wouldn't have stuck around for many of them.
    All in all, take pride in your blog. It's a part of your online identity, and people like me who don't know you personally are judging you by it. Make it your own, but make it accessible and enjoyable to the people who also care about it--your readers.

Design matters. Ease up on the widgets!

Back to the Future: Part 1

  I feel like I took a trip into 1999 last night. I've mentioned my recent entry into self-publishing, and I've been on the prowl for marketing options for my book. (Something I'm not crazy about, as I explained in last week's post.)

You remember sites like this. I hope you've updated yours
to fit into the 21st century a little better!

    So, I've been searching for blogs and websites where I can write guest posts, do interviews, or solicit a review from the blogger, and I am sorry to say that even in this modern, tech-savvy, drag-and-drop web-builder world, too many people still have awful-looking blogs and websites. Why do I bring up 1999? Because that was a time when you only build the most basic of websites if you didn't know much about coding or design. And some of these sites I looked at gave off that same feel--like the person who created them had no idea what they were doing and just slapped a bunch of stuff together and called it good.
    To be fair, some people had really beautiful sites. But they are in the minority. I must have looked at over a hundred different blogs and websites last night, and I was plagued by slow load times, an excess of 3rd party widgets and plugins, gigantic headers, ridiculously confusing navigation, poorly arranged photos and widgets that didn't fit the content/sidebar areas of the site, and things that were just plain ugly, like background images, colors, logos, poor quality photos, etc.
    I worked at a web design company, so I probably notice this stuff a lot more than the average person, but, especially with the slow load times, I don't know how these people have so many page views and so many followers with a site as disorganized/ugly/confusing as that!

  Because of all the problems I found, I'm going to break the analysis and advice into two parts. Part 2 will be up tomorrow.

1) Some of these people had gigantic headers, like took-up-almost-the-ENTIRE-screen big. Most of them were really pretty, and often, these were some of the better designed sites, but as far as attracting new visitors go, gigantic headers like that are one of the worst things you can do, no matter how pretty is it. Why? People spend the majority of their time on a website homepage ABOVE THE FOLD (i.e. the part of the webpage you see when you first arrive on a website without scrolling down at all).

Apparently these guys specialize in gigantic headers. Which might work for some products,
but for most sites, a big header is taking away from all the other great stuff you have to offer.

   Aside from not giving a new visitor any idea of what you do beyond what's in your header image, these big images can really take a toll on your load time/page speed (i.e. how long it takes for a web browser to load all the elements on a webpage from the time that a person clicks a link to the time that the page finishes loading.)

2) Confusing navigation was another issue. The majority of the sites were book blogging sites that published book reviews and accepted review requests from authors and publishers. The majority of them also had a review policy page which explained what types of books they accepted, among other details like whether they preferred print or ebook format.

    However, I would venture to say that at least a third of the sites I looked at had hidden this page somewhere on their site. If it's a big part of what you do, it should be ABOVE THE FOLD, and it should be easy enough for someone to find if that's what they're looking for. This means it should be in the navigation menu or in a widget or text box at the very top of the page. Some people had them hidden in "about" pages, "contact" pages, or profile widgets, and some of them were just little links hidden halfway down the homepage in between two other garish images or flashy widgets.

    That's it for today. Consider your website or blog and ask yourself if you commit any of these faux pas that can wreck your new visitor stats. Make sure to check back tomorrow for the rest of the list!

Overwhelmed But Flattered

  I was taken to an almost impromptu lunch yesterday (meaning I didn't know about it until that morning) and offered what might be considered a promotion. Good news, right? I was scared shitless the entire time they were talking about it. It felt kind of like an ambush, as I had no idea that that's what the lunch would be about. My coworker and I were both taken out and offered a similar position, added responsiblity, added stress, and a pay increase, though no mention was made as to how much that would be.
    My one year review was today, it was positive, and I did get a raise (yay!). But my concern was not even really how much the raise would have been for. It was more the added stress and added responsiblity that I was not sure I was ready for. It would be additional content management for our new site, which I was expecting, and the possibility of training an intern and supervising them directly, both of which I know I can handle. The thing I was wavering on had to do with the "project management" thing, which was the title that came with the promotion. Part of this position would have included me having to manage my coworkers' tasks and check on their progress on those tasks and projects, on top of doing my own task and time management. I don't mind checking in with people when my bosses are out of town, but I wouldn't want to do it as part of my regular job. I can't bug people about their jobs. I can't be the nag. I can't write on the whiteboard what they're supposed to do. And I can't sit there and tell them it has to be done by Friday because, honestly, who am I? Unless I can fire them if it's not done, who am I? Their coworker, who is younger than most of them, that is trying to keep them on track? I'm fairly certain that at least two of them would feel extremely pissed off about me in that position, not jealous, necessarily, but angry that a person of my age and experience--which is still pretty limited if you measure it by time--was put into a position of this caliber.
    We're a small company, and I've known for a long time that they've wanted to put somebody else in a semi-supervisory position to free up my bosses' time. I've had a job for one year. All the experince I have, the majority has come during this one year. I just don't feel ready to do all the work that that new position would have required. I don't feel like I have the personality to manage that many people's tasks. I can manage myself, and maybe one other person who would be doing the same kind of work as me, but five additional people? Plus my own workload managing content? It was just too overwhelming.
    Don't get me wrong, I was flattered as hell, but intimidated more. I know how much confidence my bosses have in me, and while it's appreciated, I know that a job like that would not just put me close to a mental breakdown, it might actually CAUSE one. So, without mental health benefits, or general wellness benefits (anti-stress benefits, to be precise, massages and the like), I cannot sign on for a job where I have no idea what the workload or stress load is going to be, only that it will be more. I am already stressed and I already work hard. More seems like I might be setting myself up to fail at this point. And maybe in a few months, once I get my bearing with this new site, I might feel up to taking on a little more, but until then, I'd like to have some idea of what I'm getting into. And in the meantime, I'm very happy with what I'm doing now, and I look forward to taking on the new challenges within that particular aspect of my job.
    I did get a positive review, which I was very pleased about. In light of the fact that it was my one year review, I went out of my way to put together a list of all the major projects, tasks, and writing assignments I've completed over the past year. There were a lot. Even I was surprised. I have written so much, and completed a fair number of major projects as well, and it was kind of cool to see them all in one place, rather than spread out over so many weekly activity reports. It was sort of as a defense against any poor performance things that might have come up, though thankfully, none did.
    It's strange to think I've been at the same company, and to think about how far I've come from what I was doing this time last year to now, but it's cool. I've never had a job this long, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else I can accomplish in the next year.

Happy work birthday to me... Happy work birthday to me... :)

What are some of your accomplishments in the past year? Either work-related or in your personal life.

Do you have any goals for the next 12 months?

Tell me about it in the comments below.

LONG Day In Denver

  Today I attended (not by choice) a conference for administrative assistants at a Holiday Inn in Denver. It was the nicest Holiday Inn I've ever been in, that's for sure. It was supposed to help me be a better assistant and learn some more tools and skills I can apply to my job. It wasn't a total bust, I'll admit, though I had a less than sunny outlook on the whole thing at first. These workshop things where you're supposed to meet people and do workbook exercises and teambuild is absolutely not helpful to me more often than not because that's not how I learn. Plus, I don't really like the idea of meeting strange people who I'm supposed to befriend for a day and then never see again. (I'm trying something new where I have to say positive stuff if I'm going to say negative stuff. Something about a silver lining or whatever. Bear with me.)
    Again, the conference had its moments. The speaker I sat in with for the majority of the day (there was another one whom I wish I had sat in on her discussions more) was extremely bubbly and chatty. She had some helpful points, but she didn't really give as many examples of how to put those ideas into action. The other speaker had better real-life examples and her analogies made more sense to me--again, making me wish I'd sat in on her discussions (there were 5 from each speaker throughout the day) more than I did. But some of what they said was interesting--learning about how to communicate better with different personality types; how to solve problems in the workplace in a creative way, etc.
    However, it seemed very focused toward the corporate world, which doesn't really apply to me since I work at such a small company, and other times, it seemed focused toward a more traditional office environment, which mine most definitely is not. Technology seemed to get ignored completely, which was yet another downer because, um, that's kind of a big thing where I work--web design company and all. The speaker asked for suggestions or examples of how we communicate in our offices, and I said we use Skype to Instant Message each other, which we do. It's not awesome, but it's quite useful some of the time. The speaker seemed to write it off, saying IMs could get annoying because they flash at you when they come in before you look at them, and that can distract you from whatever other work you're doing. True, but that doesn't mean it's not faster and easier than email for short messages or questions, and much faster and easier than getting up and asking people something (depending on the complexity of the question).
    All in all, I felt like it was a little too old school for me. There were a few younger women there, but most were between about 30 and 60, so there was a lot of stuff about writing stuff down, rather than using some sort of electronic system for organization. I'm like, we don't have files. EVERYTHING is on my computer. The only stuff that is on paper is stuff I've printed out so I don't have to keep tracking down that one email or that one document for a particular current project I'm working on. But those get shredded or tossed pretty quickly--they don't get filed away somewhere, never to be seen again. (Of course, it's a lot easier to bitch about the things I didn't like about it and what I didn't find relevant than to explain what I did like and did find to be relevant, which is why I'm doing it.)
    I learned some good suggestions on how to approach communication with both my bosses and my coworkers, so that was helpful. Also, learned how to approach problems and how to come up with solutions first before going to the boss, if possible. I didn't learn too much about organization because I'm a little too set in my ways on how I keep on my tasks (basically I write them down on paper/sticky note/Outlook calendar in several places, several times, so the repetition gets the task stuck in my brain and much harder to be missed or forgotten) but I did think of something I maybe could implement as far as task management goes at work. I don't know if it'll be useful, as many of our spreadsheets and files tend to get used once and then forgotten about. We have a problem at my job of implementing a system, and then not actually sticking to it and utilizing it fully. It kind of falls to the wayside sooner or later.
    Aside from sitting in a really uncomfortable chair for the better part of 6 hours, which is longer than I sit at my desk at work because I'm constantly getting up and asking questions, getting feedback, checking on my coworkers and their tasks, etc., it wasn't as awful a day as I had imagined. I did remember about three things that need to be done at work, which probably aren't done, and won't be done by the end of tomorrow, but they're all things for other people to do, so maybe I won't take the heat for not getting them done...
    Somewhat off topic, for those non-Coloradans who have no idea what Denver is like, don't drive here. Get someone else to drive you. Getting to the hotel this morning was easy, relatively traffic-free. Getting home was another story, even though we ended about 15 or 20 minutes early. Rush hour starts at like 2pm so you're pretty much screwed no matter what. Then, after two or three weeks of 80-90+ degree weather, got POURED ON the entire way back too. I waited for the storm to clear in Denver and then as soon as I headed out, it was just dumping rain the entire drive back. Hydroplaning was imminent, but I survived this time. (Sidenote: You know you live in Colorado when: you get rained on across the entire drive along the Front Range. But this only happens like once a year so it's manageable in the grand scheme of things.)
   Overall, the conference would have been better if the whole thing had been more focused on one thing like project management or communicating with your bosses and coworkers rather than trying to squeeze it all in over the course of a day. Everything got skimmed over a lot, and there could have been more examples, more in-depth coverage of topics if it had not been so broad.
   One last little complaint: I had to bring my own lunch. WTF. Cold, leftover Chipotle for lunch at an all-day conference where you have to pay $200 to get in kind of sucks.

I guess there's no such thing as a free lunch. Except I had one yesterday. 

So, WTF again.