Introduction
Back in the heyday of pulp fiction magazines, when freelancers struggled to pay the bills by writing stories for half a cent per word (at most), they had to produce, produce, produce. Their motto was “Be prolific or starve.” Armed only with manual typewriters and carbon paper, the most popular and productive writers managed to crank out entire novels in only a few days, stories and novelettes in a single sitting.
Today, with an arsenal of writing tools that includes word processors, email, scanners, internet research, lightning-fast printers, digital recorders, and voice-recognition software, it must be easy for modern authors to be even more prolific than their “prehistoric” predecessors. Right?
Life is crazy and hectic for most of us. We’re surrounded with personal and family obligations, jobs, fitness programs, virtual mountains of email, not to mention videogames, TV, smartphones, social networking, and millions of things to check out on the web.
With all those distractions, how does an aspiring author find time to write?
And when you do find the time, how do you make the most of it?
That’s what I’ll show with this book. You don’t have to be manically productive (though some of us consider that to be fun), but you will learn ways to get more writing out of every available moment.
***