Pre-Writing Challenge Updates: Week 3 + E-Book And Future Event

We’re in the final stretch now!  There’s 1 week left in the Pre-Writing Challenge and we’ve got some updates for you below.

Pre-Writing Challenge E-Book

There are big (BIG!) plans in the works for the Pre-Writing Challenge.  It is FAR from over.  I plan to run this event again in the future, and have had some great ideas to make vast improvements to it.  The participants and I have been emailing back and forth about what’ to come, and their enthusiasm and ideas have gotten me really excited about what we can do with it.

After the challenge is over, I will run a round of guest posts on Conscious Me detailing the experiences of a few of our participants.  In addition to these, several other participants will be writing about their experience as well, and we’re going to compile it into an e-book for the Pre-Writing Challenge.

There’s a few reasons for this e-book:

1. Advice and guidance for others – A lot of people have responded positively to the challenge and have commented on various participant’s blogs that they wish they had joined in.  This book will allow people the opportunity to learn from our experiences, get some great tips from bloggers who have done it, and receive some guidance and preparation for the next event.
2. Increase mailing list – As I’ve said before, I always plan to offer the best of Conscious Me to my Newsletter subscribers.  If you might have an interest in purhasing the Pre-Writing Challenge e-book, or participating in a future run of the event, sign up for my newsletter to ensure you get the news first and the best price I will offer on the e-book, ever.
3. Experience creating & selling a product – I plan to do a large part of my monetizing for Conscious Me through creating products and selling them.  This will get my feet wet and help me learn some vital lessons before I produce my first e-book on the Law of Attraction.

David Doolin Joins The Challenge – Finally!

Since the get-go, Doolin has been on board with this event, but unfortunately was hit with a denial of service attack on his site when we were about to start.  He had his hands full for some time and then had to play catch up.  Nevertheless, with one week left he’s officially jumping in and finishing out the challenge with us. He’s a brave soul.

If you haven’t met Doolin before, here’s his bio:

Author: Dave Doolin

Pre-Writing Challenge Page: Website In A Weekend Pre-writing Challenge.

Bio: Dave Doolin is a writer and programmer who is putting full time effort into launching Website In A Weekend as a major destination point for anyone interested in using blogs, especially WordPress blogs, as an essential tool for marketing, customer development and sales.

Goal: “I normally post every day, with articles ranging from moderately technical to community discusssions, all centered around small business blogging. My goal is to have a definite schedule for articles reaching out to April 12, 2010, and to have a full 7 days of  articles scheduled for publication by the end of the Pre-writing Challenge.”

Updates:

Carlos Velez – Conscious Me

I finally started to get my act together this week. My wife went to Vegas last Friday and I have put in mass amounts of hours on different blog related projects since she’s been away. One of the biggest projects has been getting organized.

I built this spreadsheet on Google Documents, after being inspired by Aaron Pogue’s (Unstressed Syllables) use of a spreadsheet to track his pre-writing work. What a difference it makes! Between totally restructuring my own challenge page last Friday into the week by week format you see now, and laying out posts and schedule dates on the spreadsheet, I have a much better idea of what I’m doing now.

I have more filling in to do on the Google doc, but just the little that’s in there so far has really helped me to see exactly where I’m at and what the plan is. I feel like I have a lot to do to finish the challenge, and that’s a little true, but I’m actually doing better than my feelings would have me believe. I now have posts scheduled for a week out, and I only need 1 more draft to meet my goal. The extra drafts still need to be revised and readied for publication, which will be my biggest task this week, more-so than writing new content.

Go check out my personal Pre-Writing Challenge Updates page to see the details of how my posts look now. I’ve highlighted all changes and updates in blue, like this, so you can quickly figure out what’s going on. Be sure to read the teasers for my scheduled posts…I want to get you anticipating their publication

Holla!

Carlos

Eleanor Edwards – Give A Brick

After a brilliant start last week in getting all the titles and teasers sorted, this week has been incredibly frustrating. At the time of writing I have four of the 28 written.

That said, I’m also hoping that by the time you read this I’ll have written a whole lot more. You’ll have to check out my pre-writing page to see what I’ve done

I had the opportunity to write a fun guest post for Heather of Shades of a Dream and Dave gave me some excellent advice on structuring the one minute motivators so despite less writing it’s still been an exciting week

So seven days left. I wonder what they’ll bring? Lots of writing and completed challenges if I have my way

Cheers,
Eleanor

Megan Potter – Limitless Living

Gosh, you start all gung ho and then things just S-L-O-W right down. I did post three posts this week, but I ended up veering off my planned course because of international woman’s day – so, do I take two or three of the “planned” titles off and count these towards my 18? That seems like the best plan, I mean, the goal was to write three posts a week and I did do that. So, that would mean that I’m officially at 12 of my 18 as it stands right now.

But, the week’s not officially over (it’s Friday morning as I type this) and my To Do list for today includes writing a few of the posts I’ve got outlines down for. If I accomlish my primary goal for the week that would mean that I’ll have done 15 posts typed and saved in my draft or published for the end of the third week. Fingers crossed that it happens!

Yours,
Megan

Deacon – Bad Deacon Design

This week, I squeezed in some time to get this challenge rolling.

I’ve got 12 titles for posts, now I just have to write the posts. Easy, right?

Luckily, I am writing informative posts about various printmaking methods and issues, which I know quite a bit about. The content should come fairly easy.

My plan is to get 5 drafts done by the end of this weekend.

Best,

Deacon

Justin Matthews- Catharsis of the Bogue

This week has actually had progress and setbacks. I did manage to get some more work done on a few of my posts, but I got enthralled with some of them and had to write and publish them. So I have a couple of new ideas to work on. I am also working on my guest post for the wrap up. I still have been able to write the night before (for the most part) so they get to post at the same time. I look forward to busting out the last posts to at least draft status by next Friday! I hope everyone is doing as well!

Later,
Justin

Dave Doolin – Website In A Weekend

Here’s what I’ve learned my first week into Carlos’ pre-writing challenge:

• More than one week out, scheduling in the WordPress Edit Posts interface is nearly unworkable. Going out 5 weeks, I had to use paper. There was no way around it for me.
• Scheduling is the hardest part for me. Keeping track even on paper was tough.
• The time lag in the editing interface really sucks when you have to spend a lot of time in it. Since I use a fair bit of HTML, I’m pretty well trapped in the integrated editor. Getting around would require a lot of work.
• “Pending” doesn’t sort by date, which is really annoying, because I’m using pending status instead of draft status to mark articles which are definitely scheduled.
• Wednesdays and Thursdays are my toughest days to schedule. I don’t have a tight grip on what I want to write for those days. Or rather, I don’t have much in my draft queue (yet) which will fit into my new plans. I should have this solved by next week.

By the time we’re done with this, I may not have everything scheduled for publication, but I will know what I need to write. And that will give me a lot of free time to kick off the promotion campaign for Blog Post Engineering. Which will be plenty good enough.

Hammer down.

Dave Doolin

Bert Padilla – Cebu Tech Blogger

Last week was tough for me on the Pre-Writing Challenge. I finished only two drafts as I’ve been busy on my “real” job. In fact, I only posted one or two articles for my daily blogging updates since Monday. I was supposed to finish five drafts for this week, but that’s okay though- I can still draft the last eight articles on the final week. My overall goal is actually to have twenty pre-written articles by the end of the challenge. Oh, I almost forgot. I have to include one guest post for Conscious Me, so that would be nine.

-Bert

Ralph – Ralph Carlson Blog

Finished week two today. I am not quite where I planned to be (10 posts in draft or final form) but it still isn’t bad. I have two posts scheduled for next week (finals) and 5 drafts that are ready for final editing. This means that I am down two from the plan. I am keeping a file of drafts which need to be finalized, final versions and this week I added a file of drafts saved in their original form in a file for drafts which have become finals. This is for possible evaluation per Carlos suggestion about this process improving the quality of writing. Next week should put me in a position to get farther ahead since I have two posts already in final form and five drafts to work from. The trick now is not to get lazy or complacent.

Until next week. Keep it up guys!

Ralph

Aaron Pogue – Unstressed Syllables

I’ve been building up toward my challenge posts with consecutive articles so far, but during week 3 I finally got to start on some of my goal articles. And with the preliminary material all done, I really slammed into the challenge posts.

My goal for the project is eight articles, which will go live over the two weeks immediately following the end of the challenge. Before week 3, only one of those was done, but over the course of this week I completely finished three more, leaving me only four more articles to hit my goal! This has been some of the most fun I’ve ever had blogging, and I really look forward to the work I can get done next week.

Sincerely,
Aaron Pogue

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Conscious Me is now on Facebook.
Visit the new page and add me as your friend!

Thanks,
Carlos

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Related posts:

1. Pre-Writing Challenge Updates: Week 2 + Darren Rowse Message To Challenge Participants
2. Pre-Writing Challenge Update: Week 1
3. The Pre-Writing Challenge Wrap Up: It’s Only Just Begun
4. The Pre-Writing Challenge: Conscious Me Updates
5. Bert Padilla (Guest Post): Advantages Of The Pre-Writing Challenge