How I Keep Track of My Writing

 

My Writing Planner - the blank spaces at the beginning of the month were because
I had to take time to sort out our 2025 financial info for our tax lady.

Over the past few years, I’ve spent time each day recording what I’ve been writing. Currently, I write for Medium (Tues & Thurs), for Substack (Mon, Wed, Fri), for my author’s website PaulineEvanosky.com or PME (Tues & Thurs), and for my website Talking to Spirit, which I also call TTS (Sun & Tues). I’ve been trying to schedule the publication of these articles and build up a bit of a stockpile for myself. It’s so if I need a day off here or there or plan something to do that isn’t something I normally do, I’ve got a cushion.

This has resulted in a pattern of work in which, over time, I write at least two articles a day. Sometimes I can get three written in a day, like I'm doing today, and very infrequently I’ll get four done. But mostly, it seems to be two articles a day. I don’t want to stress out about it, but I do want to have a bit of consistency for readers if that’s something they like.

There are a couple of places where I write that I do not publish, like my journal which can sometimes run into the thousands of words and my daily motivational bits in my Do-Good File of 150 to 200 words. It was a long time ago that, in my retirement, I realized I had the luxury of having all day to write. In fact, if I were sleepless, I could get up at 3 am, write for a few hours, and then go back to bed. I never realized what a beautiful thing a nap can be in the middle of the day.

That’s my writing life. At one point, before I started tracking all of this, back when I wasn’t writing as much, I realized that it might happen that there would be a span of time when I didn’t get bupkis done. So, what was I doing? Playing solitaire all day long? Reading? Watching movies? The reading is essential for any writer. The movies could be said to be supportive of a writing habit. I could also argue that solitaire kept my mind sharp. None of that (except the reading) really and truly fulfilled the dream I needed. Which was to write. That’s what got me tracking stuff. Also, I would get confused about when I should publish stuff and end up double-publishing on some days. Which, I suppose, isn’t a bad thing either. And sometimes I still do that if I am moved by something. I’ve got my rules, and then I break them. It’s a system I’m comfortable with.

This is my Words Count Spreadsheet. There is another column to the right that keeps a tally of how much I've written that day, and another column for the month.
So far, even including today's work (3/23) it is at 50,742 words for the month of March, 2026.

So my system involves two spreadsheets and a daily planner I designed for myself in Excel. The one spreadsheet just counts words. I get a word count on every article (excepting the ending bits of thanks and here are some links), I count my Do-Good File which doesn’t get published, but often proves to be a springboard into publishable articles and I count my journal which does the same as the Do-Good File with the added benefit of being a soap box where I can holler to my heart’s content if that’s what I want to do.

The second spreadsheet is where I track the stats I can get from the different platforms I write on. In this spreadsheet, I record the articles I will publish. It gives me a good visual to see if I’ve forgotten to write something.

This is what I call my Medium Stats. That's just the first writing platform I wrote for. Since then I've added more pages to the workbook. What is pictured here is March, 2026 for this website. To the side you can see my tab for TTS (Talking to Spirit) and Substack. Medium is off to the side.

The last thing is the planner I made. It takes up two printed pieces of 8 ½ by 11-inch paper. The month gets laid out in a grid system with the schedule listed. This, by far, is a huge help to me. I leave it open on my desktop all the time because I’m using it all the time and will schedule in whatever article I’ve finished. It quickly shows me blank spots I need to fill. I also only print two months at a time, so that if something doesn’t seem to be working, I can delete it or even add something new to the schedule. The planner picture is at the top of this article.

When I worked for somebody else before I retired, they generally all told me what to do and when to do it. Now that I work for myself, well, that’s something I have to keep track of.

I know having regrets about something isn’t really a teaching moment for yourself, but you know? If I’d been doing an abbreviated version of this years ago, I think I could have rolled into retirement firing on all cylinders. As it was, it took me a good five years or more to get my ducks lined up.

If this helps anybody to give a thought to how they track their writing, then it’s a good thing. Also, if you are billing anybody, this might also help you to track how much time you’re spending on their stuff and if they are just sucking you dry, or if the business is good.

What is nice about my system is that I will soon alter it to include book projects. I've already written a three-book series for young people about finding work. I wrote it a couple of years ago, and it needs to be edited and published. I've got plans for other books too, and I'd like to see some work on them. Will something need to give in my schedule, or am I accustomed to it enough that I can just pile the new projects on? Time will tell. 

Writing books is my life's work. I want it to mean something, and if what I've written here gives you some ideas, then I've done my job.

Thanks for reading. I’ve listed some more places where I am on the Internet. And, for the first time, I’ve created a Donate PayPal Button. Hey, if you don’t ask, how is it anybody will know you need some dough, right? Right.

🌺 Pauline Evanosky

 🌺My Links:

Talking To Spirit — my website
Talking To Spirit on Substack

Pauline Evanosky on Medium
Talking To Spirit on Substack

Pauline Evanosky — my author’s website

My Table of Contents for Medium — Updated Monthly
My Table of Contents for Substack — Also Updated Monthly

Facebook

References I recommend on your path to more psychic awareness from TalkingtoSpirit.com

🌺Donate Here On PayPal🌺

 

 

Sometimes I Worry About Repeating Myself

When I first started writing where the public might see it, one of the things I was concerned about was repeating myself. Now, with a bazillion articles written (somewhere close to 1,000), I don’t worry about it anymore. There are a few reasons.

•       Maybe it is a good subject that deserves to have a lot written about it. Some things like that eventually turn into books.
•       When I write, I don’t present the entire story. I can’t. I just remember so much. Maybe two weeks from now, I’ll think of something else related to the subject. Seeing as how I’ve probably already published the article, well, I’ll just talk about it some more.
•       If what I write about is a personal lesson, well, sometimes the things I learn take more than a few minutes to process. I’m talking years. Like patience. I’ve been working on that for years. I am certainly more patient now than I was 20 years ago, but still, there is always room for improvement. I can tell you things like that just take years for me to develop. I can’t imagine that they would be any different for other people.

The most freeing thing, though, that happened with not worrying about repeating myself was not worrying about it.

I had no idea I was limiting myself in that manner. I suppose it’s a common enough thing, like with somebody just recovering from a heart attack. They didn’t realize how everything going on in their life before the attack actually contributed to it.

I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that the stresses we feel, the frustration that goes with us hand in hand in daily life, are not conducive to a person living a carefree and happy life.

You worry about prices, about inflation. You worry that you can keep your job and your company isn’t going to fold. You worry about being able to take care of your family. You worry about how the government manages to situate itself between you and your life, the way you want to live it. You could also substitute many other entities in place of the government, your parents, your siblings, your other relatives, your friends, or people at work. And that’s just human nature. People are busy bodies. They can’t help themselves, I think.

I am not saying it is easy to let go of these sorts of worries. I know I’m still working on it. I suppose the idea is to keep trying. If you aren’t able to do it, well, just try again. It helps to keep a journal at hand to help you work through your issues. Just writing about them sometimes will help.

One of the things about worry that might help you is to sit yourself down in the midst of everything you are worried about and think something along these lines: How will worry solve the problem? Yes, ask yourself the question. Does worry keep you safe? Does worrying about it make your job more enjoyable? Maybe worry is something that helps you spin your wheels. If you weren’t worrying about something would anything get done? Actually, I need to be asking myself these questions.

Life, as I see it now, is like a sine wave, like biorhythms are. It goes up, it goes down. Sometimes you are happy and confident, and other times your knees are knocking together with fear. The goal, I suppose, would be to be able to move gracefully through life, learning stuff as you go, making the living for those around you and yourself easier.

And you just need to keep trying.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate the support. I’ve listed a bunch of places where I am on the internet.  

 🌺 Pauline Evanosky

🌺My Links:

Talking To Spirit — my website
Talking To Spirit on Substack

Pauline Evanosky on Medium
Talking To Spirit on Substack

Pauline Evanosky — my author’s website

My Table of Contents for Medium — Updated Monthly
My Table of Contents for Substack — Also Updated Monthly

Facebook

References I recommend on your path to more psychic awareness from TalkingtoSpirit.com

🌺Donate Here On PayPal🌺

A Query Into Donation Buttons

 

Created in Canva by Pauline

Okay, I had to laugh. I was reading articles on Medium.com today. Lovely website. You get to meet lots of people there, especially those interested in writing. The only downside is that to be a member you need to pay $5 a month, or $50 for a year’s subscription when you pay it all at once. I don’t mind doing it. I’ve been there almost five years, and over time, I’ve earned some money on the platform. However, in the last couple of years, they’ve had a huge management shakeup and have created a better business plan for themselves, and consequently for their members. How that worked for me is I now earn bupkus from them. Yes, I said bupkus. If you want to look on the bright side, which I generally try to do, I am learning as a writer. I’ve got a place to publish, and some people read what I write. What used to be $20 a month has dwindled down to more like $1 a month in earnings.

I read an article where the lady had a PayPal donation button at the end of her article. The plea was to help her feed her cats. I can understand. We’ve got three cats, and they do like to eat. In the past, I’ve posted a Buy Me a Coffee link, which nobody ever clicked. I’ve been using PayPal for a gazillion years, and I thought, “Hey, maybe.”

So, I went to PayPal to figure out how to make a button. You could choose whether you wanted to have a campaign; say, if you needed an updated computer to write on, you could set a donation limit of $1,000 or whatever a new computer costs these days. Then I happened to catch a YouTube short of a lady with lots of teeth in her pictures. Granted, they are nice-looking teeth, but wow, does she have a lot of them. Anyway, in her YouTube short, she talked about how people who want to donate to you don’t especially like to wade through a lot of complicated stuff. She inferred that this happens with PayPal. Also, there are fees involved. Always. Hey, that’s what banks do.

So she recommended that people use something called DonorBox. I figured, why not check it out? The one thing with me using PayPal was that I established the account back in the day when I was going by LadySkyeFyre. In those days, nobody used their real names on the Internet. I adopted the name LadySkyeFyre after everybody who read what I wrote under my original fake nickname thought I was a man. It was a combination of my initials: PEV. Also, LadySkyeFyre was a sort of a take on the stones I was using at the time to learn how to be a psychic channel. Moldavite, horribly expensive now, looks like somebody smashed up an old green Coca-Cola bottle. It is an asteroid that fell to Earth a gazillion years ago. As the asteroid fell through the Earth’s atmosphere, it burned up; consequently, it looks like green glass. That asteroid scattered itself over what are now Czechoslovakian potato fields. It is called an outer space stone, a channeling stone, or a stone of transformation, and if you are quiet enough, you can feel it vibrating in your hand. It is supposed to help you make contact with celestial beings. I used it to try to make a connection with my Spirit Guide. Did it work? Well, I’m channeling now. Maybe it did.

So, my nickname came from that stone. It fell through the sky and burned up as it did. LadySkyeFyre.

By the way, I gave one of my pieces of moldavite who reported back to me the next day she’d had four orgasms in her sleep. Who can argue with that? That never happened to me, but I use that story to establish credibility for the stone.

The problem is that whenever I use my PayPal account, it shows my old name, LadySkyeFyre, and nobody knows my real name, Pauline Evanosky. Consequently, there might be some confusion.

So, on I went over to DonorBox to check them out. That’s where I laughed because they were referring to donations made to non-profits. The only way I qualify as a non-profit is because I don’t make any money. Now, I’m not going to go through the legal process of becoming a legitimate non-profit. My husband did that when he and his boss went through all the legal hoops of doing that with The Alameda Post, an online newspaper in Alameda. Besides, I hope someday to earn some money with my writing.

However, you don’t make money unless you ask for it. For me, that will likely be an incentive to get something published this year.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate the support. I’ve listed a bunch of places where I am on the internet. And I did it: Donate Here On PayPal

 

🌺 Pauline Evanosky

🌺My Links:

Talking To Spirit — my website
Talking To Spirit on Substack

Pauline Evanosky on Medium
Talking To Spirit on Substack

Pauline Evanosky — my author’s website

My Table of Contents for Medium — Updated Monthly
My Table of Contents for Substack — Also Updated Monthly

Facebook

References I recommend on your path to more psychic awareness from TalkingtoSpirit.com

 

Thinking About Writing – The Process

I can remember someone saying once that a published book is the part of the iceberg that appears above the surface of the water. The much larger part of that iceberg is hidden beneath the water. What is hidden is the work that went into the published product. The years of thinking, of molding, of forming a story. Or, of finding the story.

I remember Stephen King once answered the question, “Where do you find the ideas for your stories?” He said he would walk in the desert. The things that were poking up out of the ground were his stories. He’d dig one up. I liked that.

Even now, as I sit writing this blog post, I really didn’t know other than I would write about the very act of writing. Other than that, I was willing to sit back and allow it to happen.

You know, that’s actually the hard part. It’s easy, and it’s hard all at the same time. At least, for me it is. It also took me years to be able to sit down and not really have a clue what my writing was going to be about, and then produce something that fulfilled me.

Now, when you’re writing on a longer project, you would have your chapters already laid out. At least, I do. I love to use a mind-mapping strategy for larger projects. You start with a premise in a circle on a piece of paper. I suppose you could do this on your computer, but I find using a writing implement, like a crayon or a marker, with the feel of paper too delicious for words. Then, like a flower, all sorts of leaves sprout. Or vines. Along each of those offshoots come your chapters. Not all of them are going to end up in the story. You’re playing right now. I love to see a few words for a chapter twine around the page, riding the back of that vine. You’re planting for your story.

Once you feel you are done, or you’ve run out of room and decide you’re done with this stage of the process, you sit back on your heels and take another look at what you just drew.

This is where you pick the offshoots that please you, and then you move to your computer or notebook. Write a very short synopsis of your story. That’s what went into the central circle. Then, begin laying out your chapters. Those are the leaves and vines on your plant. Use whichever ones you feel are necessary. Some of them you won’t use, though they might show up later on in the story.

Now, you go back to the one-liners you wrote on your computer. You expand them from the short, bare-bones statements into something a little longer. Typically, I move from one or two lines to something that is maybe five or six lines long. That is a chapter. Roughly speaking, I’ve got maybe 10 or 15 chapters. From there, I write the book.

I have already determined how I want the book to feel in my hand. For this, you go to a bookstore and see what catches your eye, or, if you’ve got books at home, do it with those books. I don’t care if the story was written 150 years ago or last week. If you liked it, then, that is all that counts. The heft of it in your hand. How does it feel to sit with a cup of tea or a beer beside you to read it? How does it feel if you go out onto your balcony? You’re looking for a mass. You’re not going to copy the book. It is merely a book that you like. I don’t care which books are popular or what trends are happening in books right now. I’m talking about what pleases you.

Look and see how many pages are in the book. Take a sample page from the book, one that has writing on each line. Count the lines on a couple of those pages. Now, count the words on a few of those lines. Do the mathematical thing and average it out. You now have a rough idea of just how many words there will be on each page. You didn’t have to count every stinking word. Just an average of a few lines. For what I write, I generally figure on 10 to 12 words per line and about 33 lines per page. It’s just an estimate. If you’ve got 350 pages, well, then you’re looking at a book that’s going to be about 115,500 words long. Which is probably okay for a novel. I’ve been told novels are about 180,000 words long. In the old NaNoWriMo writing challenges (write your heart out every November with the National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo), the goal was 50,000 words, which, the first time I did one, was an incredible feeling.

Now, this is all an estimate. You do you. But for me? It was enough to get going and to keep going. I’ve had chapters grow overlong and have gotten broken up into pieces. What might have begun as 10 chapters grew to 18. It’s just a road map.

I count everything I write, all my articles, and when I’ve got a book going, I’ll count my output there too. My goal is 50,000 words written every month. Some months I don’t get there, but I usually get close. This month, March of 2026, is going to be a good month for writing. I’m already sitting at 30,000 words, and the month is only half over. Last month was terrible at 26,000 words, but then I was preparing our tax information for our tax lady, which is a horrible job.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate the support. I’ve listed a bunch of places where I am on the internet.

🌺 Pauline Evanosky

🌺My Links:

Pauline Evanosky on Medium
Talking To Spirit on Substack
Talking To Spirit — my website
Pauline Evanosky — my author’s website
Facebook
My Table of Contents for Medium — Updated Monthly
My Table of Contents for Substack — Also Updated Monthly
References I recommend on your path to more psychic awareness from TalkingtoSpirit.com

The Thing About Writing

Created in Canva by Pauline

Some people feel satisfied if they can get a hand of cards in at some point during the day. Or, if they’ve got a book, they can pick up at the end of the day to get another chapter read. 

I like to write. For me, today is Sunday. I’m also trying to pick up my good writerly habits again. I had to put it all on hold for a bit while I did some number crunching for our tax lady. That is a task I never look forward to, and I managed this year to draw it out into a long seasonal depression. Now, that can never be a good thing, and for my writing output, it was a death knell. The only bright thing that came of it was that I might have learned a good lesson. I am bouncing back quickly, so perhaps there is that. The other thing is, I promised not to allow it all to pile up again. I’ll see how that goes.

In any case, I’m writing again. I’m back to writing something, just a couple of inches worth in my Do Good File. It’s a morning place where I pick something optimistic to talk about. Sometimes, those thoughts morph into a longer piece that I can publish somewhere.

Today, though, I just want to talk about how important it is that you allow yourself to write, no matter if all you can do is say a bad word over and over again. The better idea would be to perhaps pick ten optimistic words and write about one of them.

Okay, I’ll do that with you today: Hope. Happiness. Graciousness. Learning. Cookies. How is cookies optimistic, you might say. Well, it’s something nice to look forward to. Okay, some more optimistic words. Pretty music. The Sun. Beautiful day. Prayer. Rest.

I think that’s enough to start with. So, this is the exercise. You write down some optimistic words, and from that list, you write about one of the words. I just thought of something. What if it were a timed exercise? Just 20 minutes. That’s what Mrs. Brown had us do in the fifth grade. Every day, she pinned up a new magazine picture and had the class write about it for 20 minutes. I wonder if that’s when I became a writer. In the fifth grade at eleven years old.

I’m picking the first word on the list:

Hope.

Hope is necessary for living a good life. If you were a gardener, you would hope that whatever you are planting will grow. All of this is going to be dependent on the weather, on the amount of water the crop gets, and on whatever bugs come and go. The only thing that you can be certain of is your water if you aren’t living in a drought-prone area and can afford the water. I suppose you could pray for good weather, but I’m not sure that’s ever worked very well.

I wonder if getting through all those variables, you have to have faith. Maybe that’s the trick. Or perhaps you could plant some marigolds nearby to handle some of the insects, or buy a bunch of ladybugs to set free in your yard. I just looked on Google, and they said 1,500 ladybugs could cost $9 to $15 and be enough for an average-sized lawn. We have a second-story apartment and have a small porch in front, so I’d share some with our downstairs neighbors, who both have small back yards. It would likely help the neighborhood, for that matter.

So, that might be the life of a gardener. The life of a writer is full of words for stories and for articles. If you have enough of them, you could write books or a movie script. Personally, I write motivational stuff. It’s not intended for any particular audience, just the ones who need a boost.

I figure a writer should write something every day. It’s not always going to be worthy of publication, but who knows, the piece you wrote that was sort of half-assed might, in two days, turn out to be something better.

It’s a habit that needs tending to. Every day. Thanks for reading. I welcome comments. 

 🌺 Pauline Evanosky

🌺My Links:

Pauline Evanosky on Medium
Talking To Spirit on Substack
Talking To Spirit — my website
Pauline Evanosky — my author’s website
Facebook
My Table of Contents for Medium — Updated Monthly
My Table of Contents for Substack — Also Updated Monthly
References I recommend on your path to more psychic awareness from TalkingtoSpirit.com