How To Write A Book In Just 30 Minutes A Day

  If you're anything like me, you probably have trouble finding the time to write your next masterpiece while juggling work, family responsibilities and everything else that goes on in your life on a regular basis. Trying to carve out a few hours even in a week seems like an insurmountable task. What if I were to tell you that you could write a book in as little as one thirty minute session a day? A little more manageable, right? Here are some sure-fire tips that helped me in getting my latest work written and out the door.
  The first thing that I did was to figure out my story's characters. I sat down and fleshed them all out. Where did they come from? Why were they in the place of this story now? This is a major part of the writing process. The biggest complaint I've always had as a reader of stories is flat one-dimensional characters. So, a great chunk of time and attention should be invested here to help build a strong foundation for your work.
  The next thing that I did was to hash out the main plot of my story in three to five paragraphs. This is the right length for this summary exercise because in previous publisher submissions I've found that they all want a cover sheet that does just this... summarize your entire novel in three to five paragraphs. It's a hard thing to get right at first, but with practice it is a necessary skill that will make your synopsis (blurb) writing that much better.
  After these items I fleshed out my story chapter by chapter. I just wrote out what was going to happen, and who was involved in each major scene. This was the most labor-intensive portion of the task, but it served me well in saving time during my writing sessions. I would do this work at night or early in the morning when I had some quiet time set aside for myself to work on the project.
  Finally, I took my thirty-minute lunch breaks at work along with my notes from the aforementioned work and managed to hash out 500-700 words every day in half an hour. Doing this over the course of a month led to a finished work. It was as simple as that! Just plan your work ahead of time so that when you can make the brief window of time to work on your stories you can make the most of them.
  Be sure to check back later for some ideas that I used and still use for writing synopses and coming up with killer titles. Enjoy!

What's Really Going On At the Doctor's Office

  I had the unpleseant pleasure of having to go to the doctor's office last week. It turned out that I had a sinus infection on top of a flu virus that was reaking havok on my system. The unfortunate aspect of this realization was having to wait three hours in their lobby to get to this conclusion. I'm pretty sure that by the time I was called back into the exam room that I could have taken the morning news anchor's job with no problem.
  The real fun began when I got back there... I swear - I think that doctors today are playing some sort of twisted game with us as patients any more. They sit back there behind their computer screens scribbling God-knows-what on their clipboards. Well, I can tell you what I believe they're doing back there... MadLibs. After this particular experience, I'm certain that these professionals are working off of a fill-in-the-blank symptom MadLib, and then googleing it online:

DR: What are your issues today?
YOU: Sore throat, runny nose, cough... ya know...
DR: Umm hmm... (looks at clipboard and thinks to self) 'Eight letter word in Latin... Noun... ' Influenza.
YOU: Come again?
DR: You have influenza... or maybe cholera... no, that's only six... oh, nevermind.

  Ok... So, maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration... maybe. Let's face it, though... most PAs and doctors these days are only doing what we could do for ourselves in searching up the symptoms online. So, maybe they do have more years of trained experience, and perhaps they do know what's best. Who's to say that they aren't really doing this unbeknownst to us all?