I Really Have Been Writing

In the world of a mom with an infant, I've actually been doing pretty well in terms of getting writing done! I'm still sticking to getting all of my plotting done before I do any writing and it's going really well. I hope to break through the issues I always have when I write the middle of my book. I have a lot to learn about pacing and conflict and I'm determined to keep working on that!

Plotting more than one book at once

It's a beautiful thing when your mind runneth over with plots. Right now I'm trying to switch back and forth between plotting two novels. Talk about trying to stay organized!

Writers on Dancing with the Stars

I think a writer needs to go on Dancing With the Stars. I bet that Danielle Steel could do a mean tango. Isabel Allende can probably salsa circles around this season's contenders. And Stephen King ... well, I'd tune in to watch him dance.

But the truth is, I want to be on Dancing With the Stars. I've loved to dance all my life, and I've studied ballet, jazz, tap, musical theatre, and Argentinian Tango. The trouble is that I'm not a Star! So I guess I'll just have to keep writing in the hopes that I can work my way into America's consciousness and then become a contender on the show. Surely my future agent will be excited to know I'm open to such methods of self-promotion!

Take note, future agent!

Hope Springs Eternal

I don't know which is more important: hope or a thick skin. Sometimes I think that hope gets in the way of a thick skin. Or maybe hope is what spurs you on to the experiences that give you a thick skin. Anyway, even though just a couple weeks ago I was wondering where my ambition was, if it had finally died even though I said I had accepted it never would.

Then my baby started going to bed EARLIER and WITHOUT ME (key point). So last night I was able to get a query out and that just made me feel a million times better. And then, via Twitter, I heard about this.

You see, as an avid reader I always felt like I'd been dropped into a genre-less void after I graduated from high school. I went from reading children's and YA novels to mainstream fiction. I love authors like Maeve Binchy and Barbara Kingsolver, but rare was the book whose heroine wasn't already middle-aged with children. Even if their ages were closer, they weren't going through the same college and post-college issues that I was. Then chick lit came around, but even that didn't really fill the void for me. And I went to grad school in children's lit, where I learned that publishers defined YA as 12 - 25, but rare is the book that's really for anyone over the age of 17.

So two years ago I see about trying to rectify the situation by writing my own post-YA, pre-adult mystery novel. And the consensus from the people I workshopped with was that my heroine was in a No Man's Land: too old for YA, too young for a mainstream novel. I needed to either make sure 15 or 33 in stead of 23. Ugh. Talk about a major rewrite.

Now once again hope springs eternal. Nothing may come of this (that's the writer's creed), but maybe something will!

Letting the Paint Dry

Saw a painter friend today. She asked how the writing was going and I told her slowly, but that I was doing the best I could, how I always write something and then, despite my best intentions for doing timely work and keeping the momentum going, I end up waiting. One of my journalist friends called this, "Letting the story ripen," although that was really our code phrase for slacking off and not getting the work done. I try to tell myself I'm percolating or digesting or whatever my latest metaphor is, but I always feel like I'm just being lazy.

My painter friend nodded. "I'm going through the same thing. I always feel like my work is crap at this stage, but I have to remind myself that I'm letting the paint dry. Once it's dry, I can continue."

It was so nice to be validated by someone's tangible experience. I will continue to let the paint dry.

The Lull

I just got a letter from a writer friend of mine asking how I deal with "The Lull." The Lull is when you've finished one project and you have absolutely no interest in writing anything ever again. You know that you need to get back in the saddle and just do it because that's what writers do. Yet you're suddenly like the worst kind of couch potato. And you feel guilty about it, which couch potatoes do not!

The Lull always fills me with a kind of anxiety. My identity is so wrapped up in writing that if I don't have a project I'm writing or brainstorming I feel like a slug. I also start worrying that maybe I don't want to be a writer any more, that maybe I'm done before I've even achieved what I've always wanted.

I've gotten a little more relaxed about it these days. I have accepted that I will never lose that ambition -- if I were, it would have happened already! But I always have to have something I'm brainstorming about. It gives me hope that not only will I write again, but that I'll want to write again. So the way I get through the lull is to know that it's all part of the ebb and flow of the creative process. As a participant in that process, I just need to keep an eye on the surf so I can catch those waves!

The Chocolate Challenge

One of the hardest things about writing is feeling like you're not getting anywhere. You sit, write, read, edit. Then you sit some more, rewrite, read, and edit some more. For years my problem has been that I'm hard on myself, and I'm hard on myself because I never felt productive unless I was writing new material. But the art of writing is really in the rewriting, right?

Enter the Chocolate Challenge, a friendly competition created by the Sisters in Crime. They have use an Excel tracking sheet that helps you keep track of how many words you've written every day, but also adds a word count for editing hours. Now, I didn't win the competition, but I got so much done! February was an incredibly productive month!