Getting Ready for #NaNoWriMo

I might have a chance of succeeding at NaNoWriMo this year. I have successfully cleared my writing plate, so to speak. My next novel, Accomplice, is edited and formatted and sitting in Amazon waiting for the magic go-date. And for once, I don’t have three other projects that are begging my attention. Well, actually I have exactly three other projects, but all of them are prime NaNo candidates and not mostly-done works in progress that I’ve been procrastinating on.

When I logged into my account just now, I reviewed what I have set up the past two years, where I participated but then failed miserably.  2012 I said I was writing The Vegas Affair.  2013 I said I was writing Take Me Down. So now it’s 2014, and those are two of the three contenders for my NaNo book. Because, you know, I never wrote them.

Take Me Down is the prequel (or really, just book 1 of the series) of the sci fi romance I wrote in 2009’s NaNoWriMo called Leap.  I have never sold or published Leap because after querying and revising it for a year or two, I realized that I really needed to introduce the world and some of the side characters in a different spot.  I already have about a chapter of Take Me Down written, but I’ve been dragging my feet about working on the rest of it.

The Vegas Affair is a sequel to The Paris Affair, which was my first published novel.  The Vegas Affair will pick up with the story of Kelsey, the sister of The Paris Affair’s hero Helmut.  Kelsey is the baby of the family and used to being coddled (and rescued) by her two older brothers. She’s also pissed at both of them, who have refused to talk to each other for over a decade.  Fed up, she comes up with a plan to get them into the same room—or at least the same city: she is going to elope to Las Vegas with the one man that both brothers can agree to hate, in the hopes that they will work together to save her from certain disaster. But, of course, things don’t go quite as she plans.

My third option is Steal the Sun, the next installment to Call the Rain, my fantasy novella.  Steal the Sun will also be a novella or short novel (short for the fantasy genre).  Trapped in the equivalent of an ivory tower by a ruthless dictator, my heroine will enlist the help of a criminal to escape the only world she has ever known.  But the hero has reasons of his own for helping the runaway princess. He believes that sacrificing her is the key to saving his own people from certain doom. The fantasy world for this story has been floating around in my head for three or four years now.  I have been reluctant to really start writing on this one, and I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t have the story line solidified yet, or if it’s because I’m having too much fun musing over all of the possible directions I could take it.  Once I start writing, I lock things down and the playground in my head loses some of its adventuresome qualities.

So now, I need to decide what to write. And then strategize my November.  It looks like I will have a week of business travel to work around.  That week should include two travel days where, battery permitting, I can write many words on the plane.  But the rest of the week may be a wash depending on how stressful my days become.  Plus Thanksgiving.  It can be done. I’ve done it before. The travel may end up boosting my writing, because I won’t be bogged down by housework and the distractions of the real world.

New Release!!

So, after way too much procrastination and foot dragging and other assorted delaying tactics, I have a new release.  Accomplice, which I know I've mentioned on the blog before (I have tags to prove it!) is up on Amazon.

It can be pre-ordered now, and will be released as an ebook on November 25th.

Here's the official verbiage:

All the new widow Jessica Kingsbury wants is a quiet new life away from the Hollywood spotlight that made her infamous. But the paparazzi aren't the only ones interested in dredging every sordid secret they can from her past. 

All FBI agent Noah Grayson wants is to uncover the mastermind of a blackmail plot that touches the nation's highest ranking politicians. All the clues lead straight to Jessica's late husband, who died under suspicious circumstances. Though his instincts tell him that that the beautiful model is no criminal, he can't help but wonder how much she knew about her dead husband's business dealings. 

Then a diamond necklace with ties to the blackmailer is stolen from the Kingsbury mansion, and Jessica begins receiving death threats. She must decide whether she can trust the handsome agent with her secrets and her life, not to mention her heart.

Carpe Libro

I spent years thinking that some day I wanted to write a book. Some day I would have time to go do research. Some day I would carefully plot a story. Before I had children, I was frequently bored. Once or twice I did pull out a laptop or a pad of paper and start scribbling sentences. I never made it very far before I realized that I didn’t know what I was doing, or before that mean little voice in my head would remind me that I was an engineer, not an English major. Surely I lacked some critical knowledge needed to write.  Surely if I was meant to be a writer, then a novel would simply flow out of me in a shower of sparkles and wonder.

Ironically, I didn’t write my first book until after my second child was born. Not just after the second child, but after my maternity leave was over and I was back at work. I did have a shorter schedule—only three days a week down from full time—but any woman who’s tried to juggle a career and a family knows that working fewer hours does not make the day job easier. If anything, it ups the pressure because you have to prove to your 60-hour-a-week-married-to-the-job colleagues that your 24 work week is as valuable as theirs.

Oh yeah, and baby number two had some major birth defects requiring multiple surgeries.

Sometimes I wonder whether I ever would have had the courage to write without my son’s health struggles. Back in those early days I really did wonder whether he would make it, and for how long.  There were so many unknowns and wait-and-sees about his development. We didn’t know if he would walk. If he would ever achieve bladder and bowel control. If he would struggle for energy and breath.

I finished my first NaNoWriMo, writing The End on the first draft of my first ever novel, from my son’s hospital room for surgery number four. He was eight months old at the time.

I’m still writing. Have finished a total of six manuscripts, and have published two so far. Some day I may even publish that first book (it probably needs a few more edits, though I swear it isn’t all bad).  I’m not a NYT bestseller. I’m not a Kindle millionaire. I try hard to ignore reviews and to not obsessively check author rankings (hint, bigger is not always better, and I’d love to swap my rank and my sales figures). I may never achieve any of those things. But if I quit now, I definitely won’t.

My son continues to inspire me. He learned to roll over the day after we came home from surgery number two (while he still had the glue-type stitches in his belly). He pulled himself to standing for the first time in the hospital crib while waiting for that fourth surgery. He is now six, and spending this week at soccer camp. He’s got some of the quickest feet on the field, and routinely runs circles around kids who are quite a bit taller than he is (alas, he has inherited my family’s lack of height). He is in many ways a miracle baby.  He still has health issues, though you couldn’t tell just by meeting him. He will have challenges in his life, and there is still a potential for big problems some day. His diagnosis casts a little shadow over us still. He gets a lot of hugs.

This week at the day job, a coworker passed away unexpectedly. I had just talked to him the afternoon before. He didn’t look like a man with less than twenty-four hours of life left. We weren’t close, and hadn’t even worked together very long, but he was very nice and very fair-minded and very good at his job. His sudden absence has left a hole in our work group. I can only imagine what his wife and children must be experiencing.

Life is unpredictable. You never know what is coming tomorrow, good or bad. When my son was a newborn with an uncertain future, I realized suddenly that all the reasons I’d never written a book don’t matter so much. Who cares if it sucks. Who cares if no one ever reads it. If I never write, then I will never find out.  And if I wait for “later”, “later” may not come. I’m writing because this is what I’ve always wanted to do.

Seize the day.  Write the book.

Slowly Writing

I'm not very talkative lately, am I?

I hit one major milestone this week--I finished a complete draft of my biggest work-in-progress, a full-length romantic suspense.  Right now, the story is fermenting (aka, I am not opening it for a few weeks to allow my brain a chance to read it objectively and not just fall back into the love-hate pattern I had while writing the end).

I don't have any firm release plans yet.  I haven't even read the thing start-to-finish, let alone decided on my approaches for editing and all that.  I can self-pub it, self-edit or pay an editor, I could shop it around to a variety of e-presses, I could shop it to agents in the hopes of snagging a print press. I could stuff it under my bed and pretend I didn't spend a year and a half on the dumb thing. (wait, did I call it dumb? By "dumb" I meant "brilliant", "engaging", "evocative"....ahem...) .  I do have a potential cover photo picked out and paid for that I bought as an incentive to finish the story.  So if I do self-pub, I've got step 1 (of like 50) checked off.

Next up is a re-write/edit job on a short story called The Christmas Affair that is a tie-in to The Paris Affair. No specific release plans there either, except to say that I'll try to have it available by some method or other around Christmas. This is another sexy story, similar heat level to The Paris Affair, featuring a minor character from that first novel.  My initial draft of it, according to my critique partners, lacked conflict.  Oops.  This is why you have critique partners. (Also, The Paris Affair has a new price over at Amazon--$2.99 for the Kindle edition. If you are looking for a steamy beach read, go download a copy).

Call the Rain has been enjoying a slow but decent little career. I've got a few good reviews here and there. I'd love more, but that's not up to me, really. Short of whining and begging, there's not much else I can do except to remind folks that if you read it and liked it, then give it a few stars (and maybe a few kind words) :)

And lastly, I have a new laptop. Not that it's really writing news, except setting it up did suck several days of my time by the time I installed Office, Adobe CS4, Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc. The old one was making a disturbing clicking noise and occasionally refused to wake up from hibernation. It also was barely powerful enough to run Word on Windows 7--Skype continually complained that that the video wasn't fast enough, and the built-in wifi adapter would drop connections from all but the oldest routers.  I never could install Photoshop on it because it simply couldn't handle the pressure. Also, you can now buy micro SD cards with more storage space than it's harddrive (all of 60 gig...which was huge when I bought it).  The old laptop and I have been through a lot together--8 years and 4+ manuscripts.  It's not dead yet, but shall enjoy a slow slide into retirement with a much lighter workload.

What's next after Call the Rain

A downside of my shameless genre hopping is that, so far, I haven't really written two books in a row that are similar to each other. It's not that I can't write a follow-up, but over several years of shopping manuscripts, I was afraid to spend too much time working on a follow-up to something that might never sell.  Throwing good money after bad (or, really, throwing good time after bad).

So, if you've read either of my published books (or even if you haven't), you might be wondering what I'll publish next.  People like series, and if anyone happened to like what they read, they might want more of the same. The good news is that everything I have written will (eventually) have related follow-ups. The bad news is that I have yet to write most of those follow-ups.

Here's the plan (chronologically):

Near-Term:

Accomplice. Fall 2013  A sexy romantic suspense. Novel-length (around 65000 words). I'm a handful of scenes from the end, plus I have the post-draft work to do (lots of edits, formatting, cover art, etc).

Holiday 2013 I will be release a short (about 7500 words, or about 50 pages) tie-in called The Christmas Affair, featuring a character who only had a brief moment of screen time (Harriet, the disgruntled engineer). I have a draft of this done, but edits remain.

Longer Term:

Follow up to Call the Rain. Alas, I have not #2 in this series. And this will be a series made up of more novellas and some novel-length works.  I have two competing ideas for the next installment.  One is Quarie's story, the sister of the heroine from Call the Rain.  The second is a different part of the same overall world, but all new characters. Quarie may appeal to readers of Call the Rain, but the second idea has been floating around my brain longer. I also have the beginning 1/4 of a longer, also-related work set in the same overall world.  (Did I mention that this is Epic Fantasy with a ginormous world in which I shall slowly begin unveiling a rather large problem that affects every one of these disparate peoples that I'm going to be writing about...)

The Vegas Affair. This will be a novel-length direct sequel to The Paris Affair.  It is the story of Kelsie, Helmut's sister.  I am aiming for a 2014 release, but no promises because all I have written now is a short synopsis and some character notes.

Sci-Fi Romance series.  I  have been sitting on Leap for a couple of years (title is subject to change), but it is really book two of a series. I have the opening chapters to Take Me Down, book 1. But an opening does not a whole novel make. I have a whole series name and follow-ups planned.

The Wild Card:

And last, but not least, I have yet another contemporary (with series potential). I've been sitting on Hold on to the Knight for several years now. It's a sweet contemporary--another PG-type rated story. I didn't want to release it back-to-back with uber-sexy Paris Affair.

Ebb and Flow

The other day, my husband commented that something was wrong with my blog feed. He hadn't seen a single update in his RSS reader in nearly six months.

Oh.

No, honey. It's not your reader. It's not Blogger. Its the blogger. Its me.

Once upon a time I was full of writing advice and encouragement in the way that childless folk are full of parenting advice. I would see other writers--some multi-published authors, some just starting, like me, who complained about not getting the writing done. They blame it on the muse. On being sick. On being busy.

And I thought: Surely it's not that hard. Surely if you just keep writing, then, well, you won't ever get stuck and give it up. Surely these people are just lazy whiners.

And, like many previously childless folk who eventually have children, I did indeed discover that writing, like parenting, is not always straightforward. Writing doesn't always go "by the book".

I've got plenty of excuses. Plenty of rationales. Plenty people who regularly ask me "What are you working on?". Critique partners who ask, weekly, where my pages are. I am capable of setting measurable goals. I have a Dedicated Office Space (a very pretty one at that). And yet, I have accomplished very very little in over a year.

By "very little", I don't actually mean that I haven't written words. I have actually mostly finished a romantic suspense (The big bad guy has my hero and heroine at gunpoint right now...so the end is in sight!). I have written a short story to tie into The Paris Affair (with no conflict, apparently, according to my critique partners). I have a fantasy novella that I am hemming and hawing over (do I try subbing it to one of many publishers and hope that an odd-length, sweet-romance, traditional fantasy story will intrigue someone, or make it my self-publishing trial run?).  I have ten pages of a sci-fi I've been kicking around for like five years, and a fairly fleshed-out plotline (well, fairly fleshed-out compared to my usual Dora-The-Explorer pantser plotting) for yet another sci-fi that I've also been kicking around forever.

I have written.

But I haven't really accomplished much. And I'm not writing regularly.

It's that last part that's the problem. I'm "writing" for about twenty minutes a week. If that. And sometimes "writing" means reading emails related to my writing, or, like I did this week, updating my website to add a buy link for Kobo. 

I know what happened. I had a few years of being absolutely driven to write. I won two NaNoWriMo's in a year, and got about halfway through two more.  I am sitting on two completed full-lenght manuscripts, my 95% one, my novella, and my short.  I queried, did the RWA contest thing, went to RWA nationals twice and pitched and subbed. I have a critique group. We met in person weekly for like two years and now meet weekly by Skype.

But at the same time, I have two kids and a full-time day job (a career-type job, not something to occupy lonely hours while the kids are at school--and its been a stressful few years at work). We moved, and subsequently owned and paid for two houses at the same time for fifteen months (more stress).

And I sold a book! (Well, sold the manuscript, and then sold, ahem, some number of e- and print-books). There were facebook ads and Google ads and a few blog posts. Social networking and Goodreads giveaways.

In short, I drove myself crazy and then needed a break.  Something had to give, and since I can't ship the kids away for a few months (LOL, tempting though it seems somedays...), and since I can't/won't give up the day job, then writing is what gives.

Am I done writing? Giving up? No.

Am I going to promise, here and now, to write every day? To write three manuscripts a year? To do something else huge and magnificent and inspiring? No.

I am not a balance kind of gal. I don't peanut-butter spread my activities. I can't sign up for writing 100 words, or 500 words, or even 50 every day. For me, the "balance" is more of an ebb and flow. At some points, I will get driven to write and pump out 25 or 50k in a month or two, with one or more stories running through my head as I drive in the car and as I fall asleep every night.  And at some points I will be driven at work and find the day job running through my head as I fall asleep. At some points I just need to tune out, read some books, watch some TV, play games with the kids, laugh with my husband, and accomplish very little. Eventually, all that mind-numbing will quit actually numbing my  mind and I will feel like I have to do something different.

The ebb will flow again. It always does.

Official Business

There is a lot of business to this writing business. This week's new thing: a business license. I was informed by my local city treasurer that I am required to pay for a business license and apply for a home business occupancy permit. It made me grumpy.

I'm not averse to paying taxes that I owe or to following rules. So in that spirit I have dutifully filled out paperwork and enclosed a check. I'm not entirely sure what this license is going to buy me--I don't exactly have a steady stream of clientele visiting my office (except the fictional people in my head, but they don't need parking spaces or bother the neighbors. Usually.). I won't have any undue number of packages being delivered or picked up. No crazy additions to the house.

Heck, when I was asked to specify how many square feet of my house I intended to use for the business, I almost answered "2" (one for the laptop, one for the netbook...some nights its just more comfortable to write from the couch than the desk). Instead, I played nice and estimated the square footage of my office at an overly generous 150 (its probably closer to 120).  I didn't even claim my home office on my taxes because the IRS has a lot of stringent rules about it having to be purely business and never personal, and how on earth do I explain that to the cats who like to nap in my chair? (and the printer gets used by the entire household even though it resides in my office).

Amusingly, in this town, "professional engineers" are exempt from the business license requirement (as are priests, teachers, and auctioneers. Why auctioneers and not writers?). As I am an engineer by day, I could have pleaded exemption, but I was kind afraid that the all-knowing city would google me and decide that engineers don't generally include hot steam-room sex scenes in their technical documentation. Though that might encourage end users to actually read online help.

Writers: be aware of local ordinances. If you open a post office box (which I did), or if you claim business expenses on your taxes (which I also did), then some nice local official may decide that you are, indeed, a business and request to know the names of your employees (I judiciously decided against mentioning the cats, the kids, my current hero/heroine, or my husband-aka-Director-of-Research-slash-Facilties-Manager).

For next year, I am seriously considering re-locating the family printer and putting the furballs on my payroll. If I have to pay for a license to play make-believe in my own private library, I may as well get a tax break for my trouble.

Like Chocolate Pudding Scraped Across Too Much Ham*

There was a time last year where I was totally driven. I was actively running a food blog, drafting a new novella, submitting work to publishers, spit-polishing my house in preparation to sell, exercising regularly (and purchasing a new bikini to celebrate my efforts!).

Now? Not so much. Granted, I’ve had a busy year. I sold a book and got massively distracted by attempts at promotion and bookkeeping.  I moved and got massively distracted by packing and unpacking our junk. The day job has been getting busier—instead of working four days a week and leading a team of 2-4 people (of which I was one), I’ve been averaging five days a week (frequently more than 40 hours) and leading a team of ten people.

We have a house still on the market, which saps my energy just thinking about the mortgage payments, the constant pressure to make sure it is perfect, the constant feedback detailing all of the house’s flaws. We have a new house that is not completely set up the way I want it—mostly because we are spending every spare dimes (and a few that shouldn’t be spared) to pay the mortgage on the old one. That leaves nothing left for landscaping or a few pieces of badly needed furniture (oh how I miss having actual dressers in the master bedroom), or even for contemplating use of the basement.

I think the biggest culprit in the whole litany is that extra day of work. Yes, I know that many people work over forty hours per week, every week. I think the pool of them that do that with two school-age children (who get way too many days off school, IMHO) might be smaller—especially as I have no close-by family to help out in a pinch. The number who work that much, with children, without near family support, and with a second whole job (i.e. writing)—I think I’m in a minority. My particular combination of jobs doesn’t help—engineering and writing are both very cerebral involving lots of logic, scheduling, problem solving, recall of facts, etc. You know, all the same skills I also have to employ at home to help solve the financial puzzle, scheduling nightmare that children-with-extra-curriculars create, help with homework and answer my youngest’s endless stream of  why’s. Some days I wish I were a janitor or a gardener instead.

It is amazing how much saner I used to feel having a dedicated day per week, without people around to distract me (i.e. no husband or kids), where I can run errands or do complex tasks in peace, where I have no one’s schedule but my own to meet. I have given up way too much time--time I used to be able to count on for making phone calls (away from the giant, open cube farm at work where my coworkers can hear every last word), time I used to be able to use for house cleaning, or squeezing in a Zumba class, or pounding out a thousand words on a manuscript, or just staring numbly at the TV to give my brain a break from the constant stress and problem solving of the day job + the mom job + the writing job.

I want to set a deadline for myself. To sign up to finish my current work in progress, to edit last year’s novella, to submit more work to publishers, to do more marketing and attend more meetings and generally feel human again. I also kinda want to crawl under the covers and sleep for another month or two, then spend a couple of months watching dozens of movies, then start running five days a week until I feel physically fit again. But I hate to set goals that I know I can’t meet.

Instead, I think I need a break from goals.

* My title is a quote is from Lord of the Beans, one of our family’s favorite Veggie Tales movies. It’s a hilarious spoof of the first Lord of the Rings and full of literary gems like the appetizing image I have borrowed to describe my current state of mind.

OMG, Release day

Gulp. I'm a published author.

Happy Dance!!!

Claire and Helmut's story, The Paris Affair, snippets of which have appeared here from time to time in the past, is for sale today from Soul Mate Publishing. Soon it will be available directly on the big online retailers websites too, but you can buy for you Kindle or your Nook directly from Soul Mate.

It's fun. Its sexy. Its 55000 words of fun and sexy. I hope you enjoy it!

I am still working on how best to handle this whole promotional gig. I've got Facebook (a profile for me, a page for me, a page for my book), Twitter, a website, a MailChimp mailing list. And this blog.

I don't wanna give it up. I started this blog back during my first NaNoWriMo to kvetch about my writing and about books and to generally be myself. So I'm going to continue to do so.

I won't promise not to promote stuff here (clearly). And there might be significant overlap between my blog and my website as I try to sort out what goes where.

I have done a bit of remodelling here lately. I removed links to my family-oriented blog. My cooking one's still there (Year of the Pancake, in case you're easily impressed by my culinary "genius"). I've added page links at the top of my blog for my new release.

Happy Dance!!! (sorry, couldn't help myself)

My September

So, what's new with you in September? Did your summer end well? Getting into the
swing of the fall routine?

Here's what is going on with me since September 1st:

• We have a new house and are continuing with the Neverending Move.
• It took about 36 hours before we had our fridge, washer, and dryer hooked up and working again.
• We still have the old house and have done a lot of paint touch-ups, cleaning days, and still have some repair work to be done. And more moving. (We have a lot of junk, apparently). For the record: no we don't have a buyer yet. Lots of interest. No offers. I am sooo ready to be done making two mortgage payments.
• I am now the troop leader for my daughter's brownie troop, and feeling horrendously unprepared to lead 11 7- and 8-year-olds to anything. I am, apparently, the only one who even half-way volunteered. The first meeting was the day after the Big Move Day (ya know, back when we were still camping with no laundry or refrigeration).
• We had a death in the family (my husband's grandmother) and both kids were out of school for two days while we traveled.
• My oldest child had surgery (tonsillectomy) and was out of school for a week.
• I am the team-lead for a big project at work where 1/2 of my team (i.e. the other guy) spent 3 weeks out after being hit by a truck (literally). He is fine(thankfully). Our project is running way behind and we're working overtime to get it done by deadline. Note my expected schedule is 32 hours a week, not 40+ spread over 7 days.
• We lived for 3.5 weeks with no cable or internet service at home, making it nearly impossible to send or receive email that involved more than a few touch-pad "texted" words with the phone. Apparently, I send and receive a LOT of email that involves attachments.
• I sold my first novel.

Yes, that's my exciting news.

I sold a book!

I actually got the offer email on September 1st, Big Move Day. But I was so stressed by the move that it barely registered. The lovely editor at my publisher was so incredibly patient with me as I sent several emails saying "I'm getting to it..I am moving and don't have internet".

I was so afraid that they would change their mind and yet they didn't. Through odd-hour trips to Panera and a limited-use phone app that lets me use my phone as a network card for my netbook, I managed to get contracts filled out and signed, and am working on an art fact sheet and author bio and the beginnings of a marketing plan and...

It was just this week where I was able to take a breath and start feeling excited. Overwhelmed, but excited.

The publisher is a digital-first (which I am thrilled about...being a software gal and all, it feels right to me to be doing this with the latest technology). The story I sold is a sexy contemporary romance featuring Claire and Helmut, snippets of which have featured here on this blog. I will post some more specifics soon, with links and announcements, and probably a pointer to my official writing website.

September is nearly over, and I sincerely hope my October is a little bit less eventful.

When the Past Catches Up With You

I have been uncharacteristically quiet on my blog lately. I'm not saying that for your benefit, but for my own. I keep sensing that I should be writing, but other things are coming first in my life. Unfortunately, that goes for my fiction as well as my ramblings.

Our home life is upside down lately as we prepare to move to a new house in the metro area. Buying a house, selling a house, boxing and sorting and organizing our mountain of junk, and preparing for a new school year have taken over my creative energy. And, in typical Kristi fashion, no matter how much planning I do ahead of time, timelines change drastically. In this case we are closing on the new house the same week we originally had set as the target for getting the old one on the market, and doing it without a buyer on our current house. So there is also a rush job to get our existing house spit-shined and tuned up for buyers. We hadn't planned on stumbling across the new house, complete with 99% of our wish list and at a price we couldn't argue with, when we did.

Note: this is why I'm not a plotter. I never know when that perfect plot point is going to surface from the blackhole of my brain and I just frustrate myself by wasting time creating detailed plans that I know will change.

In the middle of this chaos, we made a trip to my mom's house. She is in the middle of a similar clean-out/re-org process as she and her fiancé prepare to combine two households. She presented me with a box of mementos that I had left when I went away to college. Sifting through that box was quite the memory trip. It was full of photos and scrap books and cards and school papers.
I learned a few things about myself that I had forgotten, things that directly relate to how I write and how I feel about my writing. The first thing I noticed was how many certificates I had. I kept everything--every perfect attendance award, every science fair medal, every English department award. And there are a lot in that box. I'm not saying that to show off my pre-college mental prowess. But all of the official, foil-embossed recognition was clearly important to me. So important that I have a whole scrapbook full of little besides merit awards.

When I contrast that to my college days, my daytime career, and my writing work, there is a marked contrast. Not that I'm a slouch or lazy or an underachiever. But I used to get more awards in a single year of high school than I've probably gotten in the seventeen years since I graduated. That has been an eye opener. It also might help explain how my views of myself changed in college and beyond (Did I ever mention I was once pre-med? Note I'm not a doctor. Amazing how humbling getting a few C's can be for the ol' ego...)
It has also been a struggle in my writing because I did not just breeze into in and start collecting awards. I have had to come to grips with the fact that my writing wasn't perfect. Some of what I have written might actually suck. Badly. I also have to learn to handle the subjectivity of the field. On one hand, contest results and feedback is colored by personal preferences of the judge, agent, or editor. On the other hand, sometimes their feedback isn't just personal preference but a reflection of a weakness in my skillset.
It's not them, it's me.

It kills part of me to admit that--the part of me with that filled that scrapbook full of tangible evidence of someone's approval. But the (slightly) more grown-up part knows that I should not quit writing because I don't win contests. My writing has improved and continues to improve. And I will be much prouder of my eventual accomplishments for having worked so hard to achieve them (thinking optimistically here).
The other thing that I learned (or rather, re-learned) about myself was a lot more fun and a lot less self-reflective. I have been plotting romance novels in my head for years. Decades actually. Plotting as I try to fall asleep. Plotting while I drive. But I didn't think that I'd ever written any of the ideas down until NaNoWriMo of 2007.

I was wrong.

Tucked away in my treasure box was a spiral notebook with half a dozen plot ideas. I had character notes, settings, even the beginnings of scenes. Amusingly, the style of those notes is virtually identical to my more recent idea notebooks. And every one of them is a romance. I guess I really was one of those writers who started young. But somehow life and college and jobs and a million other excuses got in the way. Excuses like moving to new houses.

Attention Romance Writer-Bloggers:

Quit apologizing in your blogs for being "late".

I don't care if you have a set schedule. I don't care if you're in a lineup with 30 NYT bestsellers and you're the newbie and you feel you owe 150% of your debut release success to the group blog and Holy Smokes you forgot to post your latest witty-little-slice-of-a-writers-life for FOUR WHOLE HOURS!

Don't tell me about it. No excuses. Just blog like there's nothing amiss.

I read a lot of blogs. If I leave Google Reader unattended for an entire weekend, my unread pile grows to over 400 posts. That's a LOT of posts. Honestly, I have no flipping clue whose day it is to post or by what time (and timezone) you've all agreed to post your Call Story/Recipe/Editor Interview. And besides, the beauty of blog posts and RSS and reader apps is that I, the reader, see your content on MY schedule. I don't sit around my inbox waiting for the magic "ding". I'm not tuning in on the TV at the time printed in the Sunday paper.

I guess I'm annoyed because I must have read a dozen posts this week alone that started out with "I apologize for being late to blog but...". If you're feeling ashamed of your tardiness, send a private email to your fellow blog partners asking for their forgiveness. But I am willing to bet a soda (the kind that comes in a can, shipping not included) that 99% of your loyal blog readers won't bat an eye. The other 1% are probably scary stalker-types who will have a detailed log of every euphemism for the male genetalia you've ever written in a love scene and clippings of your fingernails, and really, do you want to enable that sort of obsessive behavior?

Option: Failure

I have declared failure on NaNoWriMo for this year. I didn't even get close, By not even close, I mean I've written less than 16,000 words.

Life in November sucked. Instead of putting in extra hours writing, I had to put in extra hours at the day job. So many hours that I actually bumped into my upper limit (crazy timekeeping system won't let a "part-time" person record more than 40 hours in a week). Funny, but the only "extra" time I got to myself to write was on the days where I came to work late so that I wouldn't accidentally work too long and end up volunteering my time. The job is important for a variety of reasons, but I won't do it for free. There were a couple of other issues around the house that sapped all the creative energy right out of me during much of the time I wasn't at work.

By the time Thanksgiving came around, I was at about 13,000 words. I was off work all week because my oldest gets an entire week off from school every Thanksgiving. I could have made the decision to plop her in front of the computer, the TV, the Wii, or sent her to play Barbies for several hours each day so I could write. Instead, I let my mom-guilt decide for me and not only had a 6-year old home with me, but her (very active and tricksy) 3-year old brother too. We had a great time going to the St. Louis Science Center, and I got the kids to help clean house (honestly, I did...Grandma's visits makes for great motivation). We hosted T-day dinner at our house and I got to spend a day in the kitchen happily cooking with my Mom and baby sister for company (and for extra hands with either the food or the kiddos). The week was really quite nice, as long as I ignored the whining from my characters about why I wasn't spending any quality time with *them*.
 
I haven't yet put my two manuscript pieces together (my NaNo work was in a separate file for record-keeping), but I think I am at around 30-40,000 words total on that book (out of a projected 90-120k words...yep, it's a long one, by design). Not bad for a yearly total, especially as I wrote 25,000 of my contemporary manuscript this year and did a massive editing job on my sci fi. And I have fragments of other stuff in progress (including a "short" story that might end up as a full manuscript at the rate it's going).
2010 won't have been a total failure as far as writing goes. Not by a long shot. It was just November that kicked my butt.

@NaNoWriMo

I am probably crazy. No I am definitely crazy. And I better be super nice to my husband (when I have the time). Because I'm going to attempt NaNoWriMo again this year.

Anyone else?

I'm britelord, in case you need a writing buddy :)

Now the trick is to choose just one story idea.

Contemplating length

Have you ever written a short story?

The more I read about publication options in SF/F, the more I keep hearing about writers who started with short stories. Seems to be the "thing to do". Write (and hopefully publish) a few shorts in the same world as your novel. Build the fanbase before you even sell the book.

Except...

What if I can't write anything that short?

I didn't start out writing short. Yes, I've written a few in my time. For various classes, assignments outlined by one teacher or another. But when I started out to Write (with a capital W) a few years ago, I tackled a novel. My first real, self-directed work of fiction was a NaNoWriMo 50,000 word contemporary romance that after edits and rewrites has ranged from 65,000 to 80,000 words, depending on the version. Since then I've "finished" two additional manuscripts, one at about 55,000 words and one at 90,000.

5-15,000 words? What on earth (or rather, what in space) can I accomplish in that short of page count? And is it really worth my time?

Maybe, just maybe, my brain will work better in a longer format. Maybe I will just be a novel writer. Or am I shortchanging myself?

Intiuitively, I believe that writing (and any other brain activity) is a lot like physical exercise. You have to add variety. You have to change things up. If you don't, you fall into a rut and start losing ground. Your body gets too efficient at one thing (running or bicep curls or biking or whatever), and stops having to work at it, and you plateau in your performance or weight loss or development. But if you change up your workout, and keep your muscles guessing about their next challenge, then your favorite/best/core activites get even better.
So, should I try to write short? Should I try to come up with story ideas that can be fleshed out in less than 50,000 words? I might have to *gasp* lose the romance angle if I do that. Can I write a story without a happily ever after? Or can I build up to one in such a short work?

Part of me thinks yes. Yes I can. Yes I should.

But then part of me screams No. If I divert my attention away from the "real" writing, will I ever finish manuscript number 4 (or 4 and 5, seeing as how I have another partial one in limbo on my harddrive from 2 years ago)? And what happens if I never sell the short stories either? (that's me, ever the optimist about my publication future)

How do you name your characters?

Author Alison Kent recently blogged about having to change character names partway through a manuscript and how it was unusual for her.

That got me thinking: how do other people come up with names for their characters?

I think with every book I've tried to write, I've struggled with the problem. Every time I write in a new character (primary or secondary), I hem and haw over what to name them. I waste so much time on baby naming websites and census websites that it's ridiculous. Sometimes I have to name a character HISNAME for a few chapters so that I don't stall out on page 1.

For my first manuscript, I stole the first name of my 4th grade crush. Dorky, I know. For the heroine in that story, I borrowed one of my sisters' middle names. My first book notwithstanding, I am leery of picking the name of someone I know well. I'm figure I'll either offend them, or make them think that I'm stalking them. And many times the memory of an old classmate or acquaintance will interfere with me using a name for my hero or heroine. I can't name my protagonist after someone I disliked. I just can't. It's tempting to use them for the villains, though >:).

For my sci fi story, I had my heroine's name, Myrrah, early. And I have no idea where it came from. I thought it was made up, but I've since heard a reference to that same name, with the same spelling, used in a different context. Guess I'm not that original. I had a really hard time with her leading man, however, and wasn't sure about his name for half the novel. The name has grown on me now.

On my other contemporary, I've had many people (contest judges and an editor during a pitch) suggest that I change my hero's name. It's Helmut. Yes, it's unusual and kind of foreign-sounding and I'm open to changing it. But people remember the name :) And my heroine's name, Claire, came about because I wanted some identity confusion in the opening scenes. I didn't want to give her an androgynous name (no Chris or Pat), so I manipulated her initials (CJ). It worked. For me anyway.

I think the easiest so far is my newest work in progress, a fantasy. It's not Earth-based, so I can do whatever I want. And I am. I have a couple of basic approaches to creating fantasy-ish names, including name generator sites and looking up words in ancient languages and then chopping them into something pronounceable. In one case I needed four related names (four brothers) and I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I made up an A name, a B name, a C and a D.

As I posted last time, tracking all of this is a bit of a chore. As is spell-checking. I usually add characters' names to the Word spell-check dictionary. But that adds it to the dictionary of just one computer, not two, and the dictionary applies to every manuscript I write on that computer. So, my laptop will currently let me misspell "helmet" (as in headgear) as Helmut and not complain. Oops.

What about you. Any fool-proof name-choosing schemes? Favorite sites? Or am I just nuts? (wait, don't answer that one...)

How clean is your desk?

Mine’s trashed. My bookshelves are running over. The floorspace in our office is occupied by an enormous cutting table with an unfinished sewing project strewn about the top. I have a new bulletin board and some inspirational plaques to hang on the wall above my desk. They’ve been on the floor for a month. And my collection of RWR’s and Poets and Writers magazines are sprinkled throughout the house.

Sounds a bit like my writing at the moment too.

Too many projects, all in different states of disarray. I mean completion. Different states of completion. Right. I’m not really sure that it’s a problem. Right now, I’m leaning toward labeling the messy-desk-stage as part of my “process”.

It’s nuts. And sometimes it’s overwhelming. I will hit a point where the mess is so bad that I avoid even entering the office for days on end.  If I’m writing at that point, it’s in Starbucks, or on the couch. And then I’ll decide that enough is enough and clean and organize the whole space. Everything gets straightened, dusted, cleared, organized, sorted, boxed, and labeled.  At that point, the space is so clean that I waver between wanting to spend all my free time in there, just to enjoy the serenity of it, and being afraid to do any actual work. Because work will mess things up again.

That’s totally how I write. Right now, I’m doing final edits on one manuscript to send it to a requesting agent from Nationals. I’m (mostly mentally) re-plotting another to fix some issues that multiple people have pointed out. And I’m in the early stages of first drafting a third. There is another manuscript simmering on the back burner, requesting tweaks and submission (I’m trying to ignore it). And ideas for three or four more keep trickling through my brain.  Some days the amount of work is overwhelming, and I just avoid the writing altogether (or switch gears and start dinking with my website again, or go shopping). But I think the blitz is coming. The cleaning/organizing/tying-up-all-loose-ends blitz. The one where I finish my edits, and polish my formatting and spend way too much money entering contests and too much time sending query letters.

And if this cycle is like my last couple of cycles, once I do that cleaning blitz, I will barely touch a keyboard again for a couple of months. I’ll find myself sitting on the couch watching movies and HGTV and Food Network, and baking and planning fancy dinners (instead of the frozen chicken nuggets and cereal that we’ve eaten way too often lately).

And then, slowly, I’ll begin writing again. And I’ll collect a few pages in one spot. And leave a craft book marked and open. And maybe stick a postcard of a setting inspiration to my bulletin board. And then, before I know it, I’ll be back to the messy desk stage.

What about you? How clean is your desk?

Where's your motivation?

Sometimes when I begin cleaning out my Google Reader, catching up on the mountain of blogs that I’ve subscribed to, I run across a blog post that reminds me of exactly why I subscribed in the first place. Earlier this week on Genreality, Charlene Teglia was talking about motivation. And her post really resonated with me.

She says:

It turns out that what motivates people to flex their mental muscles takes a combination of three things; autonomy, mastery, and meaning.

Yes, yes, and yes.

I have struggled with these three problems all my life.

Mastery. In early elementary school, my mom despaired that I would ever be good at completing my homework. You see, I’d do the first problem or two of a worksheet, and then declare myself done. I’d already mastered adding 2+2, why on earth would I need to repeat it? I was ready for something else. At the time it took several patient teachers to understand that if they just keep feeding me more challenges, that I would keep moving forward. If they sat me in a desk and made me do the same thing over and over, I was likely to daydream or find trouble. Funny, my kids have the same problem...

At work, I’ve done much the same job for twelve years. Once in a while (in a LONG while), I get excited for a few days/weeks/months when I get to try out a new programming language, or a different technology. But usually, I already know this stuff. I know it well. And my specific job is far from the bleeding edge of change (the bleeding edge is slightly ahead of the cutting edge, you know...welcome to the world of techno-cliches). My job deals more with the healed-over scar tissue from a long ago surgery. There’s nothing new. There’s nothing different. That makes me some kind of technical expert (a title that is far more boring than it sounds). What it means is, I can do this job equally well when sleep deprived or decaffeinated, and still have enough brain cells left over to plot a new romance novel (which I don’t get to type until I get home).

Writing is still new. I am learning every day to improve my craft. And with every new manuscript I write, I have more research to do, more things to learn. More stuff to master.

Autonomy. This one has bitten me at work for years, and is one of the stronger driving forces that got me into writing. As a software engineer, I work as part of a team. As part of a team, I have to conform to the team’s pre-existing structure, the team’s styles of programming, the team’s established patterns of designing code. Many days, my programming job feels like a Mad-Lib. The outline is there, I just get to fill in the blanks. And if I choose the wrong verb, someone else will make me change it.

When I started my first manuscript three years ago, I was in desperate need of a creative outlet that I OWNED. With no outside voices telling me what I could or could not do, or say, or write. I needed autonomy in some part of my life. Solving the motivation problem at my day job is a whole ‘nother post.

Meaning. This one still gets me. “Meaning” in my work is not the financial reward. If it were I’d be one of the serial-overtime workers. The ones who make 150% of their so-called salary because they habitually work 60 hours or more per week, and have to be threatened by HR to take their accrued vacation days before they expire. I learned a long time ago to scale my lifestyle to my salary without going into debt. I’m not in this for the money.

And I won’t get into whether there’s meaning or not to my day job. That question has more layers than an onion, and smells far worse.

But my writing. That has meaning. Personal meaning. Emotional meaning. I write in a genre that expects a Happily Ever After for a reason. I can fix problems as I write. Fictional problems that my wacko brain cooks up, yes. I can take a small scrap of a feeling and blow it into 80,000 words of exploration.

Each of my manuscripts so far explores a theme. Themes that are at work in my real life. I’ve explored the ideas of what happens when you make lots of "right" decisions only to end up in the wrong place (Hold on to the Knight). What happens when you put all your life eggs in one basket, and someone backs over it with a car (The Appearance of Impropriety). Self-identity, accepting your whole self, and believing that you can be strong no matter what everyone else expects of you (Leap). This stuff has meaning to me. And maybe to a reader someday.

So, I write. I’m motivated to write. Maybe someday I’ll look at writing like I do my day job: as lacking in those things that motivate me. But I’m an optimist, so I hope I won’t. And the motivation to write is helping with the motivation for the day job. Sometimes it takes a little creativity, a little daydreaming, and getting in a little trouble to put you on the right track.

My laurels

No, not blogging about my garden. I've yammered enough about that elsewhere. I don't have any actual laurel bushes growing. Not sure I would recognize one. Maybe I'll look them up. Then I'll know that upon which I've been resting.

I have been busy un-writing. Un-writing is the process by which one takes a perfectly good 52,000+ word manuscript and systematically cuts it to 50,883 and counting (down). Chopping words. "Tightening." Putting the whole thing on a diet devoid of "he said", "she said", "so", "that", and "just". Someone stop me before I have to either buy a whole new wardrobe of sub-genre (like "novella"), or else add scenes. Scenes without dialogue tags. Because I use too many of them.

I am taking an on-line self-editing class over at AccessRomance.com, and have been treating my poor short contemporary as a whipping boy. Leap, my sci fi, does not have a "bye", just a temporary reprieve. So far, I'm learning a bit, and practicing a lot. And I need practice. And I've got a running list of my own writing sins and exactly what sort of penance I should be doing for each. Here goes so far:

Upon this manuscript, thou shalt
1. Run spellcheck. Seriously. Ignoring the cases where MS Word things that "goddamnit" is a misspelling of "goldsmith", but otherwise heeding the almighty dictionary.

2. Highlight all dialog tags such as "said", "asked", "muttered". Then write them out. Thou shalt refrain from using the structure "blah blah blah," he said, as he did something far more interesting.

3. Thou shalt not use two spaces whereupon one space is required. Find and replace. And repeat until it says it found none to replace. Because I like my space bar and sprinkle it generously thorughout my writing.

4. Highlight every "its" and "it's" throughout the manuscript. And examine each one individually. Not because you don't know the difference, but because sometimes the right-hand pinky fails to heed your warnings.

5. Highlight "garbage" words: that, so, just, very, really, totally, practically. This list may grow. So far, I'm keeping most of the ones I find in dialogue because they sound more natural in speech. And I'm toasting ones that are truly extraneous. And leaving a whole lot more highlighted because blue and yellow blobs all over the file will make me come back and re-read when I have more brainpower.

The class isn't even half over. So maybe I'll be back with a few more commandments.

On writing advice

I am forever reading advice to new writers that goes something like this: Treat your writing like a job.

I completely disagree.

I have a job. I show up, put in my time, get stuff done. I don't goof off. I try to treat my employer and my coworkers fairly and professionally. And it pays the bills. But you know what? I'd leave it in an instant if a good enough offer came along.

Is that really how I should look at my writing? As a bunch of motions I go through because I need the money to help feed and house my family? Or a set of outside requirements that I have to live up to?

I prefer to treat my writing like a friendship.

Any good relationship takes work, as any married person can tell you. I have to spend time writing, sometimes when there are other things I could do. I have to work hard to uphold my end of the friendship--improving my craft, sending my work out for critique, querying, pitching. But like a good friend, the writing is a whole lot of fun.

And God, do I need fun. Especially since this particular friendship isn't exactly making me any money yet.