Life: Full Speed Ahead

I finished my NaNoWriMo novel and won this year for the third time in a row, making my streak 3 for 3. Boy, was it ever tough, though. Despite my best efforts otherwise, Anemone's Song, the novel I finished in October so that I wouldn't have it hanging over my head in November during Nano, haunted me anyway. I kept having the desire to work on that instead of my Nano novel. It drove me crazy.

I suspect that's why writing during Nano this year was so difficult. I hit the third week slump hard this time around. It wasn't pretty, folks. But I forced myself through it out of sheer willpower alone. I think that was a good experience for me. Writers need to write, and not simply when we feel like it. We must write when it is difficult, and when we would really rather do anything else but glue ourselves to the chair and the keyboard.

Now that November is finished, however, I have returned to working on Anemone's Song at last, and I am much happier for it. I have a new temp. job at the moment, which is less than thrilling, but it helps pay the bills. In more exciting news, I began to write a column on Examiner. com, so I am getting more experience under my belt professionally. Writing articles for it has helped me to practice some of the skills that I am reading and learning about in order to possible dip my toes into freelance writing in the future.

My truest love will always be writing novels, though. As poetry is my weakest form of writing, writing stories are my strongest. Nothing makes me feel more alive.

Read more...

Goodbye, 2008!

So ends another year, still unpublished. So many goals not attained this year, so many goals added and attained. Successes and failures went hand in hand. Such is a writer's life.

I failed miserably at Nanofimo, depending on how you look at it. I only reached 10,000 or so words for Nanofimo on my 2007 Nano novel. But looking at it another way, that's a third of what I needed to do for Nanofimo, at least.

I may not have reached my 500 words a day goal for the year, but I did get considerably more writing done this year than I would have without that goal. I certainly put my nose to the grindstone a bit more, whenever possible.

Well, goodbye, 2008. I have mixed feelings about you, but I'll toast you just the same. I wrote my first short story in completion during you, and my daughter was born, so there were really good times along with all of the bad. Quite a stormy friendship, but in the end, I guess I'll call you a friend.

Read more...

Echoing A Recent Post of Mine...

Here is a good article I found that reiterates my point about making the time to write. Writing must be a priority (not necessarily THE priority, but a priority), or you will never get anywhere with it. Writers write. So many people don't seem to understand this. If we can sit in front of our TVs for 20+ minutes a day, we can find the time to write. Maybe instead of wasting so much of our time, we should manage it better.

Find Time to Write Your Novel
Finding the time to write your novel can be a challenge in today's always-on work environment. See how published novelist Jean Shields Fleming balances her creative life and her professional life--and how you can, too.
View more »

In college, I would read books for pleasure or write in 5 or 10 minute chunks before or between classes. It wasn't a lot, but at least I accomplished something. And it really piles up over the course of a day, much less a week.

Stop the excuses. Just write. Even if it's "horrible," it's something. You can always rework it later, or throw it out altogether. Sometimes we just have to wade through the muck, the bad writing, before we can accomplish any good writing.

Really, that's the metaphor for a writer's whole career, really. Because there's always something more to improve.

Read more...

What Being a Writer Really Means

Life as a writer is anything but the easy, get-rich-and-make-lots-of-money fantasy that so many people think it is. Writing is hard work. You have to write even when you don't feel like it. Writing must be a priority. You must make time for it. And those who like to sit around and talk about writing rarely do much writing at all. Some of them even complain that they have no time to write.

Well, guess what, my friends? Stop talking about writing. Stop complaining about having no time. Make time. Write! (That's an order, you hear me?)

I have noticed that if I do not make time for my writing, I become very nasty to be around. I am moody, tense, snap at the littlest things. Life is not pleasant for my husband, and I am not nearly as patient with my little daughter, if I go too long without writing. This is exactly what has happened to me in the last few days.

Which is why I have been forcing myself to edit and write during my daughter's nap. I don't want to edit. I'm finding it difficult to concentrate, and I feel almost bored with it, which is unusual for me. Normally I am alert and excited about editing, because it means I am almost done with a project. Instead, I feel lackluster, perhaps because I am tired. Or maybe because it looks as if it will be hard to lower my word count for this story right now.

But I am editing anyway. Because I need to. Even if it means losing a little of the little sleep I seem to get as it is. Writing needs to be a priority in my life, and it needs to be a priority in yours, too. So write! And

Read more...

The Immortality of Writing

A thought occurred to me as I played with my four month old daughter today. Being a writer is a lot like being a child sometimes. There are days that frustrate you and nothing seems to make sense or go your way, and there are days where the sheer exploration of life, of learning and discovering as you go, is simply exhilirating. I have recently experienced both types of days in the short story I am currently writing. On the bad days, I often feel as if some piece of a puzzle is missing, and it confuses me. I keep staring at a sentence or a paragraph, trying to figure out a way to make it work, and worrying why there's just something about it that seems so out of place that I can't go on. It's almost like an instinct--I know something about it isn't working, but I have to unravel what it is.

Sometimes solving that problem is as simple as rewording the sentence, or crossing it out to write a new one. Other times, I have to delete the offending sentence or paragraph entirely before my writing brain turns on again, so to speak, and the wheels in my mind start churning the story toward my next goal.

As a writer, I know I will have many "bad" days. I have even gone through blocks of time, sometimes months, where I felt myself in stasis, unable to move with a project no matter how I tried. Sometimes even working on another project didn't help, because I was simply in a very ugly slump for varying reasons.

But on the good days, it's like the words are curling straight out of my pen's ink onto the page, or like they're printing themselves on the computer screen. Words, imagery, dialogue...they're all a jungle gym or a slide that I can build, explore, and play on. And it only takes one good day to make up for a lifetime of bad ones. That's why I keep writing; I know that eventually a good day will come again.

Read more...