I read a blog post this morning where the blogger looked back on what she had written a year ago.  I got curious as to what I was doing a year ago so I took a look at my own posts.  Here’s what I found from October 2nd, 2010:

Here’s today’s hard reality of being a writer.  Sometimes the projects you spend two years of blood, sweat and tears on don’t end up published.  Sometimes, they don’t even end up finished.  My first novel is currently going into this bucket.  I made this decision subconsciously a couple of months ago but I wasn’t really ready to let my baby go.  I’ve spent two full years on it, still believe in the idea, still love my characters and eventually will return to it.  But, because I love it so much I’m not willing to use it as my “first” and thus major learning experience.  So, I’m shelving it… for now.  I’ve spent the last couple of months editing and finding more work than I thought to get it up to par and ready to write the ending.  I still know where it ends and how, just have to finish the re-write of what’s already written so I can finish it up at some point.  For now, I’m switching gears and preparing for this year’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which starts November 1st.  This time (my third) I’m going in armed with another year’s worth of learning and knowledge about how to write better and will spend October coming up with an outline so I am better prepared.  I am not sad, I’m being real.  And if talking to other writers this year and learning from them has taught me nothing else, it is that it takes writing many completed books to finally figure out how the whole process works.  Getting caught up and overly attached to one project over another just sets you up for disappointment.  So, I’ve tried my hand at urban fantasy – this year I’m tackling a straight out fictional work.  We’ll see how I like it since I don’t even know what “my” genre is yet.


So here we are today…  Last year I was ready to shelf my novel and in fact tried to do just that.  What I got was a failed attempt at last year’s NaNoWriMo where I languished halfheartedly with a new idea and eventually went back to my original one – the darling I cannot kill.  Then, thanks to my writer’s group and my friend’s editor, I discovered another layer of the toolbox of the writing craft that I didn’t even know I didn’t now about.  Now I have a completed plot structure with completely different characters, a new twist, new motivations, the works.  And I am going to finish the damn thing before I move on.  I haven’t spent this long world building and figuring out how my characters really tick just to throw it away or shelf it before it’s done.  Besides, I tried that and the characters rebelled.


I’ve done so much research and learning recently; I am a different writer than two months ago.  On tap for this October is expanding on my plot structure by outlining basic scenes (and sequels) so I can hit the ground running.  I’ll finally be equipped to complete a first draft during this year’s NaNoWriMo in November since this time I am even more prepared than in years past.


Do I have illusions that this will be the first novel I publish?  It would be nice but I know it probably won’t be.  However, I will still learn by finishing it and then revising, and querying and all the other things that go into the job of becoming a published writer.  And then I’ll start another story and another and at some point I’ll really know enough to get a publishing deal so I can then call myself an author instead of ‘just’ a writer.  Here’s to another year of chasing the dream with all the hard work it takes to make it happen… may I live through it and still enjoy it.

Here I sit… That damn cursor blinking at me… and I can’t figure out where the story goes from here.  So I thought ‘what the hell, maybe blogging about it will help!’  Of course it is also cheating because that means I’m using today’s allotted writing time for actual writing.  I’ve been kicking ass and taking names on the outline – who knew I’d be so good at it since I thought I was a discovery writer!  I’ve consistently been writing as planned – mostly.  Nothing goes one hundred percent right all the time.  And now I’m sitting here with a story that is three quarters roughed out.  I’ve got new characters I didn’t know existed, new motivations I didn’t know they had, lots of twists and tension… and now… yeah… I don’t know exactly how they all get to the ending I see in my head yet.  Of course that ending has only been summed up in a single sentence up until now which is precisely the problem.  (And no, the sentence is NOT “They lived happily ever after” either, thanks for asking!)

I keep exploring possibilities but it all feels too cliche or anti-climactic.  I need another twist and I can’t see where it will come from yet.  Nothing I’ve come up with has me inspired enough to even write down.  And no, blogging about it hasn’t helped yet either.

Anyone out there in Internet land want to share their favorite twists on story endings so I can get my creative juices kicked into gear over here?  Please?  If not, I’ll be forced to show up with no first chapter and no completed outline at writer’s group next week.  And that will suck…

Remember a couple of posts ago when I was talking about standing at the edge and knowing that leaping into this I’m-finally-going-to-write-that-novel-I’ve-been-working-on-for-years pool was going to be super shitty and hard and basically freaking out?  Well, I pulled myself together and decided that all I needed was a plan.  I tackled this gigantic endeavor as I would any project of its scope and magnitude: I broke it down to requirements and measurable deliverables and defined how to utilize my resources.  (Told you I was a total data girl and project manager extraordinaire!)

Here are my requirements:
1)  I’d made a commitment to read the entire manuscript we will be critiquing at our August writer’s group meeting.  Since this is book two of the trilogy of which the first book already has a publishing deal, I know I can’t slack on that commitment and call myself one of the members of my kick-ass writing group.  Since typically my reading happens via iPod, having to sit down and actually READ a book represents significant time.

2) I am still training for whatever I decide to do in the fall – I keep going back and forth about whether I’m going to do another half marathon or not – so I can’t slack off on my running or sacrifice training time for writing time.  I just got new shoes.  My last pair were new in late February and I’d already run three hundred miles on them. Three hundred miles every five months makes this not a small deliverable.

3)  I have to find time to write in the non-magical world where there are only 24 hours in a day, of which I still have to work eight at my “real” job and spend at least a few hours with my family being a wife and mother.  I have to write every day and be consistent about it or nothing is ever going to be different than now where I talk about writing as if it will always be in the future and never happening in the present.  The Universe sent me LOTS of pointers on this one in the form of podcast topics and daily writing tips telling me to JUST. DO. IT.  Kind of like shouting it at me with a “FOR GOD’S SAKE” added for good measure.

So here’s the general plan that I came up with…

First, I gave myself a super tight deadline of finishing the critique for my writer’s group by the end of July.  I was only two days late.  Check that one off the list!

Second, starting August 1, I will write everyday and act as if THIS month is NaNoWriMo month and just keep at it until the first draft is done. 

And finally, stick with the same running schedule I used while training for Ragnar all year since I know for the most part it works for my life.

How does that actually look with my schedule?  Monday through Friday workdays I either run at work (short-run day) or at the gym (the night Big Sister does NOT have dance) or in the morning (mid-week longer run).  When I get home from work, I’m a Mom/Taxi until the kids are tucked into bed at a reasonable time.  No more letting Big Sister stay up as late as she wants.  Since school starts in three weeks and we need to get back to a scheduled bedtime this works anyway.  The hours between 9:30 bedtime and when my natural clock winds down for the day, somewhere between 11:30 and midnight, will be devoted to writing – with the exception of Friday nights which I protect and preserve for quality time with Hubby.  Weekends are devoted to at least one long run – typically about ten miles Sunday morning – and getting on top of mundane things like laundry and dishes and perhaps squeezing in a touch of a social life – aka, the things I have been doing between the kid’s bed time and mine until now.  Since weekends are way more flexible I will write a minimum of three hours a weekend somewhere between the two days.  My house may be less clean for a while, I’ll definitely have to drink more coffee than normal and my DVR will fill up with all the things I won’t be watching regularly; but all of these things are worth what I’ll be gaining in return – being a novelist.

I’m off to an amazing start – only two days late due to the critique deadline that I blew but who’s counting, right?  The first night I spent two hours rekindling the story in my mind and working out any bugs in the outline I’ve got so far.  I figured out that the story should actually start with what’s in Chapter Three so I had to work the back story info-dump I had planned for chapters one and two in elsewhere.  And, I determined which of the three main characters point of view each chapter/section would be written from.  In the wee hours before dawn when I was awakened over and over again for a pretty heinous on-call shift, an element of the story kept churning through my head and I came up with the missing piece of my world’s creation myth – got to love bonus non-planned creative time, right?  Don’t forget, I have RELIGION of all things in my book.  Insane, I know.  Even more so when you realize that I have to basically come up with the equivalent of an entirely new system of mythology to explain what and why things happen and why people let them happen without question.  Last night, I worked another three chapters into the outline… and busted out a blog post which actually by definition counts as part of my writing.

It feels amazing making progress on the novel and it’s crazy how I kept thinking it was going to be so hard to find all this time and stick to such a rigid and unbending schedule so I wouldn’t have to sacrifice anything in my life.  What I didn’t factor in is that I enjoy writing so much that the time just flies by and all the shit about how tight my schedule is doesn’t even matter.  Here’s to starting strong and continuing the trend all the way to the end!  I am a novelist by definition since I am writing a novel… regardless of whether I ever get said novel published or not.

Lately this question has plagued me.  I’ve always worked since I was sixteen and I have a super, over-achiever work ethic.  Even through two babies and their resulting maternity leaves I have never wished to be a stay-at-home mom.  But how do you find the perfect job?  Mine is nothing I have said “I want to do {that} when I grow up”.  Because have you ever heard a child say ‘Mommy, when I grow up I want to sit on my ass in a row of cubicles, surrounded by other worker bees who are a constant form of irritation in one way or another, basically typing all day – for forty hours a week’?  No, me neither.

Which is why I’m writing a book.  So I can be my own boss and make my own hours and be the one who financially benefits as a direct result of all my hard work and labor and have a glorious life away from this crappy nine-to-five world.  Only now I’m seeing, through my fellow writing buddy and her publishing deal, exactly how much work will be required once I finish and sell a manuscript.  None of it sounds too fun or exciting – it sounds like, well, work.  And that’s only IF I finish and sell a manuscript, the hardest part of the whole process being breaking into the publishing world.  (My first novel I’ve been at for so many years it’s almost embarrassing.  Yes, yes, I know I’ve learned the craft of writing in that time so it isn’t like wasted time.  But still, we are talking years!)  Plus I’m not naive enough to think that selling one book to a publisher will mean I can pack up everything and buy a remote cabin in the Montana mountains where I can go and live and write in bliss.  It will remain work, and almost harder work once I’ve “made it”.  Then comes deadlines for new books and book tours and all the other stuff that comes with being a successful author.  I’ll just be trading one kind of hard work for another and not really setting myself free.

So how do you pick the right job that will take you through to retirement with your wits still about you and not so burned out that you can still enjoy life?  And what part of your life right now, in the present, do you have to sacrifice to get to that pie-in-the-sky end result?  Unfortunately I don’t have any of these answers.  Could it be that the uncertainty awaiting me in the life of an author is the real reason I haven’t done much on my manuscript the last month?  Forget the two vacations and running Ragnar I’ve been up to lately, what if THIS is the real reason I’m dragging my feet and filling my evenings with things that are not writing?  I mean, the outline is basically done – even detailed for most of the book – with the ending all summed up with room for my characters to form their own path to the finish as they flesh themselves out.  The perfect balance for me, the discovery writer who needs a little direction to keep her characters reined in.

Bottom line, I’m not going to know if the life of an author is right for me until I become one who has finished a manuscript and done all the hard work – just like I didn’t know what I really wanted to do when I grew up before spending fifteen years getting to where I am in the working world I am currently in.  Being a writer is the one thing I’m doing now that I remember saying I wanted to do way back then.  That’s got to mean something, right?

I guess the real reason I’m dragging my feet with getting started – again – on the novel, now that I’ve turned my reflection glass all the way to internal and taken a good hard look, is that I know it’s going to be like having two jobs.  Which means it will be hard and there won’t be much sleep involved.  Picture it: work forty hours a week away from home so we can keep paying the bills; feel like a single mom at night with hubby working a ton of late hours while juggling Big Sister’s dance schedule and spending enough quality time with Baby Sister that she likes me more than the nanny; be on-call for the day job for twenty additional hours of nights and weekends; write every day for several hours to keep the momentum up and finish the first draft this year; oh, and don’t forget to run and stay in shape so I stay sane through it all.  I guess my love affair with coffee will be good and the one with my bed not so for a while.  In a way it feels like the dread and anticipation I feel when approaching a race day.  You wonder if you’ve trained enough yet are excited to see how it all goes.  I need to put on my big girl panties and suck it up if I expect to get to the end, no matter what race I’m entered in.

If I’m being honest, and when have you known me not to be, I feel like I’m standing at the edge of my future afraid to take the next step in case I fail.  Remember the scene in the Indiana Jones movie when they are after the Holy Grail and Indy has to take a leap of faith not knowing what will happen?  That’s how I feel – standing at the edge of a cliff where I have to stop talking about how amazing it’s going to be when I get to the other side and find what I really want in life waiting for me.  (In other words, start writing this novel again and this time finish the damn thing!)  I may not know exactly how it will look but until I get there to see it I’ll never know!  So here’s to officially embarking on the journey from writer to author, may it not kill me…

Work on the novel continues at the slow speed of life with two kids and a full time job… but it IS continuing which is the only thing that matters!  This week I’ve gone back and taken the almost finished draft from before I decided to start over and began deconstructing it into outline form.  The basic story was pretty much hammered out in that draft – at least to the end of the middle – regardless of how poorly it was written in my early days of training to be a good writer.  That is the easy part!  Then I can outline the key points that have always been swimming around in my head about where the story has to go to reach the end.

But then comes the hard part…

I’ve been grappling with some massive changes that must be worked out because of some new directions I already know are in store.  For instance, I’ve decided that a different character is going to be kidnapped instead of my main character’s daughter.  The kidnapping itself was merely a means to an end to get her to follow her daughter’s kidnappers and once she got there I never wrote her authentically enough to have a missing daughter; nor could I because there were more important reasons for her to be where I had sent her.  So, no daughter kidnapped.  Solves the characterization issue but creates a whole bunch of new things to work out.  Does she even need a daughter?  I don’t think so now.  But, the daughter is key to several pieces of the puzzle – like the two main characters initial meeting happens because the daughter stumbles across him in the woods and takes him home.  If she doesn’t exist, how do they meet now without dissolving the believability of one of my favorite scenes written to date?  Okay, then maybe the daughter can stay but she isn’t the main character’s daughter.  Maybe she’s a niece?  But then that requires there to be more than a string of only-children which is how the family dynamics have already been written with an important tie to the matriarchal grandmother who is the key to everything at the end.  *sigh* 

Like I said, the hard part!

As much as I love some key pieces of discovery writing (where you just write and things happen and hopefully they all work out in the end) I don’t want to waste another year of just writing without knowing exactly how the story ends.  I need to work out all the background to the story, figure out the way all the characters fit with each other and the major plot points.  THEN I can start writing to fill in the blanks and flesh it out with characterization, description and tension.  I am a woman on a mission – to finally finish this damn thing!  If you need me, I’ll be writing… or staring blankly into space trying to figure out how to make it all work so I can start writing again!

I’ve decided I’m going to start talking about my novel in detail…  Perhaps some teasers?  I have to have an outlet to keep things fresh and since this is what my blog does usually – plus give me perspective and allow me to vent – what better way to keep me on track and working toward the finish line.  So first, a recap of where I started and where I’ve been up until now…

The first version of my first draft began as my wanting to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November of 2008.  And ended with me failing miserably and only writing like 5K words.  Plus, I found out that while I had a great idea for a story, I didn’t know squat about writing.  So, I read some books and I started learning more about the art and craft of being a writer.  The nuts and bolts if you will.  It was this year that my writing group was formed…

My second attempt at NaNoWriMo was the second version of my first draft in 2009 and I won that year with 50,000 words written in 30 days of November.  What a crazy year that was!  All while I was pregnant, too!  This was the best and biggest chunk of story writing to date but it wasn’t amazing yet.  After I went back and started editing and pulled it out to polish some stuff up to take with me to a writer’s convention last year, I realized that I’d written my main character all wrong.  Like completely wrong.  She’s supposed to be this kick ass woman who’s daughter gets kidnapped and she was instead this simpering little pussy who I would have hated to read about.  She didn’t even get that upset when her seven year old daughter was taken.  Instead she tags along with the other male character who is from another realm and isn’t even freaking out that much.

So, after trying to write something else (okay, anything else) for the 2010 NaNoWriMo I started over yet again – that makes third attempt at the first draft.  I wrote some really great new stuff involving the male main character and his other realm but when it came time to write the main female character scenes I stalled.  I still didn’t know exactly what she was going to be like and I didn’t want to fail yet again to capture her perfectly.

And then we had a writing prompt in the writer’s group last month which inspired me to write a scene that most likely fits somewhere in the middle of the book.  I nailed her character!  Being able to just write one scene and figure out how – in one isolated moment – she would react cemented everything for me and now I can go back and start writing her.

So, as soon as I’m done outlining and getting some basics down on where this story is heading so my discovery writing at least has a high level road map to keep me out of the weeds on the side of the road, I’ll be starting attempt number four of my first draft.  Number.  Four.  I’m glad I’m stubborn (my mamma didn’t raise no quitter!) or I might have thrown in the towel several attempts ago.  But, the story and the world I’ve uncovered within myself wants to get out so the world can read about them.  Who am I to argue and complain that it’s taking entirely too long?

Why I ever thought that writing a novel would be easy should be shot.  (Since I’ve read so many in my lifetime it should be a piece of cake, right?)  Oh wait… that would be suicide, so I guess I’ll refrain!  Stay tuned for new developments on this journey to a completed first draft which I’m hoping to happen before the end of the year… and yes, I mean THIS year.