Category Archives: Writing

October 2, 2010

Another year, another novel

By terraluft
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, as long as I don’t die, two days after I run my first half marathon I’ll exchange my impossible seeming running project for an impossible seeming writing one.  Having been successful at NaNoWriMo last year, I know it is not impossible and I’m determined to win again this time around!  And, most of my writing group will be toiling right beside me.  I’m SO excited!  Since I’m not going to be ready to hang up my running shoes, I sure hope my family is as supportive of me this year as they were last.  Running and writing… all at breakneck speed?  Should be an interesting month!

2 Comments | posted in Writing

September 16, 2010

Mr Monster… my first ARC

By terraluft

I know, I know… what the hell does ARC mean?  First, this is a pet peeve I’ve been dying to vent out to the world and now here’s my chance!  Have you ever noticed that groups of like-minded people (like authors) tend to create their own lingo complete with acronyms?  And then they throw those acronyms and buzz words around like it somehow makes them cool?  (Or am I just a total bitch and this bugs me way more than it should?)  In my humble opinion this practice does little to endear “outsiders” to those who use the lingo and instead makes them look like uptight snobs who never grew out of having a secret club with a secret code for entry.  I promise never ever to become one of “those” kind of people.  And I give anyone reading my blog permission to call me on it if I ever do succumb in a moment of weakness.  Deal? 

So, an ARC is an Advanced Reader Copy.  A copy of a book that hasn’t yet had all the mistakes edited out (OMG, published authors make spelling errors?!?!?) and isn’t ready to sell in bookstores or anywhere else.  They are printed to send out to readers in advance of the publishing and release date and authors get copies to do who-knows-what with.  (Now you get the name, right?)  I admit I’m new to the whole industry – who knew writing was so much more than writing a story – and I’d never heard of these little gems.  That is until Dan Wells – who I still can’t say enough good things about – made it possible for me to get one.  Which is how I came to read a book already that is not available in stores until the 28th of September… as in two weeks from now.  I’m giddy as a school girl when I think about how I, the most impatient person on the planet, did NOT have to wait over two months to read the sequel of what I have already decided is my favorite book of the year. 

Mr Monster is the sequel to I Am Not A Serial Killer and is just as fascinating and unputdownable as the first one.  How does one talk about a sequel and not ruin the original?  I’m not sure which is why it is hard to do a proper review.  The main character is still John Clever, a 15-year old sociopath obsessed with serial killers and who is still living his life with major rules so he doesn’t become one himself.  Only now he is dating the object of his obsession – very bad and very good at the same time – and embroiled in working with the FBI to catch a serial killer without incriminating himself in the process.  Dan Wells has done such an amazing job of creating a character who is so genuinely flawed and in any other book would be considered the antagonist but who finds himself the hero so we are forced to love him.  This book is also classified as Young Adult Horror and it is dark in parts but not as graphic or violent as the first – it is more up in your head disturbing rather than blood and guts although there are bits of that as well.  To say anything else would give things away and do injustice to the whole thing.  So, please trust me and if you haven’t already read the first one, get on it so you can be in line for the sequel when it hits bookstores later this month!  Personally I can’t wait for my daughter to be old enough to read them!

Leave a comment | posted in Book Reviews, Writing

September 10, 2010

One Step At A Time

By terraluft

The hubby and I took a little mini-vacation over Labor Day weekend.  We left both kids home with family and hit the road… for a 13 HOUR road trip to my sister-in-law’s wedding reception.  We drove a total of 31 hours in three days to spend about 40 hours with them.  It was totally worth it even when you factor in the TWO speeding tickets – one for each of us.  The best part was all the time we had to spend together in the car, talking and bitching and brainstorming and getting inspired for new book ideas. 

I came out of the weekend with two killer ideas for new stories to write and now I’m torn about which I want to do first after I get the initial draft of my current project finished.  The daily writing… goal?  Rule? whatever you want to call it, I’m on a total roll.  I’m about 3 chapters into my re-write and finding less and less that I need to fix once I got past the prologue.  I don’t want to jinx anything but at this rate I anticipate being finished with the first draft by Nov 1 when I get to start my new project as part of NaNoWriMo 2010.  I’m looking forward to a new story – something fresh and new and exciting – and am kind of surprised that both ideas are just straight up fiction.  No sci-fi, no fantasy, just regular old stories.  I guess I still don’t know what “my” genre is so that’s okay, right? 

All things considered, life is pretty damn good – I even set a new personal record for fastest mile tonight on my 4-mile run: 12 minutes, 18 seconds.  Not too bad considering it was the 3rd mile of that run!  Amazing… a 4-mile run is my “short” run during the week!  I’m on track for a 6-mile run on Sunday… and I’m half a mile away from having logged 150 miles just since May 23rd.  Like everything in life, it’s all happening by taking one step at a time.

Leave a comment | posted in Everyday Life, Running, Writing

August 31, 2010

Goals… okay, fine!

By terraluft

Normally, I scoff at goal-setters.  (Sorry if you are one of them, don’t take it personally!)  I’m a live-in-the-moment kind of a girl – always have been and always will be.  It is way more fun that way and I tend to avoid all guilt by not thinking too hard about life and the choices I make day to day.  I never look back or over-analyze what I’ve done for the same reasons.  Except now I am conceding that sometimes goals and all that come with them might be necessary – at least in some aspects of life.

Why the change?  I wrote again last night… only 30 new words but they are 30 more than if I hadn’t told myself that – no matter what – I have to write something every day.  A daily writing goal, if you will.  I figured I would start out small – no word count I had to make, no looming milestone to intimidate.  Just write every day.  Every. Single. Day.

It felt so good writing again and, although I have come to terms that I must go back to the beginning of my manuscript and totally revise it before I can go on, at least I know what my plans are so I can get busy getting it done.  I WILL have the first draft of my first novel complete before November 1st.  (What’s this?  Another goal?)  In hindsight I am such a better writer than when I started last year so I would have to revise anyway – I’m merely saving myself some of the work for draft two by doing it now.  Kind of like ripping the bandaid off…  The best part is that my characters are whispering to me again – or rather I’m listening for them again – which I worried wouldn’t happen since I’d been ignoring them for so long.

In many ways, it is my running that taught me this lesson I can now apply to other areas of life…  I am following a training program designed for people who have never run a half marathon.  It tells me exactly what to do every day.  And even though I look at it on paper and think “What the Fuck have I gotten myself into?”, when the day comes and it says run 3.5 miles (like today) and I’m still sore from my 5-mile run on Sunday – like I can barely walk down the stairs to get to the gym at work – I still did it and felt great doing it.

If I didn’t have a goal to run a specific distance by a specific date, I wouldn’t push myself.  Having the steps laid out for me on how to get there allows it to happen gradually one step at a time.  Without it, I might still be struggling to run for more than 10 minutes at a time instead of being able to run for more than an hour.  That last sentence was purely for me – since I have to focus on how far I’ve come rather than how far I have to go.  Easier and more productive to think “wow, I ran 5 miles in an hour and 11 minutes which is an hour longer than I could run at all 3 months ago” than “OMG, it just took me over an hour to run 5 miles, how am I going to run 13.1 in 2 months?!?” which is how I really feel inside when I think about my half marathon.

What will get me to the finish is doing the small steps every day.

So, lesson learned is that sometimes goals are important – not in the Franklin-Covey-plan-every-single-minute-of-your-day-based-around-a-goal-in-every-aspect-of-your-life way but maybe just for the really important things.  And that, when measuring progress, sometimes it is better to look back and acknowledge how far you’ve come rather than fixating on how far you have left to go.

1 Comment | posted in Everyday Life, Healthy Lifestyle, Running, Writing

August 31, 2010

Book Club Retreat with special guest appearance

By terraluft

A couple of weekends ago was book club.  This was the killer month where we let loose and rent a condo for an overnight, old-fashioned slumber party where we allow ourselves to “semi-forget” (read escape from life where) we are moms, wives and girlfriends and shop and eat and stay up talking until all hours of the morning.  Of course we carve out an hour to discuss the book we all read the month before, too!  This was our second annual retreat and while we did not have a hot tub in our room this year we had something just as cool….

This year worked out that my month to host and pick the book to read fell the same month as the retreat.  Because I couldn’t find a better choice, I picked “I Am Not A Serial Killer” by Dan Wells which I have already reviewed here.  One night at a social gathering a couple of days into the allotted reading time, one of my friends asked if I was going to ask Dan Wells, the author, to come to our book club.  After all, he is a local writer so it could totally be possible.  I hadn’t thought about it although I did have the perfect ‘in’ having met him at the writers conference I attended in April.  A couple of weeks went by and I thought about it again and told myself to suck it up and just ask him – since I really had nothing to lose after all.  I mean, the worst he could do was say No, right?  Only he didn’t!

It was an amazing night on so many levels…  we always have fantastic discussions where we dissect the characters, who we all inevitably love or hate with little in between, and theorize on why the author wrote what he/she did, etc.  Imagine having the same discussion only the author is there in the room and can tell us definitively whether we are right or wrong and even tell us why he did the things he did and how he came up with all the elements of the story.  But that wasn’t all… after the discussion he stayed and signed every one’s books and sold us t-shirts if we wanted them, passed out a few ARC (advanced reader copies) of the sequel not out in stores until next month (for a price!) and took pictures with everyone – including a photo where we all lined up on the staircase leading to the second floor of the condo with kitchen knives poised at each others throats.  (Okay, it was after 10pm at this point so you can imagine how punchy we all were getting!) This alone would have put it on the all-time greatest list of book clubs.

But it got better!  At this point in the night several people had to head for home because life only worked for them to be there for the evening instead of staying the entire night.  And I thought Dan (yes, we’re on first name basis at this point) would make his way out through the kitchen answering a couple of questions the writers in the group (my writing group is a subset of my book club) would bombard him with.  And to be fair I warned him before he agreed to come that there were four aspiring writers among the attendees who would love to discuss writing after the book discussion was over if he was willing.  What I didn’t expect was him sitting down and getting comfortable and staying well past midnight until we had asked every single question we could think about writing and publishing and editing and being an author.  What a generous and inspiring man Dan Wells is!

I gleaned two nuggets of noteworthy advice from the evening:  1) if you put as much hard work and effort into being a writer as a doctor does at training to be a doctor you’ll have just as successful a career as the doctor and make just as much money.  The only difference is that there are no college programs designed specifically to train you like the doctor has.  2) if you read 2-3 books per month on average and expect to live say 30 more years, that’s 720 -1080 books you potentially have time to read in your lifetime.  So why on earth would you waste one of those slots on something that isn’t good?  (I’ll never finish another shitty book again – minus book club selections I’m committed to reading of course – and refuse to feel bad about it!)

The most inspiring statement for me was when we were talking about being an author and Dan made the point that there is not a lot of difference between being a published or unpublished author besides having convinced someone to buy your book and print and sell it to others.  The same manuscript you sell today could be rejected by someone else tomorrow and just because you sell one does not mean you are overnight a better or even different writer.  You are simply a writer because you write.

I think I’m still a little high from the evening… can you tell?

1 Comment | posted in Events, Writing

August 17, 2010

Writers block and fundamental questions

By terraluft

How the hell did it get to be mid-August and almost 2 months since I wrote anything substantial?  (Besides my blog of course!)  It isn’t like I don’t know where the story goes – I know exactly how it ends already.  It isn’t like I haven’t had time – I’ve sat down several times and re-read the amazing scene where I left off with almost all of my crucial characters finally all in the same room where they can now go on together to the climax.  And then an hour has gone by – or once it was almost three – and not a single new word written.  Not ONE! Very disheartening and after the third time I decided I should really figure out what is going on before I open that file on my computer again.  And here we are… August and neck-deep in self-doubt and self-loathing because I’m STILL STUCK HERE!

So, I’ve been doing some major soul searching – 3 and 4 mile runs give you plenty of time for it when you’re not wallowing in doubt and loathing!  And in the course of my busy life the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with two of my writing buddies from my critique group who helped put my finger on the real heart of the issue.

It all started when I went to the writer’s conference where I honed my skills by leaps and bounds and took my writing to the next level.  What I couldn’t see, but that has been lurking in my brain, is the fact that I must once again start over…  or at the very least revise entirely what I have written.  All 63,208 words of it.  Because my protagonist has been acting all wrong.  And I mean ALL wrong!

But, as devastating a realization as that is, it isn’t even the true issue yet!

The core issue is:  what kind of a writer am I?  Am I one that writes with a plot or am I a discovery writer who lets her characters decide what happens and where things go?  Am I a write-the-first-draft-before-I-read-a-single-word-for-revision writer or am I a revise-as-I-go-so-when-things-change-I-can-fix-them writer?  Because I don’t yet know the answers to these two fundamental questions, I cannot go on.  Because do I write the next part as if I’ve already gone back and fixed my main character’s flaws that I now know exist assuming I’ll fix everything in the 2nd draft revisions?  Or do I stop now and go back to the beginning and make things right before I go on?

If there is one thing I’ve learned in this almost two year journey of being a writer (albeit an unpublished one still) it is that, while every published author has an opinion of how writing should or does happen based on their own creative process, no one is exactly the same.  What motivates us and keeps us writing is as unique as the authors themselves.  And what works for my hero Stephen King (write to the end and don’t read a word until months later when it’s time to revise it and don’t even think of plotting!) is not what works for everyone else – possibly myself included.

So, like an alcoholic at her first meeting, here I sit acknowledging I have a problem to solve.  But, admitting the problem is the first step!  Now I just have to figure out where to go from here.  Stay tuned since even I don’t yet know where that is except back to consistent writing in some form.  After all, I’ve got to finish my first draft of the current project before October 31st since NaNoWriMo commences in November and I already have an idea for my next project…

1 Comment | posted in Writing

July 13, 2010

Feeling inadequate amidst success

By terraluft

I am an amazing woman who finds time to raise two young daughters and be a wife while working full time at my “real” job, train for my first half marathon in October, manage a family schedule going in at least three different ways daily AND write a book in my spare time while keeping up with my monthly reading for book club.  Yes, I’m exhausted just thinking about it!  So why is it that I feel inadequate?

I’m certain it is because I have not had a chance to write in several weeks and my resolve to live like a writer is failing as a test of character.  I know I am being super hard on myself but I’m also being honest at the moment.  I don’t normally do guilt but lately I go to bed and feel guilty that amidst all the chaos of my life another day has gone by without writing.  I found time to run 3 miles tonight and I am willing myself to read a 1000 page book this month for book club that I’m hopefully on track to finish by the end of the week.  And yet, I can’t find time in a day to write.  And even when I do, like now, I’m writing on my blog instead of my manuscript!

If I look at it objectively I can admit that I’ve been extremely busy the last three weeks.  My sister in law got married over the 4th of July weekend two states away (six-day road trip), Big Sister had a dance competition in Las Vegas two weeks before that (another road trip) and I didn’t even have a moment to crack the laptop open on either trip.  When I got back the laundry had doubled in size and the time I normally would have spent writing I spent getting caught up on laundry and getting my house into a semblance of order again before we have to pack for the next big trip at the end of the month for my family reunion.  My running I can do at work at the gym and, with hubby working mostly night shifts lately, my evenings are devoted to dotting on my kids – not to mention the Dance Studio Shuttle Bus 4 days a week.  So it isn’t like I don’t have valid “reasons” to have little writing to show for the last months.  But that also isn’t how I want to be – with a rational excuse/reason for not writing.  No, I want to be a writer, damn it!

In the end, I’m going to quit my bitching, acknowledge what an amazing feat surviving and staying on top of my life is, and vow to do better in the coming weeks.  It’s like my hubby always says about the lottery:  you’ll never win if you don’t play.  The same can be said about writing: if you’re not doing it every day, you’ll never finish or get published.

I met a blogger (who I will keep anonymous to protect the innocent) a few weeks ago who has hundreds of followers and spouts advice to admiring fans everywhere and I learned that SHE. ISN’T. EVEN. PUBLISHED. YET.  If she can get that big of a following and talk that kind of talk having ‘only’ landed an agent, think about what I can do once I get my first novel under my belt.  I am recommitting myself starting now:  I will stop procrastinating and just write!

1 Comment | posted in Writing

June 21, 2010

I Am Not A Serial Killer

By terraluft

What an amazing read! Once in a great while a book comes along that actually lives up to the hype on the cover. This one claims to be “unputdownable” and it really was! It is a young adult horror novel but anyone will find the main character undeniably fascinating. Creepy, yes, but fascinating nonetheless.  Since it is a young adult genre, even the violence is tame enough for those with a gentler disposition. I knew I would love this book regardless of it’s merits since I met Dan Wells and got some great critique and mentoring from him at my writer’s boot camp.  It was even better than I had anticipated and made the hardback purchase for ass-kissing-with-the-author-so-he’d-share-his-secrets well worth it.

The main character is a 15-year old sociopath who’s family owns a mortuary.  He is fascinated with serial killers and because he is in therapy and knows he has issues he has constructed a whole lot of rules to keep from turning into a serial killer himself.  When there is a real serial killer who comes to town and begins terrorizing the inhabitants, he must use his knowledge of the serial killers he has studied to try and figure out who is behind the killings.  You don’t know whether to love or hate him as he plays both protagonist and antagonist at times.  The twists and turns and glimpses into a sociopath’s mind keep you turning the pages so quickly that it is over before you could think twice about putting it down.  I highly recommend this book to anyone – even the young adults it was marketed for.

The best part of this book for me personally was the fact it has proven, even though I have become an author turned crazy nit-picking reader, that good fiction can still be found and enjoyed.  It is just sometimes harder to find…and comes packaged in the strangest of covers.  This book also marks the first non-book club read for me this year.  How utterly pathetic on so many levels…

Leave a comment | posted in Book Reviews, Writing

June 21, 2010

Life of Pi

By terraluft

I should have read this book before I became a writer…  I read the jacket cover which told me it was a story about a boy and a tiger shipwrecked on a lifeboat – which sounded really interesting!  Then I had to read 97 agonizing pages of a ‘Part One’ in which nothing really happened except give background story.  (One of the first no-no’s for an author.)  In a nutshell, this was a great story, but badly written. I spent the first half of the book wondering when there was going to be a point and, by the time things started happening, I was so mad that I could have cared less about the interesting aspects of the story or even the main character. I’m glad it was a book club discussion because I came to appreciate the nuances through the eyes of my fellow readers but I still hated the actual reading of it. The author has a great way with description but sifting through the meandering of the monotony made it not really worth it.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to read for the mere enjoyment without critiquing and analyzing what I would have done differently.  One thing is for sure, I have morphed into more of a writer than a reader and sometimes I lament the loss…

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June 11, 2010

Dance Distractions

By terraluft

I just realized it has been almost two weeks since I’ve written here…  I assure you, there is a reason and it has everything to do with a major announcement a couple of weeks ago at Big Sister’s dance studio.  Turns out the economy has really hit everyone everywhere and after 27 years our director is retiring and closing.  This is very sad news by itself as Big Sister will have to make new friends and most likely not have all her dance “sisters” with her next year.  But, more pressing has been the search for a new dance studio with amazing teachers who will continue to mold her and hone her dance skills.  (The kid has to pay her way through college somehow, people!)  So, I’ve been away playing obsessive Dance Mom and letting every aspect of my writing suffer.  *sigh*

Between approaching total strangers at the school talent show last week asking where they dance (accompanied by looks that said clearly they were taught never to talk to strangers!), endless phone calls with my sister-in-law who is equally as obsessed with finding THE PERFECT dance studio for our girls, hundreds of text messages with other Moms to compare notes on new places, and visits and phone calls to potential studios we were able to find a great place close to home where Big Sister and her dancing cousin will now call home.  Thank god it only took a couple of weeks and we can now just focus on settling in for the summer schedule and team tryouts later this month.

Tonight is the Year End Show at our beloved studio where they get to showcase what they’ve been working on all year… accompanied by a ton of tears from the girls I’m sure!  The show will also feature a bonus “Parents Dance” which this Dance Mom will be participating in.  Not only am a “Dance Mom”, I am now quite literally a dancing Mom.  Next weekend is their final competition in Las Vegas where the dancing Mom will also be competing.  It’s silly, I know, but I’m LOVING getting to dance again after 25 years, enjoying every practice and looking forward to our performances.

I had a breakthrough in figuring out how to write a pivotal scene in my novel – thanks to an inspirational 4-mile walk with a writing buddy – and I can’t wait to refocus my efforts on my writing now that all the dance distractions are dealt with. Now, where’s my coffee?

Leave a comment | posted in Events, Everyday Life, Writing

May 20, 2010

My first short story

By terraluft

I didn’t win the short-story contest I entered but I’m still marking the experience in the ‘win’ category because I put myself out there in the serious world of writing – as an author – by having submitted an entry in the first place.  I threw this little piece together in a week after I got a wild hair from my writing group who all jumped on the bandwagon and submitted entries.  I figure why waste the effort and not let everyone who cares to read it get the chance?  So, without further ado, for your reading enjoyment…

Decisions
by Terra Luft

Beep-beep… Beep-beep… The sterile sounds of the many machines trapping you here like a prisoner go on incessantly. Tubes drain a putrid looking fluid from your chest while others down your throat are breathing for you. How surreal the past days have been, culminating with you lying there, pasty white and barely breathing, and me sitting here in this plastic chair wishing you would wake up so I can tell you how unbelievably unfair it all is.

For hours I sat in the waiting room while they worked on you, time marching so slowly I wondered if it had stopped, thinking of all the things still unsaid between us, praying to a God I don’t believe in that we get more time to say them. Fifteen years, you would think we’d had time to say and do it all but I’m selfish and I want more. My thoughts are haunted by the irony of all the hours of comfortable silence we’ve spent together, unaware any moment might be our last. I refuse to consider sitting on the couch, you watching a ball game while I read a book, could be the way we spent our last waking moments together. All those years we let fly by and we never discussed or planned what we would do if either of us ever found ourselves here.

What a trick fate has played on me. I’m the one with the bad gene pool, the one with the poor cardiovascular health who needs to lose a few pounds. You are the active one who plays basketball twice a week and rides your mountain bike every chance you get. So why are you lying there with a split sternum under what will be one nasty scar instead of me? And will you even be around later to tell the story of how you got it?

The thought of never hearing your voice again suddenly grips my chest. What I need right now is to see your eyes open and alert and hear you speak. I’d even settle for one of the inappropriate jokes you’re always telling at the wrong time at parties. Something to distract me from all the potentially life ending decisions I might be forced to make soon if you don’t wake up.

The endless tears stream silently down my face and I grip your hand in mine. I try to picture your hazel eyes staring out from someone else’s face, your heart beating in someone else’s chest. I know you well enough that, although we haven’t discussed donation, it is what you would want. Yet I can’t bring myself to even think of pushing the button that turns off the machines, let alone actually doing it. I pull the plug and you never wake up? No, unacceptable!

Instead, I keep the entire world shut out of this room and plant a seed of hope amid all the shock and horror. I know some think I’m in denial. I can hear them all whispering outside the door – the door I won’t let them enter. I prefer to think I’m forcing my will on the Universe. Either way, I will sit here – just you and me – watching and waiting until you wake up, my love. Because somehow I know you will and because I cannot go on alone if you don’t.

A detached part of myself wonders what you would be doing if it were me lying there instead of you. And if it were me clinging to life, what would I want you to do?

*********
 
So, there you have it.  Reading it now, a month after writing it, I know why it didn’t win… after all, it was written prior to learning all that I learned at the writer’s conference.  But, we all start somewhere.  The narcicist in me wants to hear comments from readers so bring it on my hopfully adoring public!
 
In other news, work on the first draft of my novel continues.  The last half will prove insanely better than the first half when it comes time for revisions (since I got amazing critique at boot camp) but that’s okay.  After all, there’s a reason you write a first draft: to revise in the second!

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May 13, 2010

Like You Mean It

By terraluft

I got a kick in the pants… figuratively speaking… the other day.  After my first Writer’s Conference, I was perusing all the “author” blogs and places of interest around the ‘net since apparently it is a requirement to know people and be able to recognize them by name.  I signed up for a few free newsletters – what’s another few pieces of junk mail a week to clog my In Box, right?  I added a few interesting blogs to my reading list, blah blah blah.  And then I got a little nugget of value out of the whole exercise.  I got a “free book” that had 70 solutions to common writing mistakes.  It is fascinating how much you think you know and then you find out that the stuff you didn’t know that you didn’t know is actually more than you knew.  (Ha, did I lose you on that one?!)  I’m not done reading all the pointers and tips but I’m taking one to heart that hit me hard like an open-palmed slap to the face by an angry lover when I read it:

“It isn’t enough to say you want to be a writer, you have to live like you are a writer.”

I am not entirely sure why this particular phrase hit me so hard – perhaps because lately I’ve been less than satisfied with my “day” job and have been dreaming of being a writer who was successful enough I didn’t need to have another job anymore.  I realized it is like what I always say – you aren’t going to win the lottery if you aren’t playing the lottery.  The same is true about my writing.  I am not going to get an agent or a fat book deal or hell, even a finished manuscript, if I’m not actually writing on a regular basis.  So, this is me… turning over a new leaf.  From now on I’m an author because I write on a regular basis, period.  I may not be a published author yet but if I write every day and keep polishing my craft I will be soon!  And that pesky first draft that stalled after NaNoWriMo?  Thanks to my new ebook, I’ve got tools to get me past the hump of the middle and sailing through to the end.  From here on out, it will be like NaNoWriMo every day of the year!

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April 26, 2010

New Beginnings

By terraluft
First, I am a third of the way done with my current round of HCG injections…  It hasn’t been as easy this time in many ways but I’m still seeing fabulous results and sticking to the protocol like glue.  Day 16 and as of this morning I’ve lost 14 lbs.  I had a couple of days where I didn’t drink enough water and ate the exact same thing for both meals which, I found out the hard way, will both stall the process.  So, two days of zero weight loss that I cannot get back but still pretty amazing.  I’ve never felt better and the smallest size pants in the closet are beginning to hang on me.  By this time next week I’ll need a belt to keep them from falling off and by the end of the 40 days I’ll need a new closet full of clothes.  (Didn’t really think THAT through as I don’t have the cash for an entirely new wardrobe but it’s a problem I won’t mind having!)
Second, I just took my writing to the next level by attending my first ever writer’s conference.  It was a two-day event but I was only able to spend the entire day there on Friday.  One of the add-on options was a program called ‘Boot Camp’ where you take a sample of your writing and you’re paired up with either a published author, an agent or an editor who specializes in your genre plus four other writers.  You read aloud to the group and they all give you feedback.  A very frightening prospect on it’s own to have someone else read your work before you’ve edited the shit out of it and think it is the absolute very best.  But to have to read it – aloud! – to strangers?  Bordering on the terrifying.  A fellow member of my writing group (which I found out should be referred to as a Critique Group in industry-speak but hey, we didn’t know!) both signed up and were there at 7:00 AM on Friday morning.  It was amazing the insight I got out of what Dan Wells (my assigned author) focused on and picked up on to comment about in my writing sample.  The morning itself was worth the price of admission for the entire day and I came away with fresh ideas for a chapter I hadn’t thought about since writing it at the beginning of NaNoWriMo back in November.  After boot camp, we had a full day of conference sessions where we learned how to pitch our work to an agent, address pacing of a story and add emotion to our writing.  They were all very informative but I have to be honest… I walked away Friday night thinking I didn’t really get much out of it and was glad I had done boot camp since THAT was where the real learning had happened.  
At least I thought that until I went back for the second session of boot camp on Saturday morning.  Boy was I wrong…
Just reading the next section of my own – in my mind very polished – manuscript, I found tons of holes and examples of amateur writing I had smugly thought didn’t exist in MY work the day before.  There they were… had been there the entire time and I hadn’t even seen them.  All in the course of 24 hours I became a better writer.  Maybe it was rubbing shoulders with real live published authors (I sound like such a geek, I know it but this is my life and maybe I am a geek.  After all, who else besides a geek dreams of writing a book that one day gets published and spends her days interacting more with a computer than people?  I’m bound to come off sounding geek-ish!)  Or maybe it was the energy of the space and me making the declaration that I am taking myself seriously about this writing business enough to shell out a hundred or so clams of my own money and a weekend of my time.  Whatever it was, I am so excited about the possibilities!
I entered a short-story contest NPR was hosting a couple of weeks ago, I have pretty much figured out how all the story threads tie together so I can finish my first novel, and I have committed to another short story contest with a submission due by May 15th.  Look out, world, I’m a writer!  And one giant leap closer to being a published one at that!

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