Monthly Archive for May, 2009

This week was AWESOME, work wise. I’m on chapter 11, so I’ve basically finished the first third of major rewriting I had to do, which included quite a few whole chapters or sections that needed written from scratch. I think there are only 2 new sections in the rest of my new outline, with, obviously, quite a few new lines, paragraphs, etc., to keep continuity with all the changes I’ve made.

But basically from here on in it should be smooth sailing and I should be on target to finish a rough draft of my revisions by June 1. At that point I am going to send them off to my two Alpha Readers: Dr. James Clawson and Master Christie Ko (loves you guys!). I also, now, have the luxury of sending them off to my new critique partner, Diana Rowland, whose upcoming release Mark of the Demon ROCKED MY CASBAH. Seriously. I love the tone, love the heroine, adore the male protags, can’t get enough of the south Louisiana setting, and just ate it up like it was candy. Indeed, if it were candy, it would be Sour Patch Kids. And I can’t begin to tell you the damage I can do to some Sour Patch Kids. In other terms, it was really, really good and I highly recommend you BUY THAT BOOK. I said that just like Jon Lovitz did in the Critic, btw. It’s one of my favorite jokes that nobody ever gets.

After they have at it, and I let it simmer and stew and get some distance on what I wrote (as I write book 3, btw), I’ll do a final set of edits for July 15, when my editor wants it back. Hopefully she will be pleased and I will get another chunk of advance. Chunks of advance are always nice.

The best thing about this process is that I am insanely happy with the changes. It’s gone from being a passably readable book in which fun things happen to, I hope, a book that does Jane justice, that builds on the first book and that does what a second book should do in terms of the series as a whole. Jane is much feistier in this version that she was in the first, and it suits her. Ryu comes across more vividly, here, as well. And there’s EVEN MORE ANYAN. Oy gevalt, more Anyan!

And I should desist talking about these characters like you know who they are, as the first book isn’t going to be released for what feels like EONS. So just ignore me for now, but after you’ve read it you can come back and this’ll be like free spoilers.

So I’m going to finish my smoothie and my coffee, then put on the gym clothes and head over to the cushy ‘Bucks to work. After which I will gym it. No rest for the wicked, and what not. But man do I love my job. 

It’s good to be an urban fantasist.

Hi ya’ll. Yesterday  was a big ole waste of time, in that I didn’t really get much writing done. I got a lot of cutting and pasting done, but nothing was really accomplished. I did, however, do a bunch of shit I needed to do in the rest of my life. Which, if I’m honest, was a good thing. 

Everyone always asks me “how much do you write a day,” and the answer is, “however much I can write.” Some days are outrageous. I had one day, in Edinburgh, when I was finishing up Tempest Rising, where I wrote, solid, for like 8 hours. I parked myself at the Bean Scene in Leith, which I called my “office,” and I just wrote the whole ending. Don’t get me wrong, it sucked, and needed crazy amounts of revisions, but I got it out.

On equally rare days I write for an hour, tops. In that hour I can sometimes write a whole chapter, sometimes two paragraphs.

Some really, really rare days I don’t write at all. I edit, or I take a day off to grow fresh eyes so I can actually see what I’ve done rather than what I think I’ve done.

I’ve been doing this for a really long time, now. Not fiction writing, obviously, but writing to various deadlines and working under my own steam to get various projects accomplished. I know when I’m doing what I should be doing, I know when I’m dicking around, and I know when I need a day off. In other words, I know my writerly rhythms: I know my insecurities and my compulsions. I know the little devil inside of me that urges me to slack off and the little angel that would burn me out if I let her take over. I know how I work. So, I knew that yesterday I just wasn’t going to get anything done. Not because I couldn’t, but because I just wasn’t going to. I have all this stuff coming up that is exciting, and instead of trying to ignore it and working at half-intellect, I just called it a day and turned my attention from writing to organizing my upcoming vacations.

I sorted all that stuff out, and now I have one less excuse to procrastinate. I also found myself a writing buddy and we made an appointment to meet, today, so that I have even fewer reasons to procrastinate.

But I’m not sweating the day off. I see on Twitter, everyday, people self-flagellating because they didn’t get what they wanted to get done. Sometimes I AM that person. But, the fact is that we can only do what we can do, in a given moment. Writing isn’t like turning on the faucet. There are days it feels like that, but there are days when it feels like the well has dried up. 

What I try to do is be responsive to my own abilities on any given days. On days when the creative mojo is really flowing, I clear decks and just pound out as much as I can. On days when things are slower, I try to entice the mojo with some editing, and sometimes it appears and I end up having a great writing day. Some days the mojo just does not want to come, and so I make sure to sit down for at least an hour and do something, but I won’t push it past that. Instead, I do something else I’ve been needing to do, like clean my apartment. If I have more than one of these days in a row, on the third day I’ll do what I call “muscling through” the block. Which means just sitting down and writing, even though I know, or feel like, what I’m writing is shit. Oftentimes, it is shit, and all I’ve got is a skeleton either to flesh out or to excise and start anew. But normally muscling through means the block is gone for the next day, and sometimes I actually write really good stuff that I keep. This is often the case when what seemed to be writer’s block was actually the fact I had to write something challenging, and was balking at the pressure. 

If I have a streak of really good writing, I’ll also often make myself stop, for one day, and not look at anything. I’ll be a total non-writer for a day. I might not even read other people’s writing in a complete word-vacation. That’s just to clear the cobwebs out of my brainpan, so I can see what I’ve been doing with clear eyes. Otherwise I end up just seeing all the mental clutter – what I think I wrote, what I wished I wrote, what I almost wrote – rather than what I DID write.

Okay, that’s my process in a nutshell. And now I have to go to the gym, then go meet my new writing buddy so that we can rock out to our muse. 

Thanks!