Facing Rejection – again…

In the last two weeks I’ve had huge anxiety.

I’ve been switching nannies, worried about my day job, seeking time to write, and taking care of two sick babies and a husband who’s starting his own business.

Oh, and I also got two ‘you did not make it to the next level of the competition’ rejection notes.

The rejections made me happy.

Why?

BECAUSE I PUT MY WORK OUT THERE!!!

Finally!

It’s taken me years to regularly show my work, but now I’m doing it.

In the last couple of weeks I also have notes on my latest manuscript from my three readers. Because, ultimately, I know the path to publication is long and you have to start somewhere and chalk up your share of rejections and feedback before you get to see your name on the cover.

Here’s to continuing the journey down the path!

Finding Time To Write with 2 Sick Babies and 4 Business Clients

I just wrote two drafts of a new novel. It felt easy (not that the writing is necessarily good… just easy to find the time and effort to write). I had a groove going. I was getting up at 5am, taking care of diapers and then writing.

Then the draft finished, it went out for review, my kids started getting up earlier, I started sleeping in later, my nanny took a week off, I got behind in my client work, and my motivation took a nose dive. It’s harder to collect my thoughts, shut out the background anxiety of sick kids and late deadlines and to focus clearly on my writing. It’s been impossible for about a month to get any substantial writing done.

This TOTALLY bugs me.

Yesterday I decided, “Come hell or high water I’m going to go back to getting up at 5am.”

I set my alarm. I went to sleep early enough.

But, did I do it? Did I get up at 5am and write?

Nope.

I got up at 4:30am…

and, I didn’t write a damn word.

My 9 month old baby girl was screaming her adorable little face off and running a fever of 102.2 My husband went to the store and I walked in circles around the living room trying to calm her down. She still hasn’t gone back to sleep but her fever has abated, so we’re all breathing a little easier now.

So, what do I do about my writing?

To be honest, I’m going to go a little easy on myself for the rest of the week. My son was sick all last week – I think I must have been puked on at least ten times in the middle of the night. My nanny isn’t coming in today. I do have a potential new nanny (cross your fingers) showing up in about 5 minutes. So, I need some time to work with her. I DEFINITELY need time to do my client work.

It would also be nice to take a shower and work out at some point. Not necessarily in that order…

I will still write a bit every day, I’m working out some scenes at the end of my Viking novel, but I’m not going to pressure myself to push through the chaos that has been my life for the last three weeks.

Sometimes it’s good to go with the flow, and that means this week I’ll be taking care of kids and clients.

My Amazing Writing Marathon for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Competition

I made it! I entered Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award Competition!

Now, I can’t say that I have high expectations of winning the Young Adult section… but the fact that I even submitted a 50,000 word novel (that didn’t exist 3 days ago), well… I’m pleased as punch and I know that I have a solid foundation for editing this story into a truly submission-worthy manuscript.

SHIFTER is a Nanowrimo novel that was started on November 1, 2011. I started with a single concept: A shifter girl’s boyfriend goes missing and she thinks its her parents’ fault. (You can read how a description of the story as it is now here.)

As it turns out, that’s not the story at all. But, it gave me the impetus to start writing. The story is first person, present tense, which I found very liberating to write in and I scribbled out the first 50,000 words in 3 weeks. I did it by getting up at 5am, 2.5 hours before my kids wake up and writing furiously for 2 of those hours. When I realized that the story had changed, I just kept writing. I didn’t stop to restructure, rewrite or rethink. I just wrote forward with the new information that I had in my head.

I finished the Nanowrimo version on November 21st (my birthday) and left for a week in China. When I got back I wrote an outline based on what I had learned about the story while writing it and then I set about rewriting into the outline I now had. Only, by the Christmas holidays I realized the pacing was off. So, with my writing action buddy, Mike, I reworked the outline again. (If you’ve been wondering where my blogs have gone, well, I’ve been working on the manuscript…)

What I was left with by January 7th was a brand new outline, a thrilling story and only about 10,000 usuable words for it. With two children under the age of two and a full time job, I wasn’t left with much time to complete my new version of Shifter for ABNA, but that is exactly what I set about doing. The January 23rd deadline was looming and I desperately wanted to hit it.

Still, by the time January 20th rolled around I only had 24,000 words on paper. I asked my in-laws if they would be willing to watch my son for the weekend and my husband took my daughter and I began a writing marathon that started Saturday morning at 10am and ended Sunday evening at 10pm, when I finally submitted my manuscript. In the course of that two day writing marathon, I wrote 26,000 words – some of them actually pretty good.

Now, I’m not fooling myself, I know there are rough sections and a few through lines that need to be reviewed, but mostly what I know I accomplished is pushing quickly through early drafts so that I’m in a position to carefully edit something that is close to spot on in terms of story.

To get my manuscript Bravyn to this stage took me three years. To get Shifter to this stage took me three months.

This morning I woke up thrilled to have thrown my hat in the ABNA ring, but more importantly, excited to have a second manuscript ready for polishing.

Tis the Season… to Write More

I haven’t done any Christmas shopping. I don’t know what I’m making for my family or my in-laws for Christmas dinner. I haven’t sent any Holiday cards. I haven’t gone to any Christmas parties and I don’t plan to. I also won’t be sending holiday cards. I will be wrapping some of my son’s birthday presents to put under the tree. And, for Christmas dinner, well, we might order out Chinese.

It’s not that I’m trying to ignore my family or not make my daughter’s first Christmas fabulous. It’s just… well, I’m writing. I have my pretty strict end of year deadlines on both my manuscripts and I definitely intend to meet them. Fortunately, I’m back in the swing of things and have been able to get up at 5am and get some great writing in before Armand gets up at 7:30.

More important than meeting the deadline… I’m excited by what I’m writing. I love the flavor and the tone. I love the characters. I love the dilemmas. And, for the first time in my life I’m actually writing something that I consider ‘sweet’. Well, it does start at a funeral and it’s still pretty dark, but essentially, I’m writing a warm and fuzzy love story that is perfect for this season. It’s been great to snuggle into my blankey in the wee hours of the dark morning, turn on the Christmas tree lights and write about all the cozy discomfort of first love.

Setting Targets and Getting Back into Action

The Great Wall - a truly inspiring place. Don't be surprised if this shows up in future writings!

Nanowrimo is over, we’re back from China, and I’m supposed to be getting into the swing of things and editing one of the two manuscripts I’m working on. But, wow, do I find it challenging to get back into the swing of things. When I left I had been getting up at 5am like clockwork, writing my word count and getting on with my day. This is my fifth morning back and I am struggling and I mean STRRRRRRRRRRUUUGGGGGLLLLLLLLLIIIIINNNNNNNGGGGGGGG to get out of bed by 6am.

Fortunately, so are my babies.

Which means, it’s 8:47am and they are still sleeping and I have a chance to update my blogs. When I travel I write in my travel blog (which you can view here: http://travellermama.wordpress.com) and mostly get very disconnected from my creative writing, which means, when I get back, I’m immediately on skype to Mike asking “What am I doing again?”

He reminded me that I’m now in the process of editing two novels.

So, I had to think about what I was going to do with that and how I was going to finish 2011 with a bang. My targets:

1. Get Shifter – Draft 2 done before Christmas. Shifter is my nanowrimo 2011 manuscript and really was a jumble of scenes. In the five days since I’ve been back from our trip, I wrote out a new outline and got the scenes organized into that outline, but there are now some missing scenes, so I’ll be writing those over the next two weeks, thus ending the year with a rough but sensible Draft 2.

2. Update ending of Bravyn. So, I read through Draft 5 of Bravyn and the ending really needs some reworking before I go back to the beginning. So, Between Christmas and New Years, I’ll be scribbling out that new bit, thus ending the year with a fairly solid Draft 5.

As I look at these “To Do” items, I’m completely reminded that this is definitely a process. I’m really happy to have two manuscripts that I can work on now. Swapping between the two has definitely stimulated me and made it more intersting for me as I edit.

The Truth About My NaNoWriMo Manuscript

I’m a little more than halfway through the first draft of my new manuscript, Shifter, which I’m writing as part of NaNoWriMo‘s writing month on steroids. The first 30,000 words were easy. I had a lot of ideas, I had some great characters to find and explore, I had a lot of back story to investigate. In two hours every morning I would scribble down a lot of words. I also knew most of the plot, so I was able to push the characters forward while still putting brick walls in their faces.

However…. the truth about what I’m writing is that I would not call it a manuscript. I would call it a stack of plot points, character studies and back story loosely tied together in a hap hazard fashion that depended on the mood I was in on the morning I wrote. In other words, it’s a big pile of s….

And, by that I mean: scenarios. “What would happen if she was like this?” “What about if her best friend was a dude?” “What if her love interest had a girlfriend?”

Then, night before last, I realized I needed to talk it out with someone. So, of course, I called Mike. Because I knew where the story was and I knew where it was going. But I kept having this nagging doubt that I had enough for another 20,000 words forward. I also felt that there were some big holes in the first 30,000 words. For example, Where are the bad guys? What is the urgency?

Then there was my other big nagging doubt… Are the stakes high enough? Because, of course, I’m a BIG STAKES kinda girl. I mean, THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT IS GOING TO END IF…. At least, that is what Bravyn is based on. But, Shifter is a smaller story. It’s not about the whole world falling apart, it’s about Shae’s world falling apart. And, it falls apart because her boyfriend, the love of her life, disappears.

Mike assured me that those were high enough stakes. Go figure.

So, after what amounted to a thirty minute phone call I had much more clarity on my novel. Thanks, Mike.

I spent my Saturday writing time not adding word count but actually outlining the story in broad sequence sweeps. I’m not going to spend the time right now to put my scenarios into the sequences, but at least now it’s really easy to see mentally where the holes are and what parts I have to build up.

Today, the 2,400 words I’m writing are not pushing through to the end, they’re actually going back to the first Act and building up the love story.

One thing I’m really learning through NaNoWriMo is what works for me in terms of writing process. I’m very much a novice novelist. This is my third manuscript. So, I still have to figure out thing like do I outline or write first? If I don’t outline first, when do I outline? If I don’t write first, how do I outline? With all three of my manuscripts I have tried slightly different tactics. The first two, these different tactics took me years to move through. With NaNoWriMo, I get the opportunity to push through the first draft in three weeks. What I’m getting from my NaNoWriMo manuscript is not just a new first draft, but more clarity about my individual creative process.

Puking out a NaNoWriMo First Draft

The flu hit my family hard last Saturday. Over the course of the last five days I’ve been nursing my son, then my daughter, then my son, then my husband through a pretty bad stomach bug. It was a little hard to stay on track, but I had commitments and I had help (husband and in-laws). So, I went to my Writer’s Business Meeting, I went to my Writer’s Critique Group Meeting and I got up at 5am every day and kept writing on my NaNoWriMo manuscript. That is until this morning.

Because, last night the flu hit me.

And there was no way after praying to the porcelain god for much of the night that I was getting my butt up at 5am to try and pray, meditate, and write. In fact, I was still in bed when my husband left for work and I stayed there until the last possible moment (which, in my case is when my son’s yelling can no longer be ignored).

Here’s the thing I have to confess. The only reason I REALLY allowed myself to stay in bed was because I knew I was ahead in my word count. I knew that I would take today off from work. I knew that I would find enough time in my day to add another 1,100 words to my manuscript. So, I was able to let myself off the hook and stay in bed that extra two and a half hours.

However, at about noon I sat down and added in those extra words.

Here’s the thing. I’m not writing Shifter with an outline. I know the general scenario of my story, I know my protagonist’s goal, and I know how it ends. But, essentially, I’m just puking out whatever comes to my mind around this story when I sit down and write.

My health, I found out today, definitely impacts what I write.

My girl started in her best friend’s room where I thought they were going to have a cosy, buddy talk. But they didn’t. My girl (I think her name is changing so I don’t really know what to call her – her placeholder name is Layla) was annoyed and got up and left. She ended up waiting up for her father that night to give him a pretty dark lecture. It was weirdly therapeutic and, at the same time, a great scene to include in the book (at this stage - I don’t know what stays and what goes yet).

But, with that dark lecture I completed just over 25,000 words and half of my NaNoWriMo novel. I’m well on my mark to have my 1st draft done for my birthday.

A Business Plan for my Creative Writing Career

Today I met with Mike, my writing action buddy, in order to start preparing notes for our 2012 Creative Writing Business Plan. Mike and I are your classic real world writers:  we ardently pursue the craft of writing while still maintaining ‘day jobs‘.

Even though we maintain day jobs, we’re both clear that our vision is to make a living from our creative writing. While there is a certain amount of luck and a whole lot of writing involved in this, there is also a great deal of planning. So, this year, we decided that we wanted to develop business plans.

While we’re certainly not expert business plan writers, we’ve both had businesses so we understand that writing a business plan isn’t as complicated as it might seem. The purpose of our business plans are simple, we’re not looking to impress venture capitalists, we simply wish to have a guideline for the year that will help us improve our portfolios and sell our work.

We did a lot of notes today and will work out our business plans over the next couple of months. We will then have quarterly business plan meetings over 2012 to stay focused on them and update as needed. For example, if I get an agent by June or July and sell my Primary Manuscript (Bravyn) by August, then that may change my plans to take part in the 3-Day Novel Contest over Labor Day weekend. If however, I’m still sending out query letters in August, I’ll be more than ready for a smash creative writing break.

Business Plans aren’t meant to be set in stone they’re guides that shift depending on what really happens. And, it this case, it gives me focus and a timeline.

The first steps were simple:  Putting together the overarching vision.

Goal of Business: To Sell Creative Writing

2012 Primary Objectives:

• Polish my current manuscripts.
• Get representation.
• Develop more material, including expand into different mediums

I then broke down my primary objectives and added them to a timeline; more on that in the next post. 

I always feel so good knowing that I have a guiding plan. I’m also, of course, happy to shift or change that plan, but to feel that there is some structure to my writing career helps me immensely to take it seriously and stay committed.

My NaNoWriMo Strategy

I don’t leave my writing schedule to chance. I don’t try to fit it in at some point in the day. I don’t write after I get my kids to bed, during my lunch break or in the dead of night. I write every day and I do it first thing in the morning. Period. The rest of my day feels successful and relaxed after that.

I’m three days into NaNoWriMo and well on my way to completing draft one of this manuscript by my self-imposed deadline of November 21st. I have committed 7,622 words to paper (28 pages).

In order to get this done and still work, take care of my little babies, workout, and give my husband some time, I have to use a very focused strategy. Fortunately for me I have a strategy that I developed when writing and rewriting my last manuscript (Bravyn) and I am just using that same one.

Here’s what it looks like:

5:00 am: Alarm goes off. I put it on snooze and roll over.

5:06 am: I pick up my cell phone, turn on the flash light, quietly slip out of bed without waking the husband or the 6 month old baby. I grab the pile of sweats that I have strategically thrown on the floor the night before and I walk into the living room.

5:08 am: I turn on a light, get dressed, turn on the kettle that was primed the night before.

5:10 am: I grab a diaper and a bottle of milk and go to my 21 month old son’s room. I change his diaper, stroke his head, put the bottle near him, tell him I love him and thank God for my son.

5:14 am: I go to check on my daughter and make sure that she has a bottle of milk near her that my husband can give her if she wakes up. I stroke her little head, tell her I love her and thank God for my daughter.

5:17 am: I turn the kettle off and pour the hot water in the plunger that I primed the night before with coffee grounds.

5:19 am: I slip out on to my balcony, light a candle, burn some sage, pray and set my timer for 8 minutes. I then meditate on all the things I’m grateful for in life, visualize my manuscripts being completed awesomely and easily, and ask my Higher Power for guidance throughout the day.

5:29 am: I go to my couch, grab my laptop, open write or die, put the word count in at 2,400 words and start writing.

For the next hour and a half I write no matter what. If I get bored with what I’m writing I switch scenes or tracks. I try not to think too much about what I’m writing but I do try to continually throw problems at my characters and have them cleverly wiggle their way out.

7:00 am: By this time I have met my word count and I then can chose to twitter, read blogs, write blogs, take a shower, edit or continue writing. My day is all ready successful and feels awesome.

7:30 am: My children are awake and I get the greatest pleasure of playing with and taking care of them.

By the time 9:30pm rolls around I’m exhausted and excited to go to bed because I know when 5am comes, I’ll get to wake up love my family and write again.

NanNoWriMo – Writing a Novel in a Month – or Three Weeks for Me

I love November. Not just because it’s my birthday month and we get to eat lots of turkey, but last year I discovered it was National Novel Writing Month. Anyone who is reading this probably knows about NaNoWriMo and how about 200,000 writers around the world put aside frenzied time to bash out a novel in a month.

Let me reiterate… a first draft of a novel of about 50,000 words or about 150 pages.

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to put down writing on Bravyn for a month and bash out a new manuscript.

Today, we are two days into NaNoWriMo and I am 5,000 words into my new manuscript Shifter Girl. It is so much fun and so freeing.

I love writing first drafts because I just get to check my critic self out the door, put my fingers on the keyboard and write down whatever flows through my brain. Even better, Shifter Girl is being written in the first person in a blog style, so I’m not even thinking about grammar. I’m just settling into Layla’s feelings and letting her express herself, however badly, on the computer screen.

It’s so exciting.

Today I used Write or Die to get my word count up. It worked really well for me, though I have to admit I have the sound on my computer turned off, so I’m just getting the red flashing lights if I stop writing. It’s good because it stops me from over thinking it or of getting distracted by going off to research something. Like, today I was wondering, what is a predator to the hawk. I don’t know and I didn’t find out during my writing time. I just wrote in something for now (the sparrow). I’ll research later today when it’s not my ‘write time’.

It’s a very exciting and inspiring time. I find first drafts very easy to write. For me, the hard work comes later during the editing and critique process, but in this mode, I just feel like it’s play time.

The one thing I am trying to do that will make it a bit more challenging, is that I’m actually trying to finish this first draft by November 21. Not only is that my birthday, but we leave for China on November 23 and I think with the travel time and touring it will be a bit challenging to meet a word count.

Can it be done? This article identifies 6 novels that were written in under a month. I’m anticipating Shifter Girl to be one too.