Category Archives: Writing Life

Writing Life

April accountability; May goals

Normally, I post about my goals on the first Friday of the month, but with all my conference posts last week, it seemed like a pretty full week blogging-wise.

GoalsApril accountability

Reporting on my goals for last month

  • Top priority: finalize my presentations for (and attend) the LDStorymakers conference!—Yep! It went really, really amazingly, wonderfully well. My classes were all packed, and I was almost moved to tears to see so many people as dedicated to learning about the craft as I am.
  • Second priority: Finish those last 5 Whitney reads!—Yes! Just in the nick of time, too. But now I’ve read almost as many books this year as I did last year—and I want to read more! It’s so much easier and more fun than editing!
  • Seriously, write that dang novella.—Um, no. I got some words here, but this is still not done.
  • Deep edit Spy Another Day 3 and incorporate cultural feedback.—My cultural feedback was delayed, but honestly, I had to put this project on the back burner myself, too.
  • Reread Saints & Spies to begin the publication phase!—No.
  • Write new stuff for next writing craft book.—just no.

May goals

You guys, I’m struggling a little here. I’ve had this novella on my to-do list for I don’t know how many months, and it’s really dragging. Plus I can’t find it in me to get these edits after working my editing fingers to the bone for the last year. I love the story, but I really don’t want to work on it anymore. I’ve given myself time away from it, and all that’s done is make me want even more time—and I’ve kind of promised this book is coming out this summer. I want to keep my deadlines—my commitments. I’ve already dropped one book from my production schedule, and I feel like if I drop any more, I’ll lose what little momentum I have.

So, this month, I must

  • FINISH THE NOVELLA—I have finally started to move the needle on this! Yay!
  • DO THE EDITS
  • Do rewrites on Saints & Spies
  • Participate in a sale event (more on that coming up later in the month!)
  • Think about marketing & website stuff.

Normally, with only five things on my list, I pat myself on the back for my reasonable expectation. But considering how long some of these “list-cicles” have already been on there, and how little progress I’ve made, I’m definitely daunted this month, and already feeling the pressure.

What’s up for you this month?

Photo by Celestine Chua

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Writing Life

March accountability & April goals

Whoa. Where did March go? And my birthday’s already over, so April’s kinda downhill from here 😉 . But I’ve got lots of time to get crackin’ on these goals!

GoalsMarch accountability

  • Host the goal-setting challenge for my writers’ group, the March-a-thon. (Which helps with everything else!)—Done! I let it slide a bit more than I meant to, but luckily planning ahead and delegating meant that it didn’t totally fall apart. Thanks to everyone who helped!
  • Enter rewrites from critique group suggestions on Spy Another Day 3.—Done! THAT, my friends, was a lot of work. I actually did two whole drafts on that, and still have 450 notes to address, mostly from myself. (Not exaggerating.)
  • Begin the deep edit on Spy Another Day 3.—Yes . . . if doing 1 page on Monday counts.
  • Enter beta feedback on next writing craft book & finish writing out examples.—Yep! Thanks, betas!!
  • Prep that book for publication.—Yep! (Obviously)
  • Make cover and gather materials for next-next writing craft book.—Um . . . whoops. Now it’s done.
  • More Whitney award reading.—Yes! I’d hoped to read 12 Whitney books in March, but I only got 10.5. I’m so not disappointed 😉 . With the five I’d already read, that leaves me 5 books to read by next week.
  • Write a novella (gulp!)—Yeah, no. Still feeling out the plot on this one, but I need to get it done. Seriously. However, I did get 1000 words on Monday, and taken with the scene I needed to get out of my head in November, the first chapter is nearly done.

April goals

The first two goals here are my top priorities, but the rest are in a roughly chronological order.

  • Top priority: finalize my presentations for (and attend) the LDStorymakers conference!
  • Second priority: Finish those last 5 Whitney reads!
  • Seriously, write that dang novella.
  • Deep edit Spy Another Day 3 and incorporate cultural feedback.
  • Reread Saints & Spies to begin the publication phase!
  • Write new stuff for next writing craft book.

The list looks short, but some of those tasks are huge. But I got this . . . right?

What’s up for you this month?

Photo by Celestine Chua

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Writing Life

Writing survival secret: the feel-good file

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Sometimes we say a writer’s ego is a fragile thing. But in reality, we writers put our art out there to live and die by the criticism of others. Even the most positive review will often contain criticisms, and somehow that’s the only part that sticks with us. It’s little wonder sometimes we writers suffer from crises of confidence!

While sometimes negative feedback can help us learn and grow, sometimes it has the opposite effect (especially when the work being criticized is, you know, already published.)

I’m susceptible to this, too. Reading bad reviews can ruin my whole day. Not only are they upsetting, but they can stifle your creativity, making it hard to push forward on other projects, too. Even if you’re not published yet, it’s easy to get down about your work when it falls short of your vision or feedback goes from helpful to hurtful.

Finally, I stumbled across a solution: a feel-good file. I wanted a place to collect all the things that make me happy to write. So I pulled together story ideas and inspiration, encouragement from critique partners, notes from readers and glowing reviews like this one from the Deseret News (yay!).

Right before that great review came in, I stumbled across a couple that weren’t “bad,” per se, but they didn’t make me feel good, either. I had only four chapters left on the rewrites of the next novel, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to bother going on. My mind started down that slippery slope to a pity party, thinking of other disappointments, frustrations and doubts.

And then I remembered my feel-good file. I flipped it open and within half a dozen items, I really was feeling better. It worked!

Make your own feel-good file

I searched through my email for anything that stood out in my memory, even if it was from four years ago. Anything writing-related that made me smile went into the feel-good file: praise from a beta reader, notes of appreciation from contest winners, review requests, the first email I got about an award.

Once you’ve collected the starting set, whenever someone sends you a nice note or you come across some encouragement, you can add them. Now I add Facebook messages, special Tweets, email requests, and whatever else makes me happy as it comes in. After just a few months, I’ve got hours of instant smiles on tap.

It isn’t gloating—it’s gaining perspective. One bad or mediocre set of feedback isn’t the sum total of your career or the only measure of your talent. Reminding yourself of that can help you keep going.

And of course, the best solution when you’re getting down? Succeeding at something new: nailing the next scene, fixing a story problem or brainstorming something shiny and novel.

What do you think? How do you bounce back from negative feedback?

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Writing Life

Give yourself permission to write!

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This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Becoming a better writer

It’s my first-ever vlog!

Writing may take time away from your family, friends and other pursuits. If you’re struggling with guilt over devoting time to writing, this is for you!

The notes I spoke from (not really a transcript, but good enough to get the gist)

Recently, I had a lot of family in town, and we were talking about writing. The conversation turned to a friend who was a writer as well as the primary breadwinner for his family. I confirmed that most writers don’t make enough money to quit a day job, so essentially this guy was working two jobs, one to feed his family, and one to feed his soul.

All of us sacrifice something to make the time to write, whether that’s time with our family and friends, sleep, other hobbies, entertainment, recreation, or even cleaning. (guilty) Sometimes these sacrifices make us feel like we’re abandoning our responsibilities. We even feel guilty.

I stay at home with my four children, and squeeze in working around their schedules. Sometimes I my schedule is extra demanding, and I’m not as engaged with my children as I feel like I should be. I feel this guilt, too.

But I also feel it’s really important to do what I said earlier, and feed my soul. Writing helps me feel happier. It’s a creative outlet, and it’s part of who I am.

Accepting that has made finding “balance” in my life so much easier. I’m a better friend and a better wife and a better mother when I do take this time to refuel, to do something for myself, to pursue a passion. When I give myself permission to focus on taking care of myself sometimes, to set aside some time for writing, I’m a happier person, and I’m better able to fulfill my other roles and responsibilities.

Conclusion

But fretting over what I “should” and “shouldn’t” do has only hindered me and hampered me with guilt, making it harder to write and to be happy when I’m not writing.

I’m a writer, and writers write. I can still have relationships and a life, but I need my writing time to make all of those things more fulfilling. Give yourself permission to write, to make sacrifices to write, and banish the guilt.

Be sure to join my email newsletter by Wednesday, March 12, for more about giving yourself permission to write!

I’ve wanted to try vlogging for a while, but I probably won’t give it another go until I can find a way to minimize the buzz from my computer’s fan.

What do you think? Have you given yourself permission to write?

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Writing Life

Belated accountability

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Sooo I normally do this on the first Friday of the month, but the launch of Spy Noon and then the sale the next week threw me off. The last Monday is close enough, right?

GoalsJanuary accountability

  • Get Spy Another Day #3 ready for critique group & take it to them—I did this! It was so much work, though! I really have to be better about this. The problem with my last two novels is that I’ve taken the extremely rough first draft and polished it to about the third or fourth draft state in one pass. I’ve been working way too hard!
  • Polish up that novella I wrote in September—Check! “Polish up” was my conservative way to say “get this ready and publish.” Which I did.
  • Write enough to stay sane—Aside from the new words I put into SAD #3, I didn’t write anything. No comment on the sanity.
  • Start gathering materials for my next Writing Craft book—I . . . can’t remember when I did this. But I did it!

Whew! It was a busy month. And Feburary’s kept up that pace.

February goals

Okay, the month’s almost over, I know, but fortunately I did write down what I wanted to get done this month.

  • Launch Spy Noon.
  • Prep the second half of Spy Another Day #3 and take it to critique group.
  • Finish gathering materials for my next writing craft book, and write new materials to fill in the gaps.
  • Send next writing craft book to beta readers.
  • Get covers for my next two writing craft books.
  • Gather materials for next-next writing craft book.
  • Write enough to stay sane.
  • Start reading for Whitney Awards.
  • Prep for a family gathering for a big milestone for my son!

That looks like a lot. I should always write my goals out in the last week of the month. Oy.

I’ll let you know how I did next week. I’m sure the suspense is killing you!

What have you accomplished so far this year? How is your writing process or workflow going?

Photo by Celestine Chua

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Writing Life

Is writing fast a valid career plan for you?

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Every year around NaNoWriMo, the same articles start springing up: how to write faster. Why I’m not doing Nano. Why I am doing Nano. Nano is anathema to real writers. Writing fast can only produce schlock. Writing fast is not a valid career plan.

I disagree. But I’m biased. Of my last five novels, four were written in a month or less (a piece), some during NaNoWriMo, some not. So far I’ve published two of those novels—one fast one, and the slowest novel I’ve ever written. Both were finalists for an award.

There is the general idea out there that something done fast is shoddy, as if someone who writes a manuscript quickly is required to throw it up on Amazon the next week. But that just isn’t the case.

I see no reason at all why anyone can claim that writing fast isn’t a valid career plan. (There are authors out there who write fast, publish quickly, and rake in the dough. Sounds like a career plan to me, though it isn’t quite mine.)

But writing fast isn’t for everyone. How do you know if writing fast is a good idea for you? Here are five factors to consider.

107/365 [Flying Fingers]

This ain’t your first rodeo

Writing a first novel this quickly is probably not a great idea. (Okay, I did write my first “novel” in about four weeks, but it ended up being pretty short. I also wrote it longhand. You don’t have to be like me.) It takes practice to develop the necessary storytelling skills and basic writing skills to come out of a fast draft with something workable, or even the beginnings of something workable.

Once you’ve established your writing skills and storytelling skills, you can tap into those strengths to help you write faster and come out with something that’s just as coherent as most “slow” first drafts.

You love the immersive experience of writing

I love getting lost in my own story. When I’m drafting, I live and breathe my characters’ lives. I imagine new scenes all the time. I practice dialogue. I research, I design, I plot.

If you live and breathe your stories while drafting, writing faster and writing more makes that experience even more immersive. You’re really living your characters’ story, perhaps almost in real time.

Plus, once you’ve made it through those few weeks, you can get the house clean and caught up on laundry (ha!).

You can make connections

One of the big advantages of writing a book in two or three weeks is that you’ve lived all the events in your recent memory. You might not be able to hold every detail in your short term memory, but your subconscious sometimes hangs on to important symbols, characters, events and story threads that you might forget otherwise, and have to come and weave in later. If you’re good at making these kinds of connections, writing fast could make you even better.

You can shut up the inner editor

You can’t write quickly if you’re rewriting every sentence five times. (If you type and think fast, you might be able to get away with rewriting the occasional sentence 2-3 times. Not that I’ve done that. . . .) But no matter how fast or slow you write, during drafting you should usually turn off the inner editor—not the “subject-verb agreement” portion of your brain, but the nagging self-doubts that can shut down your creativity.

You’re willing to put in the time to edit AFTER drafting

Only a Sith deals in absolutes, but I’m going to go to the dark side for a minute: ALL FIRST DRAFTS NEED EDITING. Whether you labored over your first draft for three years or three weeks, there are things you’ll have to go back and fix. (In fact, I’d argue that if it’s been three years since you began your novel, you might not even remember some pretty important pieces, and you might need some serious rewriting.) Most of my fast books have required medium-to-major rewrites. All of my slow books have required medium-to-major rewrites.

In my experience, the quality of a manuscript isn’t necessarily correlated with the speed at which it was written. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes’s premiere), Alexandre Dumas (The Knight of the Red House), Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Stephen King (The Running Man), Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Fyodor Dostoyevskiy (The Gambler—while also writing ) or Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). These books, many of them bestsellers and/or classics, were written in anywhere from 66 hours to 4 weeks.

Maybe writing fast will work for you; maybe it won’t. But it’s definitely a viable career plan, and I enjoy writing that way (most of the time), so I see no reason to stop, NaNo or no.

What do you think? Do you write fast? Have you ever tried it?

Photo by The Hamster Factor

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Works, Writing Life

Why novellas rock

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I’ll be honest: even at 99¢, my novella never sold as well as my novels. (At free, of course, it soundly beats them in numbers.) While lots of people out there are very excited about the apparent revival of shorter or mid-length fiction in the e-reader revolution, I’m still MrNiceSpy_CVR_LRGskeptical. I wrote my first novella because I wanted to be able to launch with more than one book, and because I wanted to be able to give away a freebie.

Um, that sounds pretty mercenary of me.

It’s worked, however—to an extent. I’ve given away thousands of copies of Mr. Nice Spy. Obviously I don’t know how many of those free books have actually been read, and what fraction of those readers went on to buy my novels, but . . . it hasn’t seemed like a ton have.

So why did I bother writing another novella?

I almost didn’t.

But the story really intrigued me. As soon as I knew what type of circumstances Elliott and Talia met under, I wanted to know the full story. Because it sounded like fun. I desperately needed fun.

SpyNoon_CVR_LRGSo I blocked out some time—crazy short time— and sat down. And the story just flowed.

I’m a plotter by nature, but I went really really loose for this outline. Like, “In chapter 4, we have a chase of some kind. Or not.” And yet with such a short piece, the threads came together really quickly. Within just a few days, I had a really solid first draft—and possibly my best-ever spy plot.

Another advantage? Editing is so fast. You can change major story elements just by editing a few scenes. You can hold the whole story in your head really easily and jump around as needed. Beta readers get back to you super fast. Proofreading takes one morning.

As an indie publisher, I get to set my production schedule, and I set the bar too high last year (and quite possibly again this year). And yet I still managed to squeeze in this story in a day here and a weekend there.

Will I write another novella? I have one more prequel novella bouncing around in my brain, and now I think it really needs to be shared. But only if I can have fun with it 😉 .

What do you think? Have you ever written a novella? Why or why not?

Today’s Tour Stops

Go visit Jae Randall & Rebecca Shelley!

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Writing Life

5 hidden benefits of failure

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Or how to fail again, but better

Last year, I failed.

Okay, so in reality, I had a pretty good year, as I confessed last week. (Not even counting having a baby. On my birthday. I won 2013 on that alone.) But I did have to change my plans quite drastically to accommodate some medium-sized set-backs, and a general loss of steam in the last couple months of the year.

I’ve been worried—yes, all one week of this year—that the slowdown from the end of 2013 would not only set me back at the start of this year with projects I didn’t finish and hurt my overall momentum. But I’m realizing that not only is slower sometimes okay (all right, maybe even better), but there are lots of other benefits to having things go skiddywampus every once in a while.
5failures

Prove your resilience

One of the most important benefits of failure is that we learn to bounce back. Yeah, it may be hard, but unless we’re talking about sky diving, you’ll have a chance to try again after failure.

It hurts. It does. And sometimes failure may show us something we really loved doesn’t work, or that our dream isn’t right for us in some way. But most of us don’t give up on life or dreams or the future when we fail. We bounce back because we have to, because giving up isn’t an option.


And every time we bounce back, we learn we’re stronger than we realized [Tweet it!]. We learn that the world won’t end the next time we fail—that there will probably be a next time, and we’ll live through it, and come out the other side, most likely even stronger.

Acquire new skills

When things go right the first time, we may feel happy and relieved, and bounce along our merry way. And that’s great. But when you get exactly what you expected for exactly what you put in, you don’t get to learn a whole lot.

When we fail, on the other hand, we learn the unfortunate lesson that what we just tried doesn’t work—so we have to try something new. And a lot of the time, that means tapping into something you haven’t tried before. It might mean studying it on your own to become a better writer or reaching out for help.

Increase your confidence

This might sound like #1, but trust me, it’s a little different. Because I “failed” last year, when I started this year with a . . . less-than-perfect-and-perhaps-not-quite-coherent manuscript, where the character arc wasn’t where I needed it to be and . . . maybe the entire main plot is sketchy at best and completely missing at worst—I didn’t despair of ever being able to fix it.

Last year I took a book with weak themes and weak conflicts and weak weakness and (with much help from others) turned it into what I’d hoped to create in the first place. Yep, even on my 12th manuscript, I’m reminded that revision can work miracles—and I can transform this messy manuscript into something I’m proud to publish. So instead of cowering in fear and playing games on Facebook, I’m editing this baby and digging in to try to make it as good as I can. And once I get some outside eyes on it, I’m coming back to do it all over again.

Okay, maybe there are a couple games on Facebook . . .

A chance to innovate

Sometimes, however, the best way to acquire a new skill is to try something totally new—to wing it for ourselves and leap in with both feet, and maybe a ballpoint pen and a paperclip. Brainstorming new solutions to an old problem opens all kinds of doors that simple success doesn’t even think about.
Seriously. Think about it—did MacGuyver go into a situation thinking, “Hey, I’ll have a ballpoint pen and a paper clip, I’m covered!” or “Don’t worry about that bomb, folks! I have hockey tickets!”?

Of course not. “MacGuyvering,” coming up with unusual uses for common objects to solve an emergency was his backup plan. But you can bet once it worked out the first couple times, he became a lot more confident he could do the same in the future, and he were able to think outside the box even more. (And the writers were forced to!)

Time to think

When your best-laid schemes gang agley, sometimes the biggest benefit is that it gives you some time to rethink.

For example’s sake, here’s my 2013 production schedule, color coded by days I met my goal. Key: green = met goal; gray = day off (maternity leave, holidays, Sundays). Blue & white: didn’t meet goal. (Not pictured: pushing back the launch of my 2nd book by a month.)

production 2013

After my production schedule . . . kind of got off track, I had some less than happy months of self-recrimination, doubts, increased pressure on myself, greater shortfalls . . . That second book took four months longer to finish than I’d hoped, and even then, it fell far short of what I’d hoped to write. Getting it back there was grueling, and required months more of hard work.

Happy times.

After that experience of coming back from failure, I realized that despite my efforts, my production schedule wasn’t reasonable. I did manage to write another book—faster, but not at top speed—but I knew I wanted to try to economize my time in 2014. So rather than planning day after day of 2000 words (nowhere near my top output, so I thought it would be doable. HA!), I took more time to plan out my schedule, thinking very deeply about what I can do and what I should do to preserve my sanity.

When I made out my schedule, I went by month, back tracking from launch dates, or working forward based on other demands. I broke it down by week, and tried to make sure I only had one “major” task per week. I’ll let you know how it goes 😉 .

What do you think?

How have you benefited from failure?

Photo credit: silver lining—Kylir Horton

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