Quitting Is Too An Option

This past weekend, the Moody Muses (all six of us) journeyed to beautiful Newburyport, MA for the Red Cross Chocolate Tour. At one of the stops (which featured chocolate martinis, but that's another story for another day) we found several high priced t-shirts with female "empowerment" statements emblazoned on them. You know, stuff like I'm not a princess and I don't need to be rescued.

One said, Quitting is not an option. That's when one of my fellow Muses declared, "It is too. Quitting is always an option."

Guess what? She's right.

A couple years ago, Betina Krahn wrote a terrific RWR article on The Bad Idea. Basically it was her experience with a story idea that wasn't working. Yet she simply couldn't let it go. Recently, as I embraced the 25K challenge, I discovered I had fallen into a similar trap. No matter how many times I went back and redrafted the beginning, I could not push my story past Chapter 2. Well, I could. But what I was writing didn't feel authentic or credible. I was simply sticking words on the paper. Even those words I lost last week weren't really moving the story the way I wanted.

For a few days I beat myself up. Then I gave myself a headache trying to think of what the next scene(s) should be. At 4:00 AM Monday morning, the answer finally hit me.

I needed to quit.

Not the challenge, not writing. But quit the story idea I'd so stubbornly married myself to over the past few weeks. That's the problem with being a tunnel-digging writer. Sometimes you start excavating only to discover you started digging in the wrong location. Much as I loved my hero and much as I loved the opening scenes, I simply did not have enough of a story to dig my tunnel to the end. It was time to go back and re-plot my course.

So I did. And guess what? The first half of the book came to me pretty damn quickly. I have no idea if this plot is any better than the last one or if the editors at Mills & Boon will like what I'm going to create. But at least I have a direction, and that's half the battle.

Proving that quitting is very much an option.

25K Challenge - Friday check in

This was not a good week writing wise. To begin with, I had too many unavoidable appointments that interrupted my regular writing schedule. I did write every day, but I'm one of those creatures of routine. Throw my schedule off, and you throw my writing off.

I'm also at a point early in the story, where I have to make some decisions regarding tone, plotting, pacing, etc. I want the action to unfold naturally and not feel contrived. I'm also trying very hard to capture the feel of those old, black and white movies. Thus, what words I did write came hard. I ended up with a total of 2K for the week.

Perhaps it's even closer to 2500. I don't know. Because here's where the week got really bad. I don't have the words anymore.

As I might have mentioned, I do a lot of my writing by hand, especially if I'm having a rough time creatively. This past Thursday, while I was doing my volunteer stint at our local Food Pantry, someone walked off with my spiral bound notebook.

I'm sure whoever it was, thought the notebook was free for the taking. And if they were that desperate for a notebook that they took one that was half-full of chicken scratch, then they must be hard up indeed. Shame on me for leaving it unattended.

Maybe it was divine intervention, because the words weren't all that good anyway, and because I think the story veered off in the wrong direction.

Still, man it hurt losing those words. I'm still bummed about it.

So this week's progress -- Negative 2K.

Stress...the Ultimate Motivator

I am, by nature, a gate-keeper. I need to be on time for appointments, and I obsess over meeting deadlines, whether they're self-imposed or imposed on me by somebody else. This drives my husband nuts. If a child needs to be picked up from softball practice or a sleepover, I leave myself plenty of time to get there, even if it means waiting for ten minutes until the game/festivities/practice is over. My husband won't even leave the house until it's five minutes past the appointed time the child should have been picked up. That drives me nuts.

I absolutely cannot be late. Being on time, whether it's for a doctor's appointment, a lunch date, or meeting a writing deadline, is a physical imperative for me. I feel sick if I think I might be late.

Which brings me to my current situation...I turned in my manuscript for my last book, Overnight Sensation, on January 15th. My next book, Touch Sensitive, is due...today. I really thought four months would be more than enough time to write the book, but didn't take into consideration a 2-week vacation with my family, and a 2-week business trip that often entailed 10 and 12-hour work days (I'm not joking). Nor did I consider the time it would take to do copy-edits and line-edits for Overnight Sensation.

Thus I found myself two weeks ago, with a looming deadline and 25,000 words left to write. But I realize now that stress is the ultimate motivator. For the past two weeks, I have done nothing but write. I've come home from work, thrown dinner on the table for my family, and without joining them, locked myself away in my bedroom to write. I did timeline charts and continuity charts and character charts, and in between that, I researched energy healing and Delta Force missions, and I wrote. I stayed up past midnight each night, writing. I got up early on the weekends and I wrote. I brought my laptop to softball games and drama rehearsals, and I wrote.

And I finished the story, with thirteen hours left before my deadline runs out. Yes, stress is the ultimate motivator, but there's no time to savor my accomplishment; I have just four months until my next deadline rolls around!

Check out the cover for Overnight Sensation, below!

Lesson from the Obits

I was having a little pity party for myself this afternoon, irritated with myself because I was packing Ebay items for my mother rather than writing, when I suddenly came across Tuesday's obituaries.

Three women had passed away. The first Irena Sendler rescued over 2,500 Jewish children during the Holocaust. The second, Diana Walker, was a diamond heiress who risked her life flying with Britain's Air Transport Auxillary women's division (the "Atagirls") during World War II. And the third was Pauline Dwyer, a local women's advocate who created safe havens for domestic abuse victims in the 1970s. All three of these women were remarkable, for their courage, their determination, and for the lack of pretense. If not for their obituaries, many of us would probably never know they existed. (Irena Sendler's incredible achievements went unnoticed for close to 60 years because she was so humble.)

So what do these three obituaries have to do with writing? From a nuts and bolts standpoint - nothing. (Although they would make terrific characters) But reading their obituaries reminded me that anyone can achieve anything if they are determined enough. If these women could accomplish such extraordinary things at times when women faced far more obstacles than our generation, then I can get myself published.


By the way, if you are interested in reading more about any of these women, here are some cool links:

The Irena Sendler Project

Diana Barnato Walker

Pauline Dwyer

A Tough Love Post For A Dear Friend

How Bad Do You Want It?

That's the question you have to ask yourself. How badly do you want to be a writer? How badly to you want to see your writing sell?

You have talent. You can write a damn good story. So the question becomes do you have the drive, the ruthlessness as it were, to take your career to the next level?

We've all heard before that publishing success is part talent, part luck and a whole lot of perseverance. What does that mean? It means that anyone, and I mean ANYONE, can become a published author if they work hard enough. Not just at learning their craft, but at learning to make writing a priority.

I know life has put a lot on your plate. There's family, there's work, there's obligations. Life happens. There's no way around it. But life is always going to happen. There's always going to be obligations - kids that need caring for, husbands that need attention, work that needs to be done. No one is ever going to sit you down and tell you to take time for your dreams. Why should they? They have dreams of their own.

If you want to be a writer, then you have to tell life to wait a little bit. The work, the obligations, the family - they aren't going away, but they won't implode if you take an hour or two for yourself either.

But I feel guilty, you say. I feel selfish. It took me a long time (and a whole lot of self-discovery) to be able to say - yes, you are being selfish. And so what? Don't you deserve dreams and goals as much as the next person? Would you tell your daughter or your son to put aside their aspirations because chasing their dreams made them "selfish"? No, you wouldn't. So why do you tell yourself that? As for the guilt....I got news for you. It ain't ever going away. As long as we're women and mothers and wives, we'll feel guilty. You have to learn to swallow the guilt, balance it with all the other things you do for your family, and put your dreams first anyway.

But I'm scared, you say. What if I don't have what it takes? What if I try and I fail?

Okay, what if you do fail? So what? Isn't it better to have tried and failed than to have never given it your all? There comes a time when we have to stop using our fear and insecurity as a crutch to justify our procrastination. We're all scared. We all think our writing sucks. We all worry the editor will hate what we submitted. And yes, sometimes our writing doesn't pass muster. Sometimes we get ripped on contest entries or receive a form letter on a manuscript that took us a year to polish. Failure, like life, happens. Remember that book title, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway? That's what you must do. You must swallow your fear just like you swallow your guilt, and write.

Because as I said before, anyone can be a published author if they are willing to sacrifice, work and persevere. The only person holding yourself back from achieving your dreams is yourself. Not life, not obligations, not fear -- you. You have the power to do whatever you want. But you have to step up and take that power. Stop sabotaging yourself. Stop enabling your own procrastination. It's time to ask yourself, do you want to be a writer, or a person who writes.

In other words, how bad do you want it?

25K in 31 Days - Friday Check In

I've run into a couple snags in my 25K challenge. See, I usually write long hand, then type that into my Alphasmart. And naturally, I edit that which I am typing. That slows me down considerably since I lose at least a day a week editing. I'm cool with this, because it's my process, and I believe in being true to what works.

The bigger is my internal editor. I swear, the minute I started focusing on word count, the editor on my shoulder got louder. It's like when you can't sleep and your spouse suddenly starts snoring. What you could normally block out now seems like a bazooka.

So my goal next week is to silence the editor. Or at the very least tone down the noise.

Wish me luck.

BTW -- if my hero picture shows up again....that's just because I like looking at him.

25K in 31 Days

Sounds good, doesn't it? I just entered a challenge at Cata University. During the month of May, we're going to write 25,000. That works out to about 800 a day.

I signed up because of this week's writing realization -- that I end up writing Chapter 1 three or four times before moving forward. Not that this is a bad thing. By round 3 of Chapter 1, I have a much better handle on my characters and their personalities. But I need something to propel me forward, something to make me stop fiddling around. Otherwise, I'll end up in the same boat as last time, when I was unable to move the damn cat off my heroine's desk.


In the meantime, this week's challenge is to try and come up with words to describe my hero. This is him, by the way, on the right. (A tad younger than the actual hero, but he's got such pretty eyes). When describing my characters, I try to avoid deep physical descriptions. I much rather use terms that capture the spirit of his features, like aristocratic, patrician, rugged. I'm still looking for his term.

Maybe during the next 31 days, one will show up.