Stuck?? Push!

 Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is what to do when you're stuck. Stuck writing, I presume, since other kinds of stuck aren't really what we're about here.

I'm sure there will be lots of great advice this week from all the contributors on the various tricks and techniques for getting unstuck while writing. Mine is going to be at the far end of the spectrum at Tough Love. 

When I get stuck? I push.

I'm a believer in chipping away at that block and smashing a hole through it. Inevitably there's juicy stuff on the other side. I think the universe sometimes makes us work for it, and that's what I do.

Now, I will caveat this advice by saying that I absolutely don't advise anyone beating themselves brainless against a brick wall. Use your head, and not as a battering ram! There are tools for this process; use them. This is where craft comes in and skill, where having a well-cultivated imagination will fuel the process, where having excellent work habits allows for focused attention. 

Push through those sticking places - but use your words, not your fists. 

How to Keep Working Hard Rather Than Hardly Working

 

It’s the bane of every writer’s existence, particularly those of us with so-called “day jobs.” How do I keep writing? How do I make myself edit this draft? How do I overcome the dreaded writer’s block?

For the sake of full disclosure, I have a day-job. My day job is… also writing, although in a very different genre than what I write for “fun.” So I do write for a living, I just don’t write novels for a living. I write articles, chapters, academic monographs, and novels. I’m self-published, and my first novel came out in November 2021. My third came out in June. The fourth is due out in October.

I’ve heard all the advice in the book. “Write a little every day, even if it’s only 100 words.” “Make time to work on your writing every day.” “Set aside one or two days a week to just work on your writing.” “Find a quiet writing space.” “Play music that helps you focus.” “Don’t jump between projects.” “Jump between projects.” And my personal (least) favorite, “Just make yourself do it.”

Most of that advice is contradictory, and for good reason—brains don’t all work the same way. Try the advice, then keep what works for you and throw the rest out the window. There isn’t some magical check-list that if you tick off all the boxes you’ll suddenly find a work ethic and be productive. You have to find what works for you. Maybe that’s music, maybe it’s silence, maybe it’s podcasts or white noise. Maybe you’re a weekend writer. Maybe you get up at five in the morning, or maybe you write from dinner until bedtime, or maybe you write on-and-off all day long.

I write almost every night. I come home, shut off the day-job brain, and then write while also watching (or not watching, depending what’s on) tv with my partner. Sometimes my partner goes off to play games or work on a project, and I write then, too (usually more productively, to be honest). But if I sit down and pick up my laptop and stare at the page and just… blank? I don’t write that day. 

I think that’s the most important thing: don’t force it. If you aren’t feeling it, channel Elsa and let it go. 

And you might be thinking easy for you to say, K, you have another job, and, yeah, I do. Another job that is all about writing. I use the same basic approach for both types. Because if the words aren’t coming out, there are other things that writers do. 

Yes, we do need to generate words at some point, but there’s also the researching part of writing (whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, there’s research to be done—in fiction, this could be “reading novels” in addition to looking up whether or not, say, parachutes were invented in the late nineteenth century). One of the best ways to kickstart those writing gears is to give them words to mull over—by reading. (And the occasional binge-watch of shows or movies.)

There’s also the business of writing, whether you’re an indie author or a mainstream author. Maybe you have a website to maintain, a social media account or ten to update, or blurbs to write. Maybe you have your taxes to do or you need to network with other authors. If the words aren’t coming, you’ve got that stuff that can always be worked on, too. 

So whether it’s reading, looking up a pagan calendar or how long it takes someone to bleed out from a stomach wound, outlining, beta-reading, redrafting, checking grammar rules, working on a website, designing a cover, or spending too much time on author discords… You can still be working on your writing even when the writing part isn’t happening.

And if your biggest hurdle is that irritating little voice—or maybe not so little voice—that says “nobody will like this”… Here’s something to consider.

There is no one else who can tell your stories. No one. Only you have the mind that can create them, the heart that loves them, the soul that whispers them in the shadows of the night or the curling steam of the shower. (Why do I always think of plot points in the shower?) You are the only person who can tell your stories, so it doesn’t matter how good you think they are—because you are the only one capable of telling them at all.

So, tell them. Whether it takes you a month or a year or a decade or your whole life. You are a writer. Tell your stories.

I’ll read them.

KM Avery

KM Avery is an academic who moonlights as an author, has a partner, cats, and a deep and abiding love for books, movies, videogames, and the great outdoors—at least most of the time.

Writing Routines

 Routine and ritual are a recipe for achieving flow. Flow is that state where time and effort seem to disappear. It's where deep work happens. It isn't proof against struggling. I have a regularly scheduled writing time. 8AM every weekday morning. I show up every weekday morning and open the WIP. 

It isn't a guarantee of success, though. It's down to intention, drive, and determination. That being the case, in no way to I advocate for writing every day. I do advocate for doing what works for you. I am learning that an hour in the morning is not necessarily the best way for me to work. I need much longer stretches of time. Four hours seems to be the sweet spot. I need that much time to get immersed in my stories and characters. It really seems that my continuity sense is dependent on that much time. Because there's a day job now in the mix and the care of aging parents, this means that I have to be a weekend warrior. I use my weekday morning sessions to wrap my head around where the story is going - to make notes about what scenes I want and need so I can jump in on the weekends. 

You'd think that four hours on the weekend would be easy to come by. You'd be wrong. Turns out, my family seems to think my weekends are for chores. ALL THE CHORES. A house full of people and cats needs a ton of maintenance and upkeep. I'm the only person in the family who goes up ladders. Or who handles power tools of any size. 

Most of the time, I get around the demands of family life by getting up at 5AM and working until 9AM. I usually get two hours before anyone else in the house begins stirring. Then it's another two hours of telling people to hush up and hold whatever they want to tell me, ask me, remind me, etc until after 9AM. It's a new routine which means that the boundaries are still being tested. I'm trying really hard to stand firm. Really hard. But like Jeffe, I'm dealing with family drama - same kind she is - an aging parent who's very ill and in the hospital at the moment. We're still finding out whether this will be something the parent in question can survive. So it's possible this weekend the boundaries will crumble under the pressure. 

And you know what? Fine. 

This too shall pass and then I get back up on the horse. I suspect that's the real secret. You're a writer no matter whether you write every day or grab snippets of word count when you can. Life is going to get in the way. Persistence and coming back over and over to the page is what matters. Keep coming back.

Writing Habits and Work-Life Balance

 

This week at the SFF Seven, we’re discussing work ethic and asking each other what we do to keep balanced and writing regularly?

Many of you already know I’m kind of a fiend for building a writing habit. That’s because, once I stopped resisting the idea and starting doing it – by writing every day at the same time every day – that habit carried me through all sorts of difficulties.

It still does.

For example, I’m on a plane as I type this, heading to WorldCon in Chicago. I was reading a novel (Lisa Klepas, Marrying Winterborne, highly recommend!) as the plane taxied and took off. Once we reached cruising altitude, I began to feel the prodding of habit. “Time to write!” it urges. So, I pulled out the laptop to write this blog post. Then I’ll turn to my draft of Shadow Wizard, which I need to get done.

Yes, I write every (weekday) morning. That’s how I can count on getting the book done.

Last week I visited family and there were many family goings on. There was some emotional stuff to deal with, aging parents and all that involves, and it threw me for the remainder of the week. I wasn’t productive. I was feeling stressed. I’d been knocked out of my routine by life, which is the way of life. It would be nice (in theory) if I lived in some hermitage or remote villa where all days flowed by as serene as my view of the Mediterranean Sea, but I don’t. I live in a beautiful place (no ocean) and my life is relatively even and peaceful, but I’m connected to people and life happens.

By the following Monday, I was able to slide back into my writing habit like a pair of comfortable yoga pants. Morning writing was waiting for me, restoring the necessary balance. It felt good. That’s the beauty of habit – it does all the hard work for you.

The Drive to Develop a Writing Practice

Look for the cover reveal for SHADOW WIZARD, book one in Renegades of Magic, the new trilogy continuing the Bonds of Magic epic tale! I'm getting the preorders set up today and plan to do the cover reveal on Instagram tomorrow, August 11, 2022. Members of my private Facebook group, Jeffe's Closet, may get a sneak peek ;-)

This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking: how has your writing practice changed over time?

It's interesting because the topic-suggester framed it as "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" - my college French demanded I get the saying correct - which is a French saying that acknowledges that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In other words, that surface details may alter over time, but the essence of the thing, the recognizable cycle of events, is fundamentally inalterable. Often it's applied to history. So this suggests that our writing practice may change over time, but it also stays the same. Is this this case?

I'm saying no, at least for me. My writing practice has changed considerably since my newbie days. I was reflecting recently that, as a teen and young woman, I didn't really know how to apply myself to improving at a task. This largely came from the fact that, in school all the way through high school, I could get by without really trying. I had a good auditory and visual memory, and I tested well, so I didn't need to work hard to get A's. (Except in math, which I thought I wasn't good at, even though they put me in accelerated math classes. Turns out I likely wasn't good at it because I didn't like math, so I didn't listen in class. Oops.) In college and grad school, a number of professors began riding me to apply myself, to study and do the practice problems. I kind of tried to - especially when I had to retake Immunology for my biology major and really didn't want to have to retake second semester of organic chemistry - but there was a major problem: I didn't know how to study.

I remember thinking I needed to learn how to study, but I was mostly flailing about. It was only when I had novel deadlines to meet that I got very good at refining my ability to work in concentrated ways, incrementally, day after day. I don't often think of messages I'd like to give to my younger self, but I now wish I could advise that college student, that graduate student, to develop the habit of working for a couple of hours every morning. This is my best brain time. If I had done that in school, if I had spent just that much time working practice problems and reviewing the material, I likely would have done much better.

Of course, then I might have ended up as a research scientist after all, when I'm so happy as a novelist. Maybe it took working on something I truly cared about to inspire me to develop the practice to do it. Que sera, sera!

Jeffe's Five Effective Work Habits for Writing Productivity

My series rebrand of the six-book epic romantic fantasy saga, Sorcerous Moons, is complete! Book One, LONEN'S WAR, releases Friday in Kindle Unlimited (KU), with each subsequent book releasing one/day for the following week. 

This is my first (and possibly last!) real test of whether my books can be successful in KU. I've run A/B tests before and I've always made 2-3x as much money in sales on Amazon alone than via page reads in KU. But we shall see! Tell your KU-loving friends. :D 

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is The Write Stuff: What five effective work habits make a professional writer the most successful? I can only tell you mine and that's defining "success" as being productive. The other kind of success - fame, money, adulation, awards - depends hugely on timing and serendipity. But we're focusing on work habits, so here are mine:

1. Consistency

You don't have to write every day, at the same time every day - though I do extoll that as THE single most effective method for building a consistent writing habit - but consistency is key. I build my schedule around protecting my writing time and that habit carries me through all sorts of difficulties.

2. Persistence

The other piece of building a writing habit is keeping it going. So many writers give up without finishing a book - or finishing multiple books! - or they give up after a few books. Or, when attempting to write consistently, they take time off, change their minds, prioritize something else. Persistence is what gets words on the page.

3. Focus

Shut out the world, ignore the new shinies and frolicking plot bunnies. Close the office door, put in the noise-cancelling ear buds, disconnect the internet and silence the phone. Focus on the writing and only on the writing for the time that you're doing it. Think about the story and only that. All other considerations come later.

4. Integrity

Write what you believe in and write it your way. Don't chase trends or try to make your stories a clone of someone else's. This may not seem like an effective work habit, but it is! Keeping to the integrity of the story YOU are telling allows you to focus on that and not the market, or whatever the loud voices are currently shouting about.

5. Flexibility

The previous four have all been about ritual and drawing firm lines, but with those come a need for flexibility. Be ready to change up what you're doing if you have to. Reinvent yourself regularly. Try rebranding series and putting it in Kindle Unlimited. (See what I did there?) The world changes, sometimes rapidly, and we have to be ready to change with it. 

 

2021: A Good Year for Me

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is: "It's Been A Year: Pandemic Year 2, Vaccines, New Political Administration, has it affected your writing? Better? Worse?"

I confess, this has been a good year for me. As James discussed on Monday, it's been a huge relief to me to have sanity in the White House again. Yeah, there's a lot of political stuff that's still not where I'd like it to be, but it's so much better than it was. I feel like we're at least working to solve the problems we're facing rather than digging ourselves deeper. 

I'm really happy we got vaccinated early in the year, too. My hubs and I took the opportunity to drive to Amarillo, TX to get ours. (A four-hour drive each way.) We got our second dose by March 8. That was an amazing, once in a lifetime experience (I hope!), knowing that sheer, sweet relief of being vaccinated against COVID-19. It restored a sense of safety and wellbeing that I'd missed for pretty much exactly a year.

Also, I'm one of those who became more productive in my writing during the pandemic, largely because I wasn't traveling, I think. I talk about this a lot, but having a daily writing habit carried me through even the worst of the anxiety. That habit is the foundation that allows everything else to be stable. I know this can be aggravating to people who can't write every day for various reasons, but I'm such a huge believer in the magic of ritual and building a habit that carries you through the rough patches. Still, I say this as a writer who spent many, many years not being very productive. 

This is way better.

So, though we're only 84% of the way through the year so far (and yes, I'm counting today, since it's morning for me), I'm calling it a good year for me. In particular, I'm thrilled by this graph of my income from royalties and book sales. As you can see, 2021 has been my best income-from-writing year ever, and that's with two months to go. It also doesn't count income from other sources, like teaching workshops and author coaching. 

I'm really proud of myself for the work I put in to make this happen.

How about you all - are things looking up in your neck of the woods?

Holding strong in the storm

 I hope the fact that I no longer live on a boat doesn't preclude nautical metaphors. Because here we are again. 

We all know the wind is going to blow in our lives. Most of us have learned to handle that wind and, in fact, use it to propel us. 

But those aren't the winds we're talking about this week. This week is about the storms, squalls, and cyclones. The chill and stinging rain and howling winds yanking and tugging and churning up the water of our routines and lives.

With Covid, we all know what that looks like now. Stress. Uncertainty. A little fear. In some cases, panic and desolation. 

When a storm sweeps in, the ideal place to be is moored to a solid mass. A dock. In a writer's case, that solid mass is a habit set deep in the bedrock of your days. A habit like Jeffe's. Tying up to that is safe. Reliable. Immovable. Sometimes you get a few hard bounces against the dock, but so long as your lines hold, your craft is safe.

The problem is that sometimes you're underway when storms spin up. No docks in sight. You're caught out in dangerous conditions. On a boat (and in matters of health and well-being), your single job is to keep your nose into the wind. Why? To keep from being capsized. If you can find shelter, you run for it. And then you set an anchor and give yourself a really, really long leash. That's what keeps your anchor hooked into the bottom of the seabed and your craft in a position to ride out the worst. 

Translated out of nautical metaphor: Tie up to the safety of established habit when you can, but when the horse feathers hit the fan and you can't fall back on habit, throw out an anchor. Let that anchor take the form of a craft class or anything that requires you to get your head in your writing for a few hours each week. 

Then give yourself grace. A lot of it. 

Remember. Your first job is protecting your health and well-being when storms roar in to knock you off course. When you're healthy, you have a million wishes. When you aren't healthy, you have only one wish. 

Don't let the storms steal your wishes.

A Writing Habit That Works for YOU

Amazingly enough, it's already May - which means THE PROMISED QUEEN, the third and final book in the Forgotten Empires trilogy, is out in just two weeks. That comes as a shock to me, I can tell you! 

It also makes this particular graphic quite apt and goes well with our topic this week: "When Life Gets In The Way: dealing with a schedule for writing when the world wants to go off the rails."

Nothing like a global pandemic and the attendant chaos to shake up the world a bit, huh?

I've been fortunate compared to many of the creatives I know - so many people have struggled to create art during this extraordinary time of upheaval - in that I've maintained a consistent output of words. In fact, I wrote nearly 120K more words in 2020 than in 2019 (recall that I am dubbed The Spreadsheet Queen for a reason), which I largely attribute to the fact that I didn't travel in 2020.

So, why was I able to stay on schedule when others couldn't?

There are a lot of reasons for that - including that I am blessed with happy brain chemistry and I'm not prone to anxiety - but I think the number one reason is that I've built a consistent writing habit. That's the foundation that keeps me stable and productive.

Martial artists like to poke at practitioners of yoga and meditation by saying, "But what happens when someone knocks you off your pillow?" The jibe is meant to shame those not into the fighting arts by implying that meditation is fine and all, but if you're attacked, it's fundamentally useless.

Believe me - I know this is exactly what they mean, as I used to train with martial artists fond of saying that very thing.

Whenever someone asks me about this topic, about work/life balance or maintaining creativity through upheaval, I think of that quip. 

What happens when someone knocks you off your pillow?

The answer is pretty obvious: You get back on.

See, the whole point of meditation (or prayer or self-care or whatever works for you) is to discover a solid, peaceful foundation within yourself. That's why it's called a "practice." It's something that you develop over time by doing it repeatedly. Nobody ever said it was in order to spend your entire life on a pillow in a meditative state. Once you discover that foundation, that silent core of peacefulness, then you know how to find it again. 

No one ever promised us lives where everything is perfect all the time. Things are going to happen to derail us - and the best we can do is find our way back to that foundation again, rather than being tossed about endlessly from one crisis to another.

A writing habit provides that foundation. The great thing about habits is we default to them. Bad and good, habits drive our unconscious decisions. Why not build a writing habit that works for you instead of against you?

Then, when the world knocks you off schedule, it's easy to get right back on again.

Is NaNoWriMo for You?

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is:  To NaNoRiMo or not.

For those who don't know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, where participants attempt to write 50,000 words in one month. I have mixed feelings about NaNoWriMo, mostly because I think it encourages writers to essentially binge-write, often exhausting themselves creatively in order to get that 50K.

Anyone who's followed me any length of time - by reading my blog posts or listening to my podcast - knows that I'm a strong proponent of finding a sustainable pace for writing. I've tracked my own productivity for years - almost a decade now - and I've talked to countless authors about their process. The binge method feels good in the moment, but also results in crashes. Overall, I've found that the creation binges don't compensate for the resulting crashes. This lowers overall productivity.

Conversely, discovering a sustainable production pace - a daily wordcount that a writer can produce over the long term without crashing - increases overall productivity in an amazing way. 

So, is NaNoWriMo for you? I think it can be super useful for building that daily writing habit and discovering what your sustainable wordcount is. But I think going through NaNoWriMo should be focused on that: discovering what you can do in the long term. Writing 50K in November and then crashing for months afterword won't lead to a sustainable writing practice.

Now, if you don't care about developing a sustainable writing practice and just want to see if you can write 50K in 30 days, then go for it.

But if you DO want to be a career author, then consider setting up a schedule for NaNoWriMo where you slowly increase your wordcount over the course of the month, like this:

1 100

2 200

3 300

4 400

5 500

6 750

7 1000

8 1250

9 1500

10 1750

11 2000

12 2000

13 2000

14 2000

15 2000

16 2100

17 2100

18 2100

19 2100

20 2100

21 2100

22 2200

23 2200

24 2200

25 2200

26 2200

27 2200

28 2200

29 2200

30 2200

By the end of November 30, you’d have 50,150 words. By slowly increasing the wordcount and not exhausting yourself at the beginning, you'll build up your ability to write sustainably, much like training in a new exercise. Best of all, by the time you’ve got yourself in the habit of doing 2,200 words a day, it will feel very easy and natural. Because you’d be in shape for it.

And if 2,200 words/day isn't sustainable for you, drop it back. Find out what IS sustainable. Writing is individual and what's key is finding your own process and owning it. NaNoWriMo is just one tool to discover that. 

My Secret Weapon: a Writing Habit

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "Writing through your Achilles heel - How do you keep writing through [whatever it is that prevents/stops your writing]?"

I think I was supposed to fill in my particular [whatever it is that prevents/stops your writing], but I don't think I have a specific Achilles heel that way. Not that I don't encounter obstacles to getting my words in every day! There are multitudes of those things, from Stupidly Trivial to Truly Important. When I was a newbie writer, even the Stupidly Trivial stuff won all the time. These days, only the Truly Important stuff gets in the way of writing, and even then I bounce back quickly, all because of my secret weapon.

My secret weapon is: my writing habit.

I'm a huge fan of building a writing habit. Because I've spent the last twenty years developing a writing habit, it's so refined now, so solidly at the center of my daily life, that writing almost happens of its own accord.

Sometimes, sure, I have to fight the megrims, the tooth-pulling days, the sheer don'-wannas - but the writing habit has me at my desk, writing anyway. Even if I take a deliberate sick or vacation day, I feel weird not writing, because the habit is tugging at me. I feel like something is missing until I get back to it.

Human beings are creatures of habit - both good and bad. Habit takes over when we're not deliberately working against it. We all have bad habits we'd like to kick - and know from experience how freaking hard that is to do! Why not take advantage of this force of nature and our deepest selves, and build a good habit that's hard to break?

Building a solid writing habit is the best thing I ever did, which is why I emphasize it in my Author Coaching Services. 

But you can do it on your own! Find a time when you can write at the same time, every day, even if for only five minutes. Or one. I know it's super hard to carve out that time. When I started doing this, the only time I could find was at 5am - and I am NOT a morning person. But I wanted to build a writing habit more than I hated getting up so early. If you absolutely CANNOT find a consistent time slot, then hinge it off something else that is consistent: like lunch hour at the day job, or when you get home from work, or right after you put the kids to bed. The most important aspect is that consistency, because that's what builds the habit. 

Do this for 30 days - because that's how long it takes to build a habit - and keep doing it. After that, you can move it around without breaking it. It can adapt and change over the years - and it will take on a life of its own. It will feed you instead of you feeding it. 

Seriously, the best thing for my writing I ever did. 

How I Became a Morning Writer

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week involves our writing schedules – what’s our most productive time of day, when do we actually write, how much time each day, week, month, etc.

I chose this photo I took of the moon at sunrise, because seeing amazing sights like this has become one of the great benefits of being an early riser. Who knew that catching the moon at dawn could be so very beautiful? I certainly didn't, because I was never naturally an early bird.

See, I was one of those who *loved* to sleep in. In the early days - and years - of our relationship, the hubs and I would sleep until 10 or 11am on the weekends. I'm groggy in the mornings, slow to come alert, and not particularly talkative. People ask me questions and I blink at them in incomprehension. Conversation, not so much.

BUT... I can write.

I discovered that mornings are my most productive time of day when that was the ONLY time of day I could consistently write. Those first few years after I committed to being a writer, I struggled - as many newbies do - to actually produce work. I had a busy life - a full-time career in science, two young stepchildren, debt we were determined to pay off (and did!), classes in the evenings (both taking and teaching) - and not a lot of "free" time. Waiting for that time to write to fall into my lap definitely wasn't working. Sandwiching in a bit of writing before I went to bed - delaying sleep when I was already exhausted - meant I got nothing done, very little done, or what I wrote was utter drivel.

I finally too the advice to write every day at the same time. I resisted that for years, but ultimately I knew I had to do SOMETHING different. So, I tried that, and it worked for me.

That meant, however, rising very early in the morning, because those dawn hours were the only ones when I had nothing else booked. I could write for an hour or two in the pre-dawn darkness, before anything else kicked in. That meant rising at 4 or 5am for a few years there. Some of the stuff I wrote then is pretty wild, but I built the writing habit, and it's stuck.

Now that I have the luxury of writing full time, I don't set an alarm. I get up when I wake up - usually after lying there for a while gazing dreamily out the window - and that's done wonders for me being actually alert when I'm on my feet. (I think when I made myself get up at a particular time, I wasn't always fully awake - thus my inability to process much in the way of conscious thought. I was upright, but I wasn't AWAKE.) I wake up between 5 and 7am, and mornings are devoted to writing, for the most part.

I find that if I can get my 3K words/day done by early afternoon, that's ideal. Generally I work in 1-hour sessions, with about a 30-minute break between. I'm not always good about keeping the breaks short, which I'd like to get better about in the new year. Most days I write 4-6 hours, with 3 hours of that actual fingers tapping on keyboard.

I'd really like to consistently get that down to 4 hours total, saving the time-sinks of chatting, social media, email, etc., for after the words are down. That's one of my goals for this year, so we'll see how I do!

Why Building a Writing Habit is Essential

WARRIOR OF THE WORLD, which comes out January 8 2019, is being featured in a Goodreads giveaway until November 27! Great opportunity to win one of a hundred free copies! Kensington has also started a reader Facebook group called Between the Chapters. Lots of great giveaways on there - along with author chats. I'll be doing one in January, so join up and enjoy the party!

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is one I suggested, on the idea that “Even When You’re Not Writing, You’re Writing.”

It's a good one for NaNoWriMo month, because there's so much fierce focus getting words on the page - which is something I absolutely believe in. NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month, for the uninitiated) is fantastic for building a writing habit, something that's essential for being a writer. There's a lot of reasons for this - as it's something I talk and blog about frequently - but one of the things that building a writing habit does is it allows your mind to work even when you aren't.

This can get dicey because people can be so good at denial. I can't tell you how often someone has said to me "I've got the entire book written in my head - I just need to write it down."

If you have written books, you know very well how much is packed into the space of that hyphen. If you haven't written a book, and revised it, preferably several of them, then you might not realize what a huge disconnect there is between those two ideas.

This is because WRITING IT DOWN IS THE HARD PART.

Seriously. It's hard. So difficult that most people never make it to the other side of that hyphen. Or they start and never finish.

Writing the story down, getting it right, is where all the craft, skill, dedication and perseverance of being a writer come in. You can market your little heart out, but if the story isn't there, if you haven't gotten the words down and refined to the utmost agree, you've got nothing to sell readers. 

This is why authors build and maintain writing habits. You don't get better until you write A LOT. Some say a million words to get there and I think that's probably a reasonable number. That means that even if you "win" NaNoWriMo and write 50,000 words in the month of November, you've still got 95% of the work to do to get to the point where your writing begins to hang together and actually be *good* - or, put another way, do NaNoWriMo for 19 more months.

Ouch, right?

By that I don't mean you have to write 50K/month for two years, but if you spend two years writing consistently - whatever works for you, whether every day or not - then you'll be getting somewhere. That can be offputting, but every successful writer I know has some version of that as part of their story.

The best part is, once you build that writing habit, something magical happens: the story really does begin to write in your head. Even when you're not actually putting words on the page, part of yourself is brewing the story, so that when you go to write, it's there for you and flows out.

BUT!

This is a really huge BUT -

Remember that this is on the OTHER SIDE OF THE HYPHEN. If you think the story is all written in your head, but you've never written and *finished* an entire book, you're very likely kidding yourself. There's just no way around that.

So cheers to all in the middle stretch of NaNoWriMo! This is when it starts to feel grueling. Remember that you're building a great habit. Keep it up!

Here to Breathe the Vacuum

One of my girls was diagnosed with cancer on her ear and had a bit of surgery to handle it. Here's Cuillean, post surgery with her radical ear tip. Fortunately, this was a mast cell tumor and surgery is pretty much a cure in cats. Yay.

She wants you to know the other guy (the vet) looks much worse. ;)

Writing habits.
Solitary or company for writing? Yes. Usually both at the same time. Couple of ways that goes down.

1. 5AM while everyone else is asleep. But they ARE still present. So I'm not sure what this is, really. Vacuum or company. My only interaction is with the cats who wander through for the occasional pet.
2. Coffee shop/tea shop where no one knows me. I'm in a public, but I create private space by holing up with my drink, my earbuds, and a screen to hid behind. And I do not make eye contact. No interaction, except with a barista for my drink. Maybe that doesn't count.
3. The bench on the screened in porch. This is my current favorite. Everyone else has gone off to day jobs. My alarm goes off and I sit down to work in silence. Except, I'm online with a partner and we're doing an hour of writing sprints. Communication is limited to "Go", "Time", and a report on how many words we each managed during the time. It's a little like having a work out routine. You may pay money to belong to a gym, but it doesn't mean you go. If you know you have a friend or a coach waiting for you, though, you'll haul your butt out of the warm bedclothes. In this case, it's a way to be accountable to someone else about hitting your word count goals for the day. This one is the true hybrid experience. I'm alone, but still interacting with other writers. And if one of us gets really, really stuck, we schedule a Skype session to talk out the stuck bits. Works really well. 

Granted, my ultimate goal is to be able to write anywhere. Haven't achieved that, yet. All I care is that the words happen and I exercise the focus muscles. Stretch them, maybe. Writer yoga. The more focus stretches, the better and longer and stronger the focus.

Where the Writer Is

Anyone with a cat will tell you that if you sit still long enough, you are a cat bed. Trying to write with a cat on your arms is -- challenging. So whenever I write on the boat, I have my choice of spots so long as the first rule is observed: I may sit wherever I like so long as a cat is not occupying the space. I must also observe rule two: if a cat wants the space after I have occupied it, I am obligated to move or suffer being yelled at (at best) and at worst, being occupied myself by a feline indifferent to my deadlines. So it often follows that I remove myself from the household in order to write. Not only for the ergonomic benefits, but also because the distractions at home are legion. Dishes to be done. Wildlife to observe. Cats' whims to be catered to. So while I do write aboard the boat, my very favorite place to write is Miro Tea. It's in Old Ballard - which is (for the west coast) the historic district. Some of the buildings date from the late 1800s. This is an older building. If you look in the middle row of windows, you'll see an I beam running diagonally. Earthquake reinforcing to bring the structure up to code. All of the old buildings in this section of town have them. You get this semi-Victorian exterior and a post-modern industrial thing on the interior. See the two wooden chairs just outside? There's a table tucked right up against that window behind them. That's my spot. I can see the street and the passersby from there. If the sun is out at all, I catch the rays as the sun rises. All lovely reasons to camp that spot for hours at a time while getting words, unimpeded by feline 'helpers'. But the real reason to go there is that the staff are some of the greatest people I know. They've figured out how much I love tea and have started letting me in on the secrets of which teas I ought to be trying. This year's oolong crop has had a stunning array of really excellent teas, for example, and it seems like every time I go in, they have a new recommendation to make for a tea I just have to try. Once I've decided, I can sit down, start the word count, and sip a lovely tea in a warm, friendly environment that doesn't reek of stale coffee oil. Yeah. I know. I live in Seattle and hate coffee. There's probably a law. This is the tea shop that shows up in Damned If He Does and in Nightmare Ink and Bound By Ink (though in the Ink books, the tea shop is Isa's tattoo shop.) If you read Damned If He Does, there's a brief scene in the tea shop - the young woman behind the counter is real and she will make you the same tea latte she makes the hero in the book - a Fireside Hot Chocolate. Dark chocolate, steamed milk, vanilla syrup and Lapsang Souchong. It's velvety heaven. So the next time you're in Seattle, you know where to find me. And maybe what to order when you drop in at Miro.

My Ritual to Create Rituals

I don't know what it is about publishing a book, but every single time I do, some crisis descends, and the rituals, schedules, and discipline that got the book done and published get blown to hell. I have to reinvent my process all over again, accommodating whatever crisis has arisen this time. Can I have a ritual I'd *like* to leave behind? I nominate this one.

 

Usually rituals are lovely things designed to signal our brains that we're shifting out of our everyday world and into something other. I'm all for them. My office, when I had one, was filled with ritual items. Seriously. There's an altar in the southern window. A waterfall fountain. A salt lamp. Something to bring every element into my work space. Also - cat beds. Let's be realistic. I have long been expected to write whilst holding cat. That's more an imperative than a ritual. Book one was written in this office.

 

 I miss having a dedicated desk and office chair. That much is true. I miss all of the accoutrement that went with the great luxury of space. What I do NOT miss is the heating bill that went with this particular space and the fact that it was hell and gone from everywhere ever. So rituals of all kinds have fallen by the wayside. Desks gave way to the ergonomically egregious salon table, or to writing with my laptop in my lap. Book 2 was written with the laptop in my lap while I sat in the cockpit. Took weeks to unkink my neck and back.

 

Then I had to establish a new ritual, preferably a healthier one - that of riding in to the tea shop every day to write. Books three and five were written there while sipping various murky brews. Book four was written at the boat and while I waited during a long string of vet appointments when the eldest boy took ill. (He's now fine for a 17.5 year old with liver disease.)

 

But, on the heels of publishing book five and in the midst of writing book six, the tea shop can no longer be my go-to. I 100% regret the loss of that ritual, but it can't be helped. So here I am. Gritting my teeth in the center of the ritual that requires me to find a new ritual. Quite by accident, I may have found it earlier today. While waiting for the laundry in the Laundromat, I pounded out 800 words in an hour. Hush. For me, that's incredible. My point is that if this bears out, I may wear every last stitch of clothing out by washing them. Not sure how a Laundromat is germane to a historical fantasy, but what ever. Writing, man. The glamor never ends.

 

Treasured Writing Rituals I've Discarded

In honor of this week's topic -  a writing routine we used to depend on but changed and why - I dragged out this old photo of me at my very first book signing. That's January of 2004, when my essay collection, WYOMING TRUCKS, TRUE LOVE AND THE WEATHER CHANNEL, came out. I look so fresh-faced and excited. You can practically see the visions of sugarplums and lucrative multi-book contracts dancing in my head.

~pets past self~

That was before I'd even contemplated writing a novel, or really much fiction at all. And I had lousy writing habits. Actually, I take that back. I had no writing habits. Sure, I'd gone to getting up very early (4 or 5 am) and writing before the day job in the morning. But, in order to coax myself into writing at all, I'd allowed myself to write whatever I wanted to. I don't regret this choice - because it did get me writing - but that's why I ended up with lots and lots of essays. Hey, I ended up with an essay collection published by a university press, so it wasn't a bad thing at all.

But I needed to do better, particularly when I tried writing longer works.

So I developed rituals. I had a dedicated writing desk. (By then I worked the day job from home and, while I had a single room for my office, I had plenty of room for two desks.) I played certain music (the soundtracks of The Mission and Master and Commander were my go-to's.) I did all sorts of things - read the (small-town, very thin) newspaper. I wore certain clothes for writing and others for the day job. A few other things I can't even remember.

You know what? Those things totally worked. I highly recommend establishing rituals, because all of those things, done stepwise, put my mind into the state where the words could flow. They served as a cue to do *that* kind of work.

But I don't do any of them anymore. I prefer silence when I write. I have only one desk - because we live in a much smaller house and I only have room for one. (I write full-time now, but as recently as last fall I was still doing the day job from home and I simply set up two monitors on the one desk. I read most of my news online, but only later, when it won't distract me from writing.

You know why I gave up all those rituals?

I didn't need them anymore.

I didn't even deliberately give them up. They just kind of ... fell by the wayside. As my writing habit became a firmly entrenched part of my day, I started forgetting about the rituals. I just dove straight into writing.

I suspect that's one way of knowing when you've got it down.

I Learned How to Write Novels by ... Training in Kung Fu

I'm headed home from #RWA16, the Romance Writers of America annual conference, which was in lovely San Diego this year. This was a truly wonderful gathering this year.Grateful for this community that always leaves me refreshed and supported.

Also, the first book in my new Sorcerous Moons series comes out on Tuesday. I'm loving on this cover! Yes, I helped design it, but the amazing Louisa Gallie is the one who pulled it off. Love the feel. And here's the blurb:

An Unquiet Heart

Alone in her tower, Princess Oria has spent too long studying her people’s barbarian enemies, the Destrye—and neglected the search for calm that will control her magic and release her to society. Her restlessness makes meditation hopeless and her fragility renders human companionship unbearable. Oria is near giving up. Then the Destrye attack, and her people’s lives depend on her handling of their prince…

A Fight Without Hope

When the cornered Destrye decided to strike back, Lonen never thought he’d live through the battle, let alone demand justice as a conqueror. And yet he must keep up his guard against the sorceress who speaks for the city. Oria’s people are devious, her claims of ignorance absurd. The frank honesty her eyes promise could be just one more layer of deception.

A Savage Bargain

Fighting for time and trust, Oria and Lonen have one final sacrifice to choose… before an even greater threat consumes them all.

Our topic this week is “I Learned How to Write Novels by (doing some other activity).“ It will be interesting to hear what all everyone else has to say. Hopefully Jim won’t just post that he learned to write novels by writing novels.

~Gives Jim the beady-eyed stare down~

For me, I had to teach myself how to write a novel – both by focused, deliberate habit-building, and by an overall effort to improve myself.

As for the first, I didn’t know how to write long. I started out as an essayist and short-story writer. I could hold essentially the entire arc of the story in my head and I usually hammered it out in one writing session. Sure, sometimes an all-session, but still. I’d gone to working four ten-hour days at the day job, and writing all day on Fridays. For a while I wrote an essay or story a week – though most were 1,500 – 5,000 words

When I decided to write longer, I realized this wouldn’t work. I couldn’t hold the whole story in my head, and by writing one-day each week, I’d lose too much of the thread in between.

So, I had to deliberately build a habit of writing every day for a couple of hours – and teach myself how to work incrementally, rather than in a long, focused session. This was a huge change in work-pattern for me. I had always been a binge-worker. I was the girl in college who pulled all-nighters, staying up to write my papers the night before. I’m pretty good at concentrating and working in one long session.

While some people can do this with novels, I cannot. 10,000 words/day is a really good day for me. I can’t sustain that for many days in a row. For a 130,000 word novel? No, no, no.

Therefore I had to learn how to work in slower, steady increments.

But that’s not the subject of this week. What I discovered was that something else I’d been doing helped me enormously in this effort.

I started taking Tai Chi and Pakua Chang long before I decided to become a writer. Those are both internal Chinese martial arts that fall under the collective umbrella of Kung Fu. (I learned several more arts and styles over time, but this was where I started.) I’d been dating David for about six months at that point and he really wanted to learn Pakua. I’d been a religious studies major in college and had become very interested in the idea that practice shapes belief. (Christians, for example, teach that you only need to believe and everything else follows; in Judaism, practice comes first – prayers, rituals, dietary observances – and they teach that belief, and spiritual growth, arises from that.)

All of this is a long way of saying I was up for learning Kung Fu also, as a way for practicing a physical discipline that could lead to personal growth.

We studied those arts for over fifteen years. Along the way, I discovered a level of patience I’d never before possessed. That kind of training in particular depends on incremental work. We did a lot of moving meditation. Tai Chi requires very slow, meticulous and relaxed movements. There are various standing exercises that require fortitude of both body and spirit, remaining in the same very uncomfortable position for a long period of time.

After a while of practicing an activity, it becomes easy to focus on the specific goals – the next demonstration or test – and lose sight of the original reasons for taking it up. I became intent on the trees, pouring energy into the school I belonged to, both taking and teaching classes. It wasn’t until we eventually left the school that I remembered about the forest.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that all that practice resulted in personal growth. I’d developed all sorts of patient focus for working incrementally that dovetailed directly into learning to write novels. I had created work habits that allowed me to move into a new kind of steady and productive creativity.

I get asked a lot these days to explain how I do what I do. I’m regarded as a fast and productive writer. Fortunately I also seem to write good books! The people asking inevitably want to know how to do the same – and I’m afraid my answer isn’t an easy or fast one. Except that I think we all have these other experiences that come into play, skills we’ve built over time that we can move into new 

efforts.

Nothing we do is ever wasted.