What You Need

Into every life a little rain must fall. If you mean to stay afloat both as a person and as a writer, you need a few things.

• Know what you need and create it - some of us require the illusion of stability in order to create and that stability can be elusive when life is throwing constant BS at you. Look for places you can force stability - is it enough to declare a time at which you will show up to the page and to make that space of time your anchor?
• Operate at a remove - get out of your normal place. Extract yourself from the part of your life causing chaos. Find refuge - check out the quiet section of your library. Or find a local coffee or tea shop that will let you camp a table for an hour or two. The key is to find someplace that you can retreat to where you can be the truest, most stripped down version of you - leave all the masks (spouse, child, coworker, responsible adult, etc) behind. It's just you and the page and the story. Set a timer. You'll pick up your masks and your cares once the timer goes off.
• Turn off the distractors - this isn't just about the Freedom app, though certainly use that if it helps you focus. This is about your phone. And your email. Shut them down. There is no reason on this planet for you to be 100% available to anyone 100% of the time. If you cannot bear to shut down the phone, set the Do Not Disturb for the time you want to work. You can program in exceptions so your child can always ring straight through if need be. This is only for a short time and you don't need the phone chirping, ringing, buzzing or otherwise pulling you out of your story. Immersion is hard won. Don't squander it with a stupid cell phone or an idiotic email trying to tell you who to vote for.
• Vow to become a warrior. How? Pick up the sword (or in this case, the manuscript.) Every single day. You pick it up. Some days, you'll pick it up, swing it once and put it right back down. But the bulk of the days, you'll work with it longer, trying trickier moves, acknowledging that you're clumsy as hell with it right now. But the more you pick it up and swing with intention, the better you'll get. 
• Know when to quit. A friend and former crit partner tried desperately to write while she sat in a long series of hospital rooms watching her youngest son die. She finally shut the laptop and quit. For two years. She came back to writing after and is doing very, very well now. But for her, for that time, it was necessary to put that piece of herself away so she could be fully present for her son and for herself. She has no regrets over it. 
• Get crystal clear on your priorities AND on the priorities of those around you - What do you say are your priorities. What do your actions say are your priorities. No judgements here - it's an observation about where the gap lies and why there's a gap at all, if there is one. What are your loved ones' priorities? Do they conflict with or support yours? You do know it's legit to expect your priorities to be supported only because they are your priorities and matter to you as a human being? You afford support and respect to your loved ones' priorities (within reason) because you love them and want them happy. Require the same courtesy for yourself and allow yourself to demand AND accept it.

Only you know your capacity. Only you can know what makes you tick. If you don't know, find out. It's why the gods invented therapists. No one is bulletproof. Every person on the planet will get tripped up over something. There isn't any problem with falling down. The problem is in not getting up again. 

PS: The kittens are fine. I am covered in bloody, razor-thin scratches from kitten claws. By my scars you shall know me. 

The Port in the Storm

Everyone and everything alive is subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Thank you, Shakespeare. How do you write while navigating whatever slings and arrows have been fired your way? I'd really like to know because I am the acknowledged cosmic empress of losing my footing when life shoots at me.

Maybe the fact that I seem to take it personally is a factor. The thing is we all have our challenges. Migraines are my major stumbling block because when those hit, they hit in waves, and I'll be down for several days in a row. They are electrical storms in the brain - so assuming I can even bear to look at a screen (which is assuming a lot) - nothing cogent can penetrate the random firing pattern of the synapses and the subsequent pain. Boo hoo, poor me, right? That's actually not what this is about - it's to point out that there are things and times in life when writing is 100% the least appropriate thing you can do. Or to recognize that there are times when writing is beyond your grasp, that nothing you do will get you words that day. Or that week. And that's okay.

What's not okay is forcing yourself into someone else's mold. What's not okay is avoiding the writing when physical capability has been restored. You have to come back to the writing and you have to keep coming back.
Emotional hits, stress, chaos, all of those can be written through - and I'd argue SHOULD be written through. Someone once told me that when the shit hit the fan, you can either turn away from your writing, or you can turn toward your writing. Turning toward your writing might mean being vulnerable on the page. It might mean changing where you are in the story so you can channel emotion/conflict/tension/whathaveyou to your characters. It's one of the ways I siphon off intense emotion - I figure out where in my story my character(s) feel the exact same way and I write that scene while the emotion is still fresh in me. Just by virtue of examining how and where I feel stuff lessens its impact. I get freed up. And I take great, spiteful glee in using the messy, painful parts of my life to completely muck up my characters' lives. This makes writing my port in a storm.

What about time? There will be days you don't have time for much of anything. But you have twenty minutes before you sleep - and in that twenty minutes, you huddled in bed with your laptop - you can pour out 750 of the crappiest words on the face of the planet. But you'll have written. You'll end your day on a brief, shining moment of triumph. You'll learn to write in the gaps - the brief snippets of ten minutes here. Fifteen there. And while you might not win any speed awards (gods know I don't) you will eventually amass a book, just by virtue of showing up and persisting no matter what comes.

One last quote that I keep in a file on my computer:
“Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people” Randy Pausch

Whether or not someone writes, regardless of circumstance, really does come down to wanting to write badly enough.*


*Clinical depression or other mental health issues notwithstanding. Those need treating before you can evaluate what you do and don't want.

How to Write Through the Bad Times

Hi all!!

I'm back online after about ten days away and look what I returned to! The fantabulous Grace Draven shared the cover for her story in our duology FOR CROWN AND KINGDOM. Her story is THE UNDYING KING and, wow - I dunno about you guys, but I'd take him for my forever king anytime!

I like how her story cover works with mine, her hero and my heroine gazing out at the reader with an implicit call to adventure. Both individual covers will be included inside the digital versions, which should be very cool!

The duology technically releases on Tuesday, May 31, the same day as THE PAGES OF THE MIND. That said, I believe buy links will be going up very soon. In fact, it's up on Amazon now!

Our topic of the week is: Writers in the Storm - handling adversity, stress, and generally terrible shit while still producing.

There's a lot to say on this topic, but for me it comes down to this: writing is my job. It's my chosen profession for a lot of really good reasons, but none of them are because it would be easy.

I see two pieces to this question - one is the fundamental dilemma that every human being faces, which is how to go on with the business of living when our hearts are torn asunder. Because, the thing is, everyone has to handle adversity, stress and generally terrible shit while still putting food on the table and keeping the heat on. Some people don't manage to do this, which is why we have a homeless problem. Those are people who get so torn up that they can no longer handle the business of living - for whatever reason. Other people are wounded enough to require institutionalization, temporarily or permanently, in which case they have others to take care of things like protection from the elements and basic needs.

But, above that sometimes tenuously drawn line, we all have to find ways to weather the storms of life while still keeping ourselves and our loved ones alive.

The second piece - and the reason this comes up for artists in particular - is that our creative selves tend to be tied into our emotional lives. For all that I call writing a job, it IS really different than a more intellectual or physical job. I could do day job tasks of data crunching or editing government documents even while emotionally stressed. For me, physical labor is great for when I need to deal with the storms of life. But writing while my emotional life is shot to hell... well, it's harder.

That said, it can be done. Here's a few ways to do it.

1. Use that pain

Writers often joke that a part of us stands back during terrible events, taking notes and thinking, "I'm so going to use this." Use it as it happens. Even if it's as journaling or writing something that's not to deadline, it all goes into the big well. I have a file of fragments that I go back to from time to time, for exactly that sort of thing.

2. There's more to being an author than writing

We often complain that being a writer takes all kinds of hats, particularly in this era of self-publishing and author-originated promo. Some of those hats are the equivalent of manual labor or data crunching. Catch up those book sales numbers. Check out some review sites. Do a bit of wild daydreaming, write down those ideas and think about ways to get there. Sometimes planning positive action can be the best antidote to chaos.

3. Write anyway

Many writers cite that feeling of being in the zone as one of the most fulfilling aspects of being a writer - and most acknowledge that it doesn't always feel that way. Being a career writer means writing even when it doesn't feel good, particularly for novelists. Laying down words is the foundation upon which everything else rests. Write the words anyway - you can always fix them later, and FAR more easily than you can fill all those blank pages.

Anyone else have other advice on this?