We intended to stay there for only a handful of weeks, but due to a lot of things out of our control (and mostly in Fannie Mae’s lack-of-control) it took half of eternity to close on and move into our (fabulous) new house. But we did; one fine Saturday, while I was off playing with friends and bands (and bands who are friends) in Idaho, Geek Husband and Geek Brother-in-law moved everything into my new house. It was the perfect set-up: everything got moved in and I didn’t have to lift a finger.

But moving in and unpacking are two very different things, and I was left with the unpacking. Seriously, how did we acquire so much stuff? I thought I would never finish unpacking. But then, miraculously, I did. Kinda. There were still boxes to be unpacked in the soon-to-be-a-library bonus room (or FROG, for those in the know). But all the living areas were unpacked, organized, and livable.

Finally, things were settling down. Forget the herd of alpacas and two very large puppies we just added to our lives; never mind the new (fabulous, wonderful, amazing) editor job I just took at Month 9; ignore the fact that Geek Husband and I are positioning ourselves to launch a new business. Yes, all those things added more responsibility to my life and took away more of my time. But my house was finally in order so I was able to carve away time for writing – I thing I can’t seem to make myself do when I can see all that needs done around the house.

Hurray! It’d been way too long.

Then, this morning, this happened:

That wonderful black stuff all over the stairs, my intrepid readers, is glaze. More specifically it is the glaze I bought to finish of the old stereo cabinet I painted a fabulous shade of yellow just before we moved. It’s the glaze I have been looking for ever since we got into this house.

Baby Caveman found it before I did. And Baby Caveman has an obsession with trowing things down the stairs to watch them go boom. You do the math.

The good new is: we were planning on pulling the carpeting off the stair anyway. I want finished platforms with painted risers. And when we pull the stairway carpet, we’ll pull the carpet in the future library as well. Without carpeting in that room, we no longer have anything stopping us from constructing our built-in bookshelves and window seat. And while I’m at it, I better go ahead and paint all the surrounding walls, because I would hate to do so after finishing the stairs only to have a paint mishap while doing it.

Baby Caveman threw the canister of glaze that launched a total remodel.

Now I’m back to having a ton of things around the house pulling at my attention. And back to having said things fighting for my writing time. As I told the empty staircase, however, I wasn’t going to let it keep my completely from my writing. Because, let’s face it: when one starts talking to the stairs, it’s time for one to get to the computer and release the psychosis into a novel.

I started my rewrite of 99 Days of Laney McGuire last week, and I am determined to finish it (I considered joining Pam and Quita in their quest to have a new WIP – or in my case, a new version of an old WIP – completed by the end of May, but I also have some major edits for Month 9 this month, so that’s not a feasible goal). I find myself carving time out of the day whenever I can find it: between chores during Baby Caveman’s nap, in the wee hours of the morning before I have to trudge out to feed alpacas, late into the evening after even the cat’s stopped being annoying, in spare moments between tasks when making dinner . . .

Okay, that’s a lie. The cat’s never not annoying. But you get what I’m saying.

Life never really slows down. If anything, it gets busier and busier, despite the number of things you cross off your to-do list. There’s no waiting for it to calm down enough to write, because that day will never come. Search the time out, find it in the dark corners, and steal it away from lesser pursuits. That’s what I’m doing.

This week’s tip is a short one: put away the computer, take a break, and go outside. Some time away to enjoy the rest of your life will be great. Plus, you will be more productive when you get back to writing, I promise.

How are things going for y’all? Are you going to reach your goals this month?

1) It forces you to actually finish.

Okay, so obviously that is not true. But the idea is still there. NaNoWriMo is great for the writer who has been struggling to finish anything she’s started. It gives a goal and a deadline, which is something many writers don’t give themselves. It is amazing how much more productive one is when one has a goal and a deadline. Many new writers won’t do it, so NaNoWriMo does it for them.

 
2) The communtity.

The forums at NaNoWriMo.org are filled with others just like you: semi-crazy writers trying to create their novels. They give support, help you bounce ideas around, and when things are looking down they do whatever possible to bring you back up again. The forums are fun, entertaining, educational, and a great place to meet new writer friends. Yes, there are many other forums out there that offer a place for writers to hang out, but the NaNo forums are special for many writers.

3) You have no choice but to turn the internal editor.

When you are trying to crank out 50,000 words in only 30 days,  you can’t go back to edit things. You just can’t. Not if you want to be able to meet your goal, at least.

It’s a hard thing to so, but turning off that part of the brain that wants perfection is a wonderful, beautiful thing. NaNoWriMo can help teach you to do that, and in the process free your mind for future drafts as well.

4) In the end, you have a finished draft!

Many writers will write for years and years without actually finishing something they start. It’s great to get practice putting words on paper, but that’s only part of the battle. We need to finish what we start in order to really grow. For many, the first time they ever finished a draft came during NaNoWriMo.

5) It teaches that YOU CAN DO IT!

November is over and you have a shiny (okay, probably pretty murky) first draft in hand. You did it! How long have you been working at this dream, thinking that maybe you would never be able to write a book? Now you have. NaNoWriMo has taught many people that they actually have it in them to write a book. For me, it wasn’t NaNo, but I did prove to myself that I could actually write a book by forcing myself to do it all in a month. Now that I know I can do it, the process is much less daunting and I can take my time to make the book better, knowing that in the end I CAN FINISH.

We’re a week into NaNoWriMo, and last night I deleted my words. Every. Single. One. Then I opened up a new file and started again. Did I just ruin my chances of getting 50,000 words this month? Well, never say never, but yeah, I probably did.

And I am totally okay with that.

You see, my goal is to write a book that I can make great. I know it won’t be great in the first draft, but I want to have the platform to make it so. I wasn’t getting that with what I was writing in my NaNoNovel, so I decided to call a mulligan and do it over.

Normally, I am a huge advocate of the don’t get it right, get it written camp, meaning I think one should push all the way through a first draft before going back to try to edit it. That’s how I’ve written before and it has worked beautifully. This time, however, I couldn’t make myself keep moving forward because I knew what I was working on was wrong, wrong, wrong.

It had the wrong narration, the entirely wrong tone. I could have kept moving forward – I could have written the whole book – but I knew in the end that the only way to salvage what was there would to completely rewrite it. So I decided to take a step back, evaluate what would be best for my book, and ultimately start again.

The plot and action are exactly the same, but what I wrote last night is completely different from what I had before. The tone is what I had in mind when Geek Husband and I planned the book out. It fits with the vision I have in my head, where what I wrote before doesn’t. I might have had to throw out a lot of words, but it’s all okay, because what I wrote last night sets me up for success with this book.

Some might say that, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I should have changed the tone when I realized there was an issue and then fixed the beginning to match during edits. Anything to plow through and get the first draft done this month. Shoot, once upon a time, I would have been one of those people. But I’ve learned something over the past few years of writing: yes, first drafts are all crappy – as is the nature of a first draft – but I am better off taking the time and detours needed to give myself a solid foundation than pushing through for the sake of getting more words on the paper.

I guess what it boils down to is expressed perfectly in the quote above. What I want now is to write this first draft and break-neck speed and finish it this month. What I want now is to win NaNoWriMo. But is that what I want most?

I gave that a lot of thought last night before trashing what I’d written. And the answer is: No, winning NaNoWriMo is not what I want most. What I want most is to write as solid a draft as possible on the first go-around. And, as much as I wish it weren’t the case, that is going to take some time. More than one frantic month, surely.

(Even though I decided it is not the best route for me this time, I still adore NaNoWriMo. In fact, come back tomorrow for a post on all the things about NaNoWriMo that I think are fabulous!)

Geek Husband and I have been looking to move for some time now, and recently we decided to put a deadline on ourselves and make it happen. We are now moving the first week of December. Which means I have to pack up my entire house this month. It’s amazing how much stuff you can accumulate in 3.5 years of living someplace (I’m glad it’s only been that long…I couldn’t even imagine if we’d been living here for 20 years or something).

Going along with moving, we’ve decided to take the plunge and buy a house. Add more things to take care of during November, because there’s a lot of stuff that goes into preparing to buy a home. Especially if you are getting great first-time buyer rates. I just wish there was a way to test out of all this mandatory home-buyer education. Because I’m an over-researcher so I’ve already learned all this stuff.

Then…the weekend before Thanksgiving we are holding a benefit auction to raise money to help with my father-in-law’s medical bills (he had a nasty bout of esophageal cancer). Part of the auction includes a dessert auction, so I need to bake my little tushy off (though, I won’t lie, I have a tendency to sample my product, so all that baking surely won’t reduce the size of my tushy)(which is a perfectly acceptable size)(who am I kidding? I’ll just be cocky here – I like my butt). Ahem. Anyway, lots of baking to be done.

So, yeah. I have a lot of things to juggle this month. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop my manic writing. Will I get 50,000 words this month? To be honest, probably not. There’s just too many things piling up. But you better believe I will have more words than I started with, and that’s the whole point, right?

(For the record: I surpassed my goal last night, so I’m off to a good start!)

My tip is a day late this week because I didn’t want to overshadow my contest winner post yesterday, but it’s here now and it’s a good one.

NaNo Productivity Tip: Dress for Success

One of the fun parts of being a writer is the fact that you can do your job anywhere you go, wearing anything you want. It’s been said many times that a writer’s uniform is her pajamas. So why would I want to take that comfy, lazy joy from you?

Geek Husband is a computer programmer – another job that allows one to wear whatever one likes to work. He works in an office, so there is a dress code, but it’s pretty casual. He goes to work in jeans and a t-shirt every day; he might throw on a button-up if he’s feeling particularly dressy one day. But it’s pretty well known that there are companies out there (*cough*IBM*cough*) that have a serious dress-code from their programmers. I’m talking a suit and tie here. For workers who sit in front of a computer, not seeing the public at all.

Why would a company require this? It’s simple: dressing up for work is a mental game. By buttoning up that shirt, tying the tie, and slipping the suit jacket over his shoulders, the IBM programmer is getting into the mindset to do some serious work. Sitting in front of the computer in your pajamas leaves you in that lazy mindset and you are more likely to surf the net and dink around without actually getting any work done.

As someone who’s worked at home in a number of different positions, I’ve tested this theory on myself. I know I am more productive if I get ready for the day as if I were going to work at an office where I’d be seeing clients all day long, even if really the only people I will see are Geek Husband and Baby Caveman (who couldn’t care how I look as long as I feed and play with him). Now it’s your turn to try it out.

Before you sit down to write, get dressed and ready like you would before heading off to work. Take those moments to get yourself in the mindset of working, and I promise you will be more focused and productive than if you just go to in your pajamas.

Seriously, try it.

This week I’m going to talk about something that will kill your plan of writing a novel in a month before you even get started. That’s right, I’m talking about that shiny thing that’s distracting you right at this moment.

We all have things we like to do, TV we like to watch, websites we like to visit, whatever, that we know are a total time-suck, yet we can’t turn away. You know the one. For me, it used to be FML, MLIA, pretty much anything like that. I would spend way too much time reading those little entertaining stories. Time that could have been spent writing my book had I not been reading them. So I made myself stop going to those websites.

You need to do this NOW, not on November 1st. I’ve read that it takes three weeks of solid effort to break a bad habit, but I believe if you start today you can be well-set to be distraction-free (or less distracted at least) by NaNo time. Take inventory of the things you really don’t want to give up, and keep it in your life – I’m not telling you to get rid of everything that isn’t essential. For me, that’s Jeopardy. Yes, I am fully aware of how nerdy that makes me sound, but whatever. I like to watch Jeopardy so I take that thirty minutes every day and watch it. But I cut out all other TV. Because TV was taking writing time. And those silly websites I loved going to? No more.

Why do I say to cut those things out now? Because, I won’t lie, it’s not easy to give daily habits up. So take this week to force yourself not to look. By the time next week rolls around, it will be much easier not to go to those websites. And by the end of November, you’ll be thinking, MLIWhat? 

On Chasing the Dream

You start with a little inkling of a dream. I want to write a book, you tell yourself. That little dream plants itself at the base of your mind and begs for attention. You nourish it and it grows. Pretty soon you are consumed by this idea. You want to write a book.

How do you even start? Writing a novel is a huge, daunting task. It scares you. But you still have the dream, so nervously you sit in front of your computer and you start writing. At first it is hard. Every word seems like a chore. You are terrified you won’t make it. How will this ever be long enough to be called a novel?

You keep at it. Letter by letter, you write words; word by word, you write sentences; sentences pile up into paragraphs, then chapters. And suddenly you realize: I can do this!  Before long, you are looking at a finished draft of your very own novel.

Take a minute to pause and let that sink in: you wrote a book!

It might not be pretty, that’s true. So you head back to work. You pull it apart, edit it, rewrite parts, change things up, improve, improve, improve. Will you ever be done? Every time you think you are close, you find something else to fix. You keep at it, doing the work.

Then that magical day comes. You have a real, honest-to-goodness novel. A book you are proud of .

Congratulations! You reached your dream!

You ride on that high for a few days, but then that little voice creeps into your mind. Well, it says, maybe you did write a novel, but what good is that if you can’t get it published?

So you jump on to your next dream. You query agents, and get a handful of full requests. YES! You ride along, your head in the clouds, and send the manuscript off. You wait, sure that your book will be the next big thing. Then the rejections roll in. And then some more. Your book isn’t marketable, they tell you. I like it, but it’s just not right for my list. I’m sorry, better luck elsewhere.

You try not to take it personally, but this book is like your baby. How could you not? The rejections start to wear you down. Suddenly you find yourself bitter…

A bloggy friend announces the she got an agent! Another just signed a contract on her three-book deal! You want to be happy; you should feel elated for them. But you can’t help but wonder: why not me? What is wrong with my book, and why can’t I get those things? Try as you might, you can’t help but to feel a little hostility toward those other writers.

STOP! BACK UP!

Remember your dream. Your dream was to write a novel. And you DID IT. Celebrate. Praise yourself. Let the rest be a bonus, not what makes it worthwhile.

Don’t let your dream of publishing a book overshadow your accomplishment of writing one. And never forget that original dream; it is the most important one.

Now go write another book. You’ve done it before, and you know you can do it again.

What are you doing to prepare for this year’s Month of Literary Abandon? From now until the end of November, I will be posting productivity tips every Monday to help you successfully complete your novel (or at least the first 50k words of it) this November.

(Full disclosure: I have never actually “won” NaNoWriMo. I have written a novel in a month though. More than once. Just not during November so it wasn’t all official and stuff.)

Now, on to this week’s tip:

NaNo Productivity Tip #1: Make a Plan

Maybe you’ve never used an outline before, you think all that planning ahead of time will kill your creativity when it comes to actually writing; that’s fine.

But.

If you want to write a novel in a month, unless you are superhuman, you will need to have some kind of plan. 50,000 words is a lot for 30 days of writing, and chances are, without a plan, you will end up with about 30,000 of those words being worthless. Okay, let’s be honest – even with a plan, that’s very possible, but alas, that is the nature of first drafts.

What kind of outline do you need? That’s completely up to you, but you know that old saying, “less is more”? In this case it’s completely wrong. You can’t over-plan for NaNoWriMo. At the very least, I suggest you know your basic plot, with a definite beginning, ending, and climax solidly in line.

You know what? Let’s take this one step further:

Get out a piece of paper and a pen. (Side note…I have this purple pen. I call it my Perfect Purple Plotting Pen. And now it’s time to plot out my NaNoNovel and I can’t find the pen. The horror!) Anyway, have your pen? Your paper? Good.

At the top of your paper, write a brief sentence about how your book starts. Then, at the bottom of the page, write a sentence about how it ends. Finally, pick a spot 2/3-3/4 of the way down the page and write down, briefly, what your climactic scene will look like.

This is your basic framework. Take some time and fill in the gaps, focusing on big-picture stuff only at this point. Try to fill every single line on the page with information. Unless, of course, you are using unlined paper. But you get the point.

What’s that you say? You filled all your lines but still have ideas?! That will happen once you get your creative juices flowing. What once seemed a daunting task is now behind you and you still have more to write. That’s fine – get another piece of paper and keep working. Before you know it, you will have a pretty detailed plan of action for your book. (Then, if you’re like me, you will write it all out again because you can’t stand the unorganized mess before you, but that’s not a necessary step.)

There you have it! A road-map to NaNoWriMo success. Keep your outline right next to your computer (or whatever you use to write) for the entire month of November, so it’s easy to reference if you feel like you get stuck. Can you get by without it? Sure. People do it all the time. But I promise it will be easier to get to that magical 50,000 words if you know where you are going.

SPECIAL OFFER FOR NANOWRIMO PARTICIPANTS!

Anyone who completes NaNoWriMo this November (and validates the word count) can get up to 50% off editing services. You can claim the coupon until the end of the year, and the discount will be valid through October 31, 2012, giving you plenty of time to revise and edit the novel on your own before using my services.

So I took a month off, and during that month I reevaluated things. After a lot of thinking and talking with Geek Husband, I came to a decision. I put Incubus away and started something else. I still love the story of Incubus and really believe in it, but I’m pretty sure what I was doing to try to make it good was just not healthy for me. I needed to step away. Who knows for how long. It’s not going anywhere.

Toward the end of May I started something else. Something I love love LOVE. It has been such a joy writing this book; I almost forgot how fun this can be. I keep thinking I am getting close to the end but then I remember all the things that still need to happen and realize how much work I have in front of me still. But, you know what? That’s not upsetting at all, knowing that I have a lot of work to do still because I am loving the work so darn much!

I’ve kept myself pretty tight-lipped about this project. Seriously, not even Geek Husband gets to know the full plot. He gets little bits here and there as I get so excited that I can’t help but to tell him what I just wrote, but he doesn’t get the full story. Nobody does. Not Geek Husband, not Rani, my wonderful sister who is my first reader. Nobody nobody.

But, since Jess is so sweet and interviewed me, I decided to let some little things about it out into the wild.

And now I am sharing more here. Not much more, but a little more. Here’s what I told Jess:

It’s about a girl.
And about a boy.
It’s about letting go and moving on.
It’s about forgiving others, but more importantly it’s about forgiving yourself.
It’s about kissing.
And forks.

And now for visuals!

I am so excited about this project. I can’t wait to finish it so I can share more with y’all!

Something I am great at though: line editing. The grammar is strong with this one. Things like word choice, sentence structure, and continuity are my forte’. That tiny, minor character in your manuscript who only shows up on page 31 and then again on page 287? I will remember if you said her eyes were blue in the beginning and then green toward the end. If it takes your characters only 15 minutes to get to the beach, but your characters can still go to a party at Duke University without any travel, I will catch you on it (here’s looking at you One Tree Hill – seriously, where is Tree Hill? It’s like the writers made it exist in a different dimension where the distances in this one don’t matter).

I know what my strengths are and, more importantly, where my weaknesses lie. I am working on being more critical of the big picture when reading, but for now, I hope my beta friends don’t mind me just pointing out the small picture stuff.

*Strange how it’s not hard for me to find faults in my own writing, just in others’.

It is a discouraging thing to look at a manuscript and know that it would be better to completely rewrite it than to simply edit it. What a daunting task. You stare at all the work ahead of you and wonder, how did I screw this up so irreparably?

To be sure, it would be easier and less time consuming to keep plodding through with edits and minor rewrites, but you know in the end that much won’t save the book. Nothing short of starting again at word one will produce the book you want to write.

It’s easy to realize this and then immediately begin to despair. How can you possibly call yourself a writer if you can’t do better than that? Sure, first drafts are always bad, but shouldn’t they be salvageable at least?

I sit today in near panic at the thought of what is ahead of me. I am starting a complete rewrite of Incubus, the book that will be the death of me. This is not the first time I have started over with this one, but this is the most intimidating start. Before, I was still working on a rough draft, but at the end of last year I finally put THE END on that draft. I finally had a working draft! YAY! Or so I thought.

As I have been plodding through edits, it has been nagging at the back of my mind that I need to just rewrite this. I have been ignoring that prompting for a while now, because, hello! That is a lot of work, and I want to be able to just make this book shine on edits alone. But I need to stop fooling myself and just get to work.

There is one good thing about starting from word one after already (finally) finishing a draft…In all that work I did on the book before, I learned exactly one thing: what it isn’t. I have written what I don’t want, and in doing so, I have reined in what I do want.

I don’t know what it is about this one particular book that is giving me such fits. I have other drafts sitting on my hard drive. Perhaps the sensible thing to do would be to open one of them and work it to perfection (or as near as I can get). Put Incubus down and make something else shine.

I know that would be the smarter, more prudent thing to do, yet I just can’t bring myself to do it. Something about this book just calls to me, and I feel like it is what I need to be working on, even if it is aging me prematurely.

So, I am ready to work some more. Eventually it will all pay off, I am sure. Over the next few weeks and months, surely I will eat too much cookie dough and popcorn (drafting snacks of choice). Not the healthiest diet out there, but that is something I can live with. Hey, Steven King used to shoot heroin when he was writing, so it could be worse right?

I have noticed a trend when I am writing first drafts – I generally get a few chapters in before I know who my main character is. I learn the narrator through how they relate to other characters and the surroundings. No matter how much pre-planning I do (which, generally, is not a ton), it turns out the same. For the first few chapters I don’t know who the main character really is.

It’s kinda funny, because I have no problem knowing all the secondary characters right off the bat, and I can paint them vividly, but the narrator is never the same. Never, never is my main character as vivid at the start as the secondary characters.

Once I know who my narrator really is, then I can go back in edits and insert that personality in the earlier chapters. But now I am writing something live and online, and while it is still a first draft, it would be nice for me to discover that character a littler faster so my wonderful readers aren’t left hanging and wondering who is telling this story to them for too long.

So, dear friends, I ask you: how do you discover your characters? I want to know how others go about learning who their narrator is, so take it away in the comments and let me know!

The last thing I really need in my life right now, what with Baby Caveman keeping me on my toes and edits (and a lot of rewriting) of Incubus taking up my writing time, is another project, but that is exactly what I have here.

Editing is a lot of work, and I am enjoying it, but I feel like I need to create something new as well. After a lot of thinking about it, I decided to tackle The Raskolnikov Project, a contemporary YA heavily influenced by Crime & Punishment. It’s an idea I have been toying with for a long, long time, and I think it is the perfect thing for me to be doing right now.

But I am not just writing this book. I am writing it live and online. I will be posting the book chapter by chapter (short chapters, since it is an online format) at TheRaskolnikovProject.RachelBateman.com. I am posting the book as it comes to me – no outlining and no editing allowed. It will be raw and messy and tons of fun!

Chapter One is up now, and I will be adding new material at least once a week. So go check it out – I will love you infinitely if you read along!

CONFIDENCE

You are afraid you are not good enough. That your idea is not good enough. That you will never be able to finish a full book. That nobody will like it. That you will never get an agent. Never sell a book. Nobody will read your work.

You lack the confidence to go boldly forward and just do this thing. It is a common problem for writers (and other artsy types, I would imagine…and probably everyone else as well). I would be lying if I said I had never been hit by that crippling self-doubt that makes me wonder if I can really be an author. It is something all of us struggle with, each and every one, but let me assure you:

You ARE good enough.

I have read your blogs, and in some cases your books. You are good enough to write books. Your ideas are uniquely yours. Your writing is strong. People will want to read your words. Some will declare yours their favorite book. There will be one reader out there (and maybe more) who will make your whole world when she tells you your book changed her life.

So keep going; keep writing the stories that are clambering to get out of you. Don’t let fear hold you back. Write for all you are worth, because nobody else can tell your story the way you can. Keep trying, keep writing, keep loving your work.

You ARE good enough.

You are this AWESOME

When writing, what is the biggest obstacle that stands in the way of you actually finishing your book and how do you tackle that obstacle?

My biggest obstacle is definitely plot bunnies. With every book I write, at just about the time the honeymoon period wears off and writing becomes work, my brain is flooded with a ton of shiny, new ideas. Every one tries to convince me that it is way better than the current book, that it would be way more fun to write, and that I should drop everything and work on it now.

If I listened to all the plot bunnies clambering for my attention, I would never finish a book. Sure, I would have a ton of beginnings, but without middles and endings they would be worthless. So I need to ignore the plot bunnies. Unfortunately they are persistent little buggers, so just straight out ignoring them rarely works.

Instead, I need to cage them – to wrangle them into a holding pen stocked with all the plot bunny feed they will need to be placated for a while. I do this by giving them a few minutes of my time. When a plot bunny comes knocking at my brain, I take just a few minutes to write down everything about the idea that comes to me. This might be a plot synopsis, or a few lines of dialogue, or a quick character sketch, or a full opening scene. Whatever comes to mind gets written down. BUT. I only allow myself ten or fifteen minutes to do this. Then I email what I wrote to myself and file it into the handy little GMail label “Plot Bunnies” where it lives peacefully until I can devote more time to it.

How about you? How do you deal with your biggest obstacle?

I have been asked on occasion to share his recipe with others, but I can’t. It’s not that it is some big secret, it’s just that he never uses a recipe. Geek Husband understands how breads work, so each time he makes it, he takes that understanding and goes to town, no recipe needed. Each batch is different, each time an adventure, and it is always good.

We should be approaching our writing the way Geek Husband approaches bread making. To write a story, we need to have an understanding of what makes similar stories work. We can come to this understanding by reading widely, both within or genre and not. We deepen the understanding through study of the language – learning the rules and how to break them. Once we have a deep working knowledge of how a story operates, then we branch out and write our own.

Some may worry that approaching writing this way might lead to a bunch of copy-cat books. After all, if one takes the rules of other books and applies them to one’s own book, isn’t that book destined to be a mirror of the others? Sure, this may be the case occasionally – especially when one first starts off writing – but, generally no, that’s not what will happen.

Knowing how a books structure helped it work gives you a guideline (not a hard rule, mind you) on how to structure your own book. So you take that one element – the one bit of success you know about structuring a story – and apply it to your own book. But structure is just the baseline to your book – it is the science behind what make the bread rise and bake up so nicely. All the other ingredients – the ones that really give flavor and individuality – come from you and you alone.

Don’t feel bad about looking to others’ books to help you with your own. You are not stealing their ideas or copying their writing. You are simply studying what worked (or didn’t) for them and learning how to apply that knowledge to your own writing.

What is your favorite line from your WIP?

I don’t know if this is my favorite line, but it is the one that jumped out at me, so I am going to use it. Also, I find it interesting that in all my rewriting and editing and messing around with Incubus, this is one of the only lines that has not been changed from the very, very first draft (back when I was just free-writing and didn’t even make the connection yet that what I was writing was melding into that idea I had for a book). Funny, that. Anyhow, here it is:

So, since the beginning of the year seems a great time to declare my goals, here I am doing just that. I looked at the goals I already had laid out for myself; some I changed, some stayed the same. Here they are:

2011 Writing Goals:

1. Write every day. Except Sundays…I don’t write on Sundays. I am generally pretty good at this, but sometimes I find myself getting in the habit of writing frantically one day and then skipping a few days before another frantic burst of writing. And while that works, I really don’t think it is ideal. I find that when I make the effort to write every day, even if I only get a little bit done each day, it is easier for me to stay in the groove.
2. Finally edit and polish Incubus. By now I am sure y’all are tired of hearing about my problem child. This book has given me serious fits, but I love it and I truly believe in it. And I finally, finally, finally figured out what was so darn broken with it, so I can move forward and turn my messy draft into something good now. And I will! I have wonderful people who are willing to beta-read for me…I just need to get it into a beta-worthy state first.
3. Write something NEW. I am beginning to understand the importance of having a fun secret project waiting in the wings to work on when work on my main project becomes insanity-inducing. So this year I am going to write something completely new to me – not something I have outlined and waiting in the wings or something that I have kicked around with Geek Husband or one of my writing buddies. I will write something fun and exciting and completely secret.
4. Revisit something OLD. Incubus is obviously my top priority when it comes to writing, but I do have other first drafts (much cleaner first drafts, to be honest) sitting on my hard drive waiting for a little loving. The majority of my writing energy will be devoted to Incubus, but I am definitely going to go back over these drafts and decide which project I should pursue (if any) next.
5. Prepare to (and hopefully actually do) query. This depends largely on how things go with Incubus. I feel like my writing is more where I want it to be and that I am all around better prepared to put myself out there. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I think I can get it done and polished and ready to send out into the world this year. This is a goal I will have to re-evaluate often, though, because the last thing I want to do is query too early just because I declared that I would do it this year.

2011 Blogging Goals:

1. Keep posting regularly. This shouldn’t be too tough for me – I have a lot of fun blogging and like posting. There have been a few times in the past where I just don’t feel like it, but that rarely lasts long, so I just skip a few days and get my mojo back. No biggie.
2. Comment on other blogs more. I love getting blog comments. And I love reading other blogs. But I am actually quite bad about actually commenting on other blogs (with some exceptions: I am really great about commenting to Abby and Glenna ). I really need to be better at, if I like what someone has to say, letting them know that. It’s not like it takes long, and I know I love it when people comment on my posts, so I assume others do as well.
3. Participate in the bloggy world more. I did a few blogfests last year, and I had so much fun with each of them. I would like to do more this year. They are a great way to stretch my creative muscles and get me to write something that I might not have otherwise. I have also been pretty hit-or-miss about participating in Road Trip Wednesday of late. It’s not like I *have* to do it every week, but I generally have a lot of fun with it, so I am going to try to be better about playing along.
4. Post more book reviews. So far, I have really only posted reviews when I have gotten a book from Traveling ARC Tours, and was thus required to review it. But I actually enjoy reviewing books, so I am going to make more of an effort to put reviews up on the blog. And, hey, who knows – maybe I won’t just stick to books. I love me a good movie too.
5. HAVE FUN! I love blogging and I love the blogging community. I have made friends through blogs, and I am incredibly grateful for that. But none of it would mean anything if it weren’t fun, so my biggest goal this year is to keep having fun with my blog.

There you have it – my writing and blogging goals for this year.

Did you set any new goals/resolutions this year? What are they?

So, to remedy this, I am making myself slow down. In some aspects that is. I will keep writing, because I love it, and that is what I want to do. And I will keep blogging. Really, the best way to get back to just the writing would probably be to completely back off of blogging and twitter and all of that. But I like blogging, and I like my bloggy/Twitter friends. So I am not going to do that.

I still need to slow things down, for the sake of my sanity. So what I have decided is: While I will still be blogging here, for the month of December I am not going to blog a single little bit about my writing. Not one thing for the whole month. For this month, my writing is just mine, like it was before I put myself out there into the writing interwebs.

Be prepared for a lot of randomness to take over the blog.