Month: March 2011

Went shooting in Salt Lake with Drew last weekend. This was the winning shot of the day.

[I may have told this story here before, but it’s on my mind, so I’m going to tell it again, anyway.]

I’m working through a revision right now. It’s the kind of revision where I go through every scene in my book, take it apart, and then put it back together in a better, stronger, more structured way. When I’ve got all the ideas straight in my head, I love this kind of revision. I can’t do very much of it in a sitting because of the way it scrambles my brain. Seriously. This is your brain. This is your brain while revising.

But it makes me think about the way my process has changed. I made this mistake for many years–I was afraid of revising. See, writing a book is so. much. work. I felt like, after I’d done all that work, I ought to have something in front of me that was good. I was convinced that if I just kept writing books, that my skills would improve to the point that I’d be writing books that were good enough. So I wrote seven books.

And here’s what I finally discovered: my first drafts need work. They aren’t very good. In fact, they are always a mess. Which means that after I have done all. that. work. I still need to do a whole lot more work. What I’d done by pushing through book after book was, in effect, give myself five books that were only 25% of the way done. (The first two aren’t worth going back to.) Oh, and I’d already done the part that I knew how to do, and would have to learn all new processes to get the manuscripts the other 75% of the way there.

That realization was slow in coming. I ran away from it for a really long time because I didn’t want to have to admit that the work to write a manuscript was only 25% of the work. I didn’t want to *do* the other 75%. And when I finally bit the bullet and started to really work on honing my revision skills, it was hard and long and there was no end in sight.

These days, I still see finishing a first draft as an accomplishment. But it’s only a 25%-of-the-way-there kind of accomplishment. I don’t get to tell myself I’m done. Not by a long shot. There are still many, many drafts to go. Maybe half the words that are in that first draft are actually going to survive. (Maybe.) So I let it sit for a while, get some feedback from readers, and get to work on that other 75% of the work. My books are much better. I’m happier, because I know I can fix the problems that need to be fixed. And I fix them in the kinds of ground-up ways that make my work stronger. I’m still far from where I want to be, but I’m getting better all the time.

The book I’m working on now has been fully rewritten once, and revised maybe five or six times. But many of those times were the old surface revisions that I used to do, where I was trying desperately to cover up the problems so I wouldn’t have to dismantle the book and restructure it. That’s the one part of the work I’ve found I can ditch–the avoidance. I used to work really hard at avoiding all that work.

I’ve been on a mini painting kick lately. I’ve made it a goal to finish up one force per month. In February I finished up the WarpPoodle force. Here’s most of them:

In March I finished up my Cryx–all two models that had been waiting for multiple years to be painted. April’s goal is my Neverborn, but I did 2/3 of them today.

The beauty of the goals is that each force has 2-5 models that need to be done. They’ve just been sitting for a long time, waiting for me to get around to them.

This is a rant, guys. You are warned.

Lately, I notice a lot of my friends apologizing for being writers. I’ve been noticing this increasing in my presence as I’ve had some success, especially with people I’ve just met, or old friends who weren’t self-identifying as writers when I saw them last.

“I wrote this book,” they’ll say, “but I’m not a really real writer. Not like you.”

The flavor varies. “Yes, I write a blog,” they’ll say, “but I’m not a writer.”

“I only write short stories,” they’ll say. “I’m not a writer.”

“I don’t write every day,” they’ll say. “I haven’t written this week. I’m not published. I’m not really a writer.”

When I press, I often uncover a different story. This friend has finished three novels. This friend attends a weekly writing group. This friend’s blog is quite good. This person is a writer. This person knows they’re a writer. But there’s this meta-think going on where they think that I won’t think they are a writer.

In general, it makes me feel sad to hear people apologizing for who they are. Specifically, it makes me sad to hear writers downplaying their own work. Even more, it upsets me when people use me as a comparison to put themselves down.

I started self-identifying as a writer when I was nineteen years old, finishing my first novel. My writing was not good. It was not published. I was not skilled. But I wrote. That made me a writer.

Not that anyone else took me seriously. Besides my mother. Thank goodness for my mother. When I told her I wanted to be a writer, she told me to go stand in a book store and look at all those people who made it as writers, and ask myself why it shouldn’t be me.

Other people weren’t so confident. I didn’t listen to those other people. For years, every time I told people what I was doing with my life, they scoffed. “So what are you going to do really?,” they’d ask.

Eventually, the scoffing stopped. It stopped around the time I finished my undergrad, and didn’t get a real job and forget about the dream. It stopped around the time I had three novels finished. People stopped scoffing at me, and started looking really confused. I wasn’t fitting the wanna-be writer script anymore. I was something else that people couldn’t quite figure out. I think part of what confused people was my confidence. I had sold exactly nothing. But I was not ashamed to call myself a writer.

Because I was a writer. I had been all along.

Now people I meet get really excited when I tell them about my writing. Sometimes I just want to roll my eyes. Where were these people when I was nineteen? They were scoffing at me, that’s where they were.

But I’m the same writer now that I was then. I’m just farther along in the process.

Others may disagree with me on this, but I think that if you write, you are a writer.

If you write a blog, you may be a blogger, much like I am a novelist. But we’re both still writers.

If you are not published, then you are not a published writer. But you’re still a writer.

If you don’t want to make a living at it, then writing may be a hobby for you. If you can’t yet quit your day job but want to, then writing might be an investment for you. But you’re still a writer.

If you write non-fiction, you are a writer. If you write fiction, you are a writer. If you are *gasp* self-published, you are a writer. If you write *gasp* fanfic, you are a writer. If you write occasionally, you are a writer.

It is okay to be whatever kind of writer you are. But if you write, you are a writer. Please don’t apologize for being who you are.

So I’ve been really quiet around here. That’s really a result of distraction. Here are all the things I’ve been doing that are not writing blog posts:

Writing: I finished a long-awaited revision and finally feel really good about that manuscript. Pretty sure it still needs some work, but I don’t think it’s going to need another full-reimagining. I’ve organized and started up on another huge revision. That’s not going well, for factors that I have nothing to do with the book.

Garden Ninja: Drew’s business is overflowing at the edges. Tax-return season is our busy time of year. The Christmas season is our slow season. Last Christmas season Drew had no gaps in work, and I feared for the busyness that would sprout in the spring. Well, that busyness is here. We’ve never had more than a four week turnaround ever–now we’re 100% booked until June. This is a great problem, really. Better too much work than not enough. It’s given Drew occasion to drop some of the work he didn’t want to be doing and focus on the stuff he really loves, which is a happy thing. But it also means we’ve been very, very busy.

Health: That’s not the reason my revision is stalling, though. New medication aside, I’m still getting sinus infections. I’m still way too allergic to things I can’t avoid. (Being allergic to dust mites is really like being allergic to the inside of people’s houses, including my own.) This last week I have finally gotten desperate enough to beg both my insurance and my doctors to please give me a shot once a week for the next three years so that I can function in my life. And I hate shots. The insurance said yes; the doctor part comes later today. I’m really hoping this helps, because I haven’t felt 100% normal in five years.

That last part may be the chief cause of my silence, because I don’t want to whine about it constantly, but it’s kind of hard when I’m this sick. So I post pictures of flowers instead. One of those is coming later today. It’s a very pretty one. (LJ people should check my photo blog.)

Other things: I’ve been trying to read a lot less online junk. Fewer blogs, fewer status updates, more international news. I’ve been succeeding on the news and failing on the social networking, but I’ve been letting myself slide while I’m sick. Once I get feeling better again (like I was a month ago, not all better) then I’ll make myself be more focused again.

Also, it’s spring! At least, it is in my backyard. My tree has buds on it. There are crocus growing in my flower beds and tulips getting all green and leafy. My rhubarb is coming up, which feels a lot like a resurrection, since that spot has been nothing but dirt for the last several months. I planted seeds in little Jiffy trays by the back door, and they’re sprouting, including the tomatoes. (Still waiting on the peppers, but the package says they take longer to germinate.) The cucumbers are looking the healthiest, and more thyme seeds came up than I thought I planted.

Spring will be the last season we haven’t tackled in our house, though the maintenance tasks look a lot less intimidating than the winter-prep ones did.

I’ve also been scaling back on a lot of my weekly activities. I had way too many activities, so I just couldn’t focus. I was raised to believe that I needed to be a 100% participant in every activity I joined–and I’ve decided that’s something about myself I need to un-learn. If I’m going to have a brain left to write, I need to not be scheduled every minute. Some things I can drop by occasionally. I need to pick only a couple things to attend every week. I think there’s some more scaling back I need to do, but I’m resisting, because I really love all the people involved in all of my social events.

I made a list of priorities a few months ago–which things I had to keep and which things were lower on the list. After the essentials (work, church, family). Then the top few social things that are most important to me. Everything else I’ve been letting slide if I don’t have the time/health/energy. I’m hoping to get back to a couple of those things when I feel better, but mostly I just feel less stressed when I have fewer places to be. Also, the writing is progressing much quicker, now that I’m not so scheduled.

Big update, but I think that’s it.