Author: Janci

I’m in the middle of a revision right now–one of those big nasty revisions where practically everything needs to change.  I get easily overwhelmed with these sorts of revisions, so I break them up into the tiniest possible pieces.  First I do a read-through of the printed manuscript and scribble notes all over the pages.  Where the margins are not sufficient for my scribblings, I add post-its.  Where the post-its are not sufficient, I insert blank pages.  With my most relentless critical voice I make notes about what’s wrong with every word, ever paragraph, every page, every chapter, every character large and small, and most especially every plot arc.

When I can think of solutions, I write them down in the margins, where they go.  For larger problems with plot arcs and characters, I might end up with dozens of notes in various places in the manuscript, just to fix that one thing, since a macro problem needs many, many micro changes to correct it.  When I can’t think of solutions, I just write down the problem, and think happy thoughts for my future self who’s going to have to be smarter than I am.  Good luck future self!  Try not to hate me too much.

Then, when I am done reading, I’ll go through the manuscript side-by-side with the digital version and make changes paragraph by paragraph.  I will be absolutely certain I cannot fix the book by this point.  The changes needed will just be too numerous.  But I can fix this first paragraph–it’s just a paragraph after all!  And then, since I fixed that one, I can fix the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that.  When I’m looking at the book in small increments, I’m not as tempted to rush, particularly if I work a little every day.  And somehow, miraculously, I will make it through the whole manuscript, one tiny change at a time.

And, of course, it will not be perfect then.  It will only be a second draft!  But the revisions tend to get smaller as I go, so this is probably the biggest one I will do for this book.  Unless, of course, it turns out to be one of those books that has to be rewritten from scratch.  If I thought it was, though, I’d be doing that instead of revising.

I’m about halfway through my critical read-through, and nearly every page I have passed is covered in ink.  Most scenes have notes in the margins saying something like, “they are talking about this, but they should be talking about this other thing entirely,” or “she’s thinking about this, but she should be thinking about these five other things instead.”

Or, in other words, current me says, “Good job, me who wrote the first draft!  You wrote a thing!  But dear future-me who will write the second draft, you’re going to have to do it again, only better this time!  Good luck with that!  And if you see me who wrote the first draft, try not to rub it in.”

Current me is kind of a jerk.

[This is part of an ongoing series about getting work done after having a child.  As always, what works for me will probably not work for anyone but me and my particular child.  But I hope you enjoy reading anyway.]

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these.  I’ve been trying to group eras together, so I wait for something to change significantly in my daughter’s development that affects my work habits, and then I take note and wait for it to change again, so I can talk about that era having just passed through it, rather than from the middle.  Six to twelve months was definitely an era, and one I quite enjoyed.

An amazing thing happened at six months–my daughter learned to crawl.  Suddenly instead of whining and struggling every time I put her down, she happily scooted around the house, and then crawled with competence, and then pulled to a stand and cruised everywhere, and then walked.  Everyone prophesied and complained at me: once they can move, they get into everything.  Once they can move, you’ll never get anything done.

So I was thrilled to discover that for my particular circumstances, the opposite was true.  Along with the ability to move came the magical ability to play happily by herself.  For multiple minutes at a time.  Sometimes, against all reason, for hours.

There are a couple of things that I think contributed to this.  One sadly unrepeatable thing is my daughter’s personality.  She’s fairly independent, not terribly destructive, and dissuaded from “getting into everything” by basic childproofing.  And childproof we did–everything we can lock or close or latch we did so, and what we couldn’t we gated off.  I read in one of those baby books that you really ought to childproof at least one room…but we childproofed everything, so I can put my baby down wherever we are and work while keeping half an eye on her.  It works well for all of us–she’s happy to explore everything she can reach, and I’m happy knowing that she’s safe while she does so.

The other thing we did to facilitate this is fill our house with toys.  There’s a toy box in every room, toys and children’s books on all the lower shelves, and larger, activity-center type toys in the corners.  I spend significant portions of my day picking up toys and books, but I also spend significant portions working, so I’ll take what I can get.

These days, my work space often looks like this:

(what you can’t see are the ants under the table . . . the perpetual ants who cannot be poisoned since they live in toddler-land)

I found during this time that the biggest barrier to getting work done was myself; it was easy to discount the five, ten, twenty, and thirty minute increments of happy playtime I had, since there was no way to know when any of them might come to an end.  The thought process that began with “there’s no point in starting now” would always end in a wasted day.  And, as always, there were times when I honestly couldn’t get work done–there were a few growth spurts and the week when the ear infection and teething and flu that hit all together–and it was easy in those times to forget that on a normal day, I was getting as much writing done as I ever did before I had a child.  I often had to give myself assigned times to write (naptime, early mornings before Drew began work) that could be guaranteed to be child-free, not because I couldn’t write with her around, but because I couldn’t get myself out of my way to take advantage of the time that I had.

I also found that to make the most of my short keyboard snatches during the day, I did more and more of my head-work while doing other things.  If I thought through a scene while I was prepping lunch, I could make the most of the fifteen following minutes by writing it down without having to pause to do the think-work.  I couldn’t afford to spend lots of keyboard time thinking, so I separated thought time and typing time as much as I could, which actually made my writing less frustrating over all.  Since I had a non-talking child during these months, there was plenty of time to think when my hands were busy.

So, against predictions, working during months six through twelve were doable at my house.   At twelve months things changed somewhat.  I’ll get back to you about that when it changes again.

2012 kicked my butt.

Last year around this time I was anxious to begin.  I was overdue with my first baby, and unsure how that was going to change my life, my work, my family.  I was ready to jump in and find out, and I kept having this thought: Janci, you are going to rock this year.

And I did.  But I wasn’t fully aware that it was going to rock me back.

And the strange part is, it had nothing to do with my baby.  The other day I ranked the list of things that were hardest for me this year, and my baby and all the millions of tasks that came with her was fifth.  FIFTH.  I’ll call that awesome thing number one for the year: I was blessed with an angelic and mellow child who is not all that hard to take care of.  (More about that will come in a Mommy Writer post, sometime next week.)

This year was also an awesome year in terms of work.  CHASING THE SKIP is a real book!  With a cover!  It was copy edited and line edited within the last year, and then I wait wait waited and it came out and people bought it and read it and gave it kind reviews.  In the month leading up to the release, I kept thinking, “I’ll be happy when this is over.”  And I was right.  I am happy.  Finally having a book in print feels like closure, even though I know it was really just another kind of beginning.

And then I wrote.  I finished revisions on three projects (on top of those line edits and copy edits above) and wrote a new novel and then half of another one.  (Yeah, didn’t finish in December.  Who is surprised?  Not me.  I’ll finish it.  It’s not on a deadline, so it doesn’t matter when, but right now I’m thinking February.)  Despite the prophecies of other nay-saying parents, my child did not end my ability to work.  (Even when she’s awake, much to my joy.)

I also sewed things, and took a few pictures (of things other than my kid).  I played many fewer video games this year, but only because a year in which both an Elder Scrolls game and a Borderlands game come out is a year we don’t play anything else.  I spent many, many hours exploring Skyrim.  It made me happy.  It still does.

But this was also the year of the absolute avalanche of medical bills.  We knew the maternity deductible was coming, but knowing it and seeing it are two different things.  So this was a year with two three-month stints where I honestly didn’t believe we were going to be able to make it work.  We didn’t have enough money, and we weren’t going to make it without real jobs.  We did make it, turns out, but that outcome was very far from inevitable.

This was also the year when I watched people I love go through terrifying personal crises, and could do literally nothing but listen and talk and watch.  This was the year my best friend’s little boy got diagnosed with cancer.  It was also the year he recovered.  There were other things I won’t talk about, but they were there, and they weren’t easy.

And, finally, it was the year I got somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty rejections–two from my own editor.  And no sales.  There is not yet a contract for a follow-up of any kind to CHASING THE SKIP.  And for most of the year that terrified me.

But something happened to me in October.  I let go.  And the last three months of the year, I finally figured out how to just do the things I can control, and let the rest go.  I finally figured out how to stop thinking about outcomes, and think instead about processes.  So this next year, I’m going to finish my most recent novel.  Then I’m going to finish three unpolished projects (including the book I wrote earlier this year, and the one I’m working on now) to get them ready for submission.  And if this is the year of thirty more rejections (or forty!  or eighty!), it won’t be because I didn’t do my part.  And in the end, that’s all I can ask of myself.

So the year rocked me.  And then I rocked it.  And this next year…I don’t even care.  I’m just going to live my life and parent my baby and write my books until I don’t feel like writing my books anymore.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

I was sixteen when I started dating my first boyfriend, and we were together for a year and a half–breaking up right before we graduated from high school. A year and a half felt like forever, and a lot of it was great, but by spring of my senior year, I was unhappy.

I thought about breaking up a lot. And every time I did, I thought about all the good things about my boyfriend, and about being in a relationship in general. I always decided it was worth it, but the unhappiness spread. It crept into everything. It made even the good things miserable.

So one day I’d had enough of being unhappy. We got into a fight and I decided I was done. I’d said it before, but for the first time, I meant it, and we both knew the difference.

And then something happened that I didn’t expect. I’d expected to feel worse, but I didn’t. I felt better. Lots better. Peaceful and happy and like I was really done with all the things that made me unhappy. And while my ex did lots of things after that that made me lividly mad and then eventually we became the acquaintance kind of friends, never, never did I think it would have been better if we’d stayed together

And that’s when I learned this important truth: it is better to be alone than to be in a bad relationship. It’s better to make a scary change than it is to be unhappy.

Want to read what other teamTEENauthor members have to say about breaking up? Read on!

E.C. Myers
Hilary Weisman Graham
Elizabeth Amisu

So, I “did” Nano. I started writing a brand new novel on November 1st (largely because I finished my new outline on October 31st).

And in November I wrote 9,500 words, which is slim for me in a normal drafting month. So much for Nano.

November also held a teething baby, a flu, a cold, and a whole bunch of drama. But really, I didn’t write 50k because I didn’t take it seriously. When the goal of every day of my life is to write words, it’s really hard to get more dedicated to it than I already am. So, 9.5k instead of 50.

I’m not upset about it, though, because about 8k of those words are really good words that I’m going to get to keep. I’ve already written the emotional heart of the story, and it’s solid. That gives me a powerful foundation for writing the rest, which is a great accomplishment for any month. (The other 1.5k is the first chapter. I’m going to have to write that again, as always.)

So I failed at Nano but won at life. I’m okay with that.

(And I still hope to have this book done by the end of December, which was always the real goal. That means I have to write four times as many words this month. Better get cracking.)

This month teamTEENauthor is writing on this theme: so you want to be a writer.  Volumes can (and have!) been written on this subject, but I’m going to take a stab at it anyway.  Here is my (incomplete) list of things I think you ought to do if you want to be a writer.  I’m going to limit myself to just the most important things, here.  And remember that writing, like most other things, can be done a million different ways and still done write.

If you want to be a writer, write.  This is the single most important thing you can do, and it’s true at every stage.  If you want to be a writer, then you must produce words.  Sometimes you must produce words you love, and sometimes words you hate, and think are stupid, but you must produce them all the same.  Produce the words you want to write and not the words you think you ought to want to write.  Work in whatever medium you love–blogs, novels, nonfiction, short fiction, poetry, plays.  Write what makes you excited to write, because you’re going to be spending a lot of lonely time with those words.

Let people read what you write.  This is hard for some people, but if you want to be a writer, you have to learn to interface with your audience in healthy ways.  This is going to require practice, so take a deep breath and let other people read.

Listen to what they say.   Here’s a harsh truth: readers can be wrong about how you should fix your writing, but they are never wrong about what they like.  If your readers are bored, you have a problem.  If they hate your characters, you have a problem.  And it is surely your problem, and not theirs.  A reader can rarely tell you how to solve these problems, because you are the writer, not them.  But listen to their problems with an open mind, especially if you’re hearing the same things from multiple people.

Learn to really revise.   This was the step that took me the longest.  I used to tweak a few things and call it good.  Friends, sometimes revision means starting over from scratch.  Sometimes revision means rewriting whole scenes.  Sometimes it means dropping characters, or adding characters, cutting thousands of words (keep them in a graveyard file if you must, but cut them!) or adding new chapters or scenes.  Be ruthless in your revision.  For me, this is where 75% of the work happens.  I had a professor once who said that great papers were not written, they were rewritten.  This is doubly true for fiction.

Once you’ve revised, kick it out the door.  Once you’ve revised, you need to find out how to submit your writing to your desired publication venue, and then send it out.  Even if you aren’t good enough yet.  Even if it just gets rejected (which it will, again, at every stage).

Get discouraged, but don’t let it stop you.  I was going to say that you shouldn’t get discouraged, but please.  Every writer I know gets discouraged.  Most steps of this process are hard, and discouragement is natural.  Stop for a while, if you need.  But don’t give up just because it’s hard.  You can do hard things.

When you think you are done, begin again.  Write.  Again, if you want to be a writer, you write.  Don’t be afraid to take on the title of writer early, and own it.  If you write–whatever it may be that you write–you are a writer.  Own it.  Hate it if you must, but also love it.  And above all, write.

Want to read what other authors have to say?  Check the links below.

E. C. Myers

Pip Harry

Elizabeth Amisu

Julie Cross

Mindee Arnett

Erica O’Rourke 

Michelle’s latest book, BONDED , came out last week.  It’s a collection of three fairytale novellas–a prequel to Sleeping Beauty, a retelling of One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes, and a sequel to Cinderella.

Today I’m happy to post an interview with Michelle, who happens to be not only an excellent writer, but a fantastic person.  Today we’re swapping interviews, so you can find her spotlight of Chasing the Skip over at her blog.

I’ve asked her to talk a little about fairy tale theory, which was an academic obsession of mine as an undergrad.  As a result, the question I asked sounds a little like a short answer from an English test–but Michelle was kind enough to give it a thoughtful answer.

Cornucopia of Reviews posted an interview with me today.  You can read it over there.  

I’m supposed to be drafting, but my child decided to go through a big sleep disruption instead, which involves much less sleep and more whining than I would like.  Nano.  Ha.  Good thing I’m not stressing it.

And because we got many inches of snow, which have now turned into ice, here’s an overexposed picture of a fountain.  This fountain is now turned off for the winter.  I should go take pictures in the snow, but it’s cold out there.

…it is most probably because:

they believe different things than you do,

they prioritize their various beliefs differently than you do

or

they have different approaches to  problem solving than you do.

It is probably NOT because:

they are stupid,

they are grossly misinformed,

they are sheep who cannot think for themselves,

or

they want to destroy America.

This is true no matter which side of the aisle you sit on.