Another Day

I woke up feeling especially melancholy—for no real reason. I feel like I’m waiting for something. Like I’m counting on lightning to strike, and the chances of that are one in a million. Yet I’m still looking up, hoping to see a flash, wondering why it hasn’t yet come.
(Note: Actually the chances of being struck [...]

The Post I Have Been Meaning to Write

I’ve been wanting to write this post about life. Life in general. (Okay, my life in general, seeing as I can’t really know anyone else’s the way I know mine.) The post that would get through the jumble of mud and muck in my head and figure out what I should do about my daily [...]

Outlined

I finished the outline for the YA assignment and emailed it to the editors an hour ago. “Finished” is a funny word. I could have worked on that outline all weekend. For weeks, really. It’s establishing a whole new cast of characters and although I know them better than I did some days ago I [...]

Burned Again?

Maybe I should say singed again.
About a month ago I had sent a query to an agent who had encouraged me—only she wanted to see a revised, and I wasn’t sure exactly how revised and how interested she’d be upon receiving it, if, theoretically, she ever did. I never heard back. So I did what [...]

How to Know When You’re Going Overboard

Your outline is nearing 30 pages (single-spaced!) and you still feel no closer to knowing the heart of your story than you did before.
That instead of making a nice orderly list with bullet points as you have here, you have almost entire scenes sketched out, bits of dialogue, asides into outer space, name-dropping like a [...]

Body vs. Mind

Why is it that whenever I am working seriously toward a deadline (and in this case, multiple deadlines) my health falters? I don’t see what I’m doing differently except less TV and less sleep, but in reality not really that much less sleep. And then when I don’t feel good I am less inclined to [...]

Oh, Oh, Oh

You’ll be disappointed in me. I am. I wasn’t able to finish the outline by this morning—my super-ambitious self-imposed deadline that I told the editors I’d meet because I always think I am capable of finishing things before I can… it left me in a ditch. It wasn’t even a matter of the “done” versus [...]

The Novel in My Dreams

I keep dreaming about my adult novel, the one I’ve decided to send out to indie publishers but wanted to make a few character tweaks to before doing so. In the daytime I don’t have even a moment to think about that novel—with all these freelance writing assignments I said yes to, I’ve booked myself [...]

The Sinkhole That Is My Apartment

I didn’t write a word once I reached the apartment yesterday evening. I don’t know what happens when I’m inside these narrow walls—crumbling brick on one side, grayish white on the other. All of my energy is sapped once I set a foot inside. The couch swallows me up like a sinking carpet. My brain [...]

What Happens When You Are Hungry and Fidgety and Can’t Stop Blowing Your Nose?

Fifteen minutes to five o’clock, and you decide to pack up and go home. You’ll work on the outline at home, while munching on cherry tomatoes and sucking honey-lemon cough drops. You’ll motivate in the dust and squalor of your own apartment—you will! You want the outline to be good, that’s first and foremost. But [...]

What People Are Searching For

Like Slynne on So You Think I Can (some really great posts about this!), I’ve come to notice some of the search terms that have led people to find this blog. People are seeking very curious things on the Internet, or they’re using the Google search field like a confessional. Like “take off all your [...]

Memoirs of a Most Unprolific Week

Days have gone by without me having a coherent thing to post here. I don’t want to be negative either, so when I’m feeling negative I tell myself “I’ll write something good tomorrow” and there were a few tomorrows in there as I made it through the week. I actually left the comfort of my [...]

Delirious Monday

Up at 6:30 to the sound of Lil Jon on the clock radio. If I could just… get a handle on these uh… characters… hmmmm… so tired… couldn’t fall asleep last night, but: I’m awake. The first step to writing in the morning before work is being awake…

100 Days

Surely writing the first draft of a novel in 100 days is possible. And having a demanding job is no excuse:
Great writers have done it
Yes, you have a job. Yes, you have a family. Neither have stopped great writers in the past. The poet Wallace Stevens was a vice president of an insurance company and [...]

Honesty

I’m feeling bad. Someone asked me to read their manuscript and many months later I finished it. It just wasn’t for me—it really wasn’t to my taste. In my response to the author last night I just said I didn’t think that I was “the audience for it” (so much gratuitous nudity and tits talk, [...]

Heat

The heat is overwhelming, and it’s only just the start of a hot week in the city. Monday and Tuesday, if it’s true they will come close to reaching 100 degrees, there’s no way I’m leaving the building at lunch. I’ll eat from the vending machines before I walk around in that heat. It’s the [...]

I Just Want You to Like Them

I’m grinding gears in the outline for the YA novel, pausing a little on the characters. The editors created a new set of characters and a story concept and I am to run from there. My book features two girls’ perspectives, alternating chapters between them, and I think what’s slowed me down all day is [...]

Now It’s Dark

It’s dark, and I promised E I would leave here before dark. I lost track of time. The outlining is a hodgepodge of randomness. It’ll come together, though. It’s somehow easier when on deadline. Why is that so? I need my own pressure-cooker, my own hand holding down the lid.
Gotta go. Walking home, I might [...]

Night Writing

I’ve arrived at my writing spot for a night stretch, for as long as I can last, while E is on a shoot probably until 3 this morning.
I’ve arrived. I haven’t done much else. Fact is, I am somewhat sleepy and the coffee at my elbow isn’t helping. Other fact is, I now officially have [...]

5 Books I Still Haven’t Read

Alexander Chee’s post on Fictioneer gives me a challenge. (An aside: his novel, Edinburgh, is gorgous—I can’t wait to read his next one.) There are many more than five books I still haven’t read that I’ve wanted to read, and to pick five right now, right here, means I should stop saying I want to [...]