It lives!

Wow, it has been a while! I've been underwater with this book for months, and am slowly starting to get it together, but it hasn't been easy. 2013 has been a tough one, writing-wise - a lot of my old roadblocks, anxieties and patterns have come to the surface ... which is good, because it means I have to confront them, but isn't all that enjoyable. And doesn't leave much time for blogging. Pretty much all of my energy at the moment is going into getting out of my own way so that I can get some work done. But I am alive! And I miss you. I hope you are all having a great year so far.

Boston!

Well, we are back from a terrific time in Boston but both have horrible colds, which I suppose is inevitable after all that time spent on the subway and in the snow! AWP was just wonderful - I so enjoyed our panel (and thank you to everyone who came). The highlight for me was meeting Dominic Smith and Amanda Eyre Ward, my fellow panelists - and, of course, spending time with Mary Helen Specht, our moderator. We had a couple of days to wander about after our conference duties: we spent the first in the New England Aquarium, because it was snowing and sleeting like mad all day, and the second walking the Freedom Trail. Boston is such a beautiful city, especially in the snow, and I'm so glad we got the chance to explore a little.

Are you going to the AWP Conference in Boston?

If so, stop by on Thursday!

As part of AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs), I'll be participating in a panel entitled Writing Global Fiction for a UK and US-dominated Marketplace: Struggles and Strategies.

I'd love to see you there.

Thursday 7 March, 1:30 - 2:45pm
Room 101, Hynes Convention Center
Panelists: Amanda Eyre Ward, Andrea Eames, Dominic Smith Moderator: Mary Helen Specht

A flying visit to Brenham

Wow - long time no blog! And it's because I haven't had much to say - so far, this year has been very internal for me. Lots of introspection, navel-gazing and processing, but not an awful lot of results that can be verbalized in bloggish form. This trend may continue for a while.

LOML got his instrument certification recently, and, to celebrate, we took a trip to Brenham. Of course, now that he is allowed to fly in the clouds, it was a beautiful cloudless day.

Spiders in your brain

I've used up my word quote for the day and might even forget how to speak English by the end of the night, but, luckily, Laini has said it all for me:

"Really it would have been nice for everyone involved if I had finished this book some time ago, but that is not what happened. The thing that happened is what usually happens to me to some degree or other: I kept starting over. I would get, say, 30- or 40,000 words in and think it was YAY! and then I'd have a little break going to some event like BEA or book tour and get home and read it fresh and go: UN-YAY! YAY-retraction! I would see it wasn't quite right yet, and it's a horrible spiders-in-your-brain feeling. So I'd think about how to make it YAY! again and then I'd start from scratch - only I never really start from scratch. I'll patchwork in a lot of stuff that I loved from previous drafts, but change a lot of things too. And I did this again and again, I'm sure I've written hundreds of thousands of words on this book all told and the craziest part of all is this:

For all that drastic rewriting, it has not changed in essentials. Every step of the way, it matched right up with my idea, my concept, my plot. Even the major beats - the happenings of the story - have remained the same. So: what changed?

EVERYTHING."

"I was emailing with a writing friend the other day who has a similar process as me, and we both confessed to not really discovering what a book is "about" until it is almost done. I sometimes think of this as finding the "axis," the pivot point around which the whole story turns. At which point it must be revised, restructured. This might sound drastic and terrible but it is not. I have done it with every book and story, and it is actually a fun and comfortable procedure for me, the "embettering" of the manuscript, once the light switches on in my attic. I mean, the pieces are mostly there, but they need jiggering. The suspense threads need tightening, the character arcs need tweaking, the whole thing could stand a general awesome-izing. Which is kind of a fun name for a procedure."

Yes. This.

“Each book is a new book. I’ve never written it before and I have to teach myself how to write it as I go along. The fact that I’ve written books in the past seems to play no part in it. I always feel like a beginner and I’m continually running into the same difficulties, the same blocks, the same despairs. You make so many mistakes as a writer, cross out so many bad sentences and ideas, discard so many worthless pages, that finally what you learn is how stupid you are. It’s a humbling occupation.”

- Paul Auster

Reasons to run

"‘Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would definitely have been different." - Haruki Murakami

(Found here.)

I started running to get fit. I kept running because I found it made as much of a difference in my mental life as in my physical one. It provides training in stamina and endurance; time to think; fresh perspective; and the knowledge that concentrated focus and effort for a small amount of time every day brings concrete results. If I'm feeling stuck or I'm in a bad place emotionally, running always helps.