What I’m Thinking Now

I called the police this morning.  I’ll have to tell you about that next time (it’s nothing disastrous).  This post has to do with writing my novel — where I am, where I’m going.

This past weekend, I realized a few things:

1.  I really, really love this story and these characters.  I mean, of course I always have — that’s why I’m writing the book! — but now their situation is getting bigger, more intense.  I’m walking around with an ache in my chest; the intense longing of my characters has become my own. 

2.  I love my story so much that I don’t really care whether anyone else likes it or not.  I don’t care if it never gets published.  I’m just so happy that it is, that it exists!  After all this time, it’s finally becoming a novel, not just being an idea for one, sitting mostly untapped in the recesses of my mind.  Now that it’s finally coming out — and I know I will finish it this time — I love it like it’s my own precious baby.  Intellectually, I know it is imperfect.  But I don’t care, because I love it; it is mine.  It’s like I want to finish writing it, make whatever changes I see fit, print it out and wrap it up in a receiving blanket (yes, just like a baby), and hide it safely under my bed, where no one but me can ever read it or criticize it.

Stupid, right?  But that’s how I feel.

Which brings me to …

3.  When all is said and done and the novel is finished, I am going to mourn.  I’ve been writing like a crazy person, wanting to pour out the story, get it down.  But I know now that the faster I write, the sooner it will be over.  I’m going to be so sad!  I have lived with this story, these characters, for more than 17 years — that’s nearly half my life!  These “story people”  have become a part of who I am — in so many ways I never would have imagined.  Saying goodbye is going to hurt a lot.  Yes, I have ideas for other novels, and of course I will begin one of those as soon as I’m finished with this one.  But nothing else I write will ever mean as much to me as this first story.

Which brings me back ’round to #1 — how much I have fallen hopelessly in love with this book.  Isn’t that weird?  But it’s a very good place to be.

Fall

Where on earth does the time go?

I don’t know about y’all, my friends, but I have been busy!  An exceedingly long pit stop at this awesome blog this afternoon inspired me to get myself back over here to post something. 

It’s autumn!  My favorite time of year.  It began at the end of August, with the start of football season.  My husband is a serious football fan, and it’s football, football, and more football from September through February at our house.  I enjoy the occasional game now and again, but mostly I just enjoy the sound of it on television.  That says “fall” to me.

Here in Florida, we don’t exactly get the leaves changing colors and falling, but the weather did make an abrupt turn from balmy to crisp, over night one day last week.  Wonderful.  It didn’t stay that way, of course.  This morning, waiting for the bus with my son, it felt like we were breathing soup.

But nothing stops the apple carts from showing up in the grocery stores, and I love that part of autumn, too.  The last time I was at Wal-mart, I really wanted to buy a jug of cider, but alas—no room in my fridge.

And finally, we can’t forget the October theme song on NOGGIN:  “I feel like I’m fallin’ for fall.”  I know all the words, and yes I do indeed sing along every time it comes on on the TV.  My boys think their mom is a little bit weird. 

Has the ill-named “swine flu” hit you yet?  I don’t know for sure if that’s what we’ve had here, but it’s likely, since it’s the going thing, apparently.  All three of my boys have been sick.  The oldest got an ear infection.  The middle guy caught a fever and cough (plus some vomiting—fun).  And the littlest has had a fever, too, plus gunky eyeballs.  Poor little chaps.  Charlie (in the middle) stayed home from kindergarten yesterday and today, but he should be able to go tomorrow, we think, as he’s been fever-free all day today.

In other news, I’ve started attending a Bible study at my parish on Monday mornings.  We’re doing the Great Adventure Bible Study, put out by Jeff Cavins of EWTN fame.  So far, so good.  The facilitator asked me if I would be a “table leader” for one of the small groups, and I really wasn’t sure about it because 1) I was dragging my feet about the study in the first place and 2) I’m pretty introverted and am one of the wallpaper people in those types of groups, for the most part.  (You know what I mean—I don’t say much; I blend into the wallpaper.)  But I told her I’d do it, and I’m so glad I did.  It’s turning out to be such a blessing, as is the study itself, as are the women in my group.  It’s wonderful to be studying the Bible again … I’d sort of neglected it for a while there in favor of other things.  (“Shame, shame, shame, everybody knows your name,” as my grandpa Earl would have said!)

Still plugging away on my novel.  I think I told you I had to take the whole thing apart and begin again.  It’s going much more smoothly now.  I’m making extremely rapid progress.  Working on Chapter Sixteen!  I have a couple of thoughts about that, but I think I will save them for my next post.  That will force me to come back here tomorrow and write some more, since I know exactly what I mean to say about it.  I am loving writing!

Happy Fall, y’all!

Making Up for Lost Time

Looks like I’m neglecting the old blog again, doesn’t it?

A lot has been happening around here.  First, we went on that trip to St. Pete Beach.  We had a great time—I celebrated my birthday while there, we swam in the pool a lot, I went shopping with my mom and sister, the boys played with their cousins (and my oldest got to go fishing with Grandpa).

Halfway through our time in St. Pete, I began to strongly suspect I was pregnant.  So I took a home pregnancy test and was thrilled when it came out positive.   A little apprehensive, for various reasons I won’t go into here, but really really happy.  A new baby!  My boys had been asking for one of those!  And I love being a mom.  Love it, love it.

We returned home from St. Pete, and the two older boys started school on the 24th of August.  The next day, my littlest one turned 4.  He was missing his big brothers, so I tried to make it up to him by taking him to the park, letting him help me make his birthday cake (chocolate, of course—it’s the only kind that’ll get eaten around here). 

At two o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, August 26th, I miscarried the baby.  I was only 5-1/2 weeks pregnant.  But I knew it was coming; I’d been spotting since the previous Friday.  Unbelieveably, I was also completely at peace with what was happening.  I’d prayed and prayed for peace, for acceptance, and the Lord had seen fit to give it to me just in time.  That morning of Levi’s birthday, when I’d taken him to the park . . . we’d just gotten out of the van, and he went running toward the big slide.  The sun was shining, the breeze was blowing across my face and in my hair; and I just realized:  I am so very, very blessed.  I have three wonderful boys and an amazing husband; a nice house to live in, clothes to wear, food to eat, and the intense joy of my Catholic faith.  God has only and ever taken marvelous care of me and my family.  In that moment, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of peace.  I know God loves me and has His plans for me and my family.  That may or may not include another baby.  Either way, if they are His plans, they can only be the best for us, if we are following Him.

I’d read in my Natural Family Planning book that, in the event of a miscarriage, it can’t hurt to do a conditional baptism for the little fetus/baby, just in case.  I mean, it was only slightly larger than a lemon seed, all red and bumpy, with the clear, fragile umbilical cord attached.  Did it look like a baby?  Not at all.  But from a spiritual perspective, knowing that all human life is created by God, in His image, and that He knew us before we were knit in our mothers’ wombs, there could be no question that this tiny little bundle was indeed a person.  After all, God is outside of time and space.  A person is a person is a person, regardless of age.  Just as I’m not “more” of a person than my 4-year-old—simply because I am older than he is—a newborn is not “more” of a person than a 3-week-old unborn baby.

So anyway, I put some water in a coffee cup and baptized the baby.  Then I put it in a small jar with some water, to be buried later.  When I told my husband what had happened, he was as disappointed as I was; but we were both okay then, and we’re both okay now.  I feel the occasional pang about it—like at church when the pastor prayed “for all pregnant women and women in labor.”  (What about women who’ve just lost babies?)  But things like that are just small little sufferings to be offered up.  At Mass, the prayers for the dead have become especially meaningful to me, for now I won’t only be thinking of grandmas and grandpas and a couple of old classmates whenever we make those prayers.

It’s been such a blessing, during what I thought would be an unbearable time, to have supportive friends, and of course my husband.  It’s also been a blessing to have my writing. 

A little while ago, as I was struggling to write chapter six of my novel, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the entire beginning of the book was not working.  I’d had plenty of positive feedback from my critiquers, but I knew that what I was writing was not staying true to my original vision for the story.  I liked what I had written, but somehow, it didn’t seem right.

And so, it was kind of like a person who knits, who gets a ways into a project and then realizes it isn’t right and she must unravel the whole thing and begin again.  (That’s how my mom was able to understand how I could cope with this awful process of starting over.)

I began again.  First, by spending several intense brainstorming sessions trying to figure out what I needed to do to return my novel to the vision I first had for it all those years ago.  Not that I am opposed to change.  My book is not going to be the book I first imagined, because, in the beginning, I had really imagined so little.  But there were things there that were good—things that made me long to read this story I’d thought up—and it bothered me that I had left some of those things by the wayside.  I thought I was doing what was right and best for my story; yet it wasn’t working.  I had to go back and find the heart of what I was trying to say in writing this.

There is so much more that goes into a novel than anyone but the author can realize.  So many plans, so much research (thank heavens for the Internet!).  So much hard work.

I’ve begun again, and things are going so much better than they had been.  I’ve got a prologue (which, honestly, is terrible and will probably get the axe).  I’ve got two-and-a-half chapters—good chapters, I think.  They look almost nothing like the first 2-1/2 chapters of my initial version, that I’d been working on earlier this year.  But they feel right to me.  Not perfect, by any stretch, but right.

Here’s a No-Duh Discovery:  typing is much faster than writing things out by hand.  I knew that intellectually, but I love the feeling of writing so much—of sitting with a pen in my hand, notebook in my lap.  I’d been writing everything out by hand first, then typing it.  At that rate, I figured I could probably have my first draft (the one I was working on before) complete in about a year or so.  But now, wanting to make up for the time I’d lost in starting again, I decided to take my story straight from my mind to the computer screen.  Typing.  I’m amazed at how much more I’m accomplishing each day.  Now, I’m thinking I’ll have that first draft finished in a month or two.  Talk about a huge difference!

So that’s what’s been going on in my world.  What’s up in yours?

The Simple Woman’s Daybook

For today: Monday, August 10, 2009

Outside My Window… It’s starting to look a bit gloomy, but I doubt it will rain (even though the plants could always use it).

I am thinking… I have way too much to do before our trip to St. Pete!

I am thankful for… The Internet.  It saves me so much time!

From the kitchen… Leftovers:  scalloped potatoes, split pea soup, and macaroni and cheese.  Have to eat it up before we leave!

I am wearing… A navy blue T-shirt and navy blue stretch pants (or are they called leggings?).  They’re my makeshift jammies while all my nightgowns are in the laundry.  (And yes, I’m still wearing them at quarter-to-five in the afternoon!)

I am creating… Still the novel, though right now it feels like I’m doing more freaking out than creating, unfortunately.

I am going… To see my mom and dad, brothers, sister, sisters-in-law, brother-in-law, and nieces and nephews in two days!  I’m also going to turn 36 on Thursday.

I am reading… Theme and Strategy by Ronald B. Tobias.  It’s supposed to help fiction writers write focused, meaningful, well-organized fiction.  It’s also part of why I’m freaking out.

I am hoping… To get past this panicked stage soon.  I’ve been in it for more than a week, and it’s not helping me get my book written at all.

I am hearing… Some stupid show on Nickelodeon—oh, it’s Fairly Oddparents, my least favorite.  And no one’s even watching the TV, so I am going to turn it off right this minute!  Ahhh, there.  Now I’m only hearing the washer and dryer, the dishwasher, and the sound of my boys playing.

Around the house… Well, the clothes are getting washed and dried, as are the dishes, and the kids are playing. 

One of my favorite things… Going to St. Pete Beach and staying at my mom and dad’s.  Really looking forward to it.

A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week… Go to St. Pete and hopefully have a lovely time!  Hopefully that will include thrifting with my mom and sister and lots of swimming!

Here is a picture thought I am sharing…

A stand of bamboo in the middle of a park by the river in Cherokee, NC.

Be sure to visit Peggy to read more daybooks and/or get the guidelines so you can participate, too!

Writing by Faith (and not by sight)

After two days of reading loads of literary agent blogs, my head is spinning.

I’m not one of those who writes with the goal of publication.  I write because I can’t help myself. Just ask my friend Sabrina, who could probably show you whole boxes of letters I’ve written her over the years—letters about nothing, letters about everything.*  All those years I was avoiding novel-writing, I was not not writing.  I love to write, so I find a way to do it regardless of what’s going on in my life.

(*Sabrina, don’t you dare show anyone those letters!)

Still, I’m fascinated by the world of book-publishing.  Sometimes, I think I missed my calling as an editor, so it’s interesting to me to see what’s going on in the industry—what’s “hot,” what publishers are looking for and not looking for, how the Web has changed submission guidelines, and so forth.  There’s a ton of advice out there for aspiring writers, and one doesn’t have to look very hard to find it.

The “thing” these days is to finish your novel and then query an agent.  “Query” means you send an e-mail telling them, in approximately four succinct paragraphs, what your book is about, what genre it falls under, how many words it is, and what qualifies you to write it.  (”I won a Hopwood award at the University of Michigan!”  No, not me; that’s just an example.)  Really, they don’t want to know anything personal about you unless you’ve won a fiction-writing award of some kind.  In other words, no need to mention being a stay-at-home mother of however-many-kids living in whichever state—that sort of thing.  [Edited to add:  A query letter is usually accompanied by the first five pages of the novel, or maybe a 5-page synopsis, depending on which agent you're after.]

Reading web sites like Query Shark and blogs like (the now-defunct) Miss Snark is super educational.  You really get a feel for what these insanely busy agent people are looking for in the 60 seconds each day they set aside for going through the tons of queries in their e-mail inboxes.

So last night, just for fun, I made myself do this little exercise:  If I had to write my query letter right now, what would it say?  I wrote it.  And actually, it wasn’t half bad.  In fact, if I ever do decide to query an agent about this project, I will probably go back to what I wrote last night, tighten it up, and use it; I really do think it captures my story in a nutshell, and hopefully in a way that provokes the reader to want to read the book.

Writing that “pretend query” was a great little exercise in helping me get to the heart of my story and seeing:  What is this really about?  That’s what agents want:  to know what the book is about—not what its themes or moral lessons are or what emotions it will evoke in the reader.  They just want to know what it’s about.  So I’m glad I did the exercise. I learned a few things.

Here’s what I’ve realized, though, after writing a potential query and after having spent two days reading one agent blog after the next:

1)  Apart from my mom and a few close friends, nobody is going to want to read my book.  Even if I spend years on it and turn it into something truly incredible, no one will want to look at it in publishing.  The subject is too controversial, but maybe, at the same time, too trite.  Probably agents get tons of queries for books just like mine, and they go “Ew!” and send form rejections before they even get past the first paragraph of the letter.  Seriously.  (I think of Query Shark.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I bet she would totally do this.)

2)  In spite of that sad state of affairs, I still must write this book.  For some bizarre reason, I am compelled to write it, and have even felt that God Himself wants me to write it (crazy as that may sound to some).  Perhaps the purpose is so that I will learn what it takes to write a novel, so that I will be prepared to write some other novel that He has in mind for me to write somewhere down the road, and maybe that will be the one that is meant to see the light of day in bookstores around the country.  Who can say?  I just know that I have to write this book.  I can’t put it away and forget it.  I’ve tried that before, dozens of times, and I know this for sure:  IT DOESN’T WORK.  The book will not leave me alone.  It insists upon having life, and no one but me can give it.

In Chapter After Chapter, Heather Sellers writes. . .

When you write, you believe in something no one else can see.  You spend lots of time committed to a project for which there are no assurances, no guarantees. . .Writing is communing with the the unseen; not everyone will understand why a normal, intelligent, educated, seemingly balanced person would devote her energy to something that can’t be proven:  your writing success.  A novel-in-progress may not exist for a long, long time.  But you believe in it anyway.  And even if you forget to believe in it, even if you doubt it, it’s still there.

In other words:  We write by faith and not by sight.

So I guess I’ll just keep going, making a big mess with this draft and trying to clean it up in the second, third, fourth, and subsequent drafts.

When I went off to college, my dad gave me this little business card on flashy gold cardstock—I think I still have it somewhere.  On it were three words:  Discipline And Endurance. I’ve never had much discipline, and I’ve never really endured much before (other than drug-free childbirth!).  But this novel-writing project is really teaching me about those two things.

Maybe that’s what writing this book is really all about.  I still have so much to learn.

The Spaces Between

Last night, I began revisions on chapter six, the one that was giving me fits in yesterday’s post.  I think I figured out why it wasn’t working.  Two main reasons:

1) I had an important scene shown from my female protagonists POV (point of view); then I switched scenes and went into my male protagonist’s POV and had him remember, rather awkwardly, what had just happened in the previous scene.

2) I was having my male protagonist respond to something in a way that wasn’t in keeping with his character.  He was getting angry and tormenting himself over something he saw—or thought he saw—when truly, for the type of person he is, a more realistic response would have been concern, maybe a bit of worry, but certainly not anger.

So I am working through the chapter anew, with those things in mind.  Wonderful author Julie Lessman, who I mentioned in yesterday’s post, offered me some examples from her own fiction that helped clear up the POV dilemma.  She affirmed something I had figured out for myself last night.  That was a lovely relief!

The revisions are going well, I think.  But I’m realizing a new problem:  When we plot our novels, we have all these scenes in mind; we might see them in a specific order and/or know the calendar dates on which they occur, etc.  But when we sit down to write, we cannot just have our characters hopping from one of those scenes to the next.  There are things that must connect those big scenes—little moments that give the characters’ lives a human quality, that give them (and the reader) ”down time.”

Those spaces in between big scenes are the hardest things to write.  They’re nothing, really; just “filler,” in a way.  Yet they are the threads that hold the whole mess together.  They are essential, and knowing which little bits of a character’s day or week or month to include—to show him or her having a “real life” in between the big scenes—is not easy at all.

I find myself writing all kinds of weird stuff, such as characters having random, odd-ball conversations with other characters or making trips to the grocery store or grading papers (one of my characters is a teacher).  Not for pages and pages, but maybe just a paragraph here or there, depending.  And it’s when I’m writing those little bits that I feel the least in control of my novel.

Am I unique?  I don’t think so.  But I wonder if this part ever gets easier.

P.O.V. Peril: Questioning My ‘Wise Guides’

Chapter Six is giving me fits. It should have been done already. I should be typing it up, getting it ready to send to my critique partners. But no. It’s sitting in my red binder, looking really really bad. A big mess. It’s only “sort of” done. All the scenes are there, but the last one is sketchy and all the ones before it have a problem—a big one. But I don’t know what it is.

I spent some time yesterday evening brainstorming in my notebook, just writing down some thoughts about this chapter and what might be wrong with it. In the first place, I panicked right in the middle of writing this chapter, because up ’til now my story has crawled along at an almost soap-opera-like pace, and now suddenly things are speeding up, and I felt like it was getting away from me. That was scary. But it also doesn’t seem to be the problem with Chapter Six. Perhaps it is part of the problem, though.

All I can figure out is that I’m working some of these scenes from the wrong point-of-view (POV), and that in my haste to get the chapter written, I’ve had characters (one in particular) acting in a way that goes against his nature—just in a small way, but still.

So last night, I was just plain stuck.

In Chapter After Chapter, Heather Sellers recommends that all book-writers choose “Six Wise Guides” to refer to as they write.   These are the books to study and to refer to when problems arise—and only six, so as not to get overwhelmed and confused by too many good ideas/techniques/styles/etc.  The first three are to be books on writing.  Sellers recommends one for inspiration; one on craft; and one on things like manuscript preparation, submission to publishers and agents, marketing your book, etc.  The second three should be three books “exactly like the one you want to write.”

When I told my husband about the three “exactly like the one you want to write,” he rolled his eyes and said what I thought the first time I read about the Wise Guides:  “Exactly like it?  If they’re exactly like it, then why don’t you just read those?  Why bother writing your book at all?”

I tried to explain what I think Sellers really meant:  three books from the same genre; three books that are so amazing you set them down after reading and go, “I wish I’d written that!”; three books with similar themes to the one you are trying to write.  That sort of thing.

Sounds simple, right?

I had a dickens of a time coming up with my three Wise Guides for fiction.  The how-to books were a snap: I chose the Sellers book, of course, as well as On Writing Romance by Leigh Michaels and Revision and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by James Scott Bell.  Maybe I could’ve chosen better, but those seemed like the right choices as I was beginning.  But really, I could not think of a single novel that is “exactly like the one I wanted to write.”  My main motivation all along was to write the book I’ve always wanted to read but that didn’t exist!

So I considered what came close.  Staggerford by Jon Hassler.  Wild Rose by Ruth Axtell Morren.  And then I threw in Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy, because it’s an amazing book—one of my all-time favorites—and is loaded with characters, much like I knew my own novel would be.  Its subject matter and themes aren’t perfectly in line with what I’m writing, but I figured “so what?”

Well, the time finally came.  I was stuck; I needed help.  Pull out the Wise Guides.

I went to the Binchy book first, because of all the characters, lots of POVs.  Except it turns out that she mixes them all together, the POVs.  She’ll start a scene with one character and switch to another, and another another, as many as she feels like.  Lots of head-hopping.  Just reading a few scenes, it took me several minutes to adjust to that, and honestly, I wasn’t sure I liked it.  Yet I know without a doubt that Scarlet Feather is a superb book.

Moving along.  Wild Rose is a Christian romance novel, written in a style like most romance novels these days—with two POVs, the heroine’s and the hero’s, alternating.  I love books written this way.  It’s clear, easy to follow.  It’s also not how I’m writing my novel—at least, not right now.  I was too impatient last night to delve into this book more intently.  I needed to look at an example of multiple points of view, shown in alternating fashion. I trust Wild Rose will help me later on, though.  It’s a beautiful novel.

I haven’t read Staggerford in years, but it’s always stuck with me.  In my memory, it was all third-person singular.  Bad memory.  It’s another head-hopper novel.  An awesome, amazing novel with selective head-hopping.  No help there.

I seemed to recall that LaVyrle Spencer always did a good job of switching POV with each scene, and that she would show more than just the hero’s and heroine’s points of view.  She always had good subplots going on.  I dug out Vows, my all-time favorite of her books.

Guess what? 

As I’d done with the other novels, I opened it up to chapter six.  Right away, I was reading this POV, then that POV, then this one again. . .head-hopping.  Yet, it works so well for LaVyrle Spencer.  I was immediately roped into the story, my heart started to ache—she does such a fabulous job of portraying the emotions associated with falling in love!—and I couldn’t put it down. 

But why had I remembered this all wrong?  I’d thought she switched POV only with scene changes.  I went back to the beginning of the novel, where she began with just her hero, riding into town.  About three paragraphs after he sees the heroine for the first time, the POV shifts to her, then back to him again.  She commingles POVs, so we can see the hero’s thoughts on one line and the heroine’s on the next.  It’s incredible and beautiful and probably so far above my skill level that it’s not even funny.

*Sigh*

Now what?

I turn to Julie Lessman.  All three of her novels so far are loaded with characters, and I knew I wasn’t remembering wrong:  she really does switch POV only with scene change.  She’s a superb storyteller, too.  Here is something I can wrap my brain around.  Perhaps I need to make one of her books a Wise Guide.

[Correction:  I said in the above paragraph that Julie Lessman switches character POV with each scene.  If fact, she often switches POV within scenes, but she does it by leaving white space between the sections, so it's very clear.  I think I got confused when I was rapidly perusing all this fiction for some sort of direction.  I saw that lovely white space, saw that there was a new POV, and assumed, "Ah yes, new POV, scene change," without looking more closely.  I was just looking for something that looked right, something I could hang on to and know would provide good examples, and A Passion Denied was it!  That book is going into my Wise Guides pile, for sure.]

But what does it all mean, that these novels I most admire, that have stuck with me for years and years, are written this certain way, with all these head-hopping POV shifts?  Am I supposed to write that way, myself?  Have I been doing it “wrong” for six chapters?

What a muddle.  I went to my fiction Wise Guides for help and came away all confused.  Maybe I need to turn to my how-to Wise Guides instead.  Or maybe there is no easy solution to the problem I am having.  Maybe I just need to be patient.  Maybe the subject matter of this chapter is all wrong in the first place and will have to go to the cutting room floor.  Maybe I won’t be able to write these scenes until much farther down the road, when my first draft is complete.

Maybe the muddle is meant to show me (again) that I need to let go of my awful perfectionism and just let something be terrible and off-kilter for a while.  It’s not the end of the world.  I think I’ll just get that chapter typed up and put it out there.  I have friends who will probably turn out to have a lot more wisdom than those Wise Guides when it comes to this mess I have made.

Onward.

The Simple Woman’s Daybook

Ordinarily, we do The Simple Woman’s Daybook on Mondays; but on Sunday night I had an attack of vertigo and wound up spending practically all day yesterday in bed, recovering. 

So this is my Daybook for today, Tuesday, August 4, 2009.

Outside My Window… Sunlight is streaming through the pines and oaks.  The yellow pepper plant on my deck has grown to exceed all my expectations, but the poor cherry tomato is barely hanging on.  I don’t know what happened there; the one we had last year positively flourished.

I am thinking…  About my novel.  I’m always thinking about my novel these days!

I am thankful for…  My dear and wonderful friend Sabrina, who gives me pep talks when I needed them so badly.

From the kitchen…  Homemade pizza last night for supper.  I think I’ve finally hit on the perfect crust recipe!

I am wearing…  A light blue T-shirt, navy blue soft cotton pants.  Comfy!

I am creating…  Plans for the rest of my book (of course!).

I am going…  No where.  I’m still pretty exhausted from the anti-nausea medicine I took the other night.  That stuff always wipes me out.  I’m content to stay at home for a while.

I am reading…  Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process by Barbara Shoup and Margaret Love Denman.  It’s sort of inspiring, sort of depressing!

I am hoping…  My energy will return sooner rather than later.  I’m so out of it, I didn’t even realize I’d “typed over” some parts of this Daybook entry—this laptop tends to do that, unless I am very very careful to hit the “insert” key.

I am hearing…  Go, Diego, Go! on TV.  My 3-year-old loves that show!

Around the house…  My kitchen is a real mess.  But the boys’ toys are cleaned up!  We spent 3 hours cleaning the living room and playroom last week.  There were toys EVERYWHERE!  But once it was done, it was great, and I could finally vacuum!

One of my favorite things…  Black ink all over my fingers after a productive writing session!

A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week…  Tidy up my kitchen, do some laundry, write.

Here is a picture thought I am sharing…

Cheerful Marigolds

Be sure to visit Peggy to read more daybooks and/or get the guidelines so you can participate, too!

Flicks

Only managed to get one-and-a-half pages written yesterday, because I got wrapped up in movies.

First, in the afternoon, I saw that Gospel Movie Channel (or is it Gospel Music Channel?) was showing the 1996 made-for-TV movie Home Song, based on the novel by LaVyrle Spencer.  Spencer used to be my absolute favorite author ever, and I’d read this book when it first came out, as well as seen the movie way back when.  But because there is nothing new under the sun, I knew the story of Home Song had a few tiny similarities to the story I am writing, so I thought it might be educational to watch.

It’s a pretty bad movie.  Sort of a lesson in the way novels that are mostly “talking heads” (people having conversations) and inner monologues (people thinking about how bad things are) do not translate so well to the big (or small) screen.  Good book, blah movie.  It didn’t help that the acting was just so-so.

But whatever.  Was I educated?  I’m not sure.  Maybe it was mostly a reminder of what things I don’t want in my own novel and of why I don’t look up to LaVyrle Spencer as a novel-writing goddess anymore.  (It’s a morals thing.)

Last night, Brian and I didn’t get around to having supper until after the boys were in bed.  We sat down to eat at around 9:30 p.m. and decided to watch the TMC presentation of the 1978 film Death on the Nile, which I had recorded on the DVR months ago.

Now this was worth watching.  Based on Agatha Christie’s mystery novel of the same name, it features Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot.  And the cast was just stellar:  Angela Lansbury (who has ever and always been so underrated), Bette Davis (love her voice!), Olivia Hussey, Maggie Smith, David Niven, Mia Farrow, David Kennedy, and Simon MacCorkindale (who looked so familiar to me, but I think only because he looks so much like the late author L.M. Montgomery’s husband, Ewan Macdonald—wonder if they were related?).

I was a little worried that, having been made in the ’70s, this film might be a little over-the-top dorky.  But no.  It was just terrific, all around.  And it was actually filmed in Egypt, which was so cool.  Brian and I had the murder solved before it even happened, but I think that’s because we’d both read the book years ago and have read so many Christie novels and seen so many TV shows and films based on her work.  You get familiar, you can sense who the bad guys are.  With this one, we loved how, as Hercule Poirot confronted each suspect, we got to see how each of them could have done it.  Unfortunately, that meant it was sort of like the same character got murdered eight times!  A tiny bit tedious.

But oh, if you haven’t seen that movie, it’s so worth it. 

In other news, I’ve been re-reading Howard Mohr’s How to Talk Minnesotan: A Visitor’s Guide, brushing up on my native tongue so I can make sure the dialogue in my novel sounds Minnesota-natural:

Yep.

You bet.

Quite the deal.

Whatever.

Speed

In her 1934 classic, Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande encourages hopeful writers to develop a daily habit of writing several pages—of anything—first thing in the morning.  I recall the same advice from Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones.

I never could get into the habit of “morning pages,” but the whole point of that was to get the wannabe writer to write at the same time, every day, without fail.  Brande says,

Within a very short time you will find that the exercise has begun to bear fruit.  The actual labor of writing no longer seems arduous or dull.  You will have begun to feel that you can get as much (far more really) from a written reverie as from one that goes on almost wordlessly in the back of your mind.  When you can wake, reach out for your pencil, and begin to write almost on impulse, you will be ready for the next step.

That next step is to write on schedule—to make daily appointments with oneself to write, and then keep them.

With these two practices firmly in place, Brande says,

Perhaps for the first time you see that if you want to write you can write, and that no life is actually so busy as to offer no opportunities if you are alert to find them.  Then, too, you should begin to think it less than miraculous that writers can bring out book after book, having found in yourself the same inexhaustible resources that issue in the work of others.  The physical mechanism of writing should have ceased to be tiring and begun to take its place as a simple activity.  Your realization of the writer’s life is probably more vivid, and nearer to the truth, than it was before—which is in itself a long stride to have taken.

So, it turns out I’m a bit lazy when it comes to establishing good habits of any sort.  I skipped the morning pages, and I also skipped the appointment-setting thing.  But I do write every day, and I have found it to be absolutely true that the process becomes less and less of a chore.  I can pick up my novel at any given time of day and go straight to work.  I can write for hours without my hand cramping up.  I almost never find myself staring at an empty page, feeling blocked.  At the end of every writing session, I take a moment to figure out what my plan is for the next session, whether it involves typing a chapter, beginning a new scene, or finishing one off.  (I almost never stop writing in the middle of a scene, especially at night; because if I do that, I can be fairly certain I will go to bed and not be able to sleep!)

Last night, I wrote 10-1/2 pages.  By hand.  Two or three months ago, an evening writing session would have yielded about 5-6 pages.  I’m writing faster and, I think, better.  And it feels so good.  I look back on my self—my days, my moods—before I was engaged on a daily basis with this work, and I don’t know how I stood it.  I didn’t know how bad I felt until I started feeling better!

Writing is hard.  But it’s easy, too.  You just have to do it.  Every day, a little bit or a lot.  Don’t let it slide.  Just do it.  Speed will come, and you will be amazed!