Hey all. I’ve got some awesome news.

On August 1st, I’m participating in two new blogs. I’ll still be here on a semi-daily basis, but I’ll be at the others once a week too.

Check out Plot Mamas

Six Mamas and one GrandMama will share their trials, tribulations and excitment about writing while trying to be a mother. Join me, Dragon Mama, on Tuesdays.

Also, my local critique group is starting up our blog, the 7 Evil Dwarves.

We’re going to discuss writing topics and personal things, hoping to help others in this writing game as we make our way towards publication. Join me, Snarky Dwarf, on Mondays for each weekly topic.

Thanks,

Me of Many Names 🙂

My 7th Anniversary since my husband and I were married.

I’ll be back next Monday with another inspirational quote, this time from Teddy Roosevelt. But today, I had to make a wonderful announcement.

Today, marks

(This November marks 11 years we’ve been together, and yes, we celebrate that day too 🙂

We’ve had our ups and downs. Hell, we’ve even had our sideways. But we’ve made it through them all, and we’re more in love than the year before.

Easy?

HELL NO!

But the hard work and dedication is worth every minute I spend in my husband’s arms. Knowing I’m loved and cherished just for being me (even when I’m a bitch) is the best feeling any woman can have, and the greatest gift any man can give his wife.

I’m still trying to figure this one out. With my stories, I usually have multiple projects in different stages of completion. So, if I get stuck on one, I can move to another until the muse breaks through, then go back.

The problem is, I’m stubborn.

I don’t like giving up. If I’m working on something, then I damn well want to get it done.

So how do I figure things out?

Well, I’ve heard of people who take a walk, watch a movie, or even do chores to try getting the juices flowing. For me, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.

It can help to talk things out with my writer peeps, or even my husband. He’s great at throwing out ideas that sometimes work, mostly don’t, but it gets the creativity flowing and my mind jumps to 10 things that will.

Sometimes, just the talking out loud breaks the block.

I outline basic scenes and chapters, one to two liners of “This happens, then this…” Sometimes, I can go back to the outline and it will spark the creativity.

The cranky thing is that what works on one problem probably won’t work the next time.

Sometimes the muse sucks.

But, the one thing I have always found-

If I try, try, try, and never give up, eventually, I’ll find my way back to the one some call the ‘capricious bitch’, and we’ll argue and wrestle until we’re once more in accord.

Tell me, what do you do when you get stuck?

So. What do you do when you have writer’s block?

I… well… I…

I’ll get back to you tomorrow, once I get past this block 🙂

You can’t edit a blank page.

My second favorite quote, all though I have never known it to be attributed to anyone other than Anonymous.

I remember one of the first books I tried to write. When I got stuck, I went back to the beginning and edited. Then, I’d get to the blank page and still be stuck. So what did I do?

I went back to the beginning and edited some more.

Eventually, I had a really awesome draft of about 50 pages. It never went any further, and to this day, I haven’t gotten back to it because it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Yet, there was a lesson learned. Write the first draft. At least then, there’s an entire book\novella\short story to edit into goodness.

🙂

Guest Post by Jami Gray

It’s one of the greatest mysteries of all time…how to balance creativity with reality.  Or in my case it’s more along the lines of balancing 2 energetic boys, 1 husband, a telecommuting job that actually pays the bills but sucks up 14 hours a day, my in-laws (who live with me), working out, doctor appointments, vet appointments, a 110 lb. walking fur monster, and my writing.

I’ve read and/or heard of many solutions. 

1. Get up early so you have the quiet time and put in a couple hours.  My issue—I like sleep.  I really, really like sleep. Especially when I can get it.  I’m already up around six every morning.  Pushing for a four am wakeup call is not going to work for me.

2. Dedicate a specific time/space during the day where you do only your writing.  My challenge: I telecommute for work, my house has limited space, so setting up a second office free of distractions is a beautiful dream that maybe someday, along with the lottery, I may achieve.  I share my office with my techy geek husband.  Half of the office is strewn with dismembered computer parts, magazines and various unknown life forms. The half that belongs to me is mainly a copy of what my cubicle looked like 11 years ago when I started telecommuting.  So trying to squeeze in my personal laptop and all my research materials for my writing, not really an option.  And as those who telecommute can attest to, try finding time to ignore your work during the day—yeah doesn’t really work.

3. Set a goal. Sounds simple, uh?  Not so much. First you have to figure out what kind of goal.  Do you want pages? Word count? Chapters? Cups of coffee? Hours? Minutes?  I’m an artist, people.  I don’t conform to rules and structure. That’s like a death knell to my muse. She hates it.  She’ll  just erect a never ending wall and I’m screwed. 

4. Write late at night, once everyone’s in bed.  The mom’s out there will get this one.  By the time I’ve wrangled two boys through their evening routines, gotten homework done, stuff for school set up for the next day, returned phone calls, finished dinner and it’s accompanying mess, spent some time in adult conversation with my significant other, my brain is fried.  Sitting down to write makes me want to weep.  Especially those days when work has been non-stop.  I need the hour before I fall comatose into bed just to remember how to breathe.

So what’s a busy writer to do?  You have to figure out what works for you. What sparks your creativity, what takes you away from the everyday stuff, and unleashes that fierce need to create.

For me, I’ve lucked out.  I have a very understanding husband and children who don’t mind when I disappear for a day every week.  I picked Sundays, not without some guilt mind you, but it was the day that was the slowest every week.  Carving out time just for me is not easy.  There is the mother guilt, also known as “how dare you take time for yourself” guilt, to wade through.   But for both my sanity and my family’s, it’s best to take that one day, than live with a frustrated writer for a week.

I wake up, I pack up my laptop, kiss my hubby, kiss my boys, tell them food options are in the fridge or via phone orders and I head out to spend my day at Starbucks.  There the friendly baristas are nice enough to leave me alone and keep my tea refilled, while I spend 6-10 hours ears plugged with my iTunes and spend quality time playing in my alter reality. 

Until I get that nifty publishing contract that allows me to quit my job,  a small portion of Starbucks will be supported by me and my boys (hubby included) will get that precious time on Sunday to watch sports uninterrupted and eat pizza without hearing, “How much longer is this going to last?”

Yesterday I asked how you all balance writing with life.

I find it hard. It’s something I have to work at, but over the past few years as I’ve gotten more and more serious about getting published, I don’t feel as guilty taking “Writing Time”.

Thankfully, I have a somewhat\mostly supportive family.

During the school year, I write a few hours each weekday. The nights are for family (and events like scouts, dance, ect.)

During the summer, I try to take 3-4 nights a week, sometimes on weekends. I leave the house around 8pm and sit at Sonic or Starbucks. Then, I just write for a few hours. Unfortunately, I do live in Arizona. Even at 9pm, it’s still 100+ degrees. Monsoons, please show up soon.

This past week, I tried to get back into editing during the day. I got a request WOO HOO! for one of my novels, and of course, being a neurotic writer, I had to do another edit pass before I could send it. The first two days, I got nothing done during the day. I skipped my evening writing for evening editing. The third day, I got a few edits done, but a lot input into the computer. (Yes, I edit on paper).

The fourth day, I was so close to being done. After three days of reminding the kids what quiet time was, they finally remembered. I finished edits on the last 10 chapters and got them all into the computer.

Then, I sat down with one of my other novels that I scheduled for myself to edit in July. I was going to do a quick read-through, then take this next week to do a full edit.

Damn, that story was good. Not perfect, but a lot closer than I’d remembered. I managed to get the edits done and input into the computer in one day.

Wow.

So now, it’s time to plot book #2 of that novel, edit a novella (read rewrite), and I have another book #2 written in first draft that needs a ton of work. See my previous post about my favorite quote.

I don’t expect to get them all done in July.

But, I do know that when I go for any period of time without writing in some form, I feel withdrawals. It’s sad, I know.

That is how I balance writing and life. Writing is my “me” time, my stress outlet, and everything else in between.

Now, I just need to find a night out to go out and have fun with my girlfriends 🙂

It’s hard to balance life, much less when you add in work, a relationship.

Kids.

To try to top it off with the time and effort and dedication to becoming a better author, and it seems like there’s not enough time in the day for sleeping, much less all the other things.

Beginning in August, me and some other moms are starting a blog called Plot Mamas. You can find it over on the right sidebar. Luckily, I only have to think of something to say once a week 🙂

We’re going to talk about the joys of motherhood and writing. Together. Yeah.

Also in August, school also begins again. Not only that, but my baby will be in all day kindergarten.

Woo Hoo. And Boo Hoo.

But, this means I will have all day, alone time (what’s that?), to clean the house, do school work–because yes, I am a full time student– and get to write.

But right now and for this coming month, it is still Summer vacation. Which means every five seconds, I have one of my four kidlets yelling for “MOM!!!”

Not exactly conductive to productive writing.

So tell me, how do you balance your life with writing?

First Drafts are steamy piles of alien puppy poo.

I think I’m going to try something on Mondays. Inspirational quotes I find amusing, touching, or hey, even inspirational.

One of my favorite quotes I constantly repeat to myself while writing (although it’s paraphrased):

Credited to the wonderfully talented and inspirational Stephen King.

If you’re a writer and have never read King’s ‘On Writing’, you need to run out and go buy it now. Then read it from cover to cover–multiple times. You don’t have to write horror, or even like it. That’s not what this book is about.

But IMO, it is one book every author of any genre should have in their arsenal.

This is a test of the blonde issues system.

After three weeks of trying to get wordpress to allow updates to twitter, I finally, today, stopped getting an error message and actually got a screen with a button that said “Allow” to click on.

Now lets see if this blonde managed to do it right 🙂

Guest Blogger today 🙂 My very first 🙂

Please give a warm welcome to my Crit Partner and Awesome Urban Fantasy Author Jami Gray.

Here’s her advice and experience:

************************************************************************

To pants or not to pants? That is the question.

The answer:  It’s up to you!

Yep, like many things in a writer’s world, it’s all about what works and what doesn’t.  I’ve listen and read a great many opinions on how vital an outline is to a writers’ success.  In my endless quest for answers, I’ve tried a lot of different approaches and here’s what I’ve found has worked for me.

Outlines:  Nah, not such a good idea.  Outlines remind me too much of those research papers I had to do in college.  They seem to suck the creativity right out of me.  So how exactly do I get a story on paper? Well , my first completed Urban fantasy manuscript (93K words) was born because I had an idea for a character.  This character would haunt my every waking hour, interfere when I tried to lose myself in other’s stories, tease me when I was trying to do the job that actually pays, and had my husband worried I was becoming schizophrenic and holding arguments with non-existent people.

Unable to escape her voice, I put her down on paper, wrote out the scene haunting me and so the story began.  About 50 plus pages in, the story stalled and so did I.  The character became strangely silent and when I finally lost my temper and accuse her of being a tease, she laughed darkly (seriously she did) probably enjoying my angst. 

In an effort to figure out why she was being such a bitch, I sat down and began answering some of my own questions.  And so I began doing what I later learned was called “character development”.  The whys, and how comes behind each person’s actions and reactions.  As those fleshed out, so did my world building.  The world they inhabited and the history of it all began to factor in to why decisions were made a certain way, or why actions had certain consequences. 

With this foundation I wrote out where I thought she was going and what she was going to face.  It was one page, and I wasn’t worried about punctuation, voice, POV, any of it. Just a basic road map so I could see the overall  picture (aka story arc). 

The story woke up and I was back at the keyboard.  Did I follow that one page road map? Nope.  But it was a huge help.  That road map, became what I called a touchstone map, a list of key happenings necessary for my character to get to where she needed to be.  What happened in-between those happenings never matched up with the initial plan.  I’m sure you’ve heard, numerous times, how characters will write a story, not the author.  I agree 100% with that.  Which is probably why an outline will never really work for me.

Now for my current project, I decided to try out a few tips I had learned so 50 plus pages in I wouldn’t stumble to a stop.  During a recent writer’s conference I attended a workshop by Connie Flynn on character development.  She introduced a character development worksheet that I decided to use for my new Urban Fantasy.  I like it because it helped me answer those questions that stopped me the first time. 

Again, no outline, but a basic idea of what my story was and where it was going. 

So the magic question, did I stall out?

Yeah, I did, but not because of my characters but because where I was starting wasn’t working.  So I went back, fleshed out my history on paper, and started again.  In one sitting, instead of struggling through ten pages, I got out twenty.  A clear indication I was on the right track.

Now I have much love and admiration for Higley, but the girl rocks out stories like you wouldn’t believe. And if I was the jealous type, I’d be green.  I’m a slower writer, and my OCD is a pain in the ass because I try to write my first draft as if it’s my last.  It’s a tough battle for me not to edit as I write, but thanks to the intervention of my group, I’m getting better at looking forward, not backwards.

There are so many opinions as to what’s the correct way to write, that it’s almost discouraging if you’re a new writer.  So as I’ve learned through my kick-ass critique group, it’s your story, you tell it.  Doesn’t matter how you process or how you work, you do what works for you.  That’s part of being an artist.

I suppose most authors are a sort of hybrid. Sure, there’s those authors who say they wrote a sparkling first draft with no outline. I’ve never personally met one, but I’ve heard about those awesomely talented souls.

 Then, there are the authors who will plot and outline—100 pages of outline for a book.

Personally, if I’m going to put that much effort, I’m going to be writing, not outlining.

Yeah, I’ve tried the major outlines.

“First Draft in 30 days” by Karen Wiesner, and the follow-up how-to book, “From first draft to finished novel”. She says her outline gets about that long, before she even begins writing her draft. I think her process rocks, but it’s not something I can follow.

I took a class with her at one point. One of the many classes on improving the craft I’ve taken. She is a very knowledgeable author, and a prolific one at that. She outlines in 30 days, and her second draft is of great quality—in another 30 days or so. No wonder she is so prolific.

Yet, that type of outlining just doesn’t work for me.

I’ve taken many, many classes. And from each one, I’ve found bits that work for me.

For each book I’ve written (6+1 novella, at this point) my pants-plotting approach changes.

I’ve heard this is true for many writers. Different books work with different approaches.

 My latest novel I wrote for SavvyAuthors.Com June boot camp. It’s the second in the series, so went pretty fast. I finished by the 20^th of the month, and that was with taking a few days off. So, in about 18 days.

 First, I need to admit that I’m a fast writer. Plus, having goals and motivation and the expectation of a team really had me pushing hard.

 Second, I need to admit my first drafts are slim. Some complain about overwriting a draft, then needing to cut words. I usually end up needing to add a few scenes and in total, adding about 20k words in my second draft—you know, the important stuff like emotions, setting enhancements, emotions. Putting my characters in clothes. Making sure they’re not standing in some blank, white space. Little things like that J

 As the second book in the series, I knew my people and the places. I knew how my characters would react.

 So, I was able to use my spreadsheet and do a scene outline. (I’ll post about that later this week.)

 Yet, my first draft came in at a bare minimum. My second draft will need a ton of work. Now, part of this is because there were about 12 scenes I didn’t feel like writing at the time, so just put <<INSERT scene about such and such here>>. Those in themselves will add at least 12k if not closer to 20k to my word count.

 Then, I can go back and add the little details J Or not so little as the case may be. You know, the ones that take scenes and action and dialogue and turn them into an actual story that others want to read?

 Yeah, those little details.

 So, to end my rambling, my point is this.

 A writer’s approach to each novel may be different. It changes over time, being an organic thing. And that’s okay.

 But the other point I wanted to touch on is that even when I outline, I NEVER stick to it 100%. The characters/story/plot/events may take me down new roads I didn’t think about and that’s all for the good.

 Because in this way, I can have that excitement and organic feel to my writing that pantsers hold so dear, but at the same time I have this little road map to guide me on the major events that is so critical to a cohesive story.

 Even if I do go down the scenic route every now and then.

I haven’t blogged, cause I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say that others might want to read. But as I was looking through twitter today, something finally came to me.

I know there’s a ton of information out there on plotting and pantsing, but I just felt the need to add my 2 cents 🙂

So, IMO, my definitions are:

Plotter: Someone who sits down and writes an extensive outline prior to writing a word of the book.

Pantser: Someone who doesn’t like to think about the book before hand, but instead, just sits down and begins writing, letting the characters tell the author where to go

Combination (me): Someone who doesn’t want too much of an outline, but wants a sort of roadmap before they begin.

I’ll discuss my own style and the differences above this week, so stay tuned in. But first, tell me, how do you write?