Guest Post // An Introduction

Featured from left to right: Danielle (who has guest posted on this blog before), me (with hair styled by Wind, because I am a classy broad), and Abby (the culprit responsible for this blog post). 

Note: Today I bring you a guest post from my sister, Abby. I apologize in advance. 

I think you know me, coffee beans. At least, I think you know me a little. I’m the sister that pops up from time to time in Liz’s narratives. One time I even wrote a guest post, and I think Liz has shared some of my poetry with you. I don’t know if you’ve ever wanted to know more about me, but for a long time, I’ve wanted to get to know you.

I’m not going to tell you my life story, because Liz has pretty much taken care of that. We haven’t shared every single life experience, and we haven’t responded in the same ways (in fact, we’ve often responded in opposite ways), but we’ve shared enough to be the same kind of different. Which is why we think maybe you won’t mind if I start to write for Out of Coffee, Out of Mind with some regularity. Maybe once a month. Maybe once a year. Who knows? But don’t worry, Liz is still in charge. She won’t let me post anything stupid. **Liz, you won’t let me say anything stupid right?** (Liz: *shifty eyes* Yeah, sure, whatever you say.)

So, for an introduction, let me just start with what I’m reading. Except first I should tell you that I work at an interior design company about an hour from where I live, so I have an hour each morning and an hour each evening to read via audiobook. An hour commute each way might sound absolutely horrible to you, but it’s really not. The Virginia countryside is rural and gorgeous, while the Maryland portion of my drive is...uh...okay. So I get two hours of mandatory reading Per Day. Isn’t that amazing??? Best. Life. Ever.

The reason I have this job is complicated and ugly and messy and horrible, so I’m really trying to stay positive here (I say, filling our landlord’s swimming pool with all the lemonade I’m making from the metric ton of lemons I’ve been handed).

Anyways. I just reread ERAGON by Christopher Paolini. I read it and loved it when I was thirteen, but Not Nearly Enough. Say what you will about how parts seem a little like LORD OF THE RINGS fanfiction. No one world-builds like Paolini. No one. And that kid was nineteen. Geeze. What am I doing with my life? Five out of five.

Just before that, I listened my way through Ally Carter’s NOT IF I SAVE YOU FIRST, just licking up all those Russian accents (yes, my ears can lick). (Liz: Ew.) Ally gives us a secret service agent’s daughter living in the wilds of Alaska, throwing glammed up hatchets with alarming accuracy, trying to save her best friend/worst enemy, the first son of the United States, and keeping her lipstick fresh in the process. Solid. Four out of five.

I’m currently reading Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series for the first time even though my friends have been hounding me about it for years. I’m working on THE KING OF ATTOLIA right now, and this installment is for sure my favorite so far. I’m also working on SHADES OF EARTH, the last book in Beth Revis’ Across the Universe trilogy. I’m actually reading that one physically, which is nice. I’ve given each of the books in both of these series either a four or a five on Goodreads so far.

But best of all, best of all, I am beta reading Liz’s newest project: PLANET EYES. WHAT IS PLANET EYES? You ask. Calm down. Actually don’t calm down. It’s freaking brilliant. PLANET EYES is the working title Liz settled on for HIRAETH when we all realized that no one could tell when we were saying the name of her book and when we were sneezing. **Bless you, Liz….Oh...Oh right, right I’m on chapter 15.**

This feels like a good time to segue into what I’m writing. Not that you should care too much. (Liz: It’s okay. I don’t.) Liz is still the Mycroft to my Sherlock in all things, especially writing, but whatever. First off, you already know that I write poetry. I also write thoughtful and informative emails So Evil they get me fired from churches. I’m over it. Not bitter. **Chants: I love my new job. I love my two hours of mandatory reading. I love my life.**

But that’s not really what I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you that I’ve been working on a novel, WILL THE BOLD, for the last six years. It’s about an artist and a soldier and a sister and a trail of paintings that the soldier and his sister hope will help him get his life back. And it’s almost done. So that’s exciting. At least, it excites me. I know I don’t have the right to expect you to care about your favorite blogger’s (Please, of course she’s your favorite) sister’s questionably-talented writing ventures, but I’ve got this dream of Liz and me being the new Brontë sisters. So, you know, look out world, and all that.

Aside from reading and writing and working my butt off, I like to hang out with friends, watch TV with Liz, watch TV with my boyfriend, watch TV with my coffee, run around in the rain, beg my boyfriend for a puppy, eat pie, play ukulele, dance to Bieber in the kitchen, cook in the kitchen, and last but certainly not least, leave the kitchen because I am a strong, independent woman with a career at uh...Carefree Kitchens **sigh**.


That’s it, coffee beans, that’s me. Ask me all the questions! Throw tomatoes. Joke’s on you, I make a great tomato sauce. What would you like to know?


P.S. After my initial draft of this post, I did indeed finish PLANET EYES. DANG. Five out of five. Liz and I have had many a good conversation since about possible edits (not that it needed many), and the themes of her work. Let me just say, it is my privilege and genuine pleasure every time I get the chance to have any kind of input on her work.

Post-NaNoWriMo Self Care

Since it’s already the new year, I know it’s a bit late in the game to be discussing post-NaNoWriMo self care. Additionally, it’s a little weird to be covering this topic, as it’s something I’ve never considered in the past, apart from my general practice of taking December off.

I’m just now discussing post-NaNo self care because I wanted to experience it for myself before jabbering about it to you. Talking about this year in reference to previous years is difficult because it’s like comparing completely-unrelated entities. Somewhere, over the course of 2018, my brain rebooted itself. So I can’t really say that a new approach would have been a game changer last year, only that it was a game changer this year.

This November, I paced myself, and yes, I wrote 121,121 words, and yes, towards the end I was starting to feel tired. But I had just gotten into the hang of writing every day, starting in late October, which you have probably already heard me talk about ad nauseam. I didn’t want to unlearn a good thing. So I allowed myself two days to read a book and absorb its beautiful, interesting prose during my normal writing time.

By December third, I was ready to go, but I was nervous about what I was going to write, since I wanted to let HIRAETH sit for a while. Then it occurred to me that blogging is totally a thing, that I do. So I could, you know, blog. (Sometimes my sheer brilliance astounds me.) I spent the next few days drafting and editing a small flurry of blog posts. After that, I spent a week with DRACONIAN, which was as long as I could stand, at which point I was already way tired of not working on HIRAETH. I also recognized, and I’m glad I did, that I was starting to get increasingly apprehensive about adding 10,000 words to HIRAETH to get it up to weight. The fear that I was going to mess the whole thing up with any additions, even necessary ones, was getting stronger, and I needed to act quickly.

Having added all that I needed to, I think I can say with confidence that there was no reason to be afraid. So we can all breathe a sigh of relief. I also know some of you are going to want to punch me for saying this, but you’re not allowed to punch me today, because it’s my birthday. As someone who is accustomed to drafting quickly, to whom 20,000 words isn’t that challenging, it was a strange experience to be daunted by the prospect of writing 10,000.

But, back to the topic of breaks. In years past, I think I have viewed my various writing projects through too narrow a lens. My custom was to take a month off between drafts, which was all well and good, but I didn’t work on other projects in the meantime. Part of it was that I needed some vacation time, which was fine. But a bigger part was my perceived need to stay exclusively in the world of my story. Maybe I had a more limited attention span at the time, and I just don’t remember how bad it was, or maybe I was imposing unnecessary strictures on my writing, but I was afraid that it would throw me off too much, editing multiple projects simultaneously—even though, as of November 2014, I knew that I could manage simultaneous drafting.

For those of you who are maybe not so knowledgable about writing, let me clarify why I was taking breaks between drafts. When you’ve finished a draft, it doesn’t matter which number, it’s advisable to let it sit for a while. Taking a step back lets you clear your mind a little—when you return to the draft, you see issues you had missed before, because after looking at something for too long, you stop seeing the details. If you’re trying to find a good rule of thumb for how long your breaks should be, you’ll find that numbers vary. Some authors recommend two to three months. Others say two weeks. Some authors, especially when on deadline, do drafts back to back, without any breaks at all. I have always felt like a month is the most natural amount of time for me, but I have no scientific backing for this. A month is as long as I can generally stand to wait, is maybe what I should say.

There’s nothing wrong with being monogamous in editing. But I think it contributed to my poor mental state over the past few years. I put all my hope in TIME IN A BOTTLE, because none of my other projects were even close to done. So I felt like I needed to get published with TIB, otherwise it would be at least a year before I was ready to start querying again, which felt like too much time for my teenage brain. The same with DRACONIAN, only worse, because it took so long to finish that one, and also because even though I was excited about it, I was also so discouraged by that point that I didn’t have all that much confidence it would work out. It put too much pressure on my individual novels. I could have used my various writing breaks to spread out the weight, to ease the collective load, like I sort of ended up doing with HIRAETH, which worked out amazing.

While HIRAETH is cooling its heels, I’m turning to blogging again for a change of pace. Turns out that when I’m tired of writing, I’m usually tired of a specific kind of writing, so switching things up is sometimes the same as taking a break.

I have also begun what I expect to become my next main project, which completely took me by surprise. The only thing I will tell you right now is that I have already written two thousand words of brainstorming and random scene drafting, as I work to get to know this thing. It’s a scary space story. HIRAETH is a scary space story too, but scary in a different way, I think. This one feels chilling. Not going to lie, even though I’m excited about this one, I don’t love writing rough drafts, and I am already looking forward to editing.

Oh, and let’s not forget my favorite type of writing. As I mentioned in my last post, I have begun work on the query letter and the synopsis for HIRAETH. *bangs head against keyboard* You know those people who write the summaries that get put on the inside flap of a book jacket? Those people are my heroes. They deserve free Starbucks for the rest of their illustrious lives. I don’t know what sort of magic goes on in their heads, but I am in awe of them. I will be posting more about query writing tomorrow, so I’ll leave it at that for today.

Long story short, I didn’t really do anything specific in the name of post-NaNo self care this year, but I did what I needed to maintain momentum and prevent burnout, and I’m happy with the results.

And also, it’s my birthday today, so feel free to use that as an excuse to treat yourself.

Routine

The people at Starbucks probably think I’m homeless, because I’m there at least once a day. Soon I will have to start paying rent.

This routine started out as my reading getaway. I would go there for an hour every morning, sit with my latte, and read on my phone. Once I’d grown accustomed to that, I switched from reading to writing. I used to struggle with horrible, often crippling anxiety, and this was one of its last strongholds. I was afraid to a) write every day and b) write in a coffee shop. Both of these fears were bizarre because a) I used to write every day, and b) I have known for several years now that I do my best writing at coffee shops.

At least part of my fear had to do with the fact that, with how tight my schedule is, I have to go straight from Starbucks to work, which means I need to bring my laptop to work with me, where it could get stolen, or stepped on, or, I don’t know, put in an oven or something. In the end, I decided that I had to just get over my fear, because NaNoWriMo was too important to risk not being able to write every day. (Now I’m so chill about it, I’m like, well, my laptop is going to have to be okay, because there is no way I am not going to write today.)

Starbucks is expensive, so you might be asking yourself why I go there so frequently, even just to read on my writing vacations. For a while, I tried to make Starbucks only a treat, a twice-weekly occurrence, but now I’ve been doing this writing routine for over two months, I understand why it’s important for me.

There are very good arguments for not limiting yourself to a routine, one of which being that you can train your brain to perform only under specific circumstances, which is suboptimal (one of my awesome coffee beans mentioned this to me, and I thought it was really cool). I say that that’s fair, but also that it doesn’t apply to me, or rather, without a routine, I don’t get as much writing done. It’s not a bad thing if you don’t have a schedule or if you don’t write every day; it’s just not for me. 

There’s nothing like going to the same place for an hour or two (at least) every day for the sole purpose of putting words on the screen. My brain knows what’s expected of it, so it (usually) performs. There are times when it’s a drag, and all I want to do is bash my head against my computer screen until the baristas kick me out. But one thing about going somewhere, for a set amount of time, to do a set thing, is that you tend to do the thing, even if you don’t want to. Or, at least, I do. There are times when I find myself with half an hour left before it’s time to head to work, and I don’t feel like writing more, but I tell myself to write anyway, because there’s not a whole lot else to do. I make sure to limit my available entertainment options when I’m at Starbucks for that reason. That practice is why posts like this exist.

So why Starbucks? Why not just establish an at-home writing routine? First of all, there are innumerable distractions at home. I could make food. I could eat food. I could wash dishes. I could go outside and play with the dogs. I could count the number of books I own. I could have an existential crisis. Etc. It’s not as bad at the new apartment, since we don’t have internet or reliable cell reception, and there’s something about the ambiance there that’s more conducive to concentration. So I do write there, but when I write at home, it’s spontaneous, incidental; it happens because I feel the words bubbling up inside me and need to let them out immediately.

With my routine, even working full time and allowing myself most evenings to read, I managed to write 121,121 words for NaNoWriMo. Most of that writing happened on my days off and in the two hour window I grabbed every morning before work. Pre-Starbucks, I struggled for three years to integrate some semblance of order into my writing habits, my closest thing to success being when I wrote at my old church, which was like writing at home, but with more distractions. Another victory is that I have a long-standing routine of going to a different café, actually a patisserie, and writing for several hours every Thursday, which for several months was the only writing I was getting done. It made for an excruciatingly slow pace, but it was also better than nothing, and it was the highlight of my week.

I think what it boils down to is this: writers love writing, but we also hate writing, and usually we will put a fair bit of energy into avoiding our work. If you are in an environment where distractions are possible, they will become probable. If you don’t go looking for them, they will come looking for you. But an environment that forbids distractions is, inherently, a game changer.

“But Liz,” I hear you saying, “there’s internet at Starbucks. Isn’t that a distraction?” Sometimes. It’s useful for Spotify, so I can have a wider music selection. And I’ll scroll through Twitter while I’m waiting on my latte or when I need a quick mental break. But I’m afraid I’ll look like a bum who spends all day on social media. I don’t generally advise worrying what other people will think about you, but in circumstances like this, if it helps me stay on the straight and narrow, I guess it works.

Maybe the dedication for my first book should be something like this:

to my vanity, without which this book would not exist 

I feel like that would go over well.

I completely understand if you’re reading this post and recoiling in horror because the thought of a Starbucks routine is as low on your list of appealing options as it could possibly be, right down there with “finding a dead body”. If you can’t get work done in an environment where people might read over your shoulder and sometimes old men get too chatty and the background noise can border on obnoxious, that’s okay.

I won’t lie. These were issues for me at first. (No one cares about your fake best friend, Sharon. The whole shop doesn’t need to hear about her implants.) This enterprise has been an exercise in stepping out of my comfort zone, across the board. I still have to block out the noise with my earbuds sometimes, but the background chatter does well to neutralize my tinnitus. I still write notes in my draft aimed at anyone who might be snooping, sweet nothings like, “This is a rough draft, don’t judge,” and “No one loves you,” and, “I will burn your house down.” I get squirrelly about the whole reading over my shoulder thing, because there are stages in my writing where I would show you my draft, but then I’d have to—well, you know. (I think it’s a testament to how confident I am with HIRAETH that I was rarely worried about that. Although there was that day when I was editing a fairly gory scene, and the chatty dude next to me clammed up real quick and moved to the next chair over. So I guess there are perks to this arrangement, after all.)

But there’s nothing like casually eavesdropping on people’s conversations (because when they’re talking that loud, you know they want to be heard), nothing like working alongside other people, learning the faces of regulars, getting to know the baristas by name and realizing they’re the closest thing you have to friends. *awkward laugh*

Now that I’ve established this routine, I don’t want to go back.


What about you, coffee beans? What are your writing routines? Do you like to write at coffee shops? Where do you prefer to write? What do you do to combat the whole reading over your shoulder thing?

Life Update 3 // DRACONIAN

Ages ago, in the forgotten year of 2017, I started querying DRACONIAN, which you may know as DSS. I talked a bit about it in this post.

In that post, I reference a sweet, kind agent who offered me a snippet of personalized feedback for my novel. Although it was still, ultimately, a rejection, and although I didn’t do anything about it right away, it got the gears in my head spinning. I knew that I hadn’t been getting as much interest in my queries for DRACONIAN as I had with TIB. I felt like I was missing something vital, like I had taken a step backward in the quality of my writing. So after I got over a bit of burn out, I pulled myself out of my funk, sat down with my story, and made myself face what I knew was wrong.

A long while ago (everything was a long while ago for me), I read some writing advice that said something to the effect of, “If you know you have a weakness in your story, and you’ve done your best to fix it, so you know you’re not being lazy, it’s okay to go ahead and query. No book is going to be perfect.” I’m still on the fence about whether or not that’s good advice. In my case, it wasn’t, because it gave me an out. I tried to fix the problem. I found I couldn’t. So I let myself query a novel I felt supremely insecure about, when I should have been like, “No, no, we are going to sit here, right here. We are going to look at this problem, and we are not going to leave this Starbucks booth until we know where the story’s going wrong.”

Okay, so maybe that’s a little overdramatic.

Let’s talk about the sticking point in DRACONIAN. It happens to be the most unfortunate, I dare say most common one. My beginning wasn’t working. It’s bugged me for years, has always felt like a low-level criminal offense. In its earliest iterations, when I was thirteen, it was pure exposition, all the telling and none of the showing. It stayed that way until I was eighteen. In my defense, I think that’s when I did succeed in streamlining it and introducing a good sense of rising tension. Where the breakdown happened was a few pages in, during a scene where I have a revelation that reads as too clichéd, the beginning of every single fantasy novel ever. I spent so much time trying to think around the issue. For the sake of the plot, my main character has to learn a significant secret her parents have been keeping from her, not because this will then launch her into glory and fame and riches, but because the betrayal will hurt her more than anything else, and it will affect how she behaves from that point on. But the way I had written it, it came off as tropey. There was no way for any agent to know, upon reading the first few pages, that I was trying something different.

When I finally sat down to address the problem from a new angle, I don’t know if I owe the subsequent revelation to timing, brooding, or pure happenstance. (I have this theory that stories are the sum of the times and places they were written, that where and when a scene is birthed changes its genetic makeup, that until you have written a thing, it is in flux, rich with infinite possibilities, infinite directions you could take that depend on the thinnest threads of fate and chance. Like, if you’re in the wrong place when you write something, you’ll miss some great revelation, and you won’t do it right. Or, if you write it too soon, you won’t have a vital, game changing thought that was scheduled to occur to you two months later. It’s at this point that I have to shut down this line of reasoning, because I can follow it in circles until I’m in the throes of an existential crisis, migraine and all. So, moving on.)

Somehow, (don’t look at the existential crisis, Liz, don’t do it), I finally thought of a way to restructure the beginning, to erase the aspects of it that had led to my querying woes. Of course, you know that whole, I’ll just tug on this one thread, just one more tug, one more, and then suddenly the sweater you were holding is gone, replaced by a pile of yarn. That’s what happened with DRACONIAN, but in a far less destructive way.

Altering vital details in the beginning has affected how the rest of the story plays out. Addressing those changes has, in turn, caused a cascade of differences down the line. I’ve kept a journal with extensive notes to track every stray thought that crosses my brain as I do this (it has two dragons on the cover), because there are so many balls to keep in the air. I’m about two-thirds done with the first pass now, but I don’t know how much work remains. I expect I’ll have to go through the whole thing at least two more times, so I catch all the errors and inconsistencies I’ve introduced.

I have been moving at a glacial pace on this story, usually only tackling it for (in a good session) four hours every Thursday. To which you are probably asking, if you haven’t read my pre-NaNo post, “If you were so frustrated with your slow progress, why wasn’t this one your NaNo project?” Two things. Firstly, I’m not frustrated, not generally. I’ll get to that later. And secondly, burn out is a hideous thing, and I was starting to feel it creeping up behind me. I decided I needed to set DRACONIAN aside and duck out for a month-long fling with some other stories.

The consequence of this hands-plunged-in-all-the-way-up-to-the-elbows-deep-clean edit is that my book is stronger, and I’d like to think richer, than it was before. My world building has improved; my characters have grown. I’ve shored up plot holes I’d never noticed before. My insecurity—it’s almost gone. DRACONIAN isn’t done yet. It might not be done for another six months. It might be done in two. Who knows? But I can see the bright shiny spark of what it’s supposed to be, now, and I’m entranced. Even if this book never sits on store shelves, this effort will have still been valuable. It has taught me so much about editing, so much about patience and determination and endurance. I’ve relearned, through this experience, how to love writing for the sake of writing.

As for the whole querying question, before November, I had fully intended to keep DRACONIAN as my main project, the one I prioritize finishing. There are now a few reasons why my plans have changed.

For one, it could be a while until it’s done, and it’s become such an intricate, loving revision, that I don’t want to rush it like I’ve rushed it before. I owe this book the time and effort it requires. That means that it’s going to have to become one of my side projects, at least for the moment.

Another thing is, and maybe this is a silly reason, that having already queried this one, I might want to put some distance between those efforts and renewed ones. I know people revise and re-query, and I know there are still so many agents I never queried with this project. But it’s also harder to jump back on the bandwagon with a book you’ve tried and failed with once before.

My last, and I think most compelling, reason is this: HIRAETH is suddenly so much further along, and while I have renewed confidence in DRACONIAN, it pales in comparison with how I see HIRAETH. HIRAETH feels like the one in ways that my previous two didn’t. As I mentioned in this post, I still have scenes to add and, realistically speaking, it will probably be a few months before I’m ready to query, maybe longer. Even if it was ready, I don’t think I’d send out queries until midway through January, so they don’t get lost in the holiday mix. But I want to take it and run with it.

That being said, I will still fight to get DRACONIAN to you someday, coffee beans, even if that means I have to print it out on rolls of toilet paper and leave them on your porch in the dead of the night.


That’s it for today, coffee beans. What are some stories you’ve wrestled with for years? What are some of your greatest revision triumphs? Are you currently in the query trenches/planning to jump in soon?

My Writing Process Doesn't Exist

Fair warning, coffee beans, this is going to be a long post. So buckle in and make sure to keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Now that I’ve edited two complete novels and am close to finishing my third, not to mention my various editing dalliances and numerous rough drafts along the way, I feel like I have a bit more perspective on my writing process than I did when I started this blog. That means it’s time to confront some of my overconfidence.

There’s nothing like finishing your first novel to make you think you know what you’re doing. You wrote a book. You conquered. Now you are equipped to sit sagely, handing out advice, telling others how to climb their own mountains, banish their own demons, etc, etc. It becomes uncomfortably obvious that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about when your own advice doesn’t help you write your next book.

I’ve noticed a pattern with myself. Every time I write something, big or small, I end up thinking I know who I am as a writer, how my process works. But this is a stultifying, dangerous perspective, because it limits my ability to move forward.

When I finished TIB, I knew that I was a writer who drafted in chronological order, who wrote quickly and edited quickly, who needed a minimal number of drafts. I looked at my success and told myself, okay, whipping out a book each year is easy. Knowing that I hadn’t pushed myself as hard as I could with TIB meant I could probably even manage two books per year. (Wow, Liz. Wow. I did not raise you to be this arrogant.)

Through that experience, I learned a great deal about the mechanics of my editing process, which I consider to be, in many ways, divorced from my writing process. How I approach the editing itself has never changed. I rewrite everything word for word. I subtract in the second draft, add in the third. My brain works well with that sort of structure. But the way I go about editing—the broader picture, how I approach the draft as a whole—differs.

There were things I learned through the TIB experience that I thought were steadfast aspects of my writerly identity. I got up early—4:00 am early—every morning, and wrote with my Earl Grey in bed, listening to music. I wrote after school, until supper, and after supper I wrote more. Weekends I worked late into the night after watching Star Trek. I was a writing machine.

After TIB, I picked up DRACONIAN, and I thought, with all this new knowledge and, gasp, expertise that I have garnered, surely this will be a breeze. Spoilers. It was a breeze in the way that a hurricane force wind that rips your clothes off and lands you a free trampoline in your demolished backyard could be considered a breeze. What’s worse is that the whole experience was deceptively fun at first. Drafting it was straightforward. Even the first round of editing wasn’t so horrible, though it took longer than I had planned. I was still pleased with my story, still confident that I knew what I was doing.

Then disaster struck. It was inevitable, a land slide that started ages before, whose rumblings I chose to ignore. The whole time I was working on DRACONIAN, I was querying agents for TIB. I think I sent out letters for six months to a year. I don’t remember the exact timeline, but it was a while. I received a stream of rejections for even longer than that. One came five months or so after I marked it off as an assumed rejection. I could give you more accurate numbers, but opening that Excel spread sheet is a walk in a different sort of park, the kind where you need to carry shivs and mace and everyone looks at you like you would be fun to murder.

I received an onslaught of rejections. Had I so desired, I could have printed them out and folded enough origami swans to have like, fifty origami swans. (Seriously, how am I not published?)

I experienced some life changes around this time. I graduated high school, got my first job. Then I moved to Virginia and started rooming with my sister. Like, literally rooming. Our first apartment was a single room, with a bathroom and a shared kitchen. All of these various events made my 4:30/4:00 am mornings first improbable, then impossible. I think it was easy to let that routine go, to not fight for it, and then to tell myself that I was failing at writing because, see, I wasn’t able to get up early in the mornings anymore.

What made the whole situation more unbearable is that I had a beta reader, on what I think was the third draft, who hated my book and tore it to shreds. I had it in my mind that you are allowed to ignore beta feedback you don’t think will make your story better, but you aren’t allowed to ignore feedback out of spite or because you’re hurt by it. I figured that I had to overcompensate for my emotions by listening to everything she said, no matter how untrue it felt to my story. Eventually I reached a point, some ten thousand words before the end, when I finally realized that if I looked at another one of her critiques, I was probably going to delete my entire draft.

When I handed my poor, battered book-child off to my next critique partner, this time my sister, she pointed out that all the edits I had input in the name of responding well to criticism had caused my book to take a massive step backwards. I don’t want to write a harangue on beta readers, because they are a necessary part of the process, but it really shook me, the whole experience, has made me a lot slower to seek out feedback from strangers, even vetted ones.

In 2017 I got DRACONIAN to the point where I felt it was as close to done as I could make it, so I started querying. I think I sent out around twelve query letters before realizing they all had a pretty glaring typo in them, which I had somehow missed even when I tried to fix it. I think that, more than anything, shows me how horrible my eating disorder brain fog was. And I was still trying to function like I was at 100%.

I didn’t hear back from most of those agents. One super sweet, super kind agent gave me some light, personalized feedback on my first fifty pages, and she said basically what I had been fearing, that, among other things, my world building needed more work.

I didn’t make any sort of set decision, but it just kind of happened naturally. I always meant to send out more queries, did the research on more agents, prepped more letters. I never sent them. (Don’t despair. I haven’t trunked DRACONIAN. I have another editing update that I plan to post soon.)

The lesson from that whole experience, as I saw it through the lens of how I felt as a writer post TIB, is that my writing process worked, but that I was broken. I couldn’t stick to the roadmap, so something must have been wrong with my vision.

I’m not going to argue that there was one single thing that I did wrong in the process with DRACONIAN that, if avoided, would have altered the entire course of events. There were so many things that went wrong, and there were additional factors that were out of my control.

But let’s move on to HIRAETH. I drafted HIRAETH out of order, just threw everything on the page, and none of it made sense, but all of it was exhilarating. The adults had exited the building; I could do whatever I wanted. I could make as much of a mess as I needed to in order to draft the thing, because I didn’t have to clean it up in any sort of hurry. My only plan for the story, at that point, was to share it on this blog someday, maybe, if it was good, if I felt like it. Zero pressure for me to perform. That release made it fun for me, made the story a refuge, something secret I got to keep for myself.

What I’ve learned, I think, is that my writing process doesn’t exist. With TIB, I wrote how I felt I was supposed to write, in order, quickly, with more confidence than was my due. With DRACONIAN, I thought that I could apply the same mold and get the same results. I thought I could ignore everyone saying your sophomore novel is the one that makes you want to quit, because I thought I was special and therefore exempt.

Here is something that you should know. You are allowed to write however you want, and you don’t have to have any set way you do things. Whatever works for you in the moment is your writing process. You can write at home for one book, at a coffee shop for another, in your unsuspecting neighbor’s basement for your next. Whatever gets the words on the page.

I think it’s maybe a bad idea to label yourself as a panster or a plotter, to force yourself into that dichotomy. If that works for you, awesome, and if you want the label, then wear it proudly. I spent so long telling myself that I was a panster that I never even let myself try plotting, except with the understanding that it was something I would hate. It’s hard to explain that brain space. Your subconscious takes over, turns your preconceived notions into rules which you follow to your detriment. You don’t like something because you tell yourself you don’t like it.

I outlined HIRAETH. True, I did so after the fact, when I had a handful of random scenes I was juggling, when I had to bring some semblance of order to the words on the page, but that was something I would have never even let myself consider before.

That’s what I’m trying with BMT, outlining, writing out of order, pantsing, a little bit of everything. For the first time in four years with this book, I think I finally see a hint of light at the end of the tunnel. (Although it’s weird, because I keep hearing these choo choo noises. Anyone know what that’s about?)

All this being said, it wouldn’t surprise me if, three years down the line, I decide to write a new post about how wrong I am in this one. So this is nothing definite, just something I am mulling over. But writing it down has helped me put my thoughts in order, and I hope reading it will help you too.


That’s it for today, coffee beans. What are some misconceptions you have had about your writing process along the way?

NaNoWriMo Shenanigans // Part One

How did my NaNoWriMo go, you ask? Let me tell you, it went better than I thought. I realize that sounds anticlimactic, considering how disappointing last year was for me. If you’ll recall, my goal was to write anywhere between 50K and 100K words. I ended up with 121,121. Definitely not something to turn up your nose at. Compared to last year, when I felt like I was digging words out of my brain with a spoon, this NaNo was a cakewalk. Even in the best month, not every writing day is going to be amazing. Most days are just average. But this month was full of more amazing days than I think was my fair allotment.

I’m going to cover this NaNo update with two posts, because I worked on two major projects, and I have a lot to gush about. I also figure I’ll share a snippet or two per project, because I’m feeling magnanimous.

You might recall that, way back in November 2016, I drafted a story I have oft referred to as my Super Secret Novella Side Project (SSNSP). My plan had been to whip that thing into shape and share it on my blog, back when it was supposed to be, you know, a novella. Then I got sick, and it sat untouched for a long time. When I finally picked it up and started working on it again, it was only as (brace for it) a side project, something I pulled out when my main WIP was stalling. Somewhere along the line, I decided that while it would make a decent novella, I also wanted to expand on it and explore how it would play out as a novel.

I may have, from time to time, referred to SSNSP as GITM, though I can’t remember. Either way, GITM is a meaningless title, a stand in with little relevance to what the story has become, so feel free to forget it immediately. When I began drafting it in 2016, I’d wanted to write a story with a glitch in the matrix sort of feel, so that’s what I called it, but it very quickly veered off course to something I like a whole lot better. Right now, it still doesn’t have an official title, but I’m changing the stand in to HIRAETH, which is a great deal more applicable.

When I started work on it this November, it was a feeble, 20K word story, gap-toothed and malnourished. I already had a chunk of it edited, but my main challenge was to beef it up and give it a good, thorough scrubbing.

About halfway through the month, I finished the draft, which is a weird sort of draft 2 hybrid. Let me clarify. My first draft was 100,000 words or so of mayhem, in which I drafted the story multiple times, back to back and in no particular order, trying to get a handle on what I wanted to say. Then I went into an editing frenzy and hacked away at it, keeping only the scenes and, in most cases, paragraphs that I thought had potential. I had the gall to call it a second draft, but it was only an 8,000 word, semi-coherent, extra-detailed outline. That round included zero editing, only chopping, so it doesn’t deserve a draft number, in my opinion. Then I started adding to it and editing as I went, that being the process I finished this November. I’m choosing to call this completed draft a second draft, because that’s how it looks chronology-wise, but I’ve been told it’s very clean for a second draft, and it certainly feels that way.

Currently, it is still a feeble book-thing. It weighs 42,000 words soaking wet, which, translated into normal-people-speak, is not even 200 pages. I love it. I love it to pieces. I have already read it twice through, just for fun, and I don’t normally do that sort of thing, because it’s hard not to see flaws everywhere I look. This book has been the easiest, most painless piece of writing I have ever pulled from my brain box, and it’s a breath of fresh air on the heels of DRACONIAN.

I still need to feed it some protein powder to give it muscles, because it’s a scrappy little thing, and my goal has gone from being a nice person and sharing it on this blog, to seeking out traditional publishing. I’ll need to insert some scenes, at least 8,000 words worth, (which feels like coming full circle) and I have some anxieties about that, because the pacing feels tight, and I don’t want to throw off the balance I think I’ve achieved. But I also have to make the science in it accurate and sufficiently nerdy, and I’ve got some ideas. I’m ruminating. I already got one set of beta feedback, which made me cry happy tears.

Here’s a quick rundown on what it’s about, without giving too much information: The crew of the Hiraeth, the most advanced spaceship Earth has ever produced, is tasked with terraforming a planet lightyears from home, but soon the mission devolves into chaos as the ship begins to break down, and, one by one, people start to go mad.

I could gush about this thing forever, but I think I’ll end up turning into one of those moms who talks up their snot-nosed little Johnny so much everyone secretly hopes Lassie will push him into the well. So I’ll just leave you with this snippet.

—

Objectively, you know that there are six thousand windows on the Hiraeth. Until recently, you had not realized exactly how many windows that is. It is a staggering number. You can avoid them a great deal during the day, if you stick to the inner portions of the ship. Where they present the most trouble for you is when you are on the flight deck, which contains the largest window of them all, and when you walk to your quarters at night. For whatever reason, the ship’s designers thought the captain would want a view of the outdoors, and so they built your quarters on the outer ring. You must walk along a corridor of windows to reach your room, and once inside, you are faced with another. It is almost as if they thought you would want to look out at the stars.

Over the past couple nights, you have considered relocating your quarters, but for a long list of reasons—the first being convenience and the last being your desire to maintain an appearance of normalcy—you have decided not to do that yet.

With every window you pass on the stretch of corridor, like an endless house of mirrors, you feel eyes on you. It’s subtle. If you force yourself to focus on other things, you can even forget it for a while. But then, inevitably, you remember—you feel it again. It’s less a sense of being watched and more of being observed. Not like being seen, like being looked at. So there it stays, in the back of your mind, an adrenaline drip building up in your blood.

—


That’s it for today, Coffee Beans. If you participated in NaNoWriMo, what projects did you work on? What are you excited about (writing or otherwise)?