A Little Bit of Quiet

I'm not going to apologize for being gone for a while.

One, it would be a lie.

And two, I'm a person who doesn't always have something to say. I don't believe in chitter chattering your valuable reading time and my valuable writing time by filling it with blah...blah blah...blah...blah.

But today I actually have something I've been thinking about. Yes, the gears are turning. At slow speed. But turning, nonetheless.

Sometimes I am very disappointed in things like blogs*. And facebook. And myspace. And twitter. Because there are so many people talking in blips that I wonder if we are losing the ability to create and sustain...anything.

Conversations are quippy. Witty. Tossed out like torn pieces of a note to a boy you had a crush on who picked your best friend instead of you. Nothing is personal. Because you've posted your secrets for everyone to read. And value is marked by the number of friends high fiving you during an endless walk down a high school hall, distinguishing you as cooler than the rest.

I am so NOT that girl.

I get the value of networking. I do. I'm not fond of forced social situations, but I understand that no one can sit in front of their computer every day for the rest of their life having repetitive conversations with themselves.

Well...they can. But they probably shouldn't.

And it's probably fair to say that my somewhat blasphemous thoughts are deeply rooted in a fear that I will forever be living the high school outsider girl life.

But I also wonder, as I read current titles and story lines that all sound like they are trying to get the same person to read them, if we are losing the ability to take time and be innovative. Do something different. The way Brian Selznick did with The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

In the midst of blips and quips shouting out through the universe, creating such a ruckus of high fives that you can't even hear yourself think, are we losing our ideas?

In my weird, neurotic way, I worry about that. In a conversation with myself, of course. Right before I write something quippy, of course. All the while promising to try to come up with something new.

Someone described me once as 'the sassiest, funniest, nicest person you will never meet at a party.' Which is probably true...the never meeting part, I mean...but it's only because I like having a little bit of quiet. I need it.

It's where my ideas come from.

But that's just me. What do you do for your ideas? Besides the conversation with yourself.

*Note: I am fully aware of the irony of this situation since I am, obviously, writing a blog.

Everything I Know for Today Part I

When someone says the last two months of a deployment are the longest days you will ever experience in your life...

They would be right.

Perfect to Reject in 3 Easy Steps

You know...I left the Today I Won post up for a few weeks, because, if you know anything about writing, when you finish a project...for a little bit...you feel like you've done something perfect.

And then the day after you feel like a total reject. Because that's when the letters start pouring in.

Let me show you how this happens:

When the 'no' letters start to come in, you're sad but still hopeful, so only the letter 'p' falls off to make:

erfect

And then a letter comes in full of praise, but still 'no,' confusing the letters and making them think...hmmm, why not?...so they switch places and become:

refect

And then a particularly wanted letter comes in...'no'...and it knocks you on your keister so you can't breathe...which also knocks the letter 'f' completely backwards and upside down until it almost doesn't look like itself anymore. In fact, it looks like a 'j'. So now you have:

reject

See? Perfect to reject in three easy steps. That is why a writer has to have skin the thickness of a 2x4. And that's also why you don't stew about it and cook yourself into some serious mental health soup.

You start over. Which I did.

And you laugh about it. Which I am.

And you have a good time. Because if you're not doing that, you shouldn't be writing in the first place.

Today I Won

Did you know that today I won a pizza, found the secret to wrinkle free skin AND can get larger breasts???

Now that's a lucky day.

I love reading the subject lines from the emails in my spam folder. They crack me up. All the lines read the same, screaming out:

You are special.

You have won.

You want this and you didn't even realize how vital it was to your existence until you saw this email.

Well...maybe. Pizza and wrinkle free, sure. The breasts...I'm fine with what I got.

As a writer, I think it's easy to fall into the trap of needing to hear someone say you are special. And good. Some form of acknowledgement that putting your heart, your work, your missed family time that you can't get back...in short, your life...into something is going to pay off. That, in some way, you will win in the end.

And I, being perpetually unhappy with most of what I write, find it very easy to look to someone else to tell me what I haven't told myself.

Over the last year, I wrote a story that I like. It is different. I would even say special. Parts of it are good. And today, I sent it off to an editor. A very cool editor who might not even be a good fit for this book, but that I would love to work with someday.

So today, except for the pizza...and the wrinkle free skin...and the breasts...

I won.

The Puke Factor

I finished the line edit. Chopped 2,500 words. Added maybe 1,000.

Now the manuscript is ready to go out on submission.

But, you might challenge with an outsider's wisdom which, I promise, is much smarter than me: How do you know it is ready?

I have two standards by which I measure readiness:

1.) Anne Lamott's BIRD BY BIRD reference to kneading faces while feeling burned out and rubberized.

2.) The puke factor.

Every other time I finished a draft, it felt good. I'd celebrate draft success but I knew I had TONS more work to do. And I refused to let my neurotic need to send my crappy writing overtake my neurotic need for it to be really good.

Been there. Done that. Hid my face in the sand about it.

But when I finished this draft, I wanted my husband to look at it. And then I wanted to throw up.

That's how I knew it was ready.

What do you know about your writing process? How do you know when you're done?

Snipping it in the Bud

The hubby has come and gone. My parents have come and gone. The hiatus was...sort of a hiatus. I didn't truly put things aside because I was thinking about writing even if I wasn't putting words on paper.

Actually, I was taking them away.

While I set the book aside as promised, I did work on the SCBWI W-I-P Grant application to make sure the first three chapters of my book didn't go over the 2,500 word limit. I agonized over every word and every sentence in those chapters.

I snipped. I clipped. I even blipped.

Yep. That's right. I swore. Like a drunken sailor. In German, of course, so my kids didn't know.

I couldn't figure out how to get the lousy thing smaller when I was finally down to cutting the last 50 words. Every word I cut found it's way back in because, without it, something was missing.

A smell. A sound. A feeling. An image. A character thought. A hint of voice.

I wasn't looking at sentences at this point. I was looking at every. Single. Individual. Word.

And two good things came out of it:

1.) I did finally find a spot that always felt a little wonky but I didn't know how to fix. And I fixed it. And my writing sample was 2,496 words.

2.) I really understand what Richard Peck meant when he said to write the tightest page you can. And then cut 10 words.

You have to snip it in the bud. Without taking out what's important.

And hopefully you figure out how to do it before your kids understand whatever language you are swearing in.

Killing a Tree

I'm truly understanding the value of killing a tree. Also known as a line edit on a printed copy of my manuscript. Holy marking up my paper to fix bad sentences.

I knew I tended to underwrite early drafts. I hadn't realized, at this point, that I was still missing a chapter. Or two.

Or that each page would look like a three-year-old took a black marker to it.

The thing is...I've been writing long enough that I know this. I've done line edits before. Yet every time it smacks me alongside the head and I say, 'Oh yeah...ummm...this works really well. Thank goodness I didn't send it yet.'

Which leads to two things:

1.) I won't have this manuscript out before my husband gets home for his mid-tour leave. It'll be close, but no cigar. And I will happily set it aside to give him my full attention.

2.) I'd be really interested in a study examining absorption and retention of student readers when they read from a computer screen vs. the printed page. My bet is the physical object holds more weight, figuratively speaking, than the digital one.

I even Googled to see if I could find anything. All in the name of distracting myself from writing the missing chapters, of course.

But now I'm off...it's 5:32 am. I've been up since 4:30. And George is getting very impatient about that missing chapter.