in search of the hat trick...

"there's nothing to writing. all you do is sit down at a typewriter, open a vein and bleed..." (red smith)

on sunday i finally finished book 2 of the series.

let me just tell you, friends, this book was so difficult to finish. so. freakin'. hard.

i lost faith in it about midway through, especially when it was about time to start all the major action and conflict resolution-y stuff.

but with a little help (and gentle nudges) from a couple really good friends, i somehow managed to limp along to the end. (hooray!)

in the old days, that would have been the end of it. agonize a little in the process of writing the book, whine a little, and then be done with the damn thing.

a long, long time ago...the really hard part of this writing thing was getting past chapter 3.

i mean it.

you'd have a great idea to start yourself out with and you'd go for it.  (i am sooo good at the "go for it part"!)

And then  somewhere around page 30 or 40, you'd start to realize that you didn't really plan this charade out all that great and you (and by that I mean "I") abandon ship. cannoooonball!

my guess is you'd probably blink a few times in surprise if i told you how many false starts live in my computer's cloud. (that sounded funny, didn't it? there's also that perpetual cloud my brain lives in and there are millions more false starts there, too.)

but somewhere along the way, in the past two years, i figured out how to end a book. hoooray, right?!

in the past two years i've actually had the chance to write "the end" on four projects (two of them attached to my YA series and two are in the romance/smoochy-smoochy genre).

and since i figured out how to type "the end," the panic no longer happens at page 30 or 40. it happens that next morning after you finish your book. (for the record, i only finish books at night. strange, right?)

these days, i want to unsend my book to my editors. i don't want anyone to read it and i wish i'd never said anything about being a writer at all.

i worst-case-scenario myself all to hell and convince myself that in a world of millions upon millions of traditionally and indie published books out there, mine will never really reach anybody, so why bother?

it's ugly. but mostly it shows me it's probably part of a maturing process as a writer (not a human being--i've given up hope on ever encountering one of those).

maybe the next phase is that i panic when a NY publisher wants to hand me a chunky little advance check. and then after that, i'll panic when i'm not sure if i want the red private jet or the gold one...

baby steps, i get it...i get it...

but for this moment right here...i mostly need to stuff those awful things i tell myself and march on. i've got another book to complete to round out before i can really wallow in how scary this publishing journey is and how i'm just not cut out for it.

kidding. kind of....

oh yeah, i wrote a book

i got so wrapped up in all the things these past two weeks that i forgot to properly celebrate the fact that the huge adventure i promise myself in my birthday post (read it here) actually happened. my first book went live last sunday and i kind of just want to hold it, and pet it, and name it george.

except it's an ebook and i can't hold it. and there's a girl on the cover, so i'm sure i'd have to go with georgina.

but you get what i'm chuckin' at. book one dropped this month just like i said it would. it's free over at Barnes & Noble and hopefully, Amazon will price match that soon. enjoy the freeness. i love free books.

as hannibal liked to say, i love it when a plan comes together.

a-team, y'all....a-team.

...happy happy happy...

Make Like Billy Madison...

And head back to school.

Last week I got my school assignment. I've got a new district, but I'm staying with 4th graders. Yaaaay! I have a soft spot for them...Boy Wonder being one himself and all. Yep, I'm biased.

To start each assignment off, we have a sitdown meeting with the teachers I'll be working with, a member of the WITS office, and myself. It's a short time to get to know each other, get a feel for what the teachers are looking for in the coming weeks and a chance to familiarize myself with the school.

I should jump in and say that I was 20 minutes late to the meeting despite leaving my house 90 minutes ahead of time. I-10 hosed me, ya'll. It HOSED me. What a great first impression I must have made...

This year, instead of four teachers, I have two. Two super nice, extra gentle fourth grader ELA teachers. Is it silly that the nice ones scare me more than the more stand-offish ones do?

Their biggest concern this year is adding voice to the students' work. It makes sense. Most of what their learning is aimed for the annual standardized test in the spring and it seems the rubrics are getting more rigid. Kids are getting dinged for not having enough "voice" in their essays...even the dreaded expository. (Barf.)

I've been thinking long and even longer about how to teach kids what their writing "voice" is. I have no clue where mine comes from and I'm pretty sure that it changes depending on the material and whether or not I got enough sleep. It might even lean on the amount of gas in my truck, truth be told.

It's such a vague notion, isn't it? How do you teach someone how to sound like an individual when they're taught to answer the same thing, the same way, every single time throughout their education. We're creating a generation of test drones, but we want these test drones to have an individual voice inside the 34 lines provided. But then go back to having the exact same answer as everyone else.

Luckily, the awesome teachers get to figure that part out, god bless 'em. I get to show up, make them laugh with my Lumpy Space Princess impression and let them go HAM on the paper, no rules, no censoring, just writing.

But here we are. Tomorrow is week one. We're concentrating on voice.

I'm goin' in folks...

...happy happy happy...

5-Minute MFA: Starting the 31 Day Challenge

I've never done the 31 Days Challenge (over at thenester.com). I've watched quite a few of my blog friends so it, but I have a hard enough time committing to sticking to my weekly meal plan that I can't imagine what it would be like to show up to this blog every day for a month and offer up something useful about any topic of my choosing.

Cray, ya'll. Double cray.

But I just joined up a bunch of dynamite gals who are doing spectacular things with their challenges and it's had me thinking the past week or so about what on earth I might offer. I am not so great at crafting and I'm even worse at tutorials. Tried and failed the food blog because I just don't have the patience to stage and photograph food. I want to EAT the food. I tried a jiu jitsu blog, but then I had to give up jiu jitsu for a while because my babies are just too small to drag from practice to practice. I've considered an art blog, but really, I'm just sort of a hack at art. I love to doodle, but I have nothing to offer anybody else. I write about my family on this blog, but I'd hardly consider myself a "mommy blogger." Truth be told, that moniker drives me banaynays. I love humor, but I don't always have the magic touch.

So what do I have?

Ok, ok. Stop pretending that you didn't see the EXTRA LARGE photo centered at the top of the post. I figured that I had the diploma, the student debt, and the writing chops to maybe help out people who don't have the access, money, or time to invest in an MFA program right now. Why not? Really, all you need to write is to have a seat, grab a pencil and a bit of paper....and write.

Here's a secret you might not know:

There are no secrets in writing.

No, seriously! You don't need a master's degree to be a good writer. You don't have to horde all of your ideas and guard your iPad notes with Fort Knox security levels. You don't need 1,000 books about writing (though I'm guilty of that myself!).

Really, you need to write. And then you need to edit. Then write some more. And edit some more. And then submit. Throw some coffee in there along the way and eventually, you're going to be accepted somewhere (we can't all be J.K. Rowling, though I wish you much luck in getting there!) and your story will be told.

And then you'll do it all over again.

That's really what you learn in an MFA program. That and some other things that really have nothing to do with creating your own story (some could argue that all those Dickens and Milton courses I had to take did me a favor in exposing me to classic lit, but I don't always agree.)

The point behind what I want to do with the next 31 days is provide lightening fast inspiration, tutorials, and concepts (less than 5 minutes!) that will set you on your way to writing with confidence....to help you ditch that nagging feeling that you're not worthy if you're not degreed as a writer.

Hogwash!

So over the next four weeks, in anticipation of Nanowrimo and building towards that, I'm launching the 5-Minute MFA. I'll touch on everything I learned in grad school regarding plotting, voice, editing, workshopping, crafting scenes, character pointers, and much more.

I've even convinced myself to step WAAAAY out of my comfort zone and post a vlog each week. WOWZA!

Hope you enjoy the next 31 days and come up with a meaningful challenge of your own. It'll be fun!

Another big day on Wednesday

Tonight I will go home. I will do the normal "home" things with my family. I will kiss P hello, tell him that I missed him. I will read Boy Wonder's school folder, see what "color" day he had. (Blue is great. Yellow is not.) I will ask how Boo did. Did he sleep? Did he make "mad baby" noises all day? We'll figure out dinner. I'll watch 4 episodes of Spongebob while P teaches jiu-jitsu. Then we'll figure out dinner. (Thinking take out, if you really want to know...)

The boys will have baths. They'll eat dinner. They'll destroy the house with their toys and pull things out that they'll never even play with. I'll throw them in bed and pick up after them. I'll tell the dog to relax, that P will be home any minute. I'll look at myself in the mirror and say something to the effect of "What the hell???"

And then...

I'll freak out.

See, I have another chance to pitch a manuscript tommorow morning with a Harlequin editor in New York.

6 a.m. to be exact...

The manuscript in question is a little ditty I like to call "Shelter from the Storm." It was fun to write. Not much fun to revise, and absolutely NONE fun to try to compartmentalize into cutesy sound bites for tomorrow's pitch session. I have lots of work to do tonight, perfecting my "this is why you should request a partial from me" spiel.

And that's what I'll be doing into the wee small hours of the morning. I'll attempt to interview myself and write out all the answers to the questions Ms. Editor may, or may not, ask. I'll spend a few hours tonight hanging out with my characters...the strong, silent type hero. He's a small-town sheriff with a nasty ex wife who up and broke his heart. (Nasty ex wife!)

There's our scarred, traumatized heroine. She's got an angry red scar from her eyebrow down her cheek--a souvenier from an attack by a serial killer she survived. She bought a bakery from her great aunt and started over in her old hometown. She's quiet and can't sleep well, but she's doing alright. Until...

Dun Dun DUNNNNN...

And that, dear Reader, is what makes Romantic Suspense, well, romantic suspense. (Which Harlequin Intrigue is.)

This is the second romantic suspense I've worked on, and I find they are actually kind of fun and easier to write. It's much easier to fill up pages when people are hacking at your characters with kitchen knifes or shooting at them from speeding SUVs. It's much harder to fill 50k words of two characters just plain ol' falling in love and stuff. Way harder.

So that's it. Tomorrow. Another day. Another chance to pitch the ol' romance novel. Will post any good news...