#Nanowrimo Day Seven: No Excuses

So it’s Day Seven and I’ve made it almost halfway through the challenge, word-count wise anyway. The way the project is outlined, I’ll still have further to go once I reach the 50,000-word threshold if I want to complete the book, which puts me right on schedule. If I want to finish a book, which for me runs more like 80,000 words, then I’ll have to keep going even after I “win” by the word count, in order to truly finish the book by the end of November. A memoir, which is what this is oddly shaping up to be, typically runs about that length, so that gives me a goal beyond Nano. And that’s not a bad thing to have, especially if you’re a planner like me.

Part of the reason why I have reached this benchmark is because I am a full-time writer who can devote solid chunks of time to actual writing. When you’re not a full-time writer, you daydream what it would be like to crawl into your hole under the bridge and pound out word after word for at least eight hours a day, getting paid to create full-time like a perfect writing job would allow.

But as you can see, most of my writing sessions are over after about four hours, even with revisions. If I weren’t doing a cursory edit prior to publishing these chapters on the blog, it’d be even less time. Or I’d write even more, clocking in two chapters a day instead of only one. Unless I’m approaching a deadline, that’s typically the norm. My average content ranges anywhere from 3000 words to 5000 words written per day. Imagine how many books I could write if writing was all I did.

For most independently published writers, large chunks of time devoted solely to writing are a pipe dream. When you’re a novelist, you get paid to write books. But in order to get paid, you have to worry about all the marketing side of things, too. You’re constantly doing PR work for yourself, setting aside the time to work on social media and building your brand. If you’re in between projects you’re preparing for whatever project comes next, because indie publishing is a numbers game that forces you to be forward thinking.

You’re also doing all the real life stuff that gets shoved to the side whenever you’re racing to complete a deadline.

If I could break up my job throughout the day in specific categories, creating content only takes up probably 25% of the time. The rest is spent marketing, researching, bookkeeping and other assorted administrative work. As an indie, I wear a lot of hats. The buck pretty much starts and ends with me. This means I’m my own boss, but, to be honest with you… I’m a bit of a hardass. This is why, even though my schedule is chock-full, with a book to read, an edit to finish, ARCs to prepare, an interview to go to, paperwork to notarize, housework to do, chauffeur duties and general living stuff like showering, eating and sleeping, if I dare *whisper* that I don't think I can do this Nano project, which is not something I'm doing for profit or pay, I'm quick to remind myself...

I’m one of those bosses who knows where her employee’s limits are and pushes her to them every chance I get.

I’m also the kind of boss who can see through any bullshit excuses if those goals and deadlines aren’t met. Big ambition requires lots more discipline, remember. And I demand it of myself, even when I’m juggling at least fifteen other chainsaws that day. Even if it’s a holiday, birthday or anniversary. Even if I’m sick. Even if I’m so stressed out I can’t sleep at night.

I’ll open up my computer and start writing, because there’s no excuse I’ll accept why I don’t.

For those who don’t know, I’m a huge fan of the show “Empire.” This Fox drama centers on the Lyon family, who head up a highly successful record label called “Empire.” That is truly what it is, and patriarch Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) rules just like an emperor would.

In a recent episode, he was working on a song with his son, Jamal (Jussie Smollett.) Due to some personal upheaval in his life, Jamal wasn’t feeling it. Lucious looked him point blank in the face and told him to put all the chaos, confusion, frustration and heartache into the music.

Chaos was how “Empire” was founded, with Lucious paving the way to success with a #NoExcuses attitude that meant business comes first, and bullshit comes dead last.

Given that bullshit, chaos, confusion, frustration and heartache have singlehandedly driven my writing career even before I could legitimately say I had one, this line spoke to me.

2015 has not been the easiest year for me. Like far too many indies, I’ve been swept away with the changing tide of our publishing world, changes that virtually derailed my momentum six months after I caught my first real express to success.

Given I had waited 33 years to catch it, I was extraordinarily bummed to find it only lasted for a good six months before I had to transfer, once again, back to Slow Poke station. This business is feast or famine, like I told you. We’ve discussed the statistics before. Only 20% of indies make over $1000 a year, which means some folks make $1001 and some people make millions.

Most come closer to the first number than they do the second. Statistics indicate that the biggest chunk of these writers make around the $10,000 mark annually, if you’re using $10,000 annually as the base.

In case you were wondering, a full-time job working at a fast food restaurant for minimum wage at the federal level is $15,080.

This keeps writers motivated to keep going, particularly when writing is their only job.

There’s no excuse for me, then, to not produce content. It’s either this or McDonalds, and the day that McDonald’s pays more, I may have some hard choices to make.

Until then, I’m fending off the wolves at the door with every word I write.

Hence why I write so many.

So even when my personal life has imploded around me all year, I’ve had to ignore all the bullets whizzing past my head and keep plodding forward. If I fell down, I didn’t allow myself the luxury of staying down. If I had a bad day, or a bad week, or a bad month, I had to suck it up and get back in the ring, even if there was blood in my eyes from the last sucker punch.

There was nothing left to do but put it in the content.

When I was homeless, I put all the fear and the uncertainty into the content. After my youngest son died, I put all the sadness and heartache into the content. When I found myself embroiled in a saga that involved a world where everything I encountered was as fake, and worthless, as Monopoly* money, friendships included, I put the frustration and the angst into the content.

The most significant writing I’ve done always happened at times of chaos.

So even though my mother is in hospice three states away with very little time left to live, and a half-sibling just passed away, and I’m getting closer and closer to, “You want fries with that?” I have no excuses to piss away a project.

Honestly if I wasn’t working, I’d likely be falling apart.

For most of you, the circumstances aren’t quite so dire. For some, it’s a matter of fitting in your writing project around family and full-time jobs. I completed four of my nine past Nanos doing that very thing. So I know it can be done. I can tell you how to do it. I just can’t do it for you. It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth it.

Because that’s what it all boils down to. If you want something, you make it happen. If you don’t, you make an excuse.

I do that weekly with the exercise. I want to get more fit, but that’s going to take a lot of work, and some days it’s easier to blow it off and just say, “I’ll do it tomorrow,” even though I’m relatively sure I won’t.

The time is going to pass either way. If I don’t reach my goals because I didn’t use it wisely, there’s really no excuse that covers it. Not really. So let’s run down some common excuses that you can torpedo the second they try to march into your brain.

EXCUSE NUMBER 1: YOU CAN’T WRITE A BOOK IN A MONTH.

If you look at the stats, hundreds of thousands** of people have participated in Nanowrimo since it began in 1999. Usually around only 20% actually complete the task annually. This proves that it’s quite difficult to write a 50,000-word book in a month, but it’s not impossible.

We need to stop treating it like it’s some mystical thing that happens to some and not others by virtue of luck. It is an accomplishment, not some errant miracle. Accomplishments take time, focus and dedication; most people are capable of all three.

You can write 50,000 thousand words in a month. It’s completely doable. Stephen King, whose daily count is around 2000 words per day, writes about 60,000 a month without the benefit of Nano at all.

If this is what you want to do for a full-time job one day, you’re going to have to treat it as such. Teach yourself the discipline first. Writer is not a title you’re given, it’s a title you earn. That comes only by doing. It’s up to you to do.

So why aren’t you?

EXCUSE #2: I DON’T HAVE THE TIME

This one I can kinda sorta give you, because it’s legitimate. It takes time to write 1,667 words a day. Even if you were merely transcribing 1,667 words a day, this would take time and effort. So I’m not going to blow sunshine up your butt here and say there is any shortcut around taking that time. It’s going to take what it takes and it’s up to you to figure out how to wedge it in.

It’s like the exercise bike. I only ride for 30 minutes at a stretch, but some days those 30 minutes are easier to fit in than others.

And that is why the whole time thing still falls under the heading of an excuse, even when it’s often a valid reason.

Time is what you make of it. We’re all given the same 24 hours every single day. It is how we choose to spend it that will determine our fate.

If you’ve decided to commit to Nano, it’s up to you to make the time. It’s up to you to fit the writing somewhere into your daily routine, even if it’s getting up an hour earlier and going to bed an hour later.

The whole point of Nano is to train you how to complete a project. If you’re a hobbyist or an aspiring writer who joins just to see if you could write a book in a month, you might not care if you complete it or not. As such, you’re not going to jump through any real hoops to do it. You’re not going to discomfort yourself. You’ll fit it in where you can and just wait to see what happens in the community frenzy that is Nanowrimo.

Perfectly valid, by the way. Make it work for you however you can.

If, however, you want to make this your full-time job, then you have to approach it like career, building one block at a time. For you, Nano isn’t some experiment. It’s a practice run. It’s your training ground. Just like the person who juggles going to college with work and family to prepare for their future careers, your ‘education’ involves all the same sacrifices. You will have to fit it in where you can, and find ways to fit it in where you can’t. This may mean giving up a Saturday or two for marathons to get you caught up, taking advantage of your rare downtime to rack up some serious word counts. It may mean giving up an hour of TV a night, or whipping out your notepad and writing on your breaks at work or school. If you’re a parent, particular of smaller kids, you’ll need to work around naps and playtime and family time and school. While your kids are doing their homework, do some of yours.

Better still, get your kids involved in the creative process if they’re so inclined. Enlist them as writing buddies, or artistic buddies. Challenge them to write stories or draw pictures when you’re writing your 1,667 for the day. Set an example. Encourage creativity. Get everyone in your family in on your goal so that it’s every bit their victory as it is yours at month’s end.

If you want to make this your dream career, your sacrifices and accomplishments are ultimately going to be theirs as well. Might as well get them used to it now. If it means that much to you, they’ll understand.

Look for opportunities, rather than excuses. Writing is one of the few jobs where you can do it anywhere, even if it looks like you’re doing nothing at all. You can even mentally prepare for what you need to do in your next chapter while you’re stuck in traffic. Use voice notes and scratch paper and jot down anything and everything that will make your next writing session a little easier.

This is where outlines prove the most useful. If you go into every writing session with a definite goal to accomplish, it’s going to go a lot smoother than just flying by the seat of your pants, praying that the words will come when you’re not exactly sure your Muse is going to report for duty that day.

Which brings us to…

EXCUSE #3: I HAVE WRITER’S BLOCK.

Yeah. No, you don’t. And even if you did, it’s not a valid excuse to stop writing.

I get that some days the words come easier than other days. Some days, it’s like pulling teeth to write a sentence. Some days, every single letter you type feels wrong. It just doesn’t sit well. It nags at your spirit and just brings you down, wondering why you ever wanted to be a writer in the first place.

Some days you’re going to stare at a blinking cursor for long minutes at a stretch as you mentally craft and discard sentences before they ever make it to the page. Some days you might not even reach that threshold of 1,667 words.

This makes it even more important to write every single day. Some days will be crap writing days. But some won’t. Some days it’ll be like your muse turned on a faucet and each perfect word just magically drops from heaven above. On those days, you’ll not only reach your threshold, you’ll pass it. The feeling is so euphoric that you won’t want to stop. You may stay up an extra hour that night, writing a thousand extra words, just because you could. And you should.

I love those days. Those days allow for the crap days. Since I know I need to average 1,667 words a day, the days I write 3,334 words virtually give me a day for free. I like that. I like being ahead of the game.

I’m a gold-star kinda girl, and have been since I was chasing honors in elementary school. I always want to do more than what is expected of me. If I only wrote 1,667 words a day and didn’t have that pretty blue progress bar way ahead of where it needed to be, it would stress me out. I would feel the pressure of the deadline. I would know that there wasn’t any wiggle room for a bad day where life reared its ugly head, or a crap writing day were I was lucky to reach a thousand words, much less the minimum.

If you struggle to meet that writing goal on a regular basis, it could be as simple as you not understanding the story you want to tell. This is also where the outlines come in handy, because you know the direction you’re going before you ever get started. Once you train yourself to do that, writer’s block will no longer intimidate you. You’ll have all the materials you need to build your chapters and reach your minimums.

Maybe your story is inherently flawed, without enough conflict to sustain it, where it fades out like a candle that has run out of wick. Maybe you don’t really know your characters all that well. This is where prep work will prove most useful, because a lot of this can be fleshed out before you even start your project. We’ll go into details about those later, and how you can use that to defeat the paper dragon known as Writer’s Block. Suffice it to say, it can be done. You just have to want to do it.

EXCUSE #4: IT’S CRAP. I’M CRAP. NANOWRIMO IS CRAP. UGG!!

What did I just tell you yesterday? It’s okay to suck in a first draft. It’s not going to be pretty and perfect, no matter how carefully you want to plan every single word. Give yourself the permission to write crap. Be verbose. Be pedantic. Use improper grammar. All that can be fixed later. It’s up to you to get the basic structure in place, and sometimes there’s no other way to do it than one crappy word at a time.

If you were building a house, your first draft would basically be the beams that make up the framework of the house. These show you were the walls and doors and windows will go. Eventually. Stop worrying about the shade of the curtains and pound those nails in wherever they are needed to fortify your foundation. Yes, it may be ugly at first, but I’d rather see a crappy first draft of a book than hear all the beautiful, unrealized ideas of a book no one has the balls to stick their neck out and actually write.

Show me you want it, and I’m behind you every step of the way.

If you want it, here’s the good news. You can “win” Nanowrimo. If it’s something you really want, there’s no excuse you will personally accept to prevent you from reaching that finish line.

If you don’t want it, every opportunity will present itself as an escape door. You don’t even have to go looking for them. They’ll just magically appear. If you decide to open them, then that’s on you. It’s okay not to want to finish. Nano isn’t for everybody.

That’s not a judgment call, by the way. If you decide you don’t want to finish, who am I to judge you? You get to pass your time your way. If you want to write a book, by all means, write a book. If you have other priorities, by all means, tend to your life the way you see fit.

But if you really, really want to finish Nano, the only thing that is stopping you is you. Kick off the excuses and make it happen.

You totally can.

You totally should, if nothing more than to show yourself how much you can do when you dare to declare #NOEXCUSES.

Now if you’ll excuse me. I have an exercise bike to ride. (Or a mall to walk. Either way: NO EXCUSES!)

*Another place marker to indicate that these brand names might need to be changed for publication. Once you publish a book for profit, you have to be cautious about all the specific legalities about copyrights and trademarks. I find it best never to refer to any brand name at all in my published work. Blogs work a little different though, so this is just a reminder to myself to fix this in the editing process.

**This place marker indicates that I need to research this data further. I need to dig a little to provide more accurate data, which wasn’t coming up easily in a cursory Google search as I was writing. Since I can’t spend a whole lot of time on that today due to my own limited schedule, I decided to place a little notation so I could move past it and move on.

Started First Draft: November 7, 2015 11:36am PST
Completed First draft: November 7, 2015 1:27pm PST
Word Count of first draft: 2,911
Completed revisions: November 7, 2015 2:11pm PST
Updated WC: 3,398/25,923

#Nanowrimo Day Six: You Will Suck. (And that's okay.)

One of the greatest gifts my husband Steven ever gave to me was a hardbound copy of one of my books. It surprises me still to this day that it is one of my greatest gifts, because I knew what was coming and I was relatively certain that I was going to hate it.

Back then the idea of becoming a published writer was still fairly abstract. It was a dream only, something I hoped would happen someday in my future, but I knew without any shadow of a doubt I wasn’t prepared for it by Christmas of 2005.

Granted, I had written quite a bit by then, with five books and six screenplays under my belt, including the one I had optioned. But it was clear that having anything published or produced was still pretty far into the future. (Six years to be exact.) I had a lot to learn. And I had a lot more work to do.

Steven decided I shouldn’t have to wait to see my name in print, and decided that for Christmas, he’d have one of my books professionally bound. Normally this would be a killer present for an unpublished author. And it would have been, had it not been for one teeny tiny problem.

The reason I just knew I would hate it was because of the version of the book he chose to–pardon the pun–immortalize. He decided he wanted to use the first draft of my novel, MY IMMORTAL, which I had written the year before for Nano.

This was how I managed to figure out what he was up to, no matter how sly he thought he was being. He had to get this draft from me somehow, and, like most writers, I was quite unwilling to give it up.

This made me 100% certain I’d hate the gift when he finally presented it to me.

By then I had worked through subsequent drafts, so I knew just how badly written that first draft was. You never realize that at the end of the draft, when you crawl, bloody and broken, over the finish line, with just enough stamina to thrust your fist in the air like you're stuck in a John Hughes movie.

I told him, ever so gently, in my sweet Southern way, that a snowball had a better chance in hell than he did getting that first draft. It, like every other first draft in existence, sucked way too much to be published as it was.

But he was insistent. He didn’t seem to care that this draft sucked the big one, and how much it would physically pain me to revisit it even if it was hardbound in leather. He wanted to honor my accomplishment of writing a book, any book, even a sucky one.

One thing you should know about my husband. When he decides he wants to do something a certain way, he’s fairly obnoxious about it. Personally I think that’s why we get along so well. We’re both the kind of people that, when we dig our heels in, it’s because we really, really, really believe in what we are doing, making us impossible to deter.

Long story short: he badgered me until I caved.

Finally I just plugged my nose and handed over that stinky, cruddy, awful, error-filled, verbose, overwritten, hastily written piece of suckatude and let him do his thing. It clearly meant more to him than it did to me, and letting him do what he wanted was kind of my Christmas gift to him.

I was certain I’d have to feign any kind of enthusiasm for the gift all the way up until I opened the box and saw the book for the first time.

I didn’t know how badly I wanted to see my name in print until the first time I did. I promptly burst into tears, deciding in about a second that this was the best gift ever.

That book has had a special place on our bookshelf every year since.

Now ask me how many times I’ve cracked it open to read it. Ask me how many times anyone has read it. I’ll give you a hint; it’s the same number.

It’s also the same number of people will be able to read it going into the future.

You’re basically going to have to pry the book out of my cold, dead hands, because no one gets to read it while there is still breath in my body. Nope. Nada. Can’t help you. No one is ever going to read it. Ever, ever, ever.

Why?

It sucked.

Even though it was book #4, written 23 years after that first Halloween writing assignment, it sucked. Even though I live-blogged it as I wrote it, publishing a chapter a day with minimal editing for a wide MySpace audience, who read along enthusiastically, enthralled by the sophomoric attempt, as well as my ambitious endeavor to write a book in a month, it sucked.

It sucked, it sucked, it sucked.

It sucked because it was a first draft. It sucked because, even with those 23 years, four novels and six screenplays under my belt, I was still figuring out who I was as a writer. It sucked because I was feeling my way along, trying and discarding new ideas, experimenting, and, more often than not, falling right on my face.

Fortunately that’s what those first few books are for. They exist for the sole purpose of learning how not to suck. It’s a gauntlet, if you will. An obstacle course you must navigate in order to get better.

Ironically, that’s also the reason that so many people never turn “I wish,” into “I did.”

Too many writers are afraid to suck.

Worse, we like to give them a gold star for it. We nod in agreement that writing a bad book is a waste of time. Too many bad books exist already, written and even published by those who clearly aren’t as self-aware as these careful, thoughtful writers who respect the process way too much to do something as heinous as write a bad book. On purpose. Anyone who would willingly write a sucky book is obviously a hack looking to make a fast buck, someone who doesn’t take the process seriously. Somewhere along the line we decided it showed disciplined when a writer recognized his or her limitations and curbed their enthusiasm to write accordingly.

Funny thing about writing within such limitations. It doesn’t give you much room to grow.

The best gift that Steven gave me that year was the permission to suck. It was okay. It was necessary.

No matter what you do in life, you're usually not going to ace it on the first try. In my book BACK FOR SECONDS, my heroine had to start her life over after a bitter, unexpected divorce. She threw herself into her cooking, where she used the challenge of creating delectable treats that were iced to perfection to renew her confidence. She didn't succeed the first try. In fact there was one notable scene where she had a minor meltdown, crushing those cookies into a fine powder because she couldn't get it right, not the way she wanted it.

The bigger your dream, the higher your standards.

Like anyone else who has accomplished anything great, she didn't use that suckatude as an excuse to stop. She saw it as an opportunity to get better, to learn from her mistakes. She didn't stop just because she sucked. She kept going, because perfecting this task meant more to her.

Writing a sucky book doesn't mean you don't care about or respect the process. It means you're not about to let something as temporary as sucking stop you from doing what it is you want to do.

And it didn’t stop me, at all, from seeing my dream realized. In fact, it inspired me to work a lot harder on the next book, just so it would suck less. It was the only way I’d see my name in print “for real.”

Writing a great book starts with writing rotten ones, and that’s just the truth. The first book you write will always be the worst book you write, even if you’re a writing prodigy. Raw talent likely got you into the game, but only skill can take you from a wide-eyed wannabe to an accomplished author. The only way you gain that skill is through experience. Lots and lots of experience. To learn how to write you must write… and you must write a lot. Even if it’s bad. Even if it sucks. You have to crawl before you learn how to walk and all that.

Don't take my word for it. The great Stephen King has said there are only two things you need to do to become a writer. Read a lot and write a lot.

Most of us can handle the reading part. A wordsmith typically starts as a bibliophile. We love everything about the written word. We consume all types of books and absorb all sorts of things from all types of stories and storytellers, even when we’re not aware that’s what we are doing.

Indeed, many writers start their journey assimilating what they’ve read and trying to duplicate it, which is one of the reasons so many of those first few attempts suck so badly. It’s not completely genuine or authentic. You’re simply rehashing what you’ve read in the past, forcing it through your own inexperienced filter until it resembles anything even remotely bookish.

That’s how it happened for me, anyway.

It’s kind of inevitable, really. When you’re a new writer, you’re still figuring out who you are. You have an idea what you want to say, and you lean on all the books you’ve ever read to show you how to say it.

And that’s great. You should read a ton of books. Lots and lots.

The more you read, the better you’ll write. It’s inevitable.

But here’s the part about that lesson we all miss. We are often spared all the yucky, sucky parts. We don’t get to see the first fledgling drafts of these novels, the ones that the publishers or agents said, “Yeah… it’s a’ight, but we’re going to have to put some work into it before it can go to market.”

Every great book has gone through some sort of editing process, which exists solely to minimize the suckatude. What you hold in your hand is a finished product. It is not where that writer started, not by a long shot.

We’ve all been judging our first efforts by the finished product of others as if they are the same thing, and they’re just not.

This sets up an unrealistic expectation for your own work. When you produce your first draft and you realize yourself that it doesn’t stand up to all the books you’ve read, it can be a real killjoy that will strike you right in the heart of your insecurities. This can make you shelve your projects, hidden away in some dark drawer, never to see the light of day, because you’d be mortified if anyone knew just how badly you suck. You need to be aware of and recognize your limitations, and amend yourself accordingly.

That’s how I always approached it, anyway.

Maybe that was why I could write five books and six screenplays and still be horribly mortified by the suckatude. I valued perfection over progress, and really didn’t get anywhere as a result.

It’s a sobering discovery when you learn that no matter how badly you want that gold star, or to be recognized for your spark, that bright creative genius we’ve talked about time and again, that thing that makes you special and sets you apart from everyone else, you start out sucking every bit as much as everyone else.

Every creative type will struggle with this at some point, particularly at the beginning of their careers. This is when you suck harder than you will ever suck.

At some point your inexperience will frustrate you, because you will not be able to do your brilliant ideas justice.

Yeah. That happened to me.

Nothing shuts your dreams down faster. Many writers are unwilling, and often discouraged, from writing a bad book, even when it’s a necessary part of writing a great one.

Ray Bradbury once advised writers to write 52 stories over 52 weeks, contending that it is impossible to write 52 bad stories in a row. Like any underdeveloped muscle, you have to work it out in order to get the kind of results you want. No one wakes up with a six-pack just because they really, really want them. You have to put in the time. You have to do the work.

It is in the suckatude that you learn how not to suck. And every single writer has gone through this process, whether you got to see it or not.

Even the great Harper Lee, whose book “To Kill a Mockingbird” was an award-winning classic that sustained her entire career on only one novel, sucked at first. When she sent in the book that would become TKAM, it wasn’t ready for publication at all. It had a spark of genius, but it was mired in just enough suckatude to throw the brakes on the whole thing until they could fix it.

You didn’t get to see that part. You didn’t get to see the long hours of sitting in front of a typewriter, toiling over each word choice. You didn’t get to see the back and forth with the editors, where Ms. Lee worked over the period of two years to turn that sow's ear into a silk purse. All you see is the polished, award-winning classic sitting on the bookshelf. Every word she wrote was not, as it turns out, pure gold, and she needed a little help from other people to learn how to shake off the suckatude.

As we all do.

Every new writer will ultimately face this. You’re going to suck. I sucked. Stephen King sucked. Harper Lee sucked. We all had to start somewhere in order to learn how not to suck.

Since everyone assumes that anything written in 30 days must suck by default, I say use Nanowrimo as your excuse to suck… with style.



Since you can't avoid it, you might as well learn to embrace the suckatude. Go into each writing session knowing that you might suck that day, but that’s okay. If you keep at it, day by day, word by word, you’re going to suck a little less by month’s end, simply because you’re working out that muscle.

Not every word you write will drip with honey. My typical book runs anywhere from 80,000 – 100,000 words, and of those words, there are probably ten to twenty really great passages, the kind that are so good they actually make me question whether I could have written them. When I edit the work, however, I’m ready to throw about 70% of it back, endlessly tweaking and fidgeting to get it just so.

In fact, much of your output will frustrate you. It is not an easy thing to arrange words on a page. Often they will feel inadequate in the sheer scope of what you're trying to do. Writing a book is hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise most likely hasn’t written one, particularly one that doesn’t suck. (Because that's even harder.)

Writing anything is hard, short format, long format, doesn’t matter. Every word you cast onto the page is like a piece of spaghetti flung on a wall. You never know what is going to stick until it does. It is a learning experience as you struggle to find “the right” word, or the right combination of words. You’ll find yourself scowling every single time you write the word “said,” because it won’t properly convey the emotion of the scene, which you feel should be transcribed to the letter. You’ll refer to your thesaurus more than once, to find a prettier word, a more writer-y word, to say what you want to say with style, ultimately exhausting every synonym for said in the space of a chapter. You’ll stare at a paragraph for an hour, thinking it’s clunky and confusing, but unsure how to whittle it down into something more succinct and concise. You’ll change sentence order, you’ll fiddle with sentence structure; you’ll delete words and insert words, only to wipe away the whole passage entirely in a fit of impotent despair.

In fact, this chapter itself feels sucky to me. Thanks to real life stuff, I’m up earlier than usual. Since I have a deadline to meet, I decided to get my daily writing requirement out of the way early. This forces me to write when I don’t feel my brain is firing on all cylinders. Each word feels inadequate. Nothing is flowing like I want it to flow.*

Believe me, as a writer you’re every bit as aware of when you get it right as when you get it wrong. You’ll feel it down to your bones.

You’ll be painfully aware when you suck, even decades into your writing career. Some days you just need to write through the suckatude, knowing that no matter how bad it is, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

That’s what the rewrite process is for.

That this is happening on the day I had outlined to talk about sucking actually works out perfectly, so you can see that yes… it can suck… but you will both move past it and learn from it. I may feel like I’m forcing every word this morning, but it’s not stopping me from getting the words onto the page. Deadlines don’t go away just because you can’t find the right word. Use “said,” and move on. Put the pieces in place. You can fiddle with getting them perfect later. It’s your job to keep plodding along, installing the space for your chapter, knowing that when you go back through it later, you can address whatever weaknesses you felt were there and make it stronger, even if it’s rewriting the thing entirely.

Suckatude is no excuse to stop. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to complete your first draft, regardless of if it sucks.

Spoiler: it’s going to. Like I said, first is always worst, even within specific projects.

Here’s the thing, though. You have permission to suck. It’s okay. It’s necessary. Once you learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff by doing it on a regular basis, you’re going to suck a whole lot less.

You just need to muster the courage to be imperfect for a while.

Writers who are afraid of sucking usually never write their way out from under it. Writers who realize that sucking is an inherent part of the process will inevitably use each and every failure to climb out of the suckatude, building a skillset that will take them wherever they need to go. This comes from learning what not to do every bit as learning what to do.

The best education I ever got in screenwriting came from joining websites where other newbies like me could share our work and engage in peer-to-peer reviews to polish our screenplays. This started with Zoetrope, a virtual studio for Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope, one where writers can both give and receive feedback to refine their craft.

Back when I started, you had to review something like three screenplays in order to submit one of your own. Sounds simple enough, right?

That’s what I thought too, until I realized that these were not the polished screenplays that actually made it to the screen, not by a long shot. These were early drafts from clueless, new writers, many of whom were at different developmental stages of their career, which often made it a chore to get through.

In a very real way, you stop reading for pleasure when you start writing professionally. You start picking things apart. You’re more critical. You can spot where things hit the mark and when they fall flat. You’ll do this all the time, even when you don’t realize you’re doing it. You’ll do it for published/produced material, things that were deemed OK to release to the masses. And you’ll most definitely do it in peer-to-peer reviews, where you are tasked with helping your fellow writer get one step closer to that ultimate goal of being sold.

If you’ve never done this, I highly recommend finding a writer group and adding this to your to-do list. By reading only published/produced material, you’re only getting half the picture. You need to see what doesn’t work every bit as what does. This way you’ll more easily spot the flaws and the problems in your own writing.

That wasn’t the real challenge, though. The real challenge was finding a positive and constructive way to break down the screenplay and tell the writer what didn’t work as well as what did. This requires knowledge of what makes a sucky book or screenplay suck so hard, and you can’t really identify those things without being familiar with both good material and bad material.

You must educate yourself about those things, especially if you’re a new writer yourself. It’s not enough just to decide you don’t like something, which might work for a casual reader but is never excusable for someone who wants to be a professional. You need to identify why you didn’t like it. You have to break it down. You have to solve it, kind of like a riddle. Maybe the first and only thing you can think of is, “Well. It sucked.” But that writer can’t do too much with that. Did it suck because you have personal biases you took into it? Maybe it was juvenile humor and you don’t like juvenile humor. Maybe the main character is unlikable. This often boils down to personal preference, but technical execution can also play a part. Did it suck because it was improperly formatted? Did it suck because it bored you, indicating there might be something wrong with the pacing?

Be specific. Why did it suck? What went wrong?

When you learn to answer these questions, you’ll learn how to avoid these pitfalls in your own writing.

This is why it’s kind of necessary to suck.

The challenge, then, is learning how not to suck. This comes from fearless experimentation and relentless repetition. Every writing session is a workout, flexing and training your creative muscle so that one day, over time, it becomes toned and refined. Just like going to the gym to train your body, some days you just have to grin and bear it as you write word after inferior word, no matter how frustrated you might be that you’re not quite communicating the message the way you want to. You can’t see the progress because you’re mired down in the swamp of suckatude, wading through the muck every single time you have to write a bunch of crappy paragraphs you just know you’re going to have to whittle down later into something more palatable. And, just like the gym, you’ll discover that the more you flex that muscle, the more confidence you will develop over time. After a month, or six months, or a year, you’ll finally see the progress in your body, turning it into the masterpiece you always knew it could be.

You write enough words, you’ll find that they suck less and less. Like Mr. Bradbury said, it’s impossible that they’re all bad, or that they will all suck, if you just keep going.

But you’ll never get to that place as long as you use the fear of sucking as an excuse not to try.

Leaning a bit harder on the fitness analogy, I’ll put it this way. I am a big girl. My body is not where I want it to be. In order to get where I want to be, I know I’m going to have to put in a whole lot of work. This isn’t something I can finish in 30 days, or even six months, maybe even one year. To get to where I want to go, I’ll have to exercise when I don’t feel like it. I’ll have to say no to yummy food when I really want it. I’ll have to use enormous amounts of discipline I currently don’t possess, or at least utilize for that particular task. If I want something different, I’m going to have to do something different. It’s the only way to get in fighting shape as it were.

Because this task is so overwhelming, and the demands of which are daunting, my first human instinct is to make excuses not to try. This irrational fear is wagers my success against how likely it is I will fail. The odds are not stacked in my favor. Most people have been perpetually dieting in some form or another for decades and still struggle with it. I know that the road ahead of me is not an easy one, and it’s inevitable that I will suck at meeting this challenge.

This past year, I dedicated myself to a fitness journey. I had hoped to make a huge dent in the weight I had to lose, but I only lost 23 pounds. I have plenty of excuses on why I sucked at transforming my body. I don’t want to join a gym. I don’t like working out in front of anyone, much less the kind of people who have already mastered the kind of discipline I haven’t yet developed. Even in my own house, I have to have absolute privacy to work out, which I often don’t have.

But I want that privacy because I don’t want to feel inadequate. No one does.

Whether I worked at this goal or not, the time passed regardless. Here it is a year later and I’m not all that much closer to my goal than I was when I started.

If in another year I’m still in the same exact spot I am now, I have no one to blame but myself. I could have dared to fail, dared to suck, dared to be inadequate and work through it, or I could choose not to. (Like every OTHER year of my life.)

In other words, if I’m not where I want to be, it’s kind of my choice.

To do anything of any importance, from the time you learn to walk to the time you dare to fly, you have to be willing to suck.

And if you want to do something big, you have to be willing to suck just as epically.

My son Timothy once said to me, “Your discipline must match your ambition.” This is absolutely 100% true. If you want to write a great book, you need the discipline to churn out a few stinkers along the way. You have to hold your nose and power through those books that will never sell in order to get to the ones that will.

The more you write, the more you’ll be able to tell the difference.

It’s going to take some time, but that’s okay. The time is going to pass either way. It’s up to you how you use it. You can develop that creative muscle and get yourself in fighting shape, or you can shrug it off and let the time pass without doing one damn thing to improve. The bad news is that we all suck at the beginning.

The better news is that we can improve drastically if we dare to write anyway.

The best news it that there’s no downside to writing books that suck. So your book sucks. So what? Shelve it and start on the next one, which I can guarantee you will suck a little less.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever use the suckatude as an excuse to stop writing. Only writing itself will get you past this awkward, ugly, inadequate phase that every single writer before you has found themselves in.

Not everyone will get past it.

But you can.

And you should.

So go forth and suck, my lovelies. Write stinkers of sentences, paragraphs, chapters and books. Line your walls with the page after inadequate page. Let every awkward word mock you from the screen, challenging you–daring you–to work through the crap in order to reach your full potential.

And one day, when you’re a huge success, and people are clamoring to know your secret, you can just smile wide and tell them, “I wasn’t afraid to suck.”

*As you can see from the time taken to revise this chapter, as well as the jump in the word count, I did fidget with this one a little more than the rest, simply because it sucked, and I didn't care to post it live in the condition it was in. It still isn't perfect, but I'll be able to move on to my next chapter tomorrow. In the rewrite process, who knows what might happen? I might scrap it entirely.

Odds are, however, I'll just tighten it up and sharpen the message of the content. At least the basic ideas are in place, and that's all I needed to move forward.

It still kinda sucks, but that's okay. Most of what we write is not carved in stone, so suckatude is a temporary state at best.

But that's a lesson for another day.



Started First Draft: November 6, 2015 8:31am PST
Completed First draft: November 6, 2015 10:57am PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,503
Completed revisions: November 6, 2015 1:15pm PST
Updated WC: 4,776/22,300

When the Bad Guy is a Bad Boy. Have y'all met Caz?

Yeah... I don't know where he came from, but I managed to unearth yet another douche bag that I should have hated, but I kind of loved.

If you've already read MASTERS FOR HIRE, prepare to meet Devlin's nemesis, Caz Bixby, in MASTERS FOR LIFE, who gets thrust into Coralie's fairy tale existence as her cocky, obnoxious personal trainer.

TEASER FROM MASTERS FOR LIFE

He appraised me thoughtfully. “Guess we better hit the gym then... New Year’s Eve will be here before you know it.”

“I’ve been ready for a half-hour.”

He glanced down at his suit. “Oh yeah,” he said with a grin. He put his champagne flute onto the table before he stood. He crossed the distance between us in two steps, before hovering over me with a different kind of smoldering glance all his own. I watched as he tugged free his tie, which snapped from around his neck before he trailed it across one of my wrists. My fists balled tightly, so he tossed the tie away. With that despicable smirk, he ran his hands up his sculpted chest until his fingers circled that top button. Slowly he released them, one at a time, revealing his sculpted bare chest underneath, which caught me off guard. His bold tattoos on both arms appeared to breathe thanks to his rippling muscles.

He took off the shirt and tossed it onto the sofa next to me, before angling his pelvis towards my face. “Help me with my pants?” he said as he held his hands out to the sides of his hips, like he was presenting me with pure gold. I practically breathed fire, but I didn’t move one muscle. “No? I guess I can do it then.”

His strong fingers unfastened his dress slacks, slowly unzipping them. His slacks fell to the floor, revealing snug compression workout shorts that hugged his defined bulge proudly. As he stepped out of his pants, I realized that he still wore his dress shoes. “Looks like you forgot something,” I sneered.

He chuckled as he kicked off his shoes. He reached for one sock. “I guess I’ll have to go bare. Do you mind?”

I scowled at his innuendo. “You’re such a pig.”

He leaned over me, backing me up against the cushion of the sofa, one arm on either side of me. “We’re all animals deep down, baby.” His gaze liberally drifted towards my mouth. “So what do you say? Wanna burn some calories?”

With a growl I scooted out from under his arm and rounded the other side of the sofa. He straightened with an even wider smile before he followed, trailing his laughter behind.

******

You will not BELIEVE where these two men take us all in book three, MASTERS FOREVER, a tempting little treat provided below... which will probably scare the shit out of everyone still cursing my name for how Book Two ended.

#sorrynotsorry #itsgonnabegood

TEASER FROM MASTERS FOREVER, (MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS BUT DAYUM, IT MIGHT BE WORTH IT...)

Devlin leaned back against the sofa as he studied my face. “Not how I pictured this night going,” he murmured. “How about you?”

My eyes hardened. “Not how I pictured the year going.”

He brushed a stray strand of my hair from my eyes. “Me either.”

“Jesus,” Caz exhaled as he rolled his eyes. He grabbed the remote and turned to a music channel that played pulsating dance music. He dragged me up by the hand. “This is a party, for fuck’s sake.”

“Caz, I don’t want to,” I tried to protest as he pulled me to the center of my living room. Still holding the remote, he turned down all the lights courtesy of the dimmer.

“Come on, pussycat. If you wanted to stay here and feel sorry for yourself, you’d have never left.”

A dance tune by Madonna began to play, the aptly titled “Hung Up.” Caz pulled me close, his hands on my hips, to guide me through the sensual movements as we began to undulate to the music. I stole glances at Dev, who watched us from his spot in the corner of my couch.

It was the very same corner where he had been that first night, when he commanded that I strip for him. He had seduced me that night, confidently and well. My flesh responded instantly to the memory. I shuddered and looked way, focusing on Caz, who danced closely to me, grinding his hips against me, his eyes locked with mine. “Only a couple of hours left, baby,” he said. “Do you really want to spend it sad?”

The music pulsated around me, a rolling beat that made the entire room felt like it was spinning and tumbling through space. Of course, that might have been the pot. My brain had taken off somewhere around Pluto. That, combined with the alcohol I had consumed, helped me submit to the dance. I closed my eyes and just allowed myself to ride the music.

“That’s it,” Caz murmured. “Let yourself go. You know you want to.”

Again my eyes sought Dev. Maybe I was waiting for permission. Maybe I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to lose his shit again. My eyes snapped open when I realized he was no longer sitting on the sofa.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt him fall into step behind me, pinning me between both of them.

“Dev,” I started, but his mouth landed right next to my ear.

“Shh,” he shushed, and it sent an involuntary shudder all the way through my body.

I found myself responding to the beat, braced between them. Devlin, whose mouth rested right near my ear, dragged his lips along the sensitive line of my neck. “Ever had two men at once, Coralie?” he murmured.

I practically evaporated on the spot. After everything I’d been through, after everything they had both done, I knew I was at their mercy. I was too high. I was too drunk. I was too bitter after such a crappy, crappy few months. There had been so many moments that I just wanted to turn the clock back... so I just enjoy my fantasy for one minute more.

And here Dev was, like a mirage, offering me another one. A new one. A naughty one. It was one where I could be with him again, no matter how high the cost, which had always been really high, like $25,000. Like a broken heart. Like shattered dreams. Like loving a man who might just be incapable of loving me back.

And yet… dear God, help me… it was still everything I wanted.

******

Are you scared yet?

Just wait till November 27....O_O

My boys will be back, and they're going to be badder than ever.

I. Cannot. Wait.

#Nanowrimo Day Five: To Outline or Not to Outline; That is the Question.

When it comes to prep work, writers typically segregate themselves into two camps: those who outline and those who don’t.

Those who outline prefer to have all their ducks in a row before they get started. Those who don’t outline prefer a more flying-by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants approach.

I have belonged to both of these camps. Ironically enough it was Nanowrimo that had me defecting to the other side.

I started squarely and defiantly in the “seat-of-one’s-pants” camp for my first few novels. I preferred to let the story take me where it was going to take me. There’s a lot of freedom in that, because let’s face it, our stories are living entities. Every strike of your keys or swoop of your pen brings these little darlings to life, and they often have minds of their own.

When I try to explain this to a non-writer, I typically get a skeptical side-eye glare, assessing to see if I’m insane. (Hint: I’m a writer… it’s implied.)

“How can your characters surprise you, Ginger? They’re coming from you.”

Well, yes. And no.

Back when I wrote DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS originally, it was as a screenplay, and I had very definite ideas of what I wanted to do with the story. It started as the tale of a lesbian who was a PK (or preacher’s kid,) and, after a disastrous sequence of events, fell in love with the one person in the whole town that she shouldn’t.

That’s the story idea that planted my butt in the chair anyway.

As I bounced this idea off of my husband, Steven, like I am prone to do, he explained that there should be another character in her life, a friend even. He contended that I couldn’t just have her influenced by her horrible, fanatical family.

I agreed, so I took my main character Grace to a liquor store, where she met a guy named Mike.

I should probably insert here that Grace has a lot of problems, one of the biggest of which is that she is a full-fledged addict who self-medicates with drugs and alcohol even though she’s barely nineteen years old.

So of course she’d go to a liquor store, right? That’s a completely organic thing for her to do. *Insert smug writer-type sense of self-importance here.*

All I typed were the words, “Hey, Gracie,” and suddenly Mike didn’t feel so friendly. Since I didn't "meet" this character until he inserted himself in the story, I really didn't know him from Adam. Because he was so new to me and to the story itself, he could do whatever the hell he wanted to do. He was a blank slate. I wanted to create one thing, and all of a sudden my fingers were tapping me in a whole other direction.

I spoke briefly about my first writing assignment. This truly was where I got my first taste of the story guiding the writer. I was given a picture of a house and told to write a story to go along with. Since this was Halloween, I knew that the teacher probably wanted a haunted house story, though the picture in and of itself wasn’t especially scary. It was just a picture of an old house, one that looked like it could have been built in the 1800s or early 1900s.

I had no idea what I was going to write about when I sat in front of that beautiful blank piece of paper to create a story for the first time.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I knew that I wanted the house to be sad. To me, that’s where most hauntings start. I think it would be terribly sad to be bound to an earthbound plane, ignored and invisible to the world around you. How lonely that must be. It's no wonder a ghost would want to reach out, make noise, be seen... be acknowledged.

It just wants what we all want.

So the origin to my story was a sad one. A man loves his beautiful bride so much that he builds her a grand house full of many rooms that they fill with as many children. Instead, they both die childless years and years later, because life has its own plans.

(And yes, I realize that UP got the jump on me on this one. But to be fair, it had been 28 years and I hadn’t done anything with this story, so … it was kinda fair game.)

Making this sad origin scary just didn’t seem right to me after that, but I couldn’t just leave the story like this. It was just too darned sad.

Instead of ending it as a haunted house, I ended the story as a story of hope, by turning the sad, old home into an orphanage into a happy home filled with love for all those kids who had no parents.

(I like to do stuff like that. Recently a reader responded to a promo blog for MASTERS FOR HIRE by saying, "Ginger Voight sure likes to take the norm and toss it on its head." #truestory.)

Of course by the time I was through, I knew I no longer had a Halloween story. There wasn’t anything even remotely scary about it. It was actually kind of uplifting instead. I colored in the picture of the house using happy, bright colors with nary a cobweb in sight.

(Once again, you’re welcome, UP.)

When I turned in the assignment, I was only slightly concerned that I had gone so completely off script with my first story. I am a people pleaser deep down, and I knew I didn’t do what was expected of me. For a chronic Good Girl, whose neurosis to be all things to all people began years before, the idea of invoking my teacher’s wrath, or worse – enduring her disappointment – began to gnaw at me as each day passed and I waited for my grade.

I had confidence that I was a good student, particularly in Language Arts, but the instant I didn’t get my paper back when everyone else did, I fended off an anxiety attack of near epic proportions. Could I have *gulp* failed for the first time ever?

I was a good student. Such a thing was unthinkable.

When I finally found the nerve to walk up to the front of the class and ask Mrs. Adams where my paper was, she gestured behind her to the Wall of Honor, where all the truly important things go, where my paper now hung with a giant red “A.”

I. Was. Flabbergasted.

Not only had my teacher liked the fact I went off script, she praised me for it. It wasn’t just a good paper. It was a great one.

After that, I was passionate about letting my stories guide me, confident that they would know oh so much better than I did about what was good, and what was exceptional.

Fast-forward to 2002, when I wrote the screenplay for DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS over the course of a week, churning out 40 pages in one day alone, and I could tell right away that Mike was seriously about to go off script. He felt creepy. And sinister. I could hear this character’s voice in my ear and it instantly gave me a full-bodied shudder.

This wasn’t her friend at all. This was the exact opposite of her friend. I knew within two teeny tiny words. I think my exact reaction to this was, “Ohhhh. So you’re THAT guy.”

I had a plan for Mike, but as it turned out, he had a plan for me, too–one that would change my whole storyline. This one little change, where my Muse nudged me in one direction and not the other, reshaped the plot entirely.

Later, when Grace informed me that she wasn’t really a lesbian at all, who was I to argue? I was essentially sitting in the first row of my mind’s theater, chowing on popcorn, watching my actors do improv, curious to see where, exactly, they were about to take me.

Because I didn’t outline, I was allowed to do this. I had the freedom to do this. And people who have a lot of freedom don’t typically want to surrender it, especially with the tedious work of writing out an outline. No stallion wants to be confined in the starting gate. We want that gate to open so we can gallop wherever our little hearts will take us.

Therefore I rejected the process quite emphatically and piously, even when I painted myself into quite a few corners doing it the other way. Let's face it, when you're all over the map trying to write a concise, cohesive story, there's a lot of mess to clean up after you make it through Draft One. And while writing is rewriting, it's not a fun or easy process to discard those words you practically had to pull out of your butt with needle-nose pliers in the first place.

If you’re not a seasoned storyteller, this is your early training ground, learning, usually, what not to do. Repetition gives birth to efficiency, particularly if you're learning to write professionally and on a deadline.

What any screenwriter builds is essentially a three-act play, where certain things must happen to drive the story forward. There are beats and inciting incidents and all kinds of expectations that need to be met or your screenplay will falter. And many a screenwriter has found themselves stuck in Second Act hell because they hadn’t really properly laid their foundation for their story in Act One.

Whereas Act One sets up your story, introduces you to the characters, their goals and their obstacles, Act Two is an obstacle course that demands your character is pulled along by the momentum of the story towards their inevitable “moment of truth” or “point of no return.” This is what will vault them into Act Three, your resolution, which includes any epic showdown to see whether or not your character will achieve his or her goal. This essentially boils down to answering whatever questions you posed in Act One.

Because Act Two is twice the size of Acts One and Three, it can be a little daunting. This is particularly true for new writers, who aren’t all that comfortable with turning the monsters loose to chase their beloved characters through the hellish maze one needs to survive in order to get to Act Three.

For many non-outliners, Act Two slows them down, and that’s exactly how it worked for me. Getting past page 25 in any script felt a bit like entering The Fire Swamp from “The Princess Bride.” It can be every bit as dark and treacherous.

Still, I successfully wrote three books and four screenplays this way, so I held fast to my “seat-of-my-pants” status, even after I turned one of my novels, PICTURE POSTCARDS, into a screenplay as well, and realized it was a lot easier to craft a screenplay when all the little ducks were in a row.

Then along came Nano 2004, when I had the beyond brilliant idea to turn one of my screenplays into a novel.

It sounds kind of like cheating, but it’s really not. Since screenplays and novels are two completely different animals, there’s a lot of work involved in adapting one medium to the other.

In screenplays, one is discouraged from writing anything unnecessary to move the story forward. You are tasked with only one thing: telling whomever might be reading what they would be seeing on screen. This whacks away at all the flowery prose we often indulge for descriptions. Instead, you’re expected to be a lot more technical.

Your scene setting is reduced to a neatly condensed Scene Heading, and they want you to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid.) You’re supposed to let them know if it’s an interior or exterior shot, where it is, specifically, and what type of day. You can add in special stuff, like if it’s a flashback, dream sequence or montage, but typically all scene headings are bland data, not good writing.

Here’s an example:

INT. VOIGHT HOUSEHOLD/MASTER BEDROOM – DAY

The purpose of this scene heading is to tell the filmmakers we’re starting a new scene, and where that happens to take place. That’s it. You are able to describe the scene somewhat in the “action” part of the script, broken up with actual dialogue, but you are discouraged from using much space to do this. You only have 100 pages, remember. And readers want to move as quickly as possible down the page. This discourages the use of “too much black,” which bogs down the read.

Unless your description is pertinent to the scene, it’s wasting space to get overly fixated on it.

It’s also not your job.

Screenplays are collaborative. You hand over a basic skeleton that others are then free to fill in, people like directors and set designers and costumers and makeup artists and even the actors themselves will take the basic guide you’ve given them and flesh it out into something bigger.

Whereas I can set the scene for a book by typing:

It was a cool morning, with a slight nip in the air, forcing Ginger’s feet under the covers as she balances the computer across her lap. Despite the chill in the room, a fan runs just a few feet away. There is always a fan running whenever Ginger turns her bedroom into her office, where she can write in peace. She finds the white noise soothing. Its major purpose, however, is buffering and muting any noises from other parts of the house. These noises, the sounds of her beloved family just precious feet from her closed door, are both reassuring and distracting. They yank her out of her creative zone, like being ripped out of a super suit. One minute, she’s GINGER: WRITER EXTRAORDINAIRE, fighting for truth and justice with the rat-a-tat-tat of her keyboard. The next? She’s an ordinary human. Plain ol Ginger. The wife and mother who worries about groceries and bills and what her family might need from her that day.

As such, she has filled her personal space with those things she loves, those things that further shape her eclectic personality, things in purple and black, with a nod to the 60s with lava lamps and peace signs. Things to make her happy. Things to make her comfortable. Things to motivate her and kick start her muse. An exercise bike sits nearby, calling to her, but she shakes her head. There’s time for that. Later. Much later. She has a deadline to meet.

Such a passage would frustrate a reader of screenplays, who just wants to know exactly what they can see on screen, not a whole lot of flowery description. I can define the character going in and out of their heads in a book.

Since there’s no way for the audience to know what’s going on in a character’s head, you can only describe what people can see.

For a screenplay, the above would look a little like this:

INT: VOIGHT HOUSEHOLD/MASTER BEDROOM – DAY

GINGER VOIGHT (40s, plain) tucks her feet under her comforter as a fan hums nearby. She tugs the colorful bedding up a little closer over rumpled pajamas, using the sheets smattered with peace signs to cover the goose bumps on her bare skin.

She reaches for the half-full bottle of Diet Coke sitting on her nightstand. With a swig she attempts to chase away the bags that gather under her eyes before turning her attention to the keyboard sitting on her lap.

She types something, then uses the delete key in equal measure, with a lot more force.

STEVEN VOIGHT (40s, handsome, but wary,) opens the door slowly. Ginger glares his direction.

GINGER
What?

STEVEN
I was going to go get breakfast. Need anything?

GINGER
I’m fine.

STEVEN
You can’t live on Diet Coke alone, hon.

GINGER
I said I’m fine!

STEVEN
(to himself)
Run away... run away...

Once he closes the door behind him, Ginger turns her attention back to her computer. With a snarl, she pounds the delete key five more times.

The cursor blinks on a blank page.

As you can see, I convey the same information in a brand new way, focusing on what can be seen by the audience in the theater. I don’t need to set the stage fully. It’s up to a set designer to do that. I don’t have to worry about minor details. I only need to worry about what defines the character, sets the scene, or moves the story forward.

Therefore converting a screenplay to a novel is basically fleshing out the bits I would have outsourced to other collaborators, even the actors themselves. Everything changes because the perception has changed, which affects everything down to the dialog. I can add stuff. I can direct my characters on the page (a big No No if you're a screenwriter.) I don’t have to worry about concentrating only what people “see.” Granted, “Show Don’t Tell” remains as true as ever no matter what medium you happen to write, though it’s really become the writer version of Randy Jackson’s “It was a little pitchy, dawg,” pat criticism that isn’t particularly constructive.

We’ll probably get to that later, too.

Regardless, you have a lot of room to explore things you didn’t have the space or luxury to explore before. In my novelized version, I included a brand new character, which led to another subplot that still came as a surprise to me, even though I had about the best outline ever thanks to a completed screenplay.

Which brings us back on point. Because I had already done all the prep work to craft the story, there was nothing left to do but write the book. As a result, I finished that first draft of MY IMMORTAL within five weeks, which was a new record for me. I didn’t meander around in Act Two, lost in a confusing labyrinth, without the benefit of any Jim Henson creatures to help me find my way out again.

This was what ultimately converted me to Team Outliner. Not only was it efficient, but it was also liberating. Because I knew what I had to write every day, I could concentrate on all the other stuff, the stuff I didn’t know yet, the stuff that the characters had not yet revealed to me, and let that creative juice flow.

I became an Outliner/Pantser Hybrid.

As such, it hasn’t taken me longer than about four months to write a first draft of a novel since 2004, and that was only because the books in question were darker and/or more emotionally draining. I still have the same benefit of creative discovery I always did, because the thing I learned about outlines is that they are living, breathing entities, just like the characters themselves. They can change and adapt. None of the outlines I’ve written have ever made it exactly to the page, even those that were written as screenplays first. Once the story starts in motion, it will spark to life, creating opportunities to build from all the details you fill in as you write. These are the things you could never predict by crafting an outline, which is why that's not what your outline is for.

An outline simply gives you an overall idea where you’re going. It can be as detailed or cryptic as it needs to be, just to keep the process moving. I prefer to complete an outline all in one sitting, which can be a daunting task in and of itself. I have to run the entire story through my head, putting it together like a puzzle so that I can get from Point A to Point B. For novels, I do this chapter by chapter, with some hints to how the dialog will go, sometimes, if the dialog comes to me, I note it right in the outline.

Here’s an example from FIERCE.

For screenplays, I organize it by act breaks, using page numbers as my guideline. Though the typical wisdom is a three-act structure, I go a step further and break it down into four acts, roughly 25 pages each. Act One: Setup, pages 1-25. Act Two: Conflict leading to midpoint act break, pages 25-50. Act Three: Conflict leading to point of no return/moment of truth, pages 51-75. Act Three: Climax and Resolution, pages 76-100.

Here’s an outline to my most recent screenplay, A LOVELY HAUNTING.

The approaches are different because the means of telling the story are different. But in each scenario, I play the movie (and yes, both mediums I use mental movies) completely out in my head before I ever write one word. This gives me definitive writing goals, broken down in manageable pieces, that make the process of writing a book a lot less daunting.

Like the old saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

The other benefit of laying out your whole story in front of you is that it allows you to pinpoint wherever there are any plot holes or kinks to fix–or abandon entirely. And like I said, this will change as you write, when you trade what you thought might work to what truly does, and you’ll never really know which is which until you’re pantsing your way through your manuscript,outline or no. An outline gives you a harness to wear, so you don’t fall from your precarious perch on the trapeze, but you still have to perform the stunts.

All an outline really does is ensure that you don’t plummet to a painful death, crushed under the weight of Act Two Maladies you would have seen coming had you peeked ahead. Instead of walking up a darkened staircase where you anticipate where your foot will fall guided by instinct alone, an outline simply gives you a flashlight, so you can see where you're going, even if it's only the next step. This means you can outline as you go as well. There are no hard and fast rules, just whatever works for you as an individual. There is no need for extreme points of view either direction. As long as your method gets you were you need to go, you're good.

So... yes. I get that there are two definitive camps of writers, neither side really enticed to bend towards the other. Every time I bring up outlining to a Pantser, I met with the same vehement resistance I used to use when I was a Pantser myself. I'm not trying to wreck your groove, really. This is just me saying I’ve done both, I’ve seen the value of both.

And I'll tell you this: the more skilled you become completing your projects, the less you need that flashlight. Like I said before, writing a lot means you are learning a lot, and you become a lot more adept in knowing what works and what doesn't before you even put it on the page. Which means that outlines can and do work like training wheels. My last three books were barely outlined at all, I didn't have time to prepare for Devlin Masters. He demanded my immediate, and full, attention from the get-go.

But if you’re a new writer on some crazy-ass deadline, like writing a book from scratch in 30 days, I strongly recommend going into it with an outline of some sort. Spend the entire month of October on it if you have to. Take copious notes. Use index cards for days.

By giving yourself a road map of where to go, I truly believe you will maximize your chances of getting there on time, on schedule and barely bruised at all.

Started First Draft: November 5, 2015 9:35am PST
Paused First Draft: November 5, 2015 10:53am PST
***STEVEN BREAK***
Resumed First Draft: November 5, 2015 11:21am PST
Completed First draft: November 5, 2015 12:11pm PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,495
Completed revisions: November 5, 2015 1:34pm PST
Updated WC: 3,966/17,441

#Nanowrimo Day Four: Mining for Ideas

One of the questions we often get asked as writers is where we come up with our ideas. It’s an important question, because it’s where the root of your story begins. Let’s face it, the reason you write at all is because you have something to say, about the world, about life, about people, about feelings in general. In order to get from the first page of a book to the last, you have to have something driving you.

This starts with your story idea, that little nugget that itches your brain until you have to write just to get it off your back.

It’s a romantic notion, isn’t it? The writer at the mercy of her muse, chased down and tackled every single day until she is forced to write something–anything–just so she can rid all the extra voices in her head.

Not all story ideas are like this, and if professional writers waited around for this particular phenomenon, we’d never get anything done.

Truth is you often have to mine for ideas, carefully picking and choosing where to put your passion. You have to force yourself to fall in love with your ideas and your characters, to train yourself how to race to the computer day after day just to see what they’re up to.

I grew up reading very prolific authors like Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Janet Dailey and V.C. Andrews. They spit out new books on a yearly basis, and it always astounded me how they could come up with so many stories. When I was a young writer, I was still waiting on the Muse to come calling, which she did a couple of notable times, turning my ideas immediately into a passion that I needed to, and wanted to, indulge. The rest of the time my Muse was MIA, which worried me that I might not have what it takes to join the ranks of my favorite writers, whose livelihood depended on writing book after book.

What I didn’t realize then was that the creative muscle is one that grows stronger by flexing. The more ideas you entertain and discard, the more chances you have to land on something that will motivate you enough to invest hours/days/weeks/months–years–of your life on. It’s up to you to bring the passion to your project, by first finding what you’re passionate about.

For me, back then especially, this often started with another passion of mine. Music.

Like I mentioned before, my first book was a novella based on the Barry Manilow song, "Ships." I remember very vividly lying in my single bed that one afternoon, listening to my record player (yes, I said record player,) and really listening to the words in the song.



For those unfamiliar, the song tells the story of an adult male and the complex relationship he had with what appears to be an estranged father. Because I had already seen this play out in my own family, where an adult child meets a parent for the first time, my mind just sort of ran with the idea. It all comes down to one simple question: “What if?” So I asked myself, “What if a man shows up on an adult son’s doorstep, wanting to reconnect after years of absence and silence, and the man wants absolutely nothing to do with him?”

Emotion + conflict = the birth of a story idea. I wanted to answer that question so much, it made me reach immediately for a spiral-bound notebook where I jumped in, both feet, to do exactly that.

I don’t recall exactly how much time it took me to write the story. Some days were harder than other days, because even with this novella written longhand in a notebook, I knew it had to reach a certain number of words to be considered “a real book,” and that involves a lot of skill to build the story and craft the plot. Since these were the days before Google to learn such things, I decided to use the size of the notebook as my goal to complete the story. It was going to be however long the notebook was, and that's the time frame I had to get from asking the question to finally answering it. When I was fourteen, this was what amounted to plotting a story.

Before long I had the complete "book" in my hot little hands, filling that notebook from the first place to the last, with a story that sprang from one simple question.

I didn’t write another novel until five years later, when I was homeless and living out of my car in Los Angeles at the age of nineteen. Once again, music was my motivator.

I was listening to the radio as I sat in the driver’s seat of my then-boyfriend’s (and ultimately first husband’s) old Buick LeSabre.* (*See note at the end.) We used to park behind a Ralph’s* grocery store in Van Nuys, where the forgotten road ran alongside the train tracks. It was not a busy street in the least, which is why we chose it. We could park there without any hassle and no one bothered us, even overnight when we had to put towels in the windows just for a little privacy so we could sleep.

These were the considerations we had to make, rewiring our brains for survival, taking nothing for granted. The thing about homelessness is that you feel absolutely vulnerable 100% of the time. In our world, having money is what makes you have value – what gives you the right to exist, with a place to stay, all your needs met so you can turn your attention from pure survival to actually living.

Not a lot of people really, truly get this, mostly because they’re blessed enough not to live through it.

But when you have no money and no home, you virtually become invisible to the world around you; one that is so preoccupied what you might ask of them that they’d rather not see you at all. (Kind of like certain members of my family, who told me that offering me a place to stay would “encourage dependency.”)

And perhaps that is why when “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses came on the radio that afternoon in 1989, I listened with new ears. Like almost everyone else in 1987, I had listened to Appetite for Destruction until I wore out the grooves in the record (yes, I said record.) I had seen the video more than once, the one where Axl shows up on the mean streets of Los Angeles, playing the character of a clueless kid from the Midwest who was in store for a rude, effin’ awakening the minute he stepped off the bus.



I knew a little bit more about this rude awakening, so my mind began to churn again with, “What If?” If nothing else, it gave me a sense of control when I had none, and that's a very empowering place to be.

What if a young girl runs away from her awful past and lands in Los Angeles because there is nowhere else she could think to go? What if she, too, was some clueless kid, who shows up in the ironically named City of Angels, fresh-faced, naïve, and vulnerable? Someone who faced the terrifying LA streets alone as another nameless, faceless runaway because going back home was the much scarier alternative?

And what if someone crossed her path to help her, to save her, that didn’t look anything at all like what a savior should look like? What if it was a biker, who looked to the world like a rebel at best and a criminal at worst? And what if this biker used that ambiguity to fight both the criminals and the cops, just to protect the innocent and squash the evil that simmers just below the surface in any city?

And what if… that savior was a woman?

This was what made me reach for an ever-present notebook to figure these things out longhand. Not only could I authentically embody the young, clueless girl, but I could also embody the strong, fearless road warrior who decided to protect her.

It, essentially, became a book about salvation. What could possibly be more inspirational to someone who desperately needed saving?

At the time I was attending some classes at a business school. After every lesson was done, I would put in my spare floppy disk (yes, I said floppy disk,) that I used for notes and just fired up the word processor program to fill in any down time I had getting to know these characters who would ultimately become so real to me that they felt like actual friends and family. Actually they were better than friends and family, because they were there for me when I had almost literally been abandoned by most everyone. Aside from my mother, my best friend and my then boyfriend, these fictional people were really the only people in the world who wanted to save me.

I cared about these characters so I cared about their story, so much so that I did take quite a long time to tell it. The bar was set so high I knew I couldn't grab it on the first jump. Granted, I was in the midst of surviving on the mean streets of Los Angeles at the time. Real life interfered all over the place. My mother finally road to the rescue, like she was prone to do, and we all escaped Los Angeles for Fresno, where a whole new set of concerns kept me preoccupied, especially after I found out I was pregnant.

I didn’t finish this book until 1990, where I promptly sent it off for representation only to find out I wasn’t quite ready for that part yet. I didn’t quite reach the bar I had set for myself, evidenced by the heavily edited version the agent sent back to me with a “Thanks but no thanks.”

Just because you finish a book doesn’t mean you’re ready for the big leagues, particularly when it’s your first. No one told me that, so to say I was disappointed to learn that is a whopper of an understatement.

Unlike today, back then I needed to find an agent or publisher to grant me permission to join the ranks of professional writers. I didn’t just get to hit a button and voila… there I was, sitting alongside my idols.

Needless to say, one of the biggest ways to get hung up back then was writing a story idea that wasn’t marketable. Fortunately for me, my story was, as evidenced by the heavily edited manuscript the agent sent back to me. She wouldn't have wasted her time doing that if she didn't think it had merit. It was the execution that failed. I was so embarrassed and ashamed that I had failed my beloved characters that I shelved that project and wouldn’t touch it again until I had proven to myself that I had the goods to write it.

It was 2014 before I completed a whole new draft of CHASING THUNDER, which ultimately got me what I had always wanted most: an agent who was as passionate about the project as I was. She had a buyer for it within a month after I signed with her.

Some ideas land in your brain before you have the ability to do them justice. You have to earn the right to write them. This isn’t an excuse to stop or stall, by the way. It should motivate you to develop the skills that your story deserves, and the only way you’re going to do that is writing. How much you need to write depends on how epic you want your story to be. In between the first draft of CHASING THUNDER and the one that got it sold, I wrote twenty books.

Like my dear friend Hal Sparks says about virginity, “You don’t save yourself for the one. You practice for the one."

Of course, I didn't know all that in the 1990s, when I used my inability to tell the story I wanted to tell as an excuse not to write anything at all ever. I set aside my passion for storytelling to concentrate on being a young mother and new wife. I honestly didn’t have the energy to chase the muse, even if I had known that was what I had to do.

Instead I waited for inspiration to strike. It finally did in 1995, when I ran across an ad for Harlequin or Silhouette, one of those romance publishers, who wanted stories based on the written word. It could be any kind of romance story (suspense, romantic comedy, etc.,) and it could be any kind of written correspondence.

What a great opportunity to ask some questions!

The one that got me motivated to write? “What if a woman moved into a new place and she kept getting the mail of the occupant before her? What if they were postcards, which meant she could read them without violating any privacy? And what if they were romantic postcards that were never signed? What if she fell in love with this man without ever meeting him?”

Because this was an actual publisher who was looking for material, this time I had a word-count goal. These romance novels generally fell around 50,000-65,000 words, which is shorter format than most mainstream fiction.

To my mind, these seemed easier to meet, so I sat at my computer and got going. I had a good idea what needed to happen when, so I was able to finish this particular book within a couple of months.

Of course, I was also going through some personal trauma at the time I first wrote PICTURE POSTCARDS, which had me escaping into my fictional world as a way to cope, to take control in a very powerless situation, but we’ll talk about that more during my “No Excuses” installment.

Because of this trauma, I also wrote what would eventually become THE FULLERTON FAMILY SAGA, based on more depressing and complex questions, like coping with loss and loving two very different men at the same time. These were the questions that haunted into my darkened brain in 1995.

I wouldn’t write another book till years later, when I took a project I had begun in my teens and novelized it. It was the first book I wasn't driven to write, instead it was one I very much decided to write, just to get another completed book under my belt. I didn't wait for inspiration to strike. I very purposefully sat down to craft a marketable idea that would fit neatly into the genre so that I could shop it around.

Passion still played a part, however. Like so much of my material when I was young, UNDER TEXAS SKIES was inspired by music, specifically the Eagles “Desperado” album. For those who know me, the Eagles are one of my favorite bands, landing squarely and securely in the #2 position since I discovered their music in 1983, thanks to a friend of mine.

Though I love their flawless harmonies and their musicianship, what I’ve always admired in particular is Don Henley’s and Glenn Frey’s songwriting skill. They often tell pretty complex stories in a completely poetic and beautiful way. “Lyin’ Eyes,” “The Last Resort,” “Life in the Fast Lane,” “Hotel California,” – all of these songs were self-contained novels in a way, which is why I fell in love with their music so much. My mind was allowed to run free for a few minutes and fill in the worlds that they introduced.

For the “Desperado” album, the guys were darned near operatic, telling a story over the course of all their songs, not just contained within one. I personally thought it should be a musical and set out to write it when I was only sixteen years old.

My fantasy was that one day I’d meet them when the show opened on Broadway, and how cool that would be. (Still would be, frankly.) But after I was done, writing a stage play without any idea how to do that, I knew it wasn’t good enough to show the likes of Don and Glenn. I shelved it and gave up writing for the stage before I could even get started.

Years later, when I wanted to write a book but really didn’t have any new ideas picking at my brain, I decided to revisit that story I wrote around this album. It was, at its core, a romance between a land owner and a drifter, so I had everything I needed to craft a shorter format romance novel. Since I believed that was where I had the best shot to launch my career, I figured it was a good place to start.

This project ultimately became UNDER TEXAS SKIES. (Thank you, Don and Glenn.)

By the time I discovered Nanowrimo in 2004, I had already abandoned novel writing for screenwriting. Well, maybe abandoned isn’t the right word. I hadn’t made much progress breaking down the gates to publication, so I simply decided to throw my energy into trying another angle. Screenwriting has always appealed to me because it’s more minimalist in nature. Since I tend to be a bit more verbose, writing a 100-page screenplay that says everything I need and want to say is the biggest challenge of all. It sounds so much simpler than what it is. The rules are much more defined. The format is a lot more rigid. You don’t get to meander through page after page; you run into place markers every five or ten pages that force you to stay on track.

When I first decided to answer Nanowrimo’s enticing call, I figured there was no better outline anywhere than a screenplay that I had already completed. This is an important part of selecting a story idea for Nanowrimo. To successfully complete a book in 30 days, you kind of need those place markers to keep you on track. These will keep you motivated to keep going, giving you tasks to complete one at a time until you find yourself typing “The End.”

Since this was a love story, I knew I could complete it in the shorter format of 50,000 words.

I keep bringing up word counts because that’s something you need to consider whenever you sit down to write a book. Different genres have different rules. Granted a story isn’t done until it’s done, and you should never bulk up shorter stories into bloated novels just to satisfy a word count.

But if you’re going to market your book, you need to be aware of the accepted standards. Per the Writer’s Digest and Romance Writers of America, some of these work out as follows:

Young Adult: 55,000 – 70,000
Romance: 40,000 – 100,000
Science Fiction/Fantas: 100,000 – 110,000
Mainstream: 80,000 – 90,000
Westerns: 50,000 – 80,000
Middle Grade: 20,000 – 55,000

This gives you a number of options. You can either mine for a story in specific genres that would easily satisfy the 50,000-word requirement of Nano, or you can write whatever the hell you want to write, and if your book isn’t done at the end of November, at least you will have met the word count requirement.

This was how it worked out for me with MY IMMORTAL, which I live-blogged much like I am doing now. I met the 50,000-word count before I finished the book. One I did by November 30. One I didn’t. And it’s okay either way. The objective of Nano isn’t so much to complete the book as much as it is to show you that you can complete 50,000 words in 30 days, which means you could write a solid first draft of more mainstream books within two.

Where people get most hung up is that they think they’re going to have a completed project in a month, and that’s much more daunting. Writing a first draft is just the itty bitty tip of the iceberg. This merely moves you along the game board so you’re a little closer than you would have been otherwise. It's a step in the right direction, but it's still only a step.

Can you complete a solid first draft within a month or two? Yes.

Is it ready to market?

No.

That’s not the point of Nanowrimo. It never was. The point is to get you in the habit of writing so that you can complete a project. You can turn "I wish," into "I did." You can get one step further to your goal of being a published writer, but it's still only going to be one step.

As such, you can keep the marketing aspect in the back of your head, but it shouldn’t be your sole focus, unless you’re an experienced writer who participates in Nano more for the fun and community of it, rather than the educational, skill-building aspect of it. Like we’ve discussed before, it is highly unlikely you’ll have written a polished, completed, publishable bestseller by the end of 30 days. What you’re assembling, really, is a skeleton on which to build, one that will motivate you enough to keep going day after day, so that one book becomes two. Completed projects become careers.

(This can, by the way, lead to a bestselling book. If you can’t wait to see what happens next, imagine how that will work with your readers.)

This is why I recommend picking a project where your passion sustains you. Ask the questions that drive you to the computer so you can figure out the answers. Some will get you over the finish line. Others won’t. The only time I “lost” Nano was when my story ran out before I reached the final word count.

I still finished the first draft within a month, so I personally consider that a win.

Even if it’s your own story that motivates you (memoirs = 80,000 words,) one that you would never sell in a million years because it is a little too raw and a little too real (Fatty: Nanowrimo Project 2006,) you need something to inspire your muse to keep coming around. It’s not a one-way street between the two of you. If you get in the habit of writing, she’ll show up just to see what kind of hijinks you’re getting into.

So choose wisely. You’re going to be eating/drinking/sleeping/talking/writing/obsessing about this idea for the next 30 days. Make it one that inspires you. You’re the first reader of this book, so make it one you’ve always wanted to read but never did, because it could only come from you.

This is the reason you write in the first place. Now get your fanny in that chair and make it happen.

*This asterisk represents a placeholder. I’m not 100% sure that the car in question was a Buick LeSabre or that the grocery store was Ralph's. I'll need to research to get that right, but it doesn't need to be right right now. I’m a stickler for getting things as accurate as possible, I know I’ll have to dig around through my photographs to compare the car in question in order to get this part correct, but those are loose ends I can tie up in the second draft I nitpick for consistency. Instead of using this as an excuse to stop, thus destroying the momentum and getting me out of the writing groove, I’m simply notating it so I can come back to it in the editing process. Nano is all about moving forward. There are plenty of things to fix and repair, but now is not really the time to do it. If I weren’t live-blogging this book, I’d likely not even read the passages after I write them, just so I can keep my focus where it belongs: that very next word that needs to be written. We’ll talk more about this later on; I just wanted to use this opportunity to show you how it works in practice.

Started First Draft: November 4, 2015 12:20pm PST
Completed First draft: November 4, 2015 2:01pm PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,245
Completed revisions: November 4, 2015 3:50pm PST
Updated WC: 3,975/13,429