Long time no blog. Long time no write too. Because those doubt demons really have me. No real writing for weeks, or is it months? Apart from a couple of thousand words on a new story that will probably never get finished, nothing since New Voices. Even writing this post is a bit of a cheat as it’s a cross post with the Sassy Sisters blog!

Oh, I have plenty of excuses. I was sick. The Day Job has been even more hellish than usual. I had two weeks holiday and was too busy to write (not to mention,  in a campervan with my oh-so-lovely and oh-so-attention-seeking husband for the whole time!). I have too many ideas and half finished stories and I can’t decide which one to work on now. I woke up this morning to find my brain had been removed and replaced by an alien implant.

Okay, that last one might be a slight exaggeration. But excuses, I haz them.

Problem is, we all have excuses. If excuses were reason not to write, none of us would ever get anything done. So this post Megan Crane (aka Caitlin Crews) put up on Facebook last week especially resonated with me. If you can’t see it because you’re not on Facebook yet, don’t worry, I’m going to summarise!

It would be easy to dismiss what she says with “Yeah, sure, she’s multi-published, she can write full time, it’s easy for her.” But that would be a mistake. She wasn’t always multi-published. At some stage, I’m pretty sure she was where I am right now and maybe where you are too. Written plenty, had some rejections, and just not cracked it yet. Struggling to find time to write with the demands of a full-time job and/or family responsibilities. Battling that horrible, sneaky little voice that whispers ”Why don’t you just give up. You’ll never get published. It would be so much easier to stop wasting your time.”

Somehow, she kept going, kept subbing, told that lying little voice to bugger off because she wasn’t listening.

 I need to do that too! So what can I learn from a fab seemingly natural writer like Megan/ Caitlin that I can use to get going again, get motivated, get the words flowing?

 Here’s her Ten Things I’ve Learned after Writing Ten Harlequin Presents (and Some Other Books Too), and how I can use that.

1. Category romance novels are very, very hard to write well.  And also fun!  But first: hard.  Too true! Sometimes I do expect it to be easy, or at the every least not quite so hard. I grew up being constantly told something very wrong - that if we’re talented, it comes easy. Therefore, if it doesn’t come easy, we mustn’t be talented, and should stop trying. Crap, of course. But unfortunately kids believe the crap their parents tell them. Now I’m more grown up, I need to start believing otherwise. Like “Yes, it’s hard, but I can learn how to do it.”
2. You must write the book in order to have written the book. This is the basic truth- just write it. It doesn’t matter if it’s the worst rubbish ever seen, if the characters seem as passionate as last night’s mashed potato, if the dialogue is stilted, and if the Black Moment Big Sekrit Reveal so obvious as five year old could have seen it coming. That’s what self-editing is for, fixing all that dreck. But if it doesn’t get written in the first place, it can’t get edited.
3. Your process is your process, and beating yourself up because you don’t have Writer X’s process–which, from the outside, looks so reasonable and thoughtful and calm and balanced and  CORRECT–is actually just a form of procrastination. Ooh yes, I’ve done this one. I should just write a first draft and not care how rough it is. No, I should take my time and get each scene right before I move on to the next. I should have it all plotted out before I even start, make sure I know all my turning points and story structure. No, that will kill my creativity, that all comes later in edits. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle for me. A bit of planning. A good idea of what my characters core issues are, what brings then together (aka external conflict) and what keeps them apart (aka internal conflict), before I start writing. To stop and go back if I sense I’m drifting away from the essence of the story and writing stuff that is fun but doesn’t add anything to the story or is irrelevant to the central romance, but not to be so rigidly attached to the plan that I’m not willing to let things so a little off track and see where it takes me. To get things as good as I can at the time, but not insist it all has to be perfect before I can keep writing, even if that means writing myself a note of where things went wrong and picking up again where I want the story to be. Trying too hard to “get it right” definitely stopped my writing dead more than once and led to me giving up completely for over ten years!
4. Read.  Watch.  Become a story slut. A real biggie I need to make time for. We need other people’s stories. Not to steal their ideas, but to feed our imagination. To get a sense of what a good story is. Or to see what doesn’t do it for me in a story, even if my Mum and my neighbour and my best friend adore it. Books that make me think, how on earth did this get published when I get rejected? Books so beautiful, so emotional, so darned good they make me know why my stories have been rejected and cry because I’ll never, ever, write that well, and yes, I probably never will but hey what does it matter? I’ve noticed since I seriously started writing again, I don’t read nearly as much as I did. I can’t think of the last time I watched a film. We don’t have a television, and I tell myself I’ll watch things online, but I never do. Not good. My brain is full of work stuff and dry financial worries. My imagination is story starved. I forget what shape a story that works really is. Gotta make time for this.
5. Fill the well. A bit like being a story slut, except without the stories. Feeding our creative self with other things. Walks, galleries, being in nature, cooking a new recipe, finding the perfect fabric for that dress I want to sew, being with people I love, people watching strangers. Anything we do that isn’t directly work or writing related, but that makes us feel good, that feeds our creativity. This is what Julia Cameron calls the Artist Date, making time for us. Play time. With a reason.
6. Celebrate your accomplishments. We may not have had that Call yet. But we’ve done what a lot of other people dream of doing but never do. We wrote stories. We were brave enough to send them out into the world, enter them into a contest or submit them to an editor. These are achievements worth celebrating. It’s important not to let the rejection or the bad contest score take away from that.
7. There is no shortage of words. The words are there. The story is there. If  I feel blocked, if I’m waiting for inspiration to hit, I need to just open that story file and write. Write whatever comes. Talk to my characters. If I can’t write the story in pretty scenes like I want to, write what I want to happen in this chapter. If I don’t kbnow that, write what my character wants. Switch it around, write a different scene that may never appear in the book. Write in first person to get right inside the character’ head. Anything that gets me focused on the story. And not ebay, other writers’ blogs, or needing to catch up on the five thousand Tweets I missed since yesterday.
8. What you experience while writing this book is not what readers will experience when they read it. Those pages that write easy may be hard reading. On the other hand, those pages we torture ourselves over may be the ones the reader races through, because they read so effortlessly. Or the other way around. I need to remember this. Just because it’s hard to write, doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it isn’t good, either.
9. The solution to most of your writer angst is simple:  Finish the book.  Then write another. This is it. Write. Write. Write some more. It doesn’t have to be perfect yet. It doesn’t have to be better than Nora and JC Rowling combined. It just has to be better than what I wrote last year and the year before that. The more I write, the more I’ll learn, the better I’ll get. It won’t be as good as the story in my head, but it can be good enough.
10. This is a love story, not a life sentence. Even when the writing isn’t going well, it’s better than the pain of not writing. I love writing. I love creating characters, I love giving them their stories. So I need to do it more. Actually do it, not just think about it, or agonise over which story is “right” for me or what to do next. Just write the story. And give those fricking demons the flick.

Oh, and you know I never need an excuse to post to pic of a yummy man. Especially one with chest hair- I hate waxed chests. There has to be a hero in this one (thanks Maisey!).

And even if none of my rave helps you with your writing at all, at least you get to see a cute guy as reward for reading this far.