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Fast Draft – finally!

Word page for Fast Draft- Autumn Macarthur

So, after a month of research and planning, I finally started the first draft of my convict ship Love Inspired Historical yesterday.  Phew!

Perfect timing, Candace Havens offered another of her Fast Draft workshops, that I’ve heard so many good things about.  I wasn’t quite finished the planning, but the opportunity seemed too good to miss.

So far, I have over 9,000 words of story, so it seems to be working!

I don’t know what it is about Blaze writers. I’ve planned the story using Cathy Yardley’s Rock Your Plot , because with such a big complex story I knew I needed to do something different to what I normally do; I’m writing it using Candace’s Fast Draft; and I’m also doing a Category workshop with Tawny Weber at Savvy Authors. All Blaze authors, all awesome teachers, but I’m writing inspy! And yes, I am a workshop tart!

Hopefully, I’ll report back in after ten days with a completed first draft. The finished story needs to be 70 – 75k, but I know I’ll add 25-30% in edits so I’m aiming for 55k in the first draft. I want that finished well before the online pitch to a Love Inspired editor on May 8. At 5k + a day,  it will be done.

But wish me luck, persistence, and motivation, just in case!


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If your dreams don’t scare you…

If your dreams don't scare you they aren't big enough
Image by Fit Fab Cities via Victoria Blisse

If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.

That’s what I need to hear today.

I’m scared.

When I gently suggested to my Muse in my Morning Pages that maybe it was time to up the daily story word count target from 2000 words to 3000 words, she ran and hid and won’t come out.  That idea frightened her silly. Hopefully I can coax her out so we at least get the 2000 today.

But big dreams are scary.

Getting published and putting my writing out there is scary. Opening myself up to being judged is scary. Getting rejected again is scary. Getting bad reviews is scary. Letting people open a door into my mind and see what’s inside is scary.

The fear is the price I have to pay if I want to write full time.

I need to gently push myself. I need to trust that I’ll be supported. I’m doing what I feel guided to do, so the support will be there.

I need to be scared by those terrifyingly big dreams. If I’m not scared, I’m settling for less than I could achieve.

Then I need to do the work.


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2013- the year of no more excuses not to write- starting NOW!

100 k 100 days

I’ve been thinking about goal setting for 2013.

Goals are tricky things. I’ve ended this year somewhere totally different to where I expected I’d be. I’ve been to Australia 3 times when I only planned to go once. I gave up on the idea of buying a rental property there to move into eventually. I’m writing very different stories to what I thought I’d be writing. The biggest unexpected change – I’ve done a 360 at work.

I’ve gone from thinking I couldn’t possibly leave and writing would need to fit in at the edges, to ready to resign, to accepting an offer of part-time work, to having that crash and burn after just five weeks due to staff shortages, to resigning again. That’s not going to change. From February 2013, I’ll be a full-time writer, with no household income apart from what I can earn writing. Given that my total earnings from writing so far are £150, that’ll be interesting!

But it’s an adventure I’m looking forward to. The time to do this is now. I’m in a position at last where I have the right balance of financial security and enthusiasm to make it work. My husband isn’t able to support me financially but he definitely supports me in making this change emotionally.

Staying too tightly focused on goals I decided in January wouldn’t have allowed for the changes in direction I’ve made this year. Because, crazymaking though it’s been, that rollercoaster ride has been a good one.  I’m happy with the outcome.  I’m not where I expected I’d be, but that’s okay. Other things happened that wouldn’t have happened if I’d stuck to Plan A.

I have to say, I set goals every year, and they never work out. Two years ago I did a course on goal setting and time management for writers. I loved it! The course got me all fired up and inspired. I had grand ambitious schemes, the year all planned out. Part of the course was making a detailed calendar with very specific goals for every month. Not just “Write at least 3o,000 words”, but “Write at least 30,ooo words on X story.” And the next month “Edit so many chapters of X story.” And the next month “Submit X story.” My plan looked wonderful. Needless to say, by late February the plan collapsed totally and never recovered. I ended up finishing and subbing NOTHING that year! I entered a chapter in New Voices, and that was it. A warning against overplanning!

So I’m not going to try to set those sorts of goals, tempting though it is to have everything so neatly planned out. That just makes me feel like a failure. On the other hand, I don’t want to drift aimlessly into the New Year, either! I do need some sort of structure or framework. I need goals, but loose flexible ones. Goals that allow for serendipity and surprises and life to get in the way. Plans, but ones I’m not married to.

Key goals for me must be finishing what I start, and discovering my best work patterns, the ones that help me be most productive and produce my best stuff. I need to develop good work habits, that suit MY way of writing and creating.  What I do now is to intersperse bursts of hectic and intensely focused writing, my writeathons, where I do nothing BUT write, with long periods when not much happens. Now maybe of course, that is my best work pattern. Many very successful and productive full-time writers work that way. Or maybe that’s what’s been forced on me by circumstances. I really don’t know.

What I most want to aim for in 2013 is feeling good. Feeling creative. Creating every day in some way. Discovering my own rhythms and patterns when I don’t have to fit into anyone else’s idea of what I should do. When writing and sewing and everything else I want to do doesn’t have to fit in the gaps left at the edges. The truth is, I can’t set goals now, because I have no idea at all just how productive I can become when I don’t have a Day Job getting in the way!

I’ve just signed up for a Facebook group, committing to write 100k in 100 days. That sort of public commitment is good for me. It could be tough in January, when I’m still at the Day Job. It will get easier after that, when I’m writing full-time. But I can’t keep using the Day Job as an excuse. I need to write now, not put it off till I leave work.What excuse not to write will I find then? I have lots of other distractions buzzing around my head. A clothing business. Raw vegan recipes. Art journalling. Starting another blog. Learning cover design and marketing for when I self-publish. I need to get into good habits of productivity to deal with all those other things I want to do and not keep pushing writing to the sidelines.

100k in 100 days is a good idea, but it’s not enough. I need to start sooner. I need to start NOW.

The truth is, I already write 1k a day, if I count the things the “rules” of the challenge say I can. I’m not going to count those. I’m only going to count story words. And I’m not going to allow myself to jump from story to story to get my 100k. What’s most essential for me is finishing. 2013, above all, needs to be the Year of Following Through. The year of not just having ideas and starting things, but finishing then, seeing things to completion. The year of no excuses. The year of finding out if I really want to write, or just think about writing.

Bugger worrying about 2013 goals, I need to achieve one 2012 goal. I want to finish the first draft of the novella I’m working on by the end of December. And I’ll do it.

How about you? What 2012 goal you really really REALLY want to do have you still got time to squeeze in?


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Realistic goal setting, no goal setting, or is unrealistic goal setting even better?

Turquoise blur- I have no idea what this is a photo of, but it fits how I feel!

I’m not getting any writing done, and I nag myself about it.

Or more correctly, my Internal Critic nags me. He keeps telling me I should be doing more. How can I expect to make a success of being a full time writer if I’m not writing now? I should be setting goals and deadlines. I should be making myself write, even if I’m stressed, even if I’m exhausted. He’s quite right about one thing, the stress won’t go away after I leave the Day Job, it’ll just be different stress.

2012 has not been one of my best years for writing. I completed and submitted (and had rejected) two stories, mid-length novellas. I did some planning for and started and haven’t finished at least four others, ranging from  a few thousand words to over ten thousand words into the story. I worked on a few unfinished stories from previous years, but again finished none of them.

Okay, so it was better than last year! Last year I set massive goals, had a whole calendar planned for what I would be writing, and it fell apart by February. So this year I set no real goals, no deadlines.  But this was supposed to be the year of completing stories, not the year of once again starting far more than I saw through to The End.

Once again, I feel like I’ve failed to do what I set out to do.

I don’t know what’s better, no goals at all, or setting spectacular goals.  I read different points of view. I’ve done courses that were totally focused on goal setting. I’m scared if I don’t have goals and deadlines I’ll just drift. But when I set goals I don’t reach them and I beat myself up over it.

I read this today on Zoe Winter’s blog- she missed her writing goal two years running, and plans to do it differently in 2013-

I think some people would set a lower goal, but the problem isn’t that it’s too much for me to handle, the problem is that it isn’t actionable in a way a good goal should be.

Also, something I’ve learned about myself is… bigger goals net bigger results. Even if I don’t reach the goal… I still get good results because I’m working for something big.

So next year, counter-intuitively, I’m setting a larger goal, but it’s the structure of the goal that I think will help me get at LEAST to the 365k I’ve been trying to hit and failing to hit for two years now.

My new goal is going to be: 10k for 52. That’s 10,000 words a week for the year. I’m going to track this in a few different ways so I know how much my weekly totals are each week (as well as daily totals in each week) and I know when I wrote and when I didn’t write.

So even though half a million words sounds insane, especially considering my last two years… I really think I can do it with a new mentality and structure to my goals as well as a monthly rewards system. Another thing: since I’m writing SO many words, there is a lot of pressure off me. With that much word count I can afford to write creative things I will never publish, stuff that’s just for fun. I can afford to experiment with other genres without pressure to release it into the world if I don’t like the result. It gives me the space to play.

Having that space to play gives me no excuses. Current book not working? Set it aside and write something just for me while that book percolates some more. The thing that makes writing “difficult” is the pressure to not screw up something my audience is going to be reading.

If everything I write is not intended for public consumption, I’m more likely to write more. Just staying in that habit will make it easier to write the stuff on the publication schedule. And who knows? I might create something offbeat that I love and want to share that people end up loving. But no pressure.

I like that idea. The idea of setting high goals but still being able to play with writing. I’d been thinking maybe 10k a week was a good goal for me too, once I’m writing full time. I don’t plan to write every day, but to do want to write (and I mean write, not blog or social media or read about writing or any of the other almost-but-not-quite-writing stuff I do) at least twenty hours a week. The only problem I see with setting word count goals is how to measure progress when I’m editing, where word count might go backwards yet I’ve written a couple of thousand new words in there. That’s where those finishing goals have to come into it too.

So, I could set myself a high word count goal like that. Or I could set a goal for so many stories completed and either subbed or self-published in 2013. Or I could try the goal-less route.

Like Cathy Yardley did for 2012-

Screw goals.

I’m not planning goals in the traditional way this coming year.  No benchmarks. No milestones. No action plan.

Instead, I’m looking at what I want to feel like.  I don’t want to be stressed the way I have been.  I’m not going to be desperate.  Why?

Because I know the damned thing works out.

Different approach to goal-setting, huh?

I can embrace that. Especially the bit about not allowing herself to feel stressed and desperate. For me, that stress and desperation has been what 2012′s been all about. It’s why I’m quitting the Day Job. It’s surely not what I want for 2013. The difference is though, Cathy is an established author and writing teacher. And she already had externally set goals for the year, courses she’d contacted to teach, books she’d contracted to submit. It’s not quite being goal-less, it’s about taking a different approach to goals.

I do want goals, but I want them to be goals I can meet. Goals that work for me. Goals that forward my writing career. Goals that won’t just cause more stress and make me feel a failure.

Shannon McKelden blogged about goal setting, her response to discussing it with Cathy and other writer buddies-

“I don’t want to make goals this year. I want to decide how I want to FEEL this year and figure out how to do that.”

Whoa.

It hit me that that is EXACTLY what I need!  I could set all kinds of goals…write a book this year, find an agent, write X number of posts a month…and none of those goals would matter, even if I met them, if I didn’t have fun while doing it.

Before this whole conversation, I already knew I wanted 2012 to be the Year of Creativity for me.  But this conversation made me realize WHY I want that.  I want the Year of Creativity to bring back the FUN of writing for me.  I want to look forward to sitting down and writing. I want to think about my characters and puzzle out their stories and think outside the plot box.  I want to smile with delight when I talk about writing again.  I want to read books that make me smile and want to play with  MY words and my worlds.

I foresee one major benefit to this.  I’ll WANT to write. Which will mean I’ll write more.  So my creativity will affect my productivity.  Which will, in turn, make me smile more and have more fun.  It’s a win-win situation, all with NO goals, except to write and fall in love with it again.

If we’re not having fun, all the goals in the world aren’t going to make it fun.

That’s what I want to feel at the end of 2013. I want to feel that I’ve achieved something, yes. I want to have some income coming in from my writing (I have to, or it’s back to a Real Job). But most of all, I want to have loved what I did in the year. I want to have enjoyed the process of creating, of bringing characters to life and telling their stories. No point quitting a drudgery of a Day Job and making writing drudgery instead!

So I’m kind of back where I started. I need goals. But the goals need to be as much about attitude and me as what I’m achieving externally. How I feel about what I’m doing is just as important as what I’m actually doing. That’s the reason I’m doing this. That’s what really counts. Not how many books I publish and what their Amazon rank is and how many reviews they get. But how much I’ve enjoyed the process.

The journey is a goal, just as much as the destination.


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Being like our characters- finding courage to go for our dreams


Photo by oktavianim

So, I quit the Day Job.

I gave them four months notice, so I’m still acting professionally and not leaving anyone in the merde. I’ll save as much as I can in that time for an extra financial cushion. I have a story all planned out, ready to start writing, a novella I want to get written and published fast in the hope of having a trickle of money coming in before I leave.

Now of course the fear kicks in, the fear I won’t be able to write it as well as I envision the story. And of course, I won’t.  Nowhere near it in first draft, but it will get closer to the story I see with each successive draft, until I know it’s close enough and ready to send out to the world.

I still feel the terror though. Of not being good enough. Of being found out to be a fraud, I write so much about writing, yet I can’t write. Of truly finishing something and putting it out there to be judged and criticised.  Of failing at this grand big plan to have it all, damaging one dream (the house in Australia, the reson for my savings) for the sake of another (being a full-time writer).

That’s the risk I take. I did a process of thinking what my “brand” will be as a writer. Basically, what my stories will be about. What the consistent themes are readers can expect from my books. This wasn’t actually for me as Autumn, this was for another pseudonym I’ll be using for my hotter stories. It’s all about my heroines growing their confidence. Owning their power. Overcoming the fears and limitations that have run their lives.

I realise, these are the themes of ALL my stories, possibly all good stories by any writer. In the erotica written under the pseudonym, it will be an extraordinary sexual encounter that catalyses her change. In my stories as Autumn, it will be the demands of the developing relationship. To have the relationship, she needs to change what holds her back.

Yet all these things are what I need to do too. I’m still letting fear and limitation run my life.

I don’t think I’ll be having any unusual sexual experiences, or a new relationship. But I still need to change. I need to find that strength in myself. I need to find the courage to overcome my fears. I need to stop giving away my power, and use it like a battle axe to slash through the wall of limitations I’ve surrounded myself with.

Making chance is big and scary and risky. Last week I had the high of making the decision and acting on it. This week, I have the crash, the dealing with the consequences.

I still know I’ve made the right decision. I need to take this chance now. Playing it safe in the Day Job was keeping me small, giving me excuses to not be all I could be. It’s time to go for it, but pay the price. The price is needing to face this fear. Needing to face the insecurity. Needing to face that it might all go wrong, spectacularly crash-and-burn wrong or quiet whimpering wrong.

Also, needing to face that it might all go right. Fear of success is just as big an issue as fear of failure. The only truly safe thing is to never try. Or to say I’m trying, but procrastinate. Waste time. Write about writing instead of actually writing. Sub stuff far too early as a safety mechanism.

It’s time to stop all that. Time to stop playing it safe. Time to take the risk and do the work. Time to stop being a wannabe and a couldabeen. I’ve “tried” to work at my writing. But Yoda was right. there is no try. Only do, or do not.  It’s time to do. The fear will always be there. It never goes away, according to my multi-publisher author friends.

But we can still do it anyway. No lucky charms needed. Just enough courage to get started and keep going.


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Searching for zen clam, or calm even

zen clam
Photo by Tom Swift

After yesterday’s post I decided what I needed was a bit of zen calm. Except with my typing snarly-uppy-wordiness, it always comes out clam.

So, I found zen clam instead. That clam looks very zen.

What else I found was a plan for my writing. I need deadlines, I need a story that I really truly want to write, and I need motivation. Looks like all three may have collided and hopefully a beautiful mess will result.

No new story, I need to finish what I have. I’ve gone back to one of my favourite old stories, Lock and Cady’s story from the Haven Bay series.  I mind mapped the series today, and I have some new ideas that excite me. I hope I’ve finally found my way with the story in what will be its fourth incarnation.

First, a messy first draft written for a Book in a Week course. , with waaaay too much external conflict. Second, a revised partial that’s probably one of the best things I’ve written at sentence and word choice level, but oh so wrong at the goal and motivation level, quite rightly collecting a very kind rejection from a Harlequin SuperRomance editor. Third incarnation finally had a strong goal and motivation, high stakes for both hero and heroine, but that partial needed a lot more work before it would be ready to sub. Where that version came unstuck was winning a five page critique from a SuperRomance author. It didn’t seem sensible to keep working on the story while waiting on the critique (what if I still had it all wrong?) so I started working on a new story. The critique somehow got lost on its way back to me, then I found I wouldn’t be able to enter the story for New Voices and needed to work on another story for that, and the result is it’s taken me over a year and a lot of other stories to come back to this one.

I love the setting, Haven Bay, and I love these characters. With each incarnation, I get to know them better and go deeper and deeper into their emotions. It all feels so real to me now!

I hope I can get that out when I try to write their story again. Writing a new first draft, then editing, and possibly even rewriting. Whatever it takes to make their story the best I can get it. I’ve given myself deadlines for planning, first drafting, then editing.

I’m looking forward to this!


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Sunday in the garden- not so frugal gardening, but I did save a tree

apple tree planted in a jute bag

My plan was to be a good, frugal gardener.

To avoid adding to the mountain of plastic waste that will drown the planet if we’re not careful, to grow my plants from seed or cuttings, to grow as many food plants as I can fit into our tiny garden, to avoid buying stuff for the garden as much as possible.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way.

Yesterday, my plan wasn’t to garden at all, it was to write. Well, I didn’t get to edit a single word of my story. I went out to the writing shed, and saw my favourite apple tree, the one in the plastic pot near the writing shed door, blown over in the almost-but-not-quite-gale-force gusty winds we’ve had. The tree looked miserable, and saving it became my top priority.

Which meant finding a new container for it, replanting it, and rearranging half the other plants in pots to make a new space for it. Unfortunately, it was already in the biggest pot I have.

Rather than go buy a huge new plastic pot at the nearest garden center, which would have cost a lot, probably been difficult to find, and totally contradicts my policy of NOT buying new stuff if I can help it I thought of some jute salad or veggie growing bags I bought cheaply last week.

Okay, they’re new, but they aren’t plastic, they’ll biodegrade nicely, and I think the jute industry is fairly sustainable.  Plus they won’t look as downright ugly as many plastic pots do. None of the sizes I had were right, so I cut the base out of one and sewed the sides to another one around the top edge to make an extra large and deep container. Perfect for the tree, and the other benefit of using the jute is we could knock a stake right through the base into the soil.  It cost a fraction of what a pot would, plus a bit more of my time, to make something I feel happier with that’s bigger too.

Of course, the jute will decompose within a few years, even though it’s lined with what looks like heavy waxed paper. After I’d already planted it in the jute bag, my lovely husband suggested using some of the timber panels from our unused bookshelves (I used to have an internet bookshop with thousands of books) to make raised garden beds. They’ll work well. We could use those for the tree too, make a two panel wide/ two panel high surround for it, once the jute shows signs of rotting out.

Anyway, for now, I think I saved my beloved tree. And it won’t blow over again, the bag is huge and heavy, weighted with gravel in the base, and I’ve put a stake (more recycling, it’s actually a left over steel curtain rod from the house!) right through into the ground.

Despite my best attempts, it’s hardly frugal, and not as environmentally friendly as I’d like either. I had to buy soil to fill the huge planter bag, about 120 litres. That’s a lot of potting mix. The one apple on the tree will have cost a lot of money by the time we get to eat it. It may not even be that nice an apple! Supermarket fruit plants are rarely adventurous varieties.

But a tree has more value than that. It’s all the apples this tree will ever produce I’m paying for now. Hopefully, even after we move the new owners will leave the tree there to enjoy the shade and the fruit. Though this tree was most definitely not part of my plans.

This is the apple tree I bought only because I felt sorry for it. I’d already planted four apple trees last spring, and I was about to fly to Australia in an emergency because Mum was in hospital. In the supermarket buying some nuts and fruit for the flight, I saw the last sad broken stick left in the box of bare rooted fruit trees, way past planting time. It looked dead, but I  touched it and knew it still had life left in it. Planted out immediately, it might survive.

I had no space in our garden to plant it though, and no time to do more guerilla gardening and plant it over on the waste ground near the railway line, where I’d planted other fruit trees. I had to leave for the airport in a few hours. Luckily, the mother in law had given us some big old plastic garden pots she didn’t want any more, and a huge bag of potting soil. I hastily gave the root ball a good soak, planted the pathetic stick in the pot, said a little prayer for it, and stuck it out of the way behind the shed.The tree had its chance at life, though whether it would survive or not I didn’t know.

By the time I got home, it had clearly survived and was thriving! New leaves and flower buds unfurled. I decided to leave it in the pot until next winter, then replant it in the ground while it was dormant, to reduce transplant shock. It hasn’t quite worked like that. The tree grew huge. Way bigger than the ones in our hard stony ground, where I’d struggled to scratch out a big enough planting hole. I had to pot the tree on into a bigger pot (luckily also an old one from the MiL), and now into the jute bag. It’s not going anywhere now. The place it’s in now, a few feet in front of the shed,  will do fine as a permanent spot for it. Because it’s on bare ground under the bag, not on paving, the roots should break through the base of the bag and grow down into the soil. Tree has found its place.

We could never move it or plant it in the ground, it’s too big now. The bag is way too heavy to move. And the soil here is shallow, hard as concrete when it dries out, and full of rocks and builder’s rubble. It’s hard to plant anything out, even tiny bare rooted plants or things in three inch pots, which is why I’m growing so much in pots. It took me weeks to dig out the ground to plant the hedge when I first moved here, and I ended up with bags and bags of rubble! I’d never be able to dig a hole large enough for this tree.

It’s not quite where I hoped it would go, I wanted to move it to directly in front of the shed to shade the window from the afternoon sun, but the big jute bag won’t fit there. Well, it would, but it would be right against the shed wall and that would rot the shed timbers. Where it is now, it may still give the shed a little shade if it starts to branch out more and not just grow straight up as it is now. I’m not big on pruning things, but I get the feeling I’ll need to prune the leader, that main top trunk that wants to just keep going up up up.

The other potted plants I had to move can live in front of the shed. Things need moving around more to find their best place. The baby fig tree in its big blue glazed pot will fit nicely into that space in front of the window. It’s growing fast from the 4 inch cutting I started with, and those broad fig leaves will give nice shade by next summer. Okay, maybe the summer after, next summer could be too optimistic. Even me, Ms Pollyanna, has to concede that!

I have some goji berry cuttings to plant up too, they could go in a pot by the shed door, where the apple tree used to sit.  It’s not anywhere near frugal gardening yet, but I’m getting there with the edible landscaping at least!

I really need to write though. I have all these grand plans, and I’m not taking any action to get to them. Is saving a tree a good enough excuse not to write?

That’s a trick question, of course, because the answer has to be “Yes” for me, but I wasn’t saving trees every minute of the day. And I’m not working on the story today either, I’m blogging, and blog surfing. Okay, it’s a bad, pathetic excuse! This time next week, I won’t just have airy-fairy in-my-head writing goals. I’ll have a plan mapped out and up on my wall. With deadlines.


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Rejection- and a lesson on how I need to write


Image source sawyeriii

I’m Autumn, and I’m an optimist.

There, now I’ve confessed the terrible truth, I can start the change process, right?

Optimism is normally considered a good thing. And it can be. The hope of a good outcome lets us start ambitious new projects. It keeps us going when times are tough. It lets us bounce back from defeats, because things are bound to get better. Even when we have defeats and face disappointments, at least we’ve felt good along the way.

Optimism is good. But it can also cause problems. Unrealistic expectations. Look where optimism got Mr Micawber.

Now, that doesn’t mean I want to be a pessimist. I’m married to one. Believe me, one in any household is enough. Pessimism has it’s own set of problems. I’ve had pessimistic periods in my life, and I’ve worked hard to leave that behind.

Pessimism leads to ideas that never get acted on. Projects abandoned at the first road bump, because “It was never going to work out, anyway.” Yes, pessimists can be pleasantly surprised, while optimists are often disappointed, but oh my, the misery along the way for the pessimist.

Problem is, optimism can lead to taking on too much. Overestimating what we can do and how long it will take to do it. Setting deadlines (or accepting deadline requests from someone else), that we just can’t meet. Or we bust a gut to meet, but with work that’s not as good as it could be, bent out of shape to meet the deadline. Saying “Yes” to things we’d be better saying “No” to.

I want to be a realist (better yet, an awesomist!).

I don’t have an editor dishing out  writing work to me specifically yet, but I have a nasty habit of setting self-made deadlines that are just plain crazy. Like seeing a Call for Submissions with an impossibly close due date and deciding to go for it, because idea machine my brain is, I can’t see a Call without getting at least one idea.

The answer may just be to avoid reading those Call for Submissions posts on editor’s blogs. Or if I’m gonna read them, read them when they’re first posted, not a month and a half later!

That alone might not help me, unfortunately. Long deadlines do the “I’ve got ages to write this so I’ll do that first” thing for me. Without the time pressure, getting down and doing the work easily slides to the end of my To Do list, because I optimistically hope it will take a lot less time than it actually does.

*sigh*

If I want to write full-time, knowing what makes a realistic deadline for me and how to keep it is one of the first lessons I need to learn.

The trigger for this ramble was this post, and my Christmas story getting rejected.

The email waited when I got home from visiting my mother-in-law yesterday (as if that wasn’t enough bad for one day!).

Now at least I didn’t have a long wait. But I had hopes for this story. I worked so hard on it. I do believe it’s the best thing I’ve written. I truly thought I’d cracked it with this one. I won’t pretend the rejection didn’t hurt, it did. When I read the email, it kicked me in the guts. I had a little cry. But I can’t stay hurt, unless I want to give up writing.

Here’s what he said-

I adore your premise, but the writing is a little too choppy/disjointed, and it’s hard to get a clear sense of what’s happening.

He’s right.

I knew this when I submitted the story, but I simply didn’t have time to fix it. To reduce the word count, I mangled the story. Too many short sentences. Missed words that really need to be there. It doesn’t flow well. I dropped two and a half k in the first round of edits, a lot on a twenty k novella, and lost more than just excess words with those cuts.

Trying to avoid my usual sin of rambling and overwriting, I took my writing spare to the point of losing the meaning and readability. The story needed to be twenty k. Yes, I needed to trim my first draft, tighten it and lose some weak bits and strengthen other things. But I didn’t need to damage my story so badly in the process.

Anyway, I know what to do now. I’ll let the story sit for a month or so, get some distance from it while I work on something else. Then I’ll come back to it. Do another round or three of edits and put back in much of what I took out. I’ll let the story be as long as it needs to be to tell the story right, without drifting into overwriting.

Then I’ll probably self-publish it, just for the fun of it and because I’ve wanted to have a go at self-pubbing for a long time.

Anyway, that’s down the track a bit. What’s immediate is deciding what story to start on next, and learning the lesson here.

I already have plenty of ideas for my next project, rewriting the rejected Valentine’s Day novella, set in my imaginary Australian country town of Koowindra. From that starting point, I have three or four possible stories, all different enough I could write all of them without self-plagiarism. Now I need to develop each idea enough that I can see which one grabs me the most to start first. 

I can write so many variations on this story. Coming home is a recurring theme for me. Whether it’s the hero or the heroine, someone who’s never had or  who has lost their sense of home is finding what their home is. And who their home is with.

Finding home, finding love.

That’s the truth of all my stories. Home means love, and love means home. Either they go to the place that’s home for them, and find love there waiting for them; or they find that love gives them the sense of home they’ve been missing. Either way, the theme is the same. I have so many possible variations on this. Five or six different ideas just for Koowindra stories. The Haven Bay series, another five or six stories. All different, all with the same core theme.

That’s okay, I think. It won’t make my stories too samey. I’m writing what’s important to me. I hope that will resonate with my readers too. The key to writing authentic romance stories is coming from my own emotional truth, I believe. Not writing cynically, writing what I think will sell. Writing from my heart- what I hope and believe and know.

And that’s the lesson. Not so much “don’t set unrealistic goals”. Not so much stop being an optimist. But be true to what I know about my stories.

I knew once I got to the halfway point in first draft that the story needed around twenty k, way over the required word count. I changed the outline, to keep it going even further over. That was a good choice, it strengthened the story structure.

The bad choice was then hacking the first draft not only beyond recognition but beyond readability to get word count down.

I had two other options at that stage- let the story be what I knew it needed to be, and sub it long anyway, to the same or a different publisher through regular submission routes. Not  through the Call for Submissions, as it didn’t meet what the editor requested. Or if I really desperately wanted to sub to the Call, start a new version. Change the story and the characters and the conflict enough to fit the requested word count. That’s what I’ll need to do when I’m a published writer, working on contract, with deadlines that have to be met. I need to give the editor what I promised.

It’s about staying true to the integrity of the story, and keeping my promise as a writer, both at the same time. If I sub something to an editor, it must  be what they’ve asked for. If the story isn’t they asked for, I shouldn’t sub that story to them. Doesn’t make it a bad story, it just means it’s not the right story for that particular editor for that particular request. Destroying the integrity of the story isn’t the answer. Keeping my promises is.

So back to the beginning again- the need for realistic promises! Maybe, knowing I’m an optimist, what I need to do is guess the time I think something will take, and double it.

Now on to fixing up the writing shed. It needs insulating, lining, and decorating. I can do that in a weekend, right?


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Hit send – and wait!

I’ve done it! Submitted my novella to a lovely editor at Entangled.

I’m happy with what I sent. Okay, I did attach the not-quite-optimal version of the synopsis (hint: if you decide to do some last minute tweaks, DO NOT attach the document while the tweaked version is still sitting on your desktop unsaved, you will be sending the old version!), and my blurb for the query letter sounded a little too generic rent-a-romance for my taste (by that stage I was way too tired and last-minuted to do a good enough job on this, unfortunately).

I just have to hope the story speaks for itself and he likes it!

I’ll know within the next three weeks, anyway. The great thing about Entangled is the short wait times. Also, everything I’ve heard (and my personal experience with my last sub) says the editors there give the best rejections around. Getting R’ed sucks, anytime, but a nice friendly personal rejection is soooooo much better.

So, tonight I’ll just wait for the post-submission crash. I’ve run on diet cola and adrenaline the last five days, getting this story written and edited.  Off to the Day Job in the morning. The Thursday I can start work on the Writing Shed. Sitting crosslegged on the bed with my laptop on my knees works okay for short stretches, but can be a killer for twelve hour plus writing stints three days in a row! My back and neck are not happy right now.

Getting back into some carpentry again will be fun. I’ll be insulating the shed, and lining it with pine tongue and groove boards, then building in a desk and shelving. After that, once I’ll make curtains or a blind, and a couple of cushions, it’ll be ready to move in. I got a lovely white cane office swivel chair on ebay for £8, which made me happy (compared to £60 for a new one)!

My Writing Shed will rock!

In the meantime, I’ll move on to a different writing project too - the rewrite of the Valentine’s Day novella to send to Entangled. Seeing an Entangled editor say in the July Wish List she wanted small town romances made me very happy as well - maybe the Haven Bay series? They also need complete rewrites, but I love those stories!

I also need to catch up on the lessons and homework for the online writing course I’m doing, which will mean more planning on the big fantasy romance.

I just found out (thanks to Lacey!) that Harlequin are doing So You Can Think You Can Write 2012 in September, though they’ve changed the rules (again!) and it’s more like last year’s Mills and Boon X-Factor style New Voices contest. Guaranteed publication for the winner again. I’m guessing that means NV won’t be happening this year. Interesting!

I’m not sure I’ll enter, as I’m feeling I want to be monogamous with Entangled right now.

 


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Finished first draft- and my first day writing in the shed

I’m a happy girl tonight- I finished the first draft of my Christmas novella!

Made an epic push today and wrote four chapters, plus a short scene to drop into chapter three to strengthen the heroine’s motivation.

Three things helped. A crazily close deadline. Stubborn determination to sub this story. And using the shed to write in for the first time.

As you can see, it’s a very temporary set up. The shed still has some junk and tools in it. I haven’t even started cleaning it up. Too busy with this deadline. But I bought a cheap old folding garden table and chairs set on ebay, and they arrived on Thursday while I was at the Day Job. Possibly the set is a little more shabby than chic, but I like them.

Today, it worked great. I could go in there and lock the door while I wrote the chapter on my Alphasmart. Getting into a different space, somewhere just for writing, made a huge difference. Being where it was harder for my husband to disturb me improved my focus, too.

Actually, the Alphasmart is probably the fourth thing that helped. I had to use it, as I don’t have power connected to the shed yet, and my laptop battery is getting old and won’t hold much of a charge. The Alphie works forever on two AA batteries. Well, not quite forever, but I’ve had it a while and only now is it showing any change on the power meter, it dropped from four bars to three and a half.

Using the Alphie is great. All it does is let me type and store my writing. I can’t get distracted looking something up on Google. I can’t check my emails. I can’t do anything but write on it. It’s not even easy to go back and edit things, because the tiny screen only shows two lines at a time. Then once I’m done, I take it inside, plug it into the laptop with a Word doc open, and just like magic the words appear in my document. I love it!

So first draft is done. I like some bits, and some bits suck, especially the early chapters when despite my planning I was writing my way into the story. I had my nice neat outline, but the story changed. I think for the better, but there will be things in the first half I need to tweak to make it fit the new end.

Worst of all, I’m way over word count. I know there’s stuff I can trim from the first part. I also know I am way too repetitive. I like repeating words, The sound of them. The way they look on the page, The echo and rhythm of them.

But when I’m 5k over required word count on a short novella, some of those words have got to go. Okay, a lot of those words have got to go.

There’s still a huge amount of work to do, and only four days to do it in.

But this stage is finished, and that feels good.

 

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