My revision is due at the end of next month. Also, next month is my birthday (I am not a fan of my birthday). I may not want to talk to anyone at all for the entirety of February!

But here are some good things:

My revision for 17 & Gone may not be done yet, and I may have an enormous amount of work to do by February 29, but I’m very into the book. Very, very, very into it. So there’s that.

I also found a photograph that goes with the book in my mind—no, authors can’t choose their own covers, but in my imagination this is it. I love this photo so much that I’m arranging to buy a print from the photographer, who happens to live in my hometown of Woodstock, New York, and is a high school friend of my sister’s.

And next month one of my Favorite Books of 2012 comes out… The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour. I’m interviewing the author and I’ll be giving away a copy of her gorgeous, thrilling, sexy new novel. Believe me, you want to read this book.

And I got good news this week, at a moment when I really needed it. And it made me think of how colony news always comes at just the moment I need that one thing to push me forward (like that time I found out about Yaddo after I’d just been moved to a cubicle at work and how that felt like a door had been opened).

Thank you, Millay Colony acceptance, for coming at the moment you did.

(Yes, I think I will be living with other artists and writers in that barn!)

I accepted the residency, and I’ll be there in the fall, even though I have no idea what my future holds for me in terms of upcoming book contracts, or day jobs, or anything really.

And yeah, this is going to be an interesting year. Because I’ll have two four-week-long writing retreats in 2012… I leave for Djerassi in just six weeks:

And while there I might be writing something you don’t know about yet. And I might be finding out that the Turning Point I thought I had a few years ago was only the first one. Because life takes you on many turns, doesn’t it?

Everything these other writers have said has resonated with me in one way or another: Gayle Forman telling me not to be bitter. Sean Ferrell telling me to stop making excuses. Eileen Cook on how you can’t know until you try. Christopher Barzak reminding me how much I used to love writing short stories. Saundra Mitchell telling me it is okay to walk away if I want to walk away. Eric Luper on not writing what I think the industry wants me to write. Gretchen McNeil on how everything happens for a reason. Julia DeVillers on taking the chance to write something uncomfortable because it just might be the right thing. I know these Turning Points guest blogs aren’t written only for my benefit… but some days it sure feels like they are.

GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: Julia is giving away copies of two of her books—just comment on this post to enter… there will be two winners!

When I was ten, I wrote a fan letter to an author and he wrote me back.

In fifth grade, I read a book by Frank Bonham called The Missing Persons League. It was about a boy searching for his missing mother and sister, set in a pre-apocalyptic world of oxygen deficiency and world food shortage.

It was an unusual choice for me because it was science fiction, and I was in a hardcore Judy Blume/Ellen Conford/V.C. Andrews phase. But something about The Missing Persons League resonated with me. The main character writes a “fan letter” to an author, and I decided I’d write a fan letter to the author, too.

“Dear Mr. Bonham,

I didn’t know I’d want to read science fiction, but I loved your book….”

And he wrote back:

“Dear Julie,

I didn’t know I’d want to write science fiction, either. In fact, I didn’t even know I’d write for young readers at all.”

Frank told how he had been writing adult books for decades (westerns and pulp fiction) before he surprised himself by turning to young adult books. As you can see from this excerpt, he also was wonderfully conversational about my hometown (Albany, NY), a possible sequel, and the dangers of smoking.

I must have asked him to tell me more because in the next letter, Frank told me how he had really challenged himself when he decided to write Durango Street, because it was set in Watts, in a world previously foreign to him, and many people at the time.

“Years ahead of its time, DURANGO STREET by Frank Bonham, like THE OUTSIDERS, shows that gang violence is, sadly, nothing new—and nothing glamorous… A starkly realistic, convincing, well-written teen novel.”—SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL

A photo Julia enclosed in her letter to Frank Bonham

Frank had continued to write more young adult books: contemporary novels about teen suicide, drug abuse, and urban life; dystopia; paranormal—genres that continued to “surprise him.”

Over the next few years, Frank and I wrote back and forth. I told him about middle school, my guinea pigs[1], and how my English teachers were sucking the life out of writing. He told me about his birds, California, and he encouraged me to keep writing.

“Writing can be uncomfortable, just like life,” Frank advised. “When writing feels uncomfortable, think about what that might be telling you.”

Frank passed away in 1988.

* * *

Flash forward to a new century. I had continued writing, and had published two nonfiction books for teens. Nonfiction was a natural fit for me. I received a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio State, where I learned to answer the Ws (whowhatwhenwherewhy) at breakneck speed. I was the go-to research maven in any office. “Ask Julia to find out,” was the refrain before Google stole my glory. Researching, interviewing people, and synthesizing what I’d unearthed. Perfect for nonfiction.

Important aside: I’m not saying nonfiction is easy by any means, lord no, and many nonfiction authors are those I respect most in our field. That’s not my point.

My point is that nonfiction was so obviously my genre, because writing it was, well, comfortable. Sure, people suggested I try fiction[2]. But writing fiction—much less trying to get it published—I realize now, meant I would lose control. Fiction was opinions, not just facts. It meant not just reporting, but interpreting. Not simply sharing others’ words from an interview but actually creating characters, giving voice to my own people who had something to say. My own voice, not others.

That was scary. And uncomfortable. So, no fiction for me, I would reply.

Then, as I was in the middle of writing a nonfiction pitch for my next book, my Turning Point happened. My twin sister had a baby. My intention was to fly out to stay with her and help out with the baby. That would be an all-consuming task, I figured, so I didn’t bring my research books or notes or even my own computer. But my sister had medical complications and with her nurses, husband, and our mom in the house, I was superfluous or in the way. I went over to my mom’s and started going through the boxes stored in her basement. I found my old diaries, photos, and keepsakes.

And the original letter from Frank Bonham[3].

“Writing can be uncomfortable, just like life,” Frank advised. “When writing feels uncomfortable, think about what that might be telling you.”

Yeah, life was uncomfortable. I was worried sick about my sister and her baby[4], I was away from home without my work to distract me. And I’d been going through childhood memories, so my life was flashing before my eyes. My emotions were raw and on the surface as I read the words from teen me from my diaries.

And I sat down at my sister’s computer and started my first novel. It wasn’t comfortable. But I thought about what that might be telling me. I knew the voice of my character, too. It was of the girl whose diaries I’d been reading. Teen me.

And I wrote the first four chapters of what would become my first middle-grade novel: How My Private Personal Journal Became a Bestseller. A book about a teen whose hopes and dreams mirrored what I had written in my own diary (but wouldn’t happen in real life. However, in fiction…).

Dutton published my novel.[5]

Dutton was the original publisher of The Missing Persons League by Frank Bonham.

I’ve been writing fiction ever since.

Dear Julie,

I didn’t know I’d write science fiction, either. In fact, I didn’t even know I’d write for young readers at all….

…Your friend,

Frank Bonham

p.s.

1. I certainly got more out of these exchanges than he did, but he did say I had a “unique girl voice.” He only had sons, so I hope I was a focus group of one and somehow helped him, too.
2. Shout-out to my first editor, Roy Carlisle.
3. The original typed letter is currently in a safe in a storage pod since I’ve been living overseas, but I took this picture before I moved.
4. My twin, Jennifer Roy, is my co-author on a middle-grade series. Yes, fiction! And her son is doing great.
5. The book was adapted into a Disney Channel Original Movie called Read It and Weep. Kay Panabaker, the star, looks like a fabulous version of teen me.
6. Writing this blog entry (nonfiction!), I went into journalist mode and ran across an interview with Frank Bonham that asked about his genre switch:

“While observing the problems [in urban culture], I had been vacillating between writing an adult fact book or a book for young readers. I finally decided that the book should be addressed to youngsters, for older minds too often have already set hard within their forms. Children’s minds, on the contrary, are as sensitive as sea anemones. Drop an idea in them, and they enfold and consume it, or else reject it. But at least they taste it.”

Julia (on the right) with two fellow Dutton authors: Gayle Forman (left) and ME! (center)

Julia DeVillers writes nonfiction and fiction, including: the TRADING FACES identical twins series with Jennifer Roy, the LIBERTY PORTER, FIRST DAUGHTER series, and LYNNVISIBLE. She currently lives in Saratoga Springs, NY, after her year in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Her website is www.girlwise.com.

Follow @juliadevillers on Twitter.

ENTER TO WIN EITHER HOW MY PRIVATE PERSONAL JOURNAL BECAME A BESTSELLER OR DOUBLE FEATURE:

If you comment on this post, you will be ENTERED TO WIN a signed copy of either How My Private Personal Journal Became a Bestseller by Julia DeVillers or Double Feature by Julia Devillers and her twin sister, Jennifer Roy! Two commenters will win one book each!

GIVEAWAY RULES: 

1. You must leave a comment on this post to enter. Two winners will be chosen: One will win a signed How My Private, Personal Journal Became a Bestseller and one will win a signed Double Feature. (If you have a preference for one or the other, please say so in your comment.) 
2. If you tweet about this giveaway—or post about it on Facebook or Google+—you get +1 extra entry and then have two chances to win! Just make sure you tell me or paste in the link so I know.
3. This giveaway is US only. Please make sure you have a mailing address in the US in order to enter.
4. This giveaway closes at 5pm EST on Thursday, February 2.

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

• Intro to the Turning Points blog series
• Gayle Forman: on overcoming bitterness
• Sean Ferrell: on the Writer who never arrives
• Eileen Cook: on a “nasty” book and a teacher’s advice that inspired her
• Christopher Barzak: on how short stories changed his vision for his novel
• Saundra Mitchell: on deciding to quit and walk away (giveaway open through January 27!)
• Eric Luper: on not writing for trends (giveaway open through January 31!)
• Gretchen McNeil: on how “everything happens for a reason”

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

My mom used that line so many times over the years I’d forgotten what it really means. Miss the bus and late for school? Everything happens for a reason. Soccer injury prevents you from playing ever again? Everything happens for a reason. Boyfriend dumps you the week before prom? Everything happens for a reason.

It’s like an emotional Band-Aid, something to alleviate the sting of a situation. But I’d never really internalized its meaning until just recently.

I’m divorced. There, I said it. I tend to keep details of my personal life off the Interwebz if at all possible, but this momentous event had such an impact on my writing life, it’s virtually impossible to keep it quiet. In fact, if I hadn’t gotten divorced, I wouldn’t be guest blogging for Nova now. It was, truly, my turning point.

He was my college boyfriend, the love of my young life. We’d been together for thirteen years when it all fell apart. I didn’t see it coming and I was crushed. Devastated. The end of the marriage was bad enough, but my entire identity had somehow gotten wrapped up in that relationship. I was a trained opera singer, but I’d stopped singing professionally. I’d lost touch with a lot of old friends during the last years of the marriage, so my support network was rather depleted. Even my career was tied up in him: we ran a business together that occupied the majority of my time, and when he left, the job left too. We had no children. My cat died. I had nothing.

It was odd, really, for someone like me. I’m a glass half full kinda girl, muddling through life with a generally positive, find the silver lining, let’s make the best of it mentality. My friends call it “plucky Irish.” I’m used to barreling through the bad periods of life with full confidence that something good is just around the next bend. But not this time. This time I found myself utterly, unbearably alone.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

Then one morning I woke up and said to myself, “I’m going to write a novel.” It sounds so corny when I tell the story, but yes, it really did happen just like that.

“I’m going to write a novel.”

I’d never written before. Not a short story, not a poem, hell, I’d never even kept a journal. But for some reason known only to my psyche, I decided I was going to write a novel.

And I did.

And it sucked.

Harsh, but true. That novel, an adult chick lit romantic comedy, will never see the light of day. It was full of newbie writer mistakes, clichés, overused tropes, and perhaps more Mary Sue than I’d care to admit. Still, it ignited the storyteller in me and suddenly I was hooked. Fiction-writing junky. I read some books about writing—Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees, and the best of all Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King. I took a step back. I looked critically at what I’d written. I internalized feedback from agents who rejected the manuscript. I learned how to write. I learned how I write. And I tried again.

That was three and a half years ago. Now I’m a published author, with books lined up for 2012 and 2013. Talk about a turning point.

It’s taken some getting used to, this idea of describing myself as a writer. Until just a few months ago, when someone asked the inevitable “What do you do?” question, a stumbling, roundabout answer spilled out of my mouth.

“So, Gretchen, what do you do?”

“Er, well, I’m an opera singer, but now I sing with the circus and oh yeah, I write too.”

“Um, okay.”

It wasn’t that I was ashamed of being a writer, or confused by my own self-labeling. It was more like my brain wasn’t dealing with the transition. Since I was seventeen years old, my only goal was to be a performer. It’s a difficult mentality to change. But as my debut date crept closer and closer, I forced myself to make the mental transition. Now, I say with confidence: “I’m an author.”

I wouldn’t wish a divorce on anyone. It’s a dark, soul-crushing experience, even when it’s the best possible thing for you. Like cleaving off a gangrenous limb—you have to do it in order to survive, but it’s going to hurt like hell. Still, at the distance of four years, the memory of the pain and misery faded, I realize that it was the best possible thing for me. It changed my life for the better.

Heh. Don’t tell her I said this, but Mom was right.

Everything happens for a reason.

—Gretchen McNeil

Gretchen McNeil is an opera singer, writer, and clown. Her YA horror/paranormal Possess debuted with Balzer + Bray for HarperCollins in 2011. Her second novel, Ten—YA horror/suspense about ten teens trapped on a remote island with a serial killer—will be released September 18, 2012. Gretchen is a former coloratura soprano, the voice of Mary on G4′s Code Monkeys, and she currently sings with the LA-based circus troupe Cirque Berzerk. Gretchen is also a founding member of the vlog group YARebels, where she can be seen as “Monday.”

Visit Gretchen at gretchenmcneil.com.

Follow @gretchenmcneil on Twitter.

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

• Intro to the Turning Points blog series
• On overcoming bitterness by Gayle Forman
• On the Writer who never arrives by Sean Ferrell 
• On the “nasty” book and the teacher’s advice that led Eileen Cook to become a writer
• On how writing short stories changed Christopher Barzak‘s vision for writing a novel (includes giveaway open through January 26!)
• On deciding to quit and walk away by Saundra Mitchell (includes giveaway open through January 27!)
• On not writing for trends by Eric Luper (includes giveaway open through January 31!)

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.

GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: Eric is giving away two Playaway audio editions of his novel Seth Baumgartner’s Love Manifesto—yes, you will win a preloaded Playaway device!!—just comment on this post to enter… there will be two winners!

When I attended my very first children’s writing conference back in 2001, I heard an editor say something that, in my mind, should have been introduced by the blowing of long trumpets. She said, “We are looking for humorous chapter book mysteries for boys.”

I wanted to jump up and yell, “I can do that!”

Now, I already had a completed contemporary fantasy manuscript in hand and was waiting for someone to recognize it was the perfect successor to Harry Potter, but this was in the era when I would have given my left leg to have a book published (after all, I’d still need my arms to type). So, I did what I thought any aspiring children’s writer should do: I raced home and began writing a humorous chapter book mystery for boys. Actually, I did more than that. I read loads of chapter book mysteries for boys to learn how they were constructed. I spoke to writers of chapter book mysteries for boys. Then, I began writing mine.

Somewhere through the course of writing that book, I read an interview with a different editor at a different house. He said, “We’re looking for quirky picture books and edgy young adult fiction.” I raced home to get started on those. That entailed reading loads of quirky picture books and edgy young adult fiction, speaking to writers of… well, you get the point.

For three or more years, I chased trends. I wrote with the belief that I had the inside track, that I knew something most aspiring writers did not. I wrote expecting that my manuscripts would conveniently fill the void I learned about at one writing conference or another, in one article or another.

And I racked up rejection after rejection.

Scores of them.

One flaw in chasing trends is that you are nipping at the tails of loads of other writers who happen to have gotten the same information as you. By the time I was able to produce something publishable, the industry had moved on to the next thing. And the other major flaw? I was never particularly passionate about my subject matter. For a writer, this amounts to several nails in the proverbial coffin.

That is not to say the gap between 2001 and 2004 was wasted time. I was learning a lot in that period. I was learning my craft, learning about the publishing industry, and making valuable contacts. I was reading tons of books. I was developing my voice and honing my skills. In essence, I was priming the pump.

And early in 2004 it hit me… I was struck with an interesting premise for a book (a teen who plays Texas Hold’em in an illegal poker room in his hometown and loses gobs of money from his family’s small business) and I made the conscious decision to write the book that I would have wanted in my hands when I was a teen. Editors’ wish lists be damned!

In less than four months, out came the first draft of Big Slick.

It seems like a short time for a full-length novel, but a lot was happening. Every time I sat at my laptop, I made that same conscious decision. I ignored all the talk about trends and vowed to write that one book I would have cleaved to as a kid. My hope was that there were other kids out there much like me who would cleave to the same sort of book. Once I freed myself from those editors’ pesky voices, my only trouble was my poor typing skills keeping up with the thoughts racing through my mind.

Big Slick was accepted within the first few submissions and needed very little tweaking from its original version.

Since then, I’ve learned to ignore all the chatter going on around me—I ignore talk about vampires and werewolves and zombies, I ignore talk about dystopian survival stories and talk about giant squids and evil umpires from Venus. Instead, I listen to the voice within me. Nowadays, it’s the only voice I listen to when it comes to my writing.

I’d still give my left leg to have my next novel published (although I’m not sure who would want my left leg or what he or she would do with it) but I’ve learned that writing what speaks to me is far more essential than writing what someone else tells me I should be writing.

—Eric Luper

Eric Luper has been writing for teens since 1999 when he decided to stop fighting the youthful voice that was trying to make its way into his “grown up” books. Since then, he has written a bunch of books for young adults, some of which have actually been published, including Big Slick, Bug Boy, and Seth Baumgartner’s Love Manifesto. Of Eric’s fourth novel (his first for middle-grade readers), Jeremy Bender vs. the Cupcake Cadets, Gordon Gorman says, “Hats (and tams) off to Jeremy Bender for a belly laugh not even the densest cupcakes could hold down!”  He is working on a few new projects but, for now, they are all super-ultra-top secret!

Eric lives in Albany, NY, but spends as many weekends as possible in nearby Lake George doing mountainey and lakey things.

Watch the book trailer for Jeremy Bender vs. the Cupcake Cadets:

Visit Eric at ericluper.com.

Follow @ericluper on Twitter.

ENTER TO WIN A PLAYAWAY PRE-LOADED WITH THE AUDIO EDITION OF SETH BAUMGARTNER’S LOVE MANIFESTO:

If you comment on this post, you will be ENTERED TO WIN a Playaway device pre-loaded with the audio edition of Eric Luper’s YA novel Seth Baumgartner’s Love Manifesto. The Playaway is an mp3 player with one book loaded onto it—and that book will be Seth Baumgartner’s Love Manifesto (how cool is that??). And if you tweet, or post about this giveaway on Facebook or Google+, you get +1 extra entry to win. Two commenters will win a pre-loaded Playaway!

For more information on the Playaway, visit their website.

GIVEAWAY RULES: 

1. You must leave a comment on this post to enter. Two winners will be chosen: Each will win a pre-loaded Playaway with Seth Baumgartner’s Love Manifesto on it.
2. If you tweet about this giveaway—or post about it on Facebook or Google+—you get +1 extra entry and then have two chances to win! Just make sure you tell me or paste in the link so I know.
3. This giveaway is open all over the world—yes, this is INTERNATIONAL! 
4. This giveaway closes at 5pm EST on Tuesday, January 31.

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

• Intro to the Turning Points blog series
• On overcoming bitterness by Gayle Forman
• On the Writer who never arrives by Sean Ferrell 
• On the “nasty” book and the teacher’s advice that led Eileen Cook to become a writer
• On how writing short stories changed Christopher Barzak‘s vision for writing a novel (includes giveaway open through January 26!)
• On deciding to quit and walk away by Saundra Mitchell (includes giveaway open through January 27!)

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.

GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: Saundra is giving away two signed paperbacks of The Vespertine—just comment on this post to enter… there will be two winners!

The important thing for me to realize was that I could quit.

I spent the first decade of my career as a screenwriter writing short films. The entire time, however, I was trying to break into television. I wanted to write episodics—those one-hour dramas you may enjoy in the 9 and 10 o’clock hours. I loved the form, I loved the potential. That’s what I truly wanted to do.

And when I finally got a job on an episodic, I had to turn it down. My life, my family, had grown in the ten years since I’d first dreamed the dream of writing for television. It never occurred to me to reshape it. Dogged pursuit was part of the calling.

So was job insecurity; ragged, uneven hours—the fact that I would have to move to Los Angeles with children… I’d never considered those factors. Until I had to, and I had to walk away. It’s demoralizing to give up on a dream, especially being so close to achieving it.

The truth was, it didn’t fit anymore. It was a twenty-year-old’s dream, and I wasn’t twenty anymore.

I consoled myself with writing a novel, my very first. I wanted to do something that was so far away from screenwriting, I couldn’t even see the Scriptware in the distance. It also gave me something new to pursue. I liked the grim security of writing query letters, researching agents, sending things away.

After all, I’d been querying for a decade. That was part of my day, just like having breakfast, or checking my e-mail. I burned through 80 queries for my first novel (and had written my second in the meantime,) and by 80, the pursuit wasn’t so dogged anymore. I handwaved the list of agents left uncontacted. I ignored my stamps.

Since I had written a new novel, I had to query that before I was allowed to quit. I would give the second novel one query to get an agent, that’s all. After that, I was allowed to be finished and to stop chasing. Not writing—I loved words too much, bending them, playing with them. But the chasing, the career. That would be done. So I sent that last query.

I got an agent.

But I lost that agent.

I got another agent, and that second book sold in 2007. I had an editor! I was published! It was glorious! And in 2010, I sat at my desk with a third, fourth, and fifth book rejected. My editor had just given me six pages of notes on a 60 page sample that she wasn’t even tentatively offering to buy, and I thought… maybe I’d only had one book in me.

It was reasonable. Possible. I’d seen writing a book through, from beginning to end. I’d written it, queried it, sold it. I’d revised it, copyedited it, and seen it published. Kirkus reviewed it; I’d had a signing. Instead of backing out at the last minute, like I had on Hollywood and episodics, I’d taken the entire trip. Maybe I was just done. Maybe that’s all there was to my journey as a working writer.

This time, I really did quit. No more partials, no more proposals, none. I stopped writing for publication. I gave in to my wildest fantasy, which was writing a Victorian (unmarketable) novel about a vampire (unsellable) serial killer (outdated,) and for the first time in years, I had fun. Every single day, I got up to write a book that made me happy.

I lost the serial killer and the vampire—and another agent. But the book sold, and since then I’ve had hard days. Ugly days. Completely hideous days that made me want to throw myself off a cliff. I’m still going, though, and I think that’s because I learned—several times, the hard way—that I don’t have to.

Writers have to write. But we don’t have to struggle. We don’t have to do business. We don’t have to research agents, or figure out a marketing plan, or make ourselves smile when someone tells us to our face how bad our book is. The only thing we have to do is interact with our words, and our imaginations, and the people in our heads.

Everything else, we choose to do. And though I had to make the turn several times, my turning point as an author was when I realized that I could walk away. Knowing that, in my bones and my blood, makes every day I choose to keep going that much sweeter.

—Saundra Mitchell

Saundra Mitchell has been a phone psychic, a car salesperson, a denture-deliverer, and a layout waxer. She’s dodged trains, endured basic training, and hitchhiked from Montana to California. She teaches herself languages, raises children, and makes paper for fun. She’s the author of Shadowed Summer, The Vespertine, The Springsweet, and the forthcoming Aetherborne and Mistwalker. She’s also the editor of the forthcoming YA anthology Defy the Dark. She always picks truth; dares are too easy.

Visit Saundra at saundramitchell.com.

Follow @SaundraMitchell on Twitter.

ENTER TO WIN SIGNED COPIES OF THE PAPERBACK EDITION OF THE VESPERTINE:

If you comment on this post, you will be ENTERED TO WIN a signed paperback of Saundra Mitchell’s novel The Vespertine. These paperbacks just arrived, so you’ll be one of the first to get one! And if you tweet, or post about this giveaway on Facebook or Google+, you get +1 extra entry to win. Two commenters will win!

GIVEAWAY RULES: 

1. You must leave a comment on this post to enter. Two winners will be chosen: Each will win a signed paperback of The Vespertine.
2. Please make sure an email address shows up somehow in the comment form. Or that you are logged in—via WordPress, Twitter, etc. I just need a way to get a hold of you if you win. 
3. If you tweet about this giveaway—or post about it on Facebook or Google+—you get +1 extra entry and then have two chances to win! Just make sure you tell me or paste in the link so I know.
4. This giveaway is open in the US and Canada only—please only enter if you have a mailing address in the US or Canada.
5. This giveaway closes at 5pm EST on Friday, January 27.

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

• Intro to the Turning Points blog series
• On overcoming bitterness by Gayle Forman
• On the Writer who never arrives by Sean Ferrell (includes giveaway open through January 20!)
• On the “nasty” book and the teacher’s advice that led Eileen Cook to become a writer
• On how writing short stories changed Christopher Barzak‘s vision for writing a novel (includes giveaway open through January 26!)

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.

Turning points for writers, as I imagine for any kind of artist, can come at any moment, and in any period in a writer’s development. At least that’s how it’s been for me so far in the last twelve years of my life as a writer, and I can’t (maybe don’t want to?) imagine a future in which I don’t continue to stumble upon turning points.

I started my career as a writer of short stories. My first story was published in 1999, in a small but loud little zine called Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (published by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, who later went on to form their own publishing house, Small Beer Press). And from then on, I continued to publish several short stories each year until I began work on my first novel, One for Sorrow, in 2003.

It was difficult learning how to write a continuous narrative that spanned the vast fields of a novel after learning my craft in the enclosed rooms of the short story, where order and subtlety and doing more with less—where being perfect in as few words as possible—is the rule of thumb. The novel asks for something else: for the writer to let go, to release control, to immerse yourself in the waters of another world, separate from this one, even if it’s a reflection of this one, to explore, and then to continue exploring, even after you think you’ve covered every inch of story possible, and then some.

That was probably the first turning point in my life as a writer, moving from being a writer of short stories to a writer of novels, but it’s not the turning point I want to talk about specifically, except in relationship to the turning point I had directly after writing my first novel.

When I finished my first novel, I got an agent with it, but the book didn’t sell right away. Like most novels, it was rejected by a number of publishers before it found the right editor who loved it and wanted to feed it and take care of it and bring it out into the world. But before One for Sorrow found the editor who wanted to do all of that, I needed to move on to my next book.

I was at a loss for a while, though, because I wasn’t sure what to move on to, and I wasn’t sure if I had what it takes to write a novel. I had spent a couple of years with a first-person narrator who sees ghosts, and after spending that much time writing in one perspective only, the idea of doing so again felt a little claustrophobic to me. I missed the way I could write a short story in a matter of days or weeks, and then move on to write another one, and it would be a completely new experience, even if the themes or styles were related to the one before, and in this way, it was a little bit like falling in love and discovering a new person in a whirlwind sort of romance, rather than settling in and getting married, the way it is when you write a novel.

At the time, I was living in Japan, where I taught English to elementary and middle-school students in a rural town called Edosaki. I’m the sort of writer who is often inspired by the places I live, and so, while I deliberated what kind of novel I should write next, I began writing short stories set in the Japan I was getting to know. The first story was about a fifteen-year-old boy whose family moves to Japan for his father’s job, and while there, he meets the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide years prior, and who appears as a red fox, like the Japanese spirit of the kitsune, the fox woman, a trickster type. The second story I wrote was about a group of Japanese men and women in their late 20s and 30s who had arrived at dead ends in their lives, and begin to form a suicide club out of their shared disappointments with the world. As I wrote that story, I realized that one of the characters had already had some experience with suicide in her life, and that she had in fact been the best friend of the fox girl in the story I’d just written, back when they were in high school.

I remember that I hadn’t planned that connection, but it had worked its way into the story regardless, and I was thrilled by the feeling of discovery and mysterious connections, the way I can still be thrilled when I happen to make a friend or acquaintance who it turns out knows someone else in my life, but with a completely different set of associations than the ones I share with them. It was after I stumbled upon that surprising interconnection that I had the idea: why not have my cake and eat it too? Why must a novel be about one character (or a few characters), moving from point A to point B, like a train on a track that takes you inevitably to the destination it promised? Why can’t a novel be more like life, mysterious, shifting, though woven together through the strands of connections we all have to one another, especially the invisible threads of connection we don’t always perceive at first?

That was the crux, the structure, and the theme of the book, I realized. The Love We Share Without Knowing.

I could write short stories and a novel at the same time.

The rest of the writing process for that book became a matter of allowing myself to immerse in the life of a character with a situation I wanted to explore, while at the same time unfolding the connection they had to the greater story of the book, and I could remain surprised by the connections I made, and move forward with a sense of discovery rather than a sense of planning. For me, writing is an act of unveiling what I can’t see, pulling the drop cloth off the piano, drawing the curtains back to see through the window. Whenever I try to plan, like a builder, I grow bored, and the work inevitably fails because I’ve not given myself the one thing I need in order to write: curiosity. I can’t know everything about what I’m writing, because when I do, it falls dead in my hands immediately. I can construct zombie stories in this way, but they are always lifeless, no matter that they walk and make noises. They are also maybe the inverse of the typical zombie: they are all brains and no heart. They think, but do not feel. And for me, it’s feeling that moves me, no matter how fancy an idea might be.

I can’t say that every reader, or even many readers, feels the same way as I do about a novel written in the warp and weft of interconnected stories as opposed to carefully tracked chapters. I think from what we can tell by what sells well and what doesn’t that the traditional novel form is the one with the bigger audience. But writing The Love We Share Without Knowing in this particularly interstitial manner—somewhere between the form of the novel and the form of short stories—freed me up as a writer in ways that were inexorable and glorious to rediscover the blue skies of storytelling, to fly instead of walking the pedestrian sidewalks day after day.

—Christopher Barzak

Christopher Barzak grew up in rural Ohio, went to university in a decaying post-industrial city in Ohio, and has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English in elementary and middle schools. His stories have appeared in many venues, including Nerve.com, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Asimov’s, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published by Bantam Books in Fall of 2007, and won the Crawford Award that same year. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing, is a novel-in-stories set in a magical realist modern Japan, and was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. He is the co-editor of Interfictions 2, and has done Japanese-English translation on Kant: For Eternal Peace, a peace theory book published in Japan for Japanese teens. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches creative writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

Visit Christopher at christopherbarzak.wordpress.com.

Follow @Cbarzak on Twitter.

EDITED JAN. 25: IT’S NOW TIME TO ANNOUNCE THE WINNERS OF ONE FOR SORROW AND THE LOVE WE SHARE WITHOUT KNOWING:

All commenters on this post were entered to win either a signed copy of One for Sorrow or a signed copy of The Love We Share Without Knowing! And two winners have been randomly chosen…

Congrats, Lenmeo—you won a signed copy of One for Sorrow!

Congrats, JJ—you won a signed copy of The Love We Share Without Knowing!

I will be emailing you both soon for your mailing addresses. And thank you again, Chris, for donating the books for this giveaway!

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

• Intro to the Turning Points blog series
• Guest Post on overcoming bitterness by Gayle Forman
• Guest Post on the Writer who never arrives by Sean Ferrell (includes giveaway open through January 20!)
• Guest Post on the “nasty” book and the teacher’s advice that led Eileen Cook to become a writer

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.

Each of you will win a signed ANZ edition of Imaginary Girls. Congrats!

The winners are…

Winner #1: Alexa @ Alexa Loves Books

Winner #2: Bee

Congrats, Alexa and Bee! I’ll email you to ask for your mailing addresses.

And if you didn’t win this giveaway, keep an eye out here for more. Thank you so much to everyone who entered the giveaway—and to everyone who’s reading the Turning Points blog series! I would normally be putting up a post tomorrow, but on January 18 this blog will be on strike and blacked out to protest SOPA/PIPA. For why this is so important and why we should all be concerned, please see here. I’ll be back on Thursday and Friday with two new Turning Points posts… and two new giveaways.

I can remember the exact moment I first decided I wanted to be a writer. When I was about nine I picked up a Stephen King book. I was at the library and added Salem’s Lot to my usual stack of Choose Your Own Adventure books, Nancy Drew, and the latest from Judy Blume. At the checkout the librarian took one look at the book and made a face.

“You don’t want to read this,” she said. “This is a nasty book. Nasty.”

Instantly at that moment my interest in the book went from mild to passionate. Nasty? How delightful. I no longer wanted to read the book; I needed to read it. My mom took the book from me and read the flap. She told me I could read it if I wanted to, but warned me that it would be scary.

I waved off her concern. Pffft. It was just a book. It was all made-up. I was a very mature nine. I understood the concept of make-believe versus reality. I rushed home and dived right into the story.

You can likely guess how this turned out. I slept with the light on for at least two months. I’d lie in bed quivering with dread as I heard vampires slowly lurching down the hallway towards me. I cursed Stephen King.

The strange thing was that I still knew it was made-up. Even though I knew it wasn’t real, what I felt was real. The author had created an imaginary world so vivid that it resulted in real feelings. I wanted to do that. I wanted to create stories that would make people feel. What he had done seemed magical to me, to imagine things and then bring them to life. I started writing my own stories.

I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way I decided that wanting to be a writer was no different than wanting to be a princess, or a superhero. Nice to imagine, but impossible. I focused on getting a “real job.” I still wrote (to be honest, I found I couldn’t stop), but I never took it any further. I went to university, got married, and worked as a counselor. I read all the time and still had fantasies about being a writer, but that’s all they were, fantasies.

Years later my husband encouraged me to take a writing class. The instructor pulled me aside after class one day and told me that my writing was good. She thought I should start sending my work out. Take a shot at publication. I insisted that I couldn’t do that. What if I was rejected? What if people read my writing and decided it wasn’t any good? They would crush my dream. The teacher stared at me for a moment and then said something that became the turning point in my writing and life.

“Eileen, I hate to tell you this, but you’re already not published. The worst thing that is going to happen is that you still won’t be published.”

That was my lightbulb moment. I realized that I might not ever reach my dream of being a published writer. There’s no doubt that publishing is a long shot. However, what I suddenly understood was that if I didn’t at least try, there was no way that my dream could come true.

At that moment I accepted that I couldn’t control if I reached my goal, but I was in control of at least giving myself a shot. I started to take my writing more seriously. I wrote on a regular basis. Instead of reading simply for pleasure, I tried to figure out how the author had written the book. What point of view did they choose? How did they keep my interest? I wrote a book and sent it out. When no one was interested in it, I sat myself down and wrote another. Then I rewrote it again. I sought out feedback and learned to listen instead of argue when someone gave it to me. Eventually my work paid off. I signed with an agent and a few months after that she sold my first book.

I always wondered how it would feel to hold my book in my hands. The day it was released I went to the bookstore and stared at the shelf. There it was, a real live book with my name on it.

Unraveling Isobel is my eighth book. I thought that if I ever reached this stage it would be easy, but it isn’t. I still have doubts. There are days I’m not sure I can pull off a particular scene, or in some cases, the whole book. Then I remind myself that if I don’t try, then I’ll never know. I can’t control the outcome, but I can control my effort, and that makes all the difference in the world.

—Eileen Cook

Eileen Cook is a multi-published author with her novels appearing in six different languages. She spent most of her teen years wishing she were someone else or somewhere else, which is great training for a writer. Her latest release, Unraveling Isobel, came out this month.

You can read more about Eileen, her books, and the things that strike her as funny at eileencook.com. Eileen lives in Vancouver with her husband and two dogs and no longer wishes to be anyone or anywhere else.

Follow @Eileenwriter on Twitter.

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

• Intro to the Turning Points blog series
• Guest Post on overcoming bitterness by Gayle Forman
• Guest Post on the Writer who never arrives by Sean Ferrell (includes giveaway open through January 20!)

And look for open giveaways on the giveaways page so you can win some books! 

Series images by Robert Roxby.

But if you’re still here, I’ll tell you a strange thing: Last night I had a delicious dinner (gnocchi!) with an editor friend, and I was talking about my publishing junk and I realized how light I felt about it all. Like… anything I used to worry about and strain myself over really didn’t matter so much anymore because I couldn’t control it, so there was no point in worrying. Even like some of the things I’d taken so seriously before were not really so important. Like things were fine. Like I was perfectly content and okay.

Yeah… strange moment, right?

Now why am I feeling this way? No idea. Maybe it’s that I love the novel I’m revising and the writing went exceptionally well yesterday. Maybe it’s that I finished a new draft of a proposal for a new novel and I’m proud of myself for turning that in. Maybe it’s that I have ideas for future novels and I just want to focus on getting to the place where I can write them. Maybe it’s my writer friends, who help more than they know. Maybe part of it is even how I’m spending time focusing on these new features on my blog: thinking about other writers and their books instead of mine. I love doing that. Maybe it’s simply that it’s a new year and feels like a fresh start.

So I woke up this morning feeling lighter than I have in a long time. As I said on Twitter, I feel like this:

Yes, that’s the morning Angela Chase woke up and discovered she was inexplicably “over” Jordan Catalano.

Now, in this analogy does that make the publishing industry my Jordan Catalano? That makes a terrible kind of sense.

I don’t know how long my good feeling will last. But it’s nice while I have it.

Come back next week for more authors revealing their Turning Points! (And I’m still giving away Imaginary Girls… you can enter here.)

The Writer never arrives.

You haven’t written anything for a long time. So long you forget how to end a… You don’t have enough time. There are socks and underwear to be washed. There are dishes, oh the dishes you have. There is a spouse or someone demanding to be one or fighting to not be. There are children or the whispers and worries asking for them. There is there is there is. Mostly there’s the problem that The Writer hasn’t shown up. You’ve checked your email, peeked out the door, nosed about the windows, listened for the phone. No sign of him on Twitter. Facebook. All your days are made of things that cast shadows, things that stand between you and a figment that isn’t even an idea yet: the book, the story, the poem, the, the, the. You need The Writer to show up because he’ll have the time, the perfect place, the writing pen, the right pen, the right, the rite. You need The Writer to show up, wine whiskey coffee in hand, unlit cigarette—he quit smoking more than a decade ago but symbols are crutches as easily as crutches are symbols—behind an ear. You need his attitude, his slouch, his far-away-stare, you need his ease in his body, his roaming mind, you need need need most of all that one thing that you’ll never have even if you pasted all his other attributes to you like a homemade Halloween costume. You need The Writer to show up because he knows what to say.

Here’s a terrible secret: The Writer never shows up.

After graduate school I had an MFA and no idea what to write. I moved from Boston to Brooklyn, worked in publishing long enough to witness 9-to-5 work beat my desire to write nearly to death and leave it shaking in an alley between East Village bars. I thought, “When I have time to write ha ha ha I’ll get to work on it.” It. That’s what I called my writing. It. All I lacked was the “sh.” I envisioned a writer showing up who knew not only how to say something, but what to say. I was lost in a mush of conflicting ideas, images, and oddities I didn’t know how to handle. I was supposed to have something to say, right? That’s what writers do. They say things. They get the words out in the right order and they mean things. I couldn’t do that. I could only distract myself until he showed up. Thank God for Xbox, comic books, and cartoons.

Maybe the writer was lurking in a writing group. I joined one. I spent a good deal of time fretting about what to take to the group, what of my “it” they would respond well to. Swallowing criticism tasted like a mouthful of batteries. I already knew the stories I submitted were terrible. Did I need a group to remind me? The others in the group were writers. Two of them were published. What was I? I scrambled—between work and distractions and the serious business of trying to finish Halo—to gather words into piles big enough to trick the group into thinking I was actually like them, that I could write, that I had something to say. Mainly I did this by taking old pieces, things long critiqued into lexicons I no longer understood, work that no longer felt like mine. The pressure to please my readers had hobbled me.

One week I had nothing. The night before the group was to meet I went through a stack of work and had nothing that felt worth taking. I was paying to attend this group and so I wasn’t going to simply skip it, or go empty-handed. Even though I knew that if The Writer showed up he’d need a better place to write, and better material to work with, and a clear idea of what he was trying to say, I stayed up late and cobbled together something new. It felt a little like a last hurrah, flaming out in tremendous fashion, and maybe it was the exhaustion or the pressure to take a certain number of pages, but I didn’t censor myself as I usually did, I didn’t worry about the dearth of ideas, didn’t worry about the fact that what was tumbling out was, in a word, weird. I’d read weird before, and I knew many very talented writers worked in weird the way bakers do flour, but they were writers, they had a point. I was simply me, and my weird was leaving me with question marks all around. When I finally stopped I had fifteen pages of who-knew-what, but there was a certain storyishness to the words, not as much it-acity, and I resolved to not tinker or even read it before attending the group. I would simply hold my nose and swallow.

The Writer never arrived. I did. I stopped waiting for the moment when I would know what to say. I realized later that I’m not supposed to know what to say. I’m writing to find out what needs to be written. And not only in my fiction. This post, my tweets, marginalia, revision notes, who knows what any of them are supposed to do or be, but they get done, and not by some writer. It’s just me. Me, with the holes in my socks and the laundry in the washer and a pile of Legos between my feet. Do I still long for a Writer to show up and start chiseling some of the barnacles off for me to make the sailing a little smoother? Of course. But do I expect it?

That thing I cobbled together the night before my writing group was a turning point, an end to waiting for The Writer to show up, a beginning to taking care of the work myself. And a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral pyre. The piece got very positive and constructive feedback. The only negative response was a reader saying he didn’t see how I could have the narrator enter a lion’s cage so early in what felt like a longer work. “Don’t know how you’re going to get him out of there.” I didn’t know either, and that was okay. I didn’t know how he’d get out of the cage any more than I knew what it “meant” or what I was trying to say. All I knew was that this was the thing I needed to work on. This was “it.”

After some tussling and no-holds-barred editing, that piece became my first novel, Numb.

The Writer still hasn’t shown up. At this point, he doesn’t need to.

—Sean Ferrell

Sean Ferrell’s fiction has appeared in journals such as Electric Literature’s “The Outlet” and The Adirondack Review. His short story “Building an Elephant” won The Fulton Prize. His debut novel, Numb, was published by Harper Perennial in 2010. His second novel, The Man in the Empty Suit, will be published in 2012 by Soho Press.

He lives and works, in no particular order, in New York City.

Visit Sean at seanferrell.com.

Follow @byseanferrell on Twitter.

EDITED JAN. 23… IT’S NOW TIME TO ANNOUNCE THE WINNER OF A SIGNED COPY OF NUMB!

All commenters on this post were entered to win a signed copy of Sean Ferrell’s debut novel Numb. And a winner has been randomly chosen…

Congrats, ElyssaJK! I will be emailing you soon for your mailing address. And thank you again, Sean, for donating the book for this giveaway!

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

• Intro
• Guest Post by Gayle Forman

And look for more open giveaways on the giveaways page so you can win some books! 

Series images by Robert Roxby.

I am not a very enlightened person.

Oh, I try to be. I try to be kind and open and generous, but I’m a Gemini, so I have a flip side that is also begrudging and jealous and resentful. Really. I can be such a pissy little thing if I don’t watch out.

So the turning point in my career is actually kind of strange.

It was about six years ago. At that point, I had published many, many magazine articles and one book, my nonfiction travelogue called You Can’t Get There from Here, which was fun while it lasted but not something I saw doing again (I had to travel around the world for a year to report it; there is a reason a trip like that is called journey of a lifetime). I was on the verge of publishing a YA novel, Sisters in Sanity. After writing Sisters, I’d experienced something I’d never felt in all my years of being a journalist: contentment, a sense of this being what I wanted to do.

Of course, in my world, contentment is coupled with fear (I already told you I am not very enlightened). Because now that I’d figured out what I wanted to do—write YA novels—and I sensed I was pretty good at it—I’d been writing about and for teens for much of my career anyway—it all mattered. I mean, how many chances did you get to write books that bombed—and You Can’t Get There bombed, and the early signs for Sisters weren’t looking so promising—before the nice people in the publishing houses took away your chances to publish books?

Which is why what happens next—this turning point—is all so weird. A short while later, it became clear that the publisher of Sisters in Sanity was not doing anything to promote it, and that my homemade efforts—a song we recorded based on the book; a book trailer made by a Hollywood friend of mine, this being in 2007, in the dawn of book trailers—were not even being used, and that the book would indeed go the way of 99 percent of novels, i.e., slide quietly into the remainder bins. Shortly after publication, a friend of ours was over for dinner, someone in the alternative publishing universe. We were in my kitchen when he asked how the book was doing. I told him the sad truth. He asked, “Aren’t you bitter?”

The thing is, I am no stranger to bitter. I can be impatient and petty and easily embittered. Last week, at my daughter’s dance recital, I became bitter when a grown man cut in front of me in the popcorn line, thus getting the last of the batch of popcorn. Yes, it was rude of him to do so, but seriously, I get bitter over this? There is something wrong with me.

But when my friend asked me if I was bitter over the fact that the publisher had done squat to support my book and the book was going to bomb, I made a decision. I decided I was not going to be bitter. I was going to choose to not be bitter. Even if I had to work really hard at it. Because for one, as I explained to my friend, I was a published author, with two books to my name, and I was still, if barely, making my living as a writer, which is a pretty enviable position. But even more important, even then, I understood that if I gave in to the bitterness, it would do what bitterness does, it would corrode me from the inside out, eat away at the soft, open parts of me where I’m pretty sure the stories come from. So I told my friend this:

“I’m not going to be bitter. I’m just going to keep writing books and hope that one day maybe I’ll write a book that hits, and people will go back and read Sisters in Sanity.”

At the time, it was a most pie-in-the-sky dream. Like how when I was twelve, I used to fantasize about becoming friends with Bono. There was simply no basis in reality for it.

My friend looked at me like I was being very hippie-dippy. And then he said a very nice thing. “Well, I’ll be bitter on your behalf then.”

Somehow, I managed to keep true to my word. And Sisters did bomb. And then the editor I’d worked with on it left the publishing house—and editing—and my agent, who’d sold my first two books, shut down her shop. So I had no editor, no publisher, and no agent, and it wasn’t like anyone was clamoring to take me on. Ten years as a professional writer and I was back to square one. That seemed like a most justifiable reason to be bitter. But for the second time, I made an intentional decision not to go there. Instead, in a very Pollyanna move, I would view the crash-and-burn of my career so far as an opportunity!

So, with no agent and no publisher and no idea if it was even a viable novel, I started a book that was living deep inside me. About a girl and her family, and the love of her life, and music, and a choice. This turned out to be If I Stay. The book that launched me, I guess you could say.

Now’s the part in the story where I tell you that I have turned all Zen and learned to never be bitter again. But that’s not how it works. And I already told you about the popcorn guy, which was a couple weeks ago. And there is always something to feel pissy about. Every writer at every level experiences fear, and that fear seeds bitterness. And, yes, I’m still scared someone will take away this privilege I have of writing books for my job. But with writing and publishing, I have to re-teach myself the turning-away-from-bitterness thing all the time.

I do this for two reasons. There is the obvious karmic, good-energy stuff of not giving in to the dark side. It feels so much better to go to the gratitude place. And just as there is always something to feel bitter about, there is always something to feel grateful for. But there is also a practical side for writers, for all creative people, for all people, really. It can be oddly satisfying to wallow in bitterness. For about two seconds. And then you get pulled under and have to expend all this energy just swimming, keeping your head above water. Energy that would otherwise be spent creating.

Sisters in Sanity never did find its audience. Well, not in the U.S., anyhow. In France, they love that book. Some of my French readers tell me it’s their favorite of all three of my novels. Sometimes they tell me this while I am in France. And sometimes when that happens, I am transported back into my Brooklyn kitchen, back to that conversation with my friend all those years ago, back to that single fateful decision that has brought me here.

—Gayle Forman

Gayle Forman is an award-winning author and journalist whose articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, and Elle in the US. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Visit Gayle at gayleforman.com or ifistay.com.

Follow @gayleforman on Twitter.

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

• Intro

And look for open giveaways on the giveaways page so you can win some books! 

Series images by Robert Roxby.

Thank you so much for reading and commenting on the writer-to-writer interview I did with Amy Garvey about her debut YA novel, Cold Kiss! Amy has generously offered a signed copy of her book—plus “cold kiss” temporary tattoos—to one commenter on the post.

The winner has been randomly chosen and it is:

Raven!

Congrats, Raven. I will email you for your mailing address soon.

And even if you didn’t win, I hope you’ll pick up Cold Kiss. It’s such a beautiful book!

The theme of the new blog series is a meaty* one: Turning Points

I asked various authors this question: What was your turning point as a writer? And, I have to say, from the posts that have been sent in to me so far, I am humbled, thrilled, surprised, and most of all inspired by the great response that came from the asking of this question.

There are some truly incredible posts coming up—all about writing struggles, writing breakthroughs, the low points, the high points, the shocking points that changed everything… and much more. I can’t wait for you to read them.

Now, where did the theme of “turning points” first surface in my head? Sort of accidentally, when, in March 2011 before Imaginary Girls was published, I blogged a story about how I gave up writing adult fiction and began writing YA.

I said things like:

Not so many years ago, I had a turning point in my writing career. An “Aha!” moment. Something made me remember it yesterday and I wanted to share it here—to show how you might think you’re going one way down a certain path you’ve carved for yourself, but in fact there’s another path carved for you. There it is, waiting, glimmering in the near distance. It was your true path all along.

And:

…I remember very clearly looking up, straight into the sun shining through the office window, lighting up my new glossy wooden desk and the bright white proof pages, thinking, I didn’t know a YA novel could be like this! Thinking, What if—and this would be the first moment I’d consciously think this—what if I wrote a YA novel, too?

I’d only meant to tell my blog readers how I ended up writing YA, but that post seemed to resonate with a lot of people—and was featured on the WordPress “fully pressed” page, so more people than my usual audience here saw it and began flooding the piece with comments on their own turning points. Which I thought was pretty amazing.

[Click here to read the full post on my turning point as a writer.] 

So this got me thinking that many of us have these stories. Setting out to write and publish our books isn’t such an easy, well-lit path, is it? Not everyone knows exactly what they’re doing when they begin, and things very rarely—if ever—go as planned. In my case, things fall apart and stitch themselves back together in better, more brilliant ways than I’d originally intended. And once one turning point has been maneuvered, another comes around when it’s least expected. (I may be in the midst of one now, but I’ll need some distance to know for sure.)

The Turning Points blog series will be an ongoing feature on this blog, with about three posts a week, for as long as I have authors’ stories to share. There will be quite a few giveaways included with these posts, so keep an eye out for ways to win books, generously donated by their authors. [Keep checking back on the giveaways page to see all open giveaways on this site.]

The series is starting this week—on Wednesday, January 11 with a wonderful, inspiring guest blog by one of my favorite YA authors. Those of you who’ve been longtime readers of this blog may remember me posting about how much I love this author’s books. Who could it be? And what turning point might this author be revealing to us?

I think you’ll really want to come back on Wednesday to find out.

* I felt so weird typing that word, as a vegetarian. 

If you’d like to keep up with the Turning Points blog series, please add distraction no. 99’s feed to your RSS reader, or scroll down to the bottom of this site, on the left, and you will see a button to subscribe to this blog by email, so you’ll be notified whenever a new post goes up.

BUT WAIT.

I want to say this:

Hey, you. Yes, YOU. If you are an author—published or on your way to being published; YA or adult or children’s or nonfiction or comics or screenplays or poems; or even a person who worked toward becoming a writer and has since gone on to become something else—and this theme of Turning Points deeply resonates with you, I’d love to include your guest blog in this series. Just email me.

A note about the artwork: All the Turning Points blog series illustrations, like the one at the top of this post, will be by Robert Roxby. You can contact him directly for more information about his design work and illustrations (and check out both the “What Scares You?” and the “What Inspires You” blog series to see more of his amazing illustrations!). 

The giveaway is now closed. Thank you for entering!

See you back here Wednesday for the start of the series—with guest blogs, and more giveaways, and stories of perseverance, reinvention, and inspiration.

Remember the “What Inspires You?” blog series that ran here in November? It’s really wonderful to think that it’s continuing to live on, outside this space. I was excited to be contacted by a writer and blogger named Mieke Zamora-Mackay, who said that reading the inspiration guest blogs helped her through NaNoWriMo and even inspired her to write her own piece! I wanted to share her blog about what inspires her to write. Thank you so much, Mieke!

If you, too, were inspired by the November series and have put up your own blog, I’d love to see it and share the link here. Just email me!

And speaking of inspiring blog series? I have a new one starting this week, on the topic of Turning Points…

Come back tomorrow to find out more of what I mean by that.

Setting word-count goals; Googling myself; innocently overhearing the word “Goodreads”; seeing ratings of my book in any kind of capacity, bad or good; talking about my ideas before writing them down; showing my first drafts to people who are not my husband, agent, or editor (i.e., people who have a true investment in making my work better); doing public events (I need a day to recover after); scrolling through everyone’s awesome book news on Twitter and Facebook and realizing I don’t have awesome news so am I doing something wrong? am I a disappointment an embarrassment should I stop writing should I crawl under my desk and live there forever (and other stupid depressing ridiculousness); comparing my output to other writers’; comparing my anything to anything at all; writing with the TV on; writing in close proximity to a comfy bed.

But it doesn’t help to only point out the negative and wallow in what’s keeping me from getting good words on the page. What does help is keeping an eye out—and heart open—for what *will* work. And not talking myself out of it.

Here’s what’s worked for me—and what I hope to continue in 2012, the year I have some Big Goals (and bigger dreams I won’t say aloud to anyone, but they exist, yes, shh):

Writing Dates

I used to be a solitary writer—I could never write beside other writers I knew, and I refused to try—and I think this was because I spent most of my hours at some very demanding day jobs, where I was constantly being interrupted by people, and so when I had those few precious hours to write, I needed to be alone and have no one talk to me. The silence fed me and helped ignite my words. But then something changed in the fall of 2009: I stopped working my full-time day job, and the time I had for writing ballooned out into bigger shapes than I ever had before. Suddenly there was too much silence. No one was interrupting me. In fact, no one was talking to me at all—and I began to feel alone and adrift in the world (and more dramatic, as you can see by this description). Now, I’m still keeping busy as a freelancer, but I can rearrange my hours as I see fit, so I usually save all the writing for the morning into midday, and the freelance work for the late afternoons and evenings. And this past year I discovered something that really works for me: going on writing dates with other writers, especially first thing in the morning. I’ve become a bit of a serial writing-dater. I meet different writer friends at different cafés on different days and write next to them. I have a writing group where we meet at a café usually, if we’re good, once a week and talk for forty-five minutes or so and then write. I’ve even traveled off my island to Brooklyn just to write with other writers! Somehow, being with other writers while they pound their keyboards close by keeps me pounding mine. Or being inspired to do so. Or maybe feel embarrassed if I’m not, so there could be a bit of a shame factor in this. Still, it’s the strangest thing: Me, a solitary person who is well known in my family for needing “alone time” voluntarily wanting to do the most intimate thing with someone next to me. And yet it works. So I’ll keep doing it.

Artist Colonies

An artist colony is such a magical idea: a place set aside that houses and feeds and takes care of artists who come for short stays to simply do some work. That’s it. (If you want to know more about colonies, here’s an old blog post I put up with pieces from other writers about colonies they’ve been to.) You must apply to get into a colony—and if you get in, most are free—so it’s not something you can plan for… it’s more something that you dream for. You apply and cross your fingers and hope. I’ve been lucky to be able to be a resident at a few colonies lately: I went to Yaddo in the spring of 2010, to MacDowell in the winter of 2011, and I’ll be headed to Djerassi this spring. I’m very lucky. I keep applying to these places, because I’ve seen how wildly amazing being at a colony is for my writing. I come away with work that stuns me, work I don’t think I could have done in my own distracting real life. There’s a definite, distinctive difference in my writing, so I think the sacrifice to go is worth it. (Sacrifice because it’s hard to be away from home, hard on E, and hard on me missing him, not to mention how it can be difficult to arrange four weeks away from my responsibilities.) I say four weeks because I’ve discovered this is the ideal amount time for me to spend at a colony: not too much, not too little, and very possible to get a massive amount of work done. Now that I know how well these colonies work for me and while I stare my deadlines in the face, I wish I could flit off to a colony when I most need it. (You have no idea how much I wish I could be at MacDowell or Yaddo right now while I face this revision deadline.) But all I can do is keep on applying, and hope to be able to arrange a colony stay every year or two or ten. I’ll keep crossing my fingers.

Downing the Internet

Oh, how obvious is this one. Yet I must put it on the list! Sometimes I get crafty, and bad, and I tell myself that I am a fully functioning adult who is perfectly capable of writing while the internet is on and available in the next window. Some days—days I’m crazily inspired and can’t keep my words from spilling out—this works out fine. But other days, most days, this is not the best of ways to go about writing. So, for the longest time, other writers were telling me about MacFreedom. I should try it, they told me. It will work! Why in the world would I need that ridiculous plugin? I thought to myself. Besides, you could just restart your computer and be back on the internet in no time, ha! I thought, already planning my demise. I made excuses, I rolled my eyes, I did not download the stupid thing. And then came the day when I secretly skulked off and downloaded MacFreedom. Guess what I’m going to say next? IT IS AMAZING. It’s like a firewall between me and the distracting rest of the universe, a physical barrier from me and my worst self. I put it on for 60-minute-long blocks and, often, once the hour is up, I find myself still writing, forgetting I even have the internet to go and goof off on in the other window. So yeah (writer friends, you were right). Other ways I sometimes down the internet to write is to walk far out of my way to a specific café that does not have wifi. I write there in the mornings, thankful that there’s no way to get online. This year I’d like to try to down the internet for whole weekends, but I may need superhero strength to accomplish this feat (also, if I down it for everyone, I could get arrested). We shall see.

Twitter

Wait, what? Is this a typo? Didn’t I just include Twitter on my list of things that are bad for my writing? Well, yeah. Using Twitter to compare myself to other authors and belittle my accomplishments and lack of new book deal / foreign sales / movie deals / teaching gigs / conference panels and book events / accolades and kittens / etc. / etc. / etc. is absolutely ridiculous. Stupid. Immature. Utterly unhelpful. It’s also not helpful to use other writers’ word counts to make me feel worse about mine. But Twitter can actually make my writing go better… because it helps me feel connected to other writers. And when I see that they, too, are struggling, I feel less alone with my struggles. When I see that they are able to produce work when they’re up against the same wall I keep smacking my face against, a Wall of Doubt, a Wall of Fear, when I see them smash through these walls, I feel like I can force my way through mine. Maybe this goes back to how I feel so solitary now that I’m freelancing and writing instead of working full-time, but with Twitter I remember there is a whole world of other writers out there. And we’re all trying to write the best books we can and then, occasionally, we goof off a little together. Is that so wrong?

Walking Around the Block

I get my best ideas when I’m walking through the neighborhood. Washington Square Park has seen more of my lightbulb epiphanies than I can count, and the rhythmic noise of an express train on the subway tracks gets my imagination running to the point that I’ve occasionally considered riding the 2 train back and forth, up and down, with a notebook, to see what comes. It’s funny that doing something physical where I am actually not sitting in front of my laptop begging words to come will bring those words more often than not, but it’s true. So when things are bad, when things are rotten, when my words make me cringe, I’ve learned that the absolute best thing I can do for myself and for my words is to get actual physical distance from them. Not so much time apart but space between us. Like leave the laptop in the locker at my writing space and walk around the block. Just walk and think and not-write. I forget to do this sometimes. I sit and seethe and I forget that the one thing that can help is always out there: the city where I live, with its beautiful buildings and its cracked sidewalks and its gorgeous dark alleys and its layers of history (who has been kissed or killed in that alley—I don’t know!) and its hidden messages to me in the graffiti of strangers, and so I must remember how well this works for my writing. I should walk through my world more often and then return to my page.

Blogging and Not-Blogging

Over the years, I’ve found that keeping this blog has been a great way for me to warm up my typing fingers, as I know I’ve said before, and get my mind in shape for writing for the day. Sometimes I like to write a blog post about writing and while I’m in the midst of that I discover that talking about my writing process in this forum somehow cements a piece of the actual writing itself. I publish a post and then I’m off! On fire on the page. And just as much as blogging sometimes helps me get in gear for actual writing, sometimes it’s also the absolute last thing I should be doing. Because there are some things I can’t say so publicly here. For one, I’m superstitious and don’t want to talk too much about a novel-in-progress before it’s edited and complete. And for two, because I don’t want to put some of the negative things in my head out in the world, since in truth they’re fleeting. If I blog them here, they become more memorable, more permanent. So lately I’ve been “not-blogging”—I’ve been writing blog posts to the world that absolutely no one in the world ever sees. It’s like I have a phantom version of this blog on my laptop and its only reader is me. Sometimes it’s not important to publish these words and let you read them; sometimes it is enough just to have written them down. It’s cleansing. And I love stepping into my novel when I’m squeaky clean and brushed free of worries and angst and self-loathing and petty jealousies. I’m an open door then. And that’s when the most exciting and surprising parts of my novel will come through. So I blog to keep the door open. I blog to find my way in.

I’d love to know what works for your writing. What do you do that makes your writing better? What would you like to do more of? Let me know in the comments. Maybe some of us will want to try a hand at them, too!