Category: first-drafting
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Inspiration for November
Are you a person of questionable sanity who’s doing the NaNoWriMo challenge this month? If you are, you surely know the writing spree starts today, and maybe you’re seeking some inspiration to get you through to November 30 with your heart and head and fingers intact. Or maybe you’re a person who has a writing deadline […]
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After the Writing Weekend
I went away this weekend to write. This was my view while writing one night: And this was an especially invigorating breakfast: Since I’m between deadlines—and thus lacking in panic, which actually helps me write—I kept switching between projects. One was in synopsis. One was in rough first draft. Decisions were made in both, the […]
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First Draft Aftermath
I finished the first draft of my new novel late last week and turned it in. This will be my second book with Dutton, but I’m going to keep myself quiet about what it’s called and what it’s about until I’m deeper into the process. We haven’t even started revising yet, so who knows… This […]
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Every Novel Is Its Own Distinct and Distinctly Flawed Animal
Writing a novel once—or twice, or four times if you count the adult novels I never published, or eight times if you count the work-for-hire novels written under fake names—does not necessarily mean you understand how to write a novel. Writing workshops didn’t prepare me for writing novels. (Mostly we focused on short stories.) Reading […]
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A Finish-Your-Novel-Or-Else Song
Have a deadline? Trying to finish your novel in a week? Trying to revise before your eyes fall out? Need motivation? A kick in the pants? Something that makes you stop sobbing? Sometimes an upbeat song helps. If I share mine, maybe you’ll share yours? Here’s a song I listen to when I feel sure […]
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The Book Isn’t Done Yet and the Delicious Panic Sets In
I have less than two weeks to finish the first draft of this new novel. I’m going to make it this time. I know there will be rounds of revision after this, so I really should let go and turn this in. But… yeah… I need the story to have an end first. While I […]
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The Self-Imposed Page 1 Rewrite
The internet is a minefield. I’m censoring what I want to say about that. You know what else is a minefield? My first draft. Every time I make progress I see another UTTERLY IMPORTANT plot piece I need to go back and change! I get new ideas and I want them in! My muse—yes, I […]
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You Can’t Know (Or: a Telegram Not Sent)
You can’t know how you’ll handle things. You can guess. You can even make an educated guess, based on what you know of yourself from all other experiences that came before, like the fact that you published a book once before, you were read and reviewed and rated before. You survived. I’d been through this […]
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A Pocket of Quiet
I’m soon about to slip into a nice pocket of quiet in the weeks before my book comes out on June 14. In just the past week I made it through the first public reading of Imaginary Girls, my first radio interview for Imaginary Girls, my first panel experience (not what I expected! one of […]
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Before the Novel was THE Novel
Today, there was a click-through to my blog from an old post I wrote here in 2008. That post was about Imaginary Girls (formerly called Mythical Creatures, so in the old post I called the novel “M”), which I had just begun rewriting from scratch. At this point, I had no idea what would come […]
distraction no.99 