Deadlines

I think we can all agree that few things motivate you to actually open up the word doc and WORK on it as well as a deadline. Whether it's real--you have to deliver work to an editor, or even just pages to your critique group--or totally self-imposed, knowing the "must have by" date is a very effective lighter fluid for the all-important fire-under-the-ass. It gives you a clear sense of how to structure time; knowing where the finish line is lets you work backward, and parcel out your to-do list into little time-packets of however much work you need to get done, in whatever way works best for you.

I may be the only person who thinks of it that way, but then I'm totally OCD.

I realize that the "whatever way works best for you" part is open to serious interpretation, of course. My college roommate rarely started a paper more than 24 hours before it was due. She usually wound up working til some time in the very-early hours of the morning, fueled by a near-constant stream of coffee and cigarettes, but she always got it done, and from what I heard, she usually did a kickass job. She needed to be in a serious pressure-cooker situation before she could be bothered to really focus on the problem at hand.

Hide & Seek

There's a theory that I'm sure many people would vociferously disagree with: that all books are, to some extent, about the author.

No, they're not all autobiographical. They may not even contain a single recognizably autobiographical element (though I think we could have a three-cocktails-and-you-feel-deep-and-smart argument about how much voice--by which I mean authorial voice--says about the speaker, and how, simply by writing what one chooses to write, one might in fact be revealing huge swathes of personal information, even if the subject matter happens to be vigilante space-puppies). 

Even then, though, the author is putting him or herself onto the page in important ways--the habits the mother in the story has, say, or the speech patterns of the best friend, or the side-character's vocal disdain for disposable diapers and vaccination. Those characters are all fictional, their tics imagined, but they probably have one or more real-life models, and when those models are drawn from an author's life (and where else could they be drawn from, really? Space-puppy reports to command base?), they of necessity tell us something about the author's background, worldview, or relationships. Sometimes the mother is being modeled after a woman observed in the park, and sometimes she's Mommy Dearest, but she probably got that particular way of pinching her nose to bottle a sneeze from some (more or less) known entity. 

Pretty sure the resemblance to dear old Mom isn't always accidental

So what's an author's responsibility to the people s/he knows? 

Your Best Procrastination Techniques: GO! When You're Ready, That Is...

It didn't even hit 10 AM this morning before this Monday felt like a particularly aggressive, spiteful, headache-inducing, cocktails-required Monday.

What option does a girl have when faced with such a day other than procrastination?

I don't know about you folks, but I'm motivated to do my best procrastinating in two specific circumstances:

CIRCUMSTANCE 1: Nothing is really due, so why worry about getting started?

CIRCUMSTANCE 2: Everything is due yesterday. But I'm telling you about it today. You'll make time, right?

What Kind of Editor are You?

Partially because I'm hoping to some day soon be working with a professional, I-work-at-a-publishing-house, this-is-my-day-job editor--and even more because I've been forced to deal with I-know-better, how-about-I-just-rewrite-your-work, emphatically non-professional editors at my current day job--the idea has been rolling around my brain lately: what kind of editor am I? What kind do I need?

As far as my personal editing style, I think I'm best at the small picture. A sentence that's not working right I can spot--and fix--in a blink. Paragraph and even chapter level problems are easy-peasy (is it too long? too short? not following? I know the answer).

What's harder, and what I've been trying to train myself to do better, is seeing the forest for the trees.

In Touch/Out of Touch

Well, it's official.

I can't be trusted anymore.

That's because today I have officially crossed the threshold of being-30, a.k.a. out of the realm where I can reasonably claim to be "too young" to understand things (let's be honest; there's something about that 3 at the front of the decade that makes one seem irrevocably adult, at least as far as expectations go).

I was hoping that the trade-off would be that I woke up magically comprehending escrow, but that part still hasn't kicked in. Maybe that's a turning-40 thing.

Honestly, I'm not particularly freaked out about the number--I'm hoping they'll learn to do things with Botox within 10 years that will keep me from ever REALLY aging meaningfully--but there is a concern tied to my biological clock that goes beyond vanity, or even the possible (though not plausible) compulsive desire to eventually breed:

The older I get, the more out of touch I am.

How I imagine teens now see me.

Are You Living in a Comedy or a Tragedy?

There are two kinds of people, people who come up with arbitrary splits that are supposed to tell you something that's not totally inane, and people who think these "two kinds of people" lines are trite, simplistic, and annoying.

BUT.

There are also two kinds of people, I heard recently, and for once I tended to agree: people who think they're living in a tragedy, and people who think they're living in a comedy.

I'm definitely the latter. In the moment, of course, I'm as liable to get frustrated, or melodramatic, or just plain sad about the awful things--death and casual cruelty and the bus being really, REALLY late--but when you look at it from a bird's-eye view, doesn't the whole thing just seem like a loopy Tom Stoppard play?

The way I see it, there's nothing--truly nothing, and yes, I'm including very hot-button issues under this umbrella, like for instance the big-r-as-in-"R__ is never funny"--that you can't make funny. It takes some time, both to gain perspective and because raw flesh isn't tough enough to stand up to the razor-slice of a cutting joke. But if you ask me, the general absurdity of human existence (because cosmically speaking, just about everything we DO is absurd) means that even our pain can be mined for humor.

The "What's Your Writing Process" Blog Tour!

I was chatting with my writing partner and my agent last week (confession: I set up this sentence just so I could say "my agent," which still feels magical and almost illicit, like saying "my boyfriend" after months of does-he-like-me, or "my pony" if you're the kid whose dream actually came true), and she brought up the idea of blog tours as an additional way to promote a book.

I promptly admitted I had basically no understanding of blog tours. I've seen them, of course, but I have no idea how one sets such a thing up. Do you just call up the blog and offer to stop in and read from your...no, that's wrong. No one has given their phone number to a stranger on the internet since the early days of AOL chat rooms (and then only because you were the person who was ACTUALLY 11 and were really, really stupid, even for 11).

Which of course meant that less than 24 hours later, my awesome writer friend Julie Artz--author of amazing MG adventures and a great lady to grab a cocktail with--asked me if I'd be interested in doing one. Thanks, karma! I must be helping all the old ladies these days!

Anyway, Julie's tour is about writing process, something I mostly don't have. Without further ado...

Fantasies

So part and parcel with taking a first major step towards being a "real" author (let's not waste time arguing this one and all just accept that I'm still mostly faking this) is spending more time than usual watching the fantasy film reels.

You know you have them too. The Walter Mitty moments that you occasionally let yourself play out, where you charm Jon Stewart with your amazing wit (because clearly he wants to talk about your pointless humor book on The Daily Show) and he loves you so much he makes you a regular correspondent, or you sell enough books that you get to quit your day job AND take a real vacation, or you even just see someone reading your book on public transportation and feel overwhelming satisfaction at knowing that person paid to read the words you wrote.

I mean, they don't all have to be EPIC fantasy, right?

I wonder though, how much "it's possible that if everything goes well I might..." is positive, and how much is negative.