We Interrupt This Blog...

Woman leaning on a tree stump in a mossy forest

I started this blog as a way to look back over my writing journey so far and to keep up on how things are going. As a Enneagram Type 1, I wanted to keep it chronological and neat. Go from the beginning and then start following along in my day-to-day.

But guess what? Life isn't neat, as much as it drives me bonkers to admit.

I have had 'Update Blog' on my to-do list for weeks now. A to-do list that never stops growing, as I'm sure most people can relate to. It just kept getting moved down the calendar. But today, I felt excited about writing a post about what's going on in my writing life RIGHT NOW. So that's what I'm going to write about.

Is there something amazing happening right now? Unfortunately not. Not yet. But I am hitting a nice stride in my middle grade novel and it feels right to chat about it a little bit.

I started writing this novel about three years ago for NaNoWriMo (RIP). I'd had the idea for a few months and finally started getting it down on paper. I had been studying the craft of picture book writing obsessively, but novel writing? Not so much.

That first draft took me f-o-r-e-v-e-r to write. Months and months. And it was a complete mess when it was done. I had pantsed my way through it. I fiddled around with revisions for a while, but mostly I neglected it.

It finally hit me that a writer of more than one genre was much more marketable than solely a picture book author, so I needed to get that novel polished.

Last fall I pulled that manuscript back up and tried to figure out what wasn't working. I read Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody on an airplane and came home with a plan. I got a huge whiteboard and created an army of Post-it notes with plot. I dug into my characters. I revised my face off.

Then I sent it off to my beta readers for feedback. Then back to the drawing board. Revisereviserevise.

I thought it was in good shape. I had depth for my main character with a solid arc. I had an exciting plot. There was humor. There were scares. My beta readers liked it. So I decided to query it.

Querying is a whole post in itself. Maybe a whole blog series. It hurts my head to think about. But it is a necessary evil. The first query is the worst. Lucky me, I'd already started querying my picture books, so the terror was less.

Agents and editors are overwhelmed right now and have been for a long while. I know this, and yet the disappointment with the form passes and crickets still stings.

But then I got a champagne rejection! I know it sounds wild to celebrate a rejection, but here we are. The agent said some really lovely things about my manuscript and that made all the difference for me. I knew that the story had some real merit. So, I put on my big girl boots and I applied for the Highlights Whole Novel Workshop.

I was accepted! But Whole Novel deserves its own post. So, be on the look out for that.

A woman in a teal coat stands next to a Highland cow made of rusty chains.

I've been home from Highlights for a couple of months now. I have digested the feedback from my fabulous reader, Rob Costello, and the conversations I had with him and my Brain Trust. I took my story through Story Genius by Lisa Cron.

I struggled.

I wrote the first chapter. Then wrote it two more times. It's still not right, but its okay for now. I moved on. I had to fight every day to sit down and get words on the paper.

It's not that I don't love my story, or my characters. Maybe I am battling that perfectionist in my soul. Maybe the stress of the external world is affecting my creativity. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I have just been trying to be gentle with myself. I tell my writer friends all the time to give themselves grace. I need to allow myself the same.

I started doing some meditation for creativity. I started making more time to read for fun. I stopped the internal yelling match about how many words I had to go to finish this revision.

And last week, I started to write. I got past the beginning of the story and into the fun part. I am now stoked to sit down and get going on my pages. I do have a (loose) deadline of the end of this month for a complete revision. Will I make it? I hope so, but even if I don't, I'll be closer than I was yesterday.

The publishing industry is super slow and for some reason that makes a lot of writers antsy to get stuff out to agents and editors quickly. I definitely feel that pressure. But writing because it's fun is a lot more productive than writing under pressure.