Put the Damn Thing Away Already!

I have to say that to myself sometimes. PUT THE DAMN THING AWAY ALREADY!

I used to hate the advice about shelving your WIP and getting back to it weeks or months later because I thought, I'M READY NOW! I wrote it. I edited it. I packaged it up with a really great query and even have a pretty darn good synopsis to go with it. Why shelve it when I'm pumped enough to query NOW?

I hate to admit when I'm wrong and all the advice is right. So I'm not going to say that. I'm just going to let you know it's there in the back of my mind and I'm fully prepared to allude to it. (Hey, stubborn people can get far in life just like everyone else.)

NaNo had this really great way of forcing me to shelve that WIP I really thought was ready to go as well as a tiny bit of feedback I received on  a partial I sent out last June.

Now, my advice to everyone else is since you've written your book and edited it, maybe put a query together and a rockin' synopsis, SHELVE IT!

You have at least twenty other story ideas to write, get to it. That's what I did. I wrote two other books while I was letting my first book marinate.

Now I'm back to the first book and ready to query the second book which marinated while I wrote the third book. See how the cycle goes?

Maybe, if I'm lucky, within the year I could have three books ready to query. Who knows?

IS THERE ANY REASON YOU DON'T THINK YOU NEED TO SHELVE THAT MANUSCRIPT FOR A COUPLE OF MONTHS BEFORE YOU QUERY? HAVE YOU SHELVED ANYTHING AND THEN GOTTEN BACK TO IT?

(P.S. Hello and welcome new followers and Crusaders! I'm about to go around and return the follow and start getting to know all of you a bit better. I'm not a daily blogger. At most I get out and around the blogs twice per week. I usually only blog once per week as well. If you have an Email Subscription box on your blog then know that I'll be following via email. I tend to focus my short window of spare time on my WIP's. If you don't have an Email Subscription box and want to know how to put one up, email me and I'll let you know.)

Rach Writes and Has An Awesome Crusade

I'm a Crusader.

I might not be an excellent Crusader (there were things I missed and times I spent away) but I'm a Crusader all the same.

Are you a Crusader?

What's that you say? Oh, okay, let me back up a bit and include some linkage.

A Crusader is a writerly blogger who has stumbled upon Rachael Harrie at Rach Writes and has noticed that she leads the most awesome Writer's Platform Building Crusade in the world. I'm not exaggerating.

Crusaders sign up and meet other Crusaders who vow to support each other in the blogging and writing community by way of comments.

Personally, I've met some of the nicest people in the blogging community this way.

I thought maybe I was going to skip the second round of crusading because I recently found out my mom is suffering from Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer and life has become somewhat overwhelming. However, the first round of Crusaders have been so supportive during this fragile time of my life that how could I pass up the opportunity to be part of this amazing community again?

I didn't REALLY feel like a blogger until the first round of Crusading. I would be completely lost and feeling left out if I didn't join again.

I'm a Crusader. That's who I WANT to be. Where do you fit in? Where do you belong? YOU BELONG WITH THE CRUSADERS! NOW GET YOUR BUTT OVER THERE AND SIGN UP.

Happy Writing, Writers! Can't wait to make your aquaintance soon.

I Sat Down to Write the Other Day...

Thank you Rachael Harrie for the Crusade.

I sat down to write the other day when my doorbell rang. Something inside me was telling me not to answer it but just last week the neighbor’s kid drank a toxic amount of cough syrup and so what if it was an emergency? I thought to myself.


“Hey Jim, what’s up?” I asked but really didn’t care because if I took in his story with more than a blank stare I was going to lose that little bit of story I created right before I sat down to write.

“The flu must be going around because J.T. and Lila are both throwing up at my house. Hey, do you have a flat head screwdriver I can borrow?” He just stood there un-phased by what he just said.

Ugh! Seriously? Why? Why would anyone in their right mind come over to tell me their kids were barfing? I didn’t want to, but I let him follow me to the garage where he got the screwdriver he was supposedly looking for. I still think he was of the philosophy that when the flu was out he must spread it around so the whole neighborhood could be done and over it at the same time. But what if I could fend it off for a couple of days and then hear about the flu in passing from someone else who heard that Jim’s kids were home sick? At least then I would have time to process the info and prepare myself for disease to hit my household of five. I know, I know, it’s the flu and I have three kids and live in a neighborhood with thirty kids between the ages of two and ten; I’m bound to get the flu regardless. Still, this just threw my whole day off.

Now psychosomatically affected by the flu, I sat back down to my computer with a can of 7up and a bowl of crackers. Now where was I with my story? I thought, reading back through my WIP.

My writing goal for the day was 1700 words, a lofty goal, but November first wasn’t far away and I needed to practice for NaNoWriMo. The writing was going quite well. I was actually more excited about this practice writing project than the idea I had for NaNo but then it was already 11:15am and I only had five minutes left before I had to pick up my kindergartner from school. I hated Wednesdays. My days were already fragmented but throwing a weekly minimum day into the public school system just really made me angry. To top it off, minimum day for half-day kindergarten just didn’t make sense.

Luckily, I was able to get my son to sit right down and do his worksheets without too much of a fuss. And then off he went to play and I sat back down to write. Okay, my story was really getting good at this point; I was in the zone.

“Mom, there are ants on the counter,” Nolan, said when he went to get a cup for water.

“Okay, okay. I’ll get it, just a minute.” And off he went to play again. The ants were there, in the back of my mind, but with creativity flowing out of me at 90 words per minute I didn’t want to stop. Now, if he had said flies or cockroaches were all over the counter, I would’ve jumped, but we just had a heat wave over the weekend so a few ants were bound to come inside. Still, the ants were bothering me. My writing slowly ground to a halt, I looked over my shoulder and wished I hadn’t put it off for even a minute; there weren’t a few ants, it was a remake of Indiana Jones. They were everywhere.

I did what I could with the ants until I realized for the second time this day, that it was minimum day at school and I had my third grader to pick up, so I dashed out the door. My third grader hated to read. Can you imagine that? What kid doesn’t like to read? This was why I hated this time of day. I spent forty-five minutes arguing with my daughter to complete her twenty minutes of reading while I wiped and sprayed the newly formed grouping of ants in the kitchen. It was really an hour of arguing with my daughter but I turned on the wet vacuum and mopped the floor while she continued to argue and complain while I enjoyed the white noise of the vacuum. That last fifteen minutes of white noise must have calmed her down because she sat down to read quietly, giving me a few minutes to pound out some more words on the computer.

“Mom, can Nolan and I go over to Aunt Regina’s house while you pick up Fischer from preschool?” My daughter asked after she completed her reading.

Fischer! Would I have forgotten my three year old if Madeline hadn’t said anything? Nah. It was minimum day. I was still on track for picking him up regardless of how I remembered to do so.

I didn’t manage to get back to my computer again this day until eight o’clock at night, but I was able to write until midnight so in the end I was able to accomplish that 1700 words.

This is a story largely based on true events, though pieced together from different days and years. Every day is crazy with three kids in the mix but I’m driven, so I’m not worried about my productivity yet.

I'm on a Crusade, Please Join Me

Just since yesterday, thanks to the Writing Experiment, I have gained new followers and have started following a lot of great new blogs.  (I'm excited to check my Dashboard every day now)

Over at Rach Writes she has a Writer's Platform Building Crusade going on and I have climbed aboard.  Care to join all of us? 

We are part of a new generation of writers and we must embrace it.  Let me take you back in time for a second to 1998, the year I started dabbling in the publishing world.  It wasn't pretty, people!  In 1998 I was twenty years old, living as a resident tourist in an apartment in Hollywood, California and dial-up was my best friend and worst enemy.  There were no online forms for agents, no Query Tracker.  My view into the publishing world was from a large book called The Writer's Market.  They didn't have a fun interactive website like they do now, or I didn't know about it.  I was buying lots of stamps and waiting for months for rejections to my queries. 

That wasn't even the worst of it.  Blogging was non-existent, so I was writing in a vacuum with no one to write with that understood the writing world.  It was no wonder so many classic writers offed themselves or became depressed alcoholics.  It's not safe to be a writer without friends.  That's why I put my fiction aside for a bit and have now come back to it twelve years later.  (Sure, I kept my lofty writing goals in my head and I never gave up on my journals, but I didn't query again for twelve years.)

Us writers need each other and blogging is the best way for us to have a group and still be alone with our thoughts when we need to be.  Thank you bloging world for being here when I'm down and when the words won't spill out across my blank pages.

Thank you Rachael Harrie for the crusade!