The Green Elephant

I want to talk about the elephant in the room.

The green one.

The one that sits behind the screen and judges.

Both their own self worth and what they have accomplished.

A few months back someone sent me a screen shot a tweet that criticized authors for talking about writing many words in short periods of time and that the writing is probably trash. As a prolific sprinter, and knowing that I tweet about it a lot to encourage other writers, I was hurt. The tweet in question said that it was doing more harm than good by pressuring writers, rather than encouraging them because when I sprint I get a lot down.

As much as two thousand words an hour.

But as much as my presence on Twitter has only been high in the last year or so, I’ve been writing for six years now.

When I come up with a story, sit myself down, and focus… I DO THE WORK.

I don’t have kids or family to care for, I’ve spoken about how I do this a lot in this blog post.

But that didn’t change a random stranger for judging all I’d accomplished.

Without ever actually knowing me.

So, I stopped tweeting my sprints.

I kept doing it but I toned right back how much I was writing, but I did say that I’d managed to write a book in nineteen days, I wasn’t going to let them take that away from me.

On the flip side I producing all this work that was… going nowhere.

And all the while I was watching others self-publish books, picked up by indie presses, get agents, have their books published… and the big names having their books adapted to TV and Movies.

I wont bore you with the self-absorbed rant about how my circumstances weren’t fair, suffice to say there was more than one.

But I still congratulated EVERY single one of those that I saw, every damn time, no matter what it was, because I wasn’t jealous of them, I was jealous that they were somewhere I wanted to be.

And then I came back to the green elephant.

That all the while I was jealous of others successes, all this time, there were people jealous of what I could do, and do often. Its ugly. I hate it.

And I refuse to lie about it.

Then I came across this song.

The whole line that caught me was “I want to be you…nique.”

Everyone says there is no one path to writing, to becoming successful, and they are absolutely right.

And then today @BruceKnapp gave me a #writerslift for my sprints. That he used them to help him focus and that was all I needed.

I have no idea where my journey is taking me, but I can tell you one thing; I’m going to keep sprinting, I’m going to keep being vocal about it, and if I help you great, and if I don’t block me.

But I’m going to keep doing what I think its best for me, I’m going to keep writing and at the end, do you know what I’m going to have? I hope to have 10 FREAKING BOOKS WRITTEN THIS YEAR!

So I don’t know what you want to accomplish but I’m not going to let anyone stop me, don’t let anyone stop you.

October 11, 2019 0

1 Book in 25 Days

I wrote a book in 25 days.

Lets cut straight to the facts as they are;

I don’t have kids
I live in a rural area
I have a short commute
I worked fucking hard at it

I love the book, I think it’s a great stand alone story and for me that’s a rarity.

It sprung into my head after I halted work on the Last Prophecy series because buying houses is expensive and the budget said no to editing. Hell the budget said no to my damn haircuts, but we negotiated over vodka. I gave up desserts for it as part of keto.

Scott, being the wonderful and supportive person he is, rightly pointed out it’s just a delay so those of you who’ve stuck with me this far, I’m sorry. I’m still writing the stories, but the release dates are totally out of my hands.

Instead I’ve done some beta recommended rewrites on Queen of Spades the last month, and this other idea I’ve titled Behind the Veil.

The book wouldn’t shut up. It wouldn’t go away. I sat down and wrote it with no idea what was going to happen. I don’t think it’s a steaming pile of garbage but the verdict is still out from the first beta reader.

So, how did I write it?

Writers Block

When you don’t have an idea what happens next you need to think quickly and keep typing, keep writing, keep the momentum going. I’d start a chapter with a bang and finish it on a cliff-hanger of a comment which dragged me back into what happens next?

It kept the story moving briskly and my pace was very high. There was more to it than that but I’ve written articles on how I do this before.

Sprints

Fellow writer Zack Riley runs a cosy little discord channel that allows me to do writing sprints. I normally run for an hour, and will do several hours all in a row with 15 to 30min breaks.

The sprints have a bot timer so you have a prompt to keep you on track. You start a sprint, add yourself & your word total, and go when the buzzer hits. There is no TIME to stop and think, you’ve got to write as many words as you can and you are only challenging yourself. It takes practice to do it on command, (I’ve been doing it for 5 years) but after a while you can just sit and work on the story.

When I started I’d be lucky to get a couple of hundred.

Now, on a bad session, I’ll get 1200 words or so. On a good one I’ll get 2.5k words.

Outline

There wasn’t one. I just wrote Letitia’s story as hard as I possible could. I kept the story going as much as I could. Letitia may as well have been possessing me for how this story spilled out on its own.

I like to credit my imagination, but I read a lot of horror, I’d just never written it before, and it was exciting to be doing this for the first time.

You should have some idea of where it is going, just don’t be afraid if the story turns into something else, if its pressing you to write it, then its exciting, not just for you but hopefully the reader too! If its becoming boring and predictable to you, how is it going to feel to the reader? Try just letting yourself go, and sprints is a great way to do that.

No breaks!

No capes, no breaks.

I would get up in the morning and write, I would write at lunch, I’d get home and write, and I’d write for as much as ten hours on a weekend. I felt invigorated and refreshed by the constant appeal of not knowing what was going to happen. The story that was whispering in my ear, kept me coming back, even dreaming about it. By the end of it I just wanted to go back and edit it because I was in love with it.

No games. No TV shows. Nothing but writing and reading breaks (with the odd Armello game with Zack).

It meant I watched a couple of movies with my husband. We live alone, and we’re far from friends, so my time was able to be utilized to write, and knowing it was important he was incredibly supportive and reminded me to eat.

You can do this too

I am lucky in that I don’t have kids or other commitments that consume too much of my time. I live in a rural area I’m new to which means I don have many local friends.

But I work 40plus hours a week.

I have a dog that needs walking twice a day.

Hubby & I share the housework evenly. Sure he might have cooked more, but I do my part.

It was how I utilized my writing time. Rather than socialize on Twitter, I told people I was writing.

Rather than stuff around doing other things I focused solely on what time I sat down at my computer and how much writing I could put into that time. It wasn’t something I could do when I started five years ago.

All of this takes years to balance and even now I feel overwhelmed and overworked some days.

You can do this too, remember what time you sit down at a computer and ask yourself what do you want to get out of that time.

Do the writing sprints and get better with practice.

Take the story other places, let it guide you, learn to listen to it.

At the end of this all I want you to take away is that you could do this.

You could write a book in 25 days.

Ask yourself how you are utilizing your time, and what you want to get out of it.

Learn how to do writing sprints and how to fly by the seat of your pants. Even if you plot, you really just have to know what you are writing next, sit down, and do it.

I had to give up on a part of my life that had never made me happier. The Last Prophecy series is my calling to write. But while its on hold, and while I can write like this, I know a two very important things;

I’ve never been poorer, & I’ve never been happier.

I’ll write my own stories, my own way, and every time I figure out a new way to do it I’ll share it with you.

February 22, 2019 2

Write the Darkness Within

“I don’t know how you did it.”

The compliment came when I announced I’d completed my 2018 goal of writing six books. They didn’t know how I did it. Thinking back, neither do I.

I normally write a blog post at the end of the year about my accomplishments and hopes for New Year, like it was a wondrous learning experience. I save the post for New Years Eve, an achievement of great pride, to tally up that I at least had something to show, and would finish on a note of peace and hope.

Laying claim to six books sounds like I had an awesome year, it would have been a great post.

I did not have a good year. I didn’t want to write that post.

I had a very bad year that has been proceeded by several bad years and my writing suffered for it. I’d swing between writing something great, the editor has said no major changes to A Phantom Presence, which was a first for me. But for him to then say that To Chase a Prophecy was not Ok, I think I rewrote it twice.

And I didn’t get those books to him on time, or in the condition they *should* have been up in. Because of all the real world distractions that dragged me down, and left me feeling used, hopeless, and above all tired.

So how did I write those books? With sadness. With despair. With a wellspring of unquenchable rage that this was all I had in the world that mattered, and it mattered to few more than to me.

It consumed me.

It was my waking wrathful thoughts and my bitter night time regret.

I sat at the computer when I was hot, tired, dirty, mind blank, with nothing left except that that burning anger at the world and all the things in it that had gone wrong.

My work wasn’t a reflection of my mood. It was what drove the stories I intended to write.

I burned through words as I tried in vain to exhaust the endless anger within me. All it did was tally up a word count I wasn’t trying to prove to anyone, not even myself. I’d write over ten thousand words a day and shrug it off as thought it was nothing, because to me, it was just what I needed to do.

There is no other way to get word counts like this, and if I have gained anything from it, it’s the ability to sit down at a computer and write ten thousand words in a day. Day after day. I am not proud of that because when I was writing those words, all that mattered was the story, the all encompassing desire to write ceaselessly on.

So if you need advice on how to sit down and write six books in a year, if you need motivation pull you through that work in progress, I don’t have it. I wouldn’t wish this feeling on anyone.

Because underneath all that rage, all that wrath, all that energy I had nowhere else to direct, I found I was made of a one very simple component.

Determination.

Where I had failed at so many things, had so much taken away, this was mine.

No one could take it from me, no one could stop me, and no one could tell me I was wrong.

I lit up words, destroyed people, created endless streams of nonsense tangled in tales that were from waking nightmares and bitter memories. And I made it beautiful, but my own.

No one can tell you how to write.

No one has a magic wand on a best seller.

No one knows the story like you do, and no one can write it like you will.

Write from the darkness within, and you’ll find what you need. I know I did.

January 1, 2019 0