An Avalanche of Words

I haven't experienced the productive writing that I'd anticipated over this Christmas break. Looking at all of the weeks with reduced teaching, and even no teaching, I thought I'd write a ton. (Is there such a thing as a ton of words?)
But I haven't. Maybe it's my indecision.
I have three books in the works. I can't figure out which one to run with.
It would make sense to work on A Charm of Finches, which is already 75,000 words. My novels

This is a mockup
I created for my
in-process novel

generally come in at 80,000-100,000 words. The novel is about Maeve, a 32-year-old agoraphobic who decides to change her life through feng shui. Hopefully, it's humorous women's fiction as this young woman figures out how her life went awry and what she needs to do to get it on track.
But this book is really confusing me. It doesn't have a clear plotline. So I've farmed it out to Angie and Emily who will hopefully read it and give me direction as to which way it should go.
The book I was working on in November, Paris Runaway, has about 50,000
words written. It's the one about Sadie, a divorced mom, whose 17-year-old daughter Scarlett runs away to Paris, chasing the French exchange student. Sadie decides to go after her and discovers something many people learn in Paris. Life is to be lived, not tolerated. I'm kind of stuck on this one because I need some color and scenery from Marseille, and I've never been there. But I will be there in two months!

This is a book cover mockup that I created with
a photo from Virginia's blog Paris Through MyLens.
Thanks for the permission to use the photo, Virginia

Finally, Autumn in Aix has about 35,000 words written. It is a sequel to my first novel The Summer of France. Fia is still in Aix en Provence running a bed and breakfast with her great aunt and uncle and raising her teenage twins in a new culture. She's surprised to find herself lonely for friends; she's helping her twins adjust to a new society, when she meets an American tourist with Iranian heritage who is visiting France for suspicious reasons. Can she protect France's art treasures with the help of Frenchman Christophe, who has given up the family business of black market art dealing to work with the French government and the Louvre at retrieving art.
So those are my three choices and I've been frozen in indecision. I've read through a couple of them. I liked the start, but it didn't inspire me to immediately write more.
I often say that it's too hectic around my house to get anything done with all three kids home, but even when everyone is asleep, I find reasons to get up from the table and do something else other than writing.
Maybe I need a regimented schedule to inspire me.
This week, I started teaching again at one college and the other one begins next week, so between the two, maybe I'll realize how precious writing time is and I'll get to work.
I'd love to hear which, if any of these books catch your attention. I'm hopeful to launch a novel in 2015, maybe two!

Short Story Available

I'm so excited to announce the publication of my short story, "French Masquerade" on Kindle.
I probably wouldn't be nearly as excited if not for the adorable cover, made possible due to the great photograph by Linda Mathieu on Frenchless in France.

Here's the description of the story:

As Joanna’s only son graduates and her marriage stumbles to an unexpected close, an old friend drags her to Paris to drown her sorrows in wine, museums and men with accents. Can the City of Light ignite a spark in Joanna or only torch songs from her younger days? 

I hope you all will consider downloading my short story. It's only 99 cent on Amazon Kindle.
And please, let me know what you think.

Writing Changes

Although I have a new novel that just came out, I've dived into writing again rather than promoting.
I decided to stick with France, since it's something I love, and I won't tell you the premise but will share the title -- Paris Runaway.
This time, I'm planning out the scenes rather than just writing. It's different. I hope it will help me to write more quickly, but worry that it might limit my characters.
One of the fun parts of writing a novel is naming the characters. I wanted the main character, a divorced mom to have a name like Sophie, but I couldn't go with Sophie because my first novel was Fia, short for Sofia.
I decided to go with Sadie, which I like, and which is actually short for Sarah, who knew. The last name of the family is Ford. It fits well with Sadie's ex-husband -- Draker Ford, as hard as his name sounds. But then I needed a maiden name for Sadie. I wanted her maiden name to have three syllables and to include an s sound. So I landed on Sadie Harrison. That sounds good.
It wasn't until later that I put together the name and realized the character's full name -- Sadie Harrison Ford.
Ooops. I think I'll leave it and have the character joke about her two last names.
Sadie has two teenage daughters Evangeline and Scarlett. Scarlett's French crush is Luc, and Luc's father is Auguste.
I have a couple weeks of Christmas break yet, so I hope to get a lot of writing done. You never know when I'll have another novel available.
I See London I See France is on Amazon at Barnes and Noble and in paperback at Lulu.

Mocha Rewards

This morning, after a seven and a half mile run, I'm sitting on my front porch enjoying a final mocha. My running partner, Najah, and I decided that mochas will be my reward for finishing a certain number of words on my current writing project. 

I get no more mochas until I reach that 22,000 -word goal. Then 45,000 words, then 67,000 words, then finished.

It sounds like a lot, but I'm actually just deconstructing and reconstructing a book that I wrote before. I've decided to make some changes so a lot of the work will be cutting and pasting then writing other sections and editing everything together. I'm giving myself a time limit so I can try to solve that other problem I mentioned a few weeks ago -- cutbacks at my job. I've started applying for other, full-time jobs, but if I could bring in a little more income from my writing then I could continue to teach college as an adjunct and have time to write. If I get a full-time job, plus teach college, I'll never have time to write.

It seems silly that I need to motivate myself, but with free time and without set deadlines, I often just fritter it away. That's why Najah and I decided on the joint punishment/reward of mochas or no mochas. And she's going to be my motivator and task master. She'll text me encouragement, like a Nike app: "Way to go!" or "Keep it up!" But she's also willing to push me and scold me if I fall behind. 

So wish me luck that I move along quickly and get to my next mocha. 

The book I'm rewriting is I See London, I See France. Parts of the book are the same and some have changed: a mother of three young children has a fight with her husband and he walks out. She thinks about when she last felt vibrant and pins it down to a semester abroad in France. She wonders how life might have turned out differently if she'd married the Frenchman she had a crush on. She decides to sell the minivan and travel to Europe with the kids to see if she can rekindle that spark of life within herself, and maybe a romance too. 

Inspiring Inspiration

I went to a writing conference on Saturday. One of the sessions was about inspiration, led by Hannah Stephenson of The Storialist. She's a poet, which a lot of times I don't get, but she inspired me in the session.
I liked her idea that inspiration is a muscle and the more we exercise that muscle, the stronger it gets. Inspiration begets inspiration.
And, I have to admit that writing in my blog makes my voice stronger, even though I have a friend who complains that my fiction voice is not as strong as my blogger voice. Of course, on my blog, I'm writing as the character of me. This is a character I know pretty well by now.
Stephenson suggested that writers, or creators of anything, set "ambitious goals" of what they will create each day or each week. She writes a poem every weekday. So I set a goal of writing for an hour each morning. Then I promptly got up and graded papers for two hours this morning rather than writing.

I also liked Stephenson's idea that many of us feel like we have to support our partners, our children, our careers, but we don't necessarily support ourselves. If creating fiction or art is part of us, then we have to "show up" for ourselves and not let down that inner part of us. I guess that's true. Other commitments take priority.
One of Stephenson's ideas was to take inspiration by simply noticing the mundane around us. Notice it and think about what makes it interesting. She finds inspiration in the grocery story, overheard conversations, and mostly art. She gave us a chance to try it too. In a piece of art made from cut and folded paper silhouettes, in a huge, sunlit room, children danced around a May Pole. And I noticed the shadows cast from the long ribbons around the pole. Then I began to connect the idea of shadows to a new novel I'm working on.
Most of my inspiration for writing comes from my daily life, slogging through work and motherhood and wifehood and friendship. Sometimes just a walk in the morning might inspire me. Many times I push that inspiration aside, put my head down and continue to push ahead with the things that must be done.
So part of my inspiration must be allowing myself to stop and soak in that inspiration before noting it on paper and incorporating it into my work.
What about you? What inspires you and how often do you feel inspired?

Mad

Today I'm feeling mad. Mad as in angry. Not mad as in crazy.
Two main reasons are making me mad:

Maybe I need a drink so I won't be so angry

1. Small town gossip. I know, I grew up in a small town, but not quite this small. So an after-prom party had alcohol and I got a call from one of the parents Sunday morning. Her oldest is a sophomore and she was apalled. I had to kind of talk her down. Then, somehow, I got the blame for telling people about alcohol at the party, which meant Tucker got blamed for telling me, which he didn't. All of those senior girls in their beautiful prom dresses (see the prom post from Saturday) blamed Tucker for ratting them out and Tucker had "the worst day ever." Parents who believe high school parties won't have alcohol are just naive.
2. Writing. I'm reading books that I keep putting down because they aren't very good, and then I can't believe that my books aren't published. What's the deal? I'm not saying my books are masterpieces, but I think I can give many of these books a run for their money.
A writing instructor at one of the colleges where I work is reading my novel. She has lovely things to say like, "I'm fully engaged" and "I can picture this." Then yesterday she says that to get published my manuscripts need to "have some bite," which I interpreted as snarky and sarcastic, or they have to be so intelligent that people bow down in amazement at how smart the author must be.
And I said, "Who wants to read books like that?"

Maybe I need to go to France with Grace and eat crepes

I'm writing escapist books with fun plots that deal with emotional issues most people face. Why? Because that's what I like to read.
So why are these things making me mad?
Well, a few weeks ago, I told Earl that I might be entering menopause so I'd be more irritable than usual. I was only using that as an excuse so that I could tell him to stop reading sections of the newspaper to me while I was trying to work.
Now that I'm feeling so mad about everything, I wonder if those words aren't true. Maybe everything gets under my skin because I'm starting menopause. Or maybe that's just my excuse du jour.
Show me that I'm not alone. Tell me what makes you mad?

NaNoWriMo Attempt

Well, today is the last day of November and I have to say that for a big chunk of November, I fell off the writing train.
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's an organized effort to get people to write 50,000 words of a novel. I've done it two times before successfully, and a few other times half-heartedly.
I started out strong, writing the required number of words each day to finish. Then I started getting distracted by work and basketball and swim team.
And somewhere in the middle of the month I slid into a funk. I decided I wasn't a writer any more and just gave up. Maybe it was the holiday blues. Maybe I was missing my daughter Grace who is in France instead of home.
So at 5:53 a.m., I have 24,243 words of my next novel. But yesterday at this time, I only had 18,108 words.
Who knows what can happen in a day?
To be fair to me though, I do have to work then I have a staff meeting and next I have to be at Tucker's swim meet. In between though, I'll write my boney fingers off.
Check in at the bar along the right side to see how far I get today.
And when I'm finished, even if I don't reach 50,000, I'll have a good chunk of a new novel started, because I'm a writer. There's no escaping it.

Crafting Villains

At the writing conference I attended a week ago, a psychologist spoke about creating villains.
Funny, cause I don't think of my novels as having villains, but every novel has something or someone the main character must struggle against. As Carolyn Kaufman began to explain how to give rise to the perfect villain, I realized that a number of characters in my latest novel might be villainous.
The perfect villain is someone who "pushes your hero's buttons," Kaufman explained.
I hadn't thought about that. I began to consider my current main character Fia, whose goal is to have a happy family. Her husband could be the villain as he opts for money over family. The Frenchman bad guys struggles to be free of a controlling family. Lots of family buttons being pushed. That makes me happy.
"The villain will personify the dark side of the hero," Kaufman explained. The villain must be the hero's shadow, that dark side. "Think of the things that you consider the darkest, most heinous. That's what is in your shadow," she said.
Kaufman went on to explain some hero/villain duos. Bilbo and Gollum. Luke and Darth Vader.
"A truly great villain personifies your hero's dark side and what your hero will become if he falls prey to that dark side of himself," Kaufman said.
I would add here Harry Potter and Voldemort. JK Rowling made it so clear throughout her books that the main differences between Harry and Voldemort were the choices that Harry made to do good rather than evil.
So the hero should be tempted to give up that important thing, to turn to the dark side, but resist.
Kaufman had a lot of great insights and tools in her book The Fiction Writer's Guide to Psychology and on her website at Archetypewriting.

Long, Cold Writing Winter

Have you noticed my silence on the subject of writing? I'm kind of frozen in indecision.
I have sent query letters for my latest novel, Ransoming Raphael, to 13 agents. I've had one request for more material and several rejections. Some I haven't heard back from.
Hundreds of literary agents sell novels to publishers, so why have I stopped after a baker's dozen? I worry that I need to fix something in my novel before sending it out again. Or, I worry that the query letter doesn't sell my novel well enough. I don't want to send letters to all the good agents, get rejected, then make changes to my novel or query letter and not have more good agents to send it to. So I'm doing nothing.
This break between classes has stretched out before me without early morning writing sessions at the computer. I haven't taken my laptop and tromped down to the coffee shop where the smell alone is inspiring. Instead, I've avoided the computer, the fiction, the agent search. I wrote a Christmas letter and published it myself. I don't think that counts.
A few years ago, when I searched for an agent for Trail Mix, my novel about two women who hike the Appalachian Trail, I received an email from a man who worked for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. He said the Conservancy was dabbling in publishing some fiction. I had a lot of interest from agents about Trail Mix at that time and decided to continue my search rather than asking him to take a look at my novel. Now, I wonder if that would have made a difference in my career. To have a book published, even by a small publisher, would be an extra achievement to put on my query letter.
Here's the cover I envisioned for my book Trail Mix:

The jump from writing to publishing is huge. That chasm gets wider every time I step toward it. I know that my writing can improve, so I vow to work on it this year, with workshops and writing conferences. Even if I write well, getting published remains out of reach, until I find an agent willing to take a chance on a novice.
Some do. I just need to find the right one.
So there I am, frozen between working on writing and working on selling. Maybe a happy medium, a compromise of 60 percent writing, 40 percent selling, or some other fraction that doesn't make me tired to think about.
The one thing I can't do any more is pretend my writing life doesn't exist and pop in another movie. I haven't watched Coco Before Chanel yet.

Failing Works Sometimes

In one of the textbooks we use for English composition class, an example of introductions points out that John Milton and Beethoven were both failures. Startling idea, right? How could they be failures when their work lives on centuries later? Well, they're failures because, although they achieved great things, they didn't meet their wildly outlandish goals.
I am setting out to be a failure tomorrow, and I want you to join me.
I have joined NaNoWriMo, again. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel from Nov. 1 through Nov. 30.
It's a crazy idea. The reasons not to join stack up like dirty laundry in the basement, yet I signed up anyway for the fifth year in a row.
Fall quarter is the busiest for me. Thanksgiving at the end of the month always drags me away from my computer. I know if I focus on writing that my exercising will dwindle away. I just finished a novel and haven't even fleshed out my ideas for the next one.
Nevertheless, on Monday morning, Nov. 1, I will begin work on my new un-named novel.
The first year I took part in NaNoWriMo, I succeeded in writing 50,000 words.
Every year since then, I have failed. But if I get to the end of the month and I wrote 30,000 words, that doesn't feel so awful. Maybe I've only written 20,000 or 10,000. At least I've started thinking about and writing a new novel.
How many people spend years planning the novel they will write and never type out the words? The novel lives only in their head.
Face it, when is a good time to try to write 50,000 words? We'll always put it off another day, another year, another decade. When the kids are older, when work slows down, when I'm thinner, when we're wealthier... Excuses are easy to find. Time isn't.
So I signed up.
You'll find me under PaulitaK.
Sign up and friend me.
Let's be failures together.
Go to www.nanowrimo.org. It's free, but you can make a donation if you want to.