The view from the comfy chair in my study. Where I spent a lot of time recovering from that pesky pulled ab.
I know I'd posted that I was good as new and back to writing, but then I had a recovery set-back that quite literally landed me on my ass for two weeks. Who knew you could pull an ab muscle? Or that I even had ab muscles under all this untoned glory? Apparently it's a fairly common complication when patients get back into exercise after a hysterectomy with muscle repair. I've always had a love-hate relationship with running, but when I ended up on the sidewalk throwing up after 2 miles? Yeah, definitely hate-hate.
But I really am all mended now. I took the good advice that a few of you gave me and took it easy, and I'm happy to say that I'm back to running again (but not a 2 mile sprint two months after major abdominal surgery...that was not my brightest idea). So I'm back up to speed, even if that speed is much slower than I'd like it to be.
I spent a few days in April in Portland with a great group of Dreamspinner Press authors at the annual Dreamspinner Press Author's Workshop, and I came home revitalized and ready to get back to writing.
While my progress on training for a half-marathon are slow thanks to my surgery and set-back, my creative muscles are working overtime plugging along at a merry pace on my latest manuscript. I'm settled back into a normal writing routine, which has brought a
flurry of productivity both on Playing House (the
third in the Dropping Anchor series) and in other areas.
The Barnacle in her sparkly Anna dress.
Does anyone else have a spike in general creativity when
they're writing regularly? When I make the effort to get my butt in the
chair and write a certain amount daily I tend to suddenly have urges to
start other creative projects. (And not as a procrastination method...in
addition to the writing! *g*)
A poorly lit shot of my great new chevron headboard.
So far I'm 25K into the Playing House manuscript, and I've managed to make my daughter an Anna costume (from Frozen), rescreen a patio door to allow for a nice cross-breeze while I'm writing in my study, build an adorable headboard (from scratch!) for my bedroom, experiment with making my own organic hair styling wax (it's working pretty well) and deodorant (it's not), and make wildflower seed paper with the kids for their teacher cards. (You can plant the paper flowers they made and real flowers will grow. How cool is that?)
Hair wax...in old Easter eggs, since I didn't have containers.
What nonwriting things do you do when your creativity is spiked?
I've often had people ask me about my writing process, and I rarely give the same answer. It's not that I'm being evasive, but more that my process has changed over time and even changes day-to-day. Some days I sit down and struggle to write anything at all, and other times I sit down and bang out 10,000 words in less than 24 hours (in a hotel room over Thanksgiving shared with my husband and two young kiddos, no less).
My most successful writing days come when I can zone out and just write. I'm a world class procrastinator, and if given half the chance I will wander way from my manuscript and do just about everything under the sun other than write. So when I really need to get things done, I don't worry about researching specifics or finding the perfect word. I just channel my characters and write.
A peek at notes from my latest WIP, Finding Home.
Will I need to do more work later on those parts? Definitely. My draft for my current WIP, Finding Home, is littered with notes like __need to research terminology on how rowers talk about strokes__ and __insert fancy-sounding craft beer name here__. Sometimes I can't find the right word to flow with the sentence, and I leave myself notes like __a word that means flighty but isn't flighty__. Or I realize that I can't remember some minor character's name even though I know I introduced him at the beginning, so I might write __the dude from the coffee shop from chapter one___ instead of breaking my concentration and going back to find the name itself. It's amazing how much more productive I am when I let the smaller things go instead of following a tangent down a rabbit hole and ending up spending an hour researching the craft brewing process when all I really needed was a throwaway sentence on how microbrews are conceived.
That's not to say that I don't research. I do, like a fiend. When I wrote Island House I didn't know a catamaran from a kayak, let alone how to tie anchor bend. (Now that I've brought it up, you know you can't resist learning the knot. Go ahead, there's the video...you wouldn't be reading about how to zone out and write productively if you could effectively avoid temptations like that one) I let myself get sidetracked by research, and as a result it took me almost three years to finish the manuscript.
I learned my lesson after that. I'm now 3/4 of the way through the follow-up to Island House, and the new outlook I've adopted on writing is definitely paying off. By giving myself permission to leave those places undeveloped so they don't interfere with the writing flow, I've taken away my excuses for procrastination and the roadblocks between me and a decent word count. Of course, there are still those inevitable days where I just can't seem to bring myself to string more than a sentence or two together. Now instead of being frustrated by them, I use them to go back and do the research I skipped and finish the scenes that I'd have gotten hung up otherwise.
This won't work for everyone, especially those of you who write linearly and need to perfect a scene before you move on. But it's a godsend for me, since if I'm not moving forward I lose interest. Or, you know, let a tiny bit of research hang me up so much that I put an almost completed manuscript on the back burner for three years before buckling down and finishing it.
A Dutch author actually hooked himself up to a gaggle of electrodes to monitor his brain function while writing. I have to say that while I'm curious about what goes on in my head while I'm writing, I don't think I'd take it that far. How about you?
Proof for my editors that despite what it seems like, I *do* actually own a Chicago Manual of Style...
I almost always write to music, and that music usually flavors the tone of whatever I'm working on. I try to match up my character's mindset with what I listen to, which sometimes drives Hubs crazy. (When I wrote Island House, I listened to a few sad Weepies songs on repeat for months because Niall, the main character, is in a bad headspace. Hubs still flinches every time they come up on the radio.)
My latest project is a short novella about a couple in their early thirties who have fallen into the rut that a lot of long-term relationships fall into--they're too comfortable with each other and their (lacklustre) love life has taken a back seat to their careers. I usually write about characters that are just falling into a relationship, so it was a fun challenge to take a look at a couple whose love life was getting stale and help them get it back on track. (I've been with my husband for almost 16 years, married for 11 of those, so I know stale and the fight to beat it! *g*)
While they weren't what I listened to as I wrote, I definitely took some tongue-in-cheek inspiration from two great parody songs that poke fun at life as a thirty-something.
The first is the Yahoo! SketchY "We're Not Young," a parody of F.U.N.'s "We Are Young" and the second is Fuse's "32," a parody of Taylor Swift's "22." Enjoy!
