There's really nothing I could say that would dignify this.

Probably I am very, very sick, because I'm taking a break from writing by writing.

Sitting here, thinking that through...

Nope. Still doesn't make sense.

Brain and hands are all rather numb, but hi, words! Hello!!

Look at all your nice little shapes on this white screen.

(I have said I get book drunk, right? Yup. And word drunk. Drugged by the sheer momentum of one sentence after another. Whew. Dizzy.)

Last week, I crossed the midpoint of my novel's plot. And then in the last two days, I've cranked out 31 pages, putting me at 261 pages total.

Which sounds pleasantly book-ish.

It also means I'm staggering around the house grinning at everyone, but I keep forgetting what I'm doing or saying. I'm not exactly present.

Instead I'm trying to keep in my mind that image of the strange new city I invented. Trying to keep the pace of that conversation those two characters were having. Trying to get those last nuances sorted into words. Tapping phrases into place.

I made the mistake of thinking about my book while folding laundry, and one article of clothing has absolutely vanished. A pair of black tights, now nowhere to be seen.

I'm convinced they got sucked into my story somehow, and when I'm writing I'll find a pair of tights, surfacing in the midst of an unlikely sentence. 

This is the stage in the game when I'm surprised to see human beings who have three dimensions, instead of two. I feel like we should all be made up of words, sliding around in paragraphs, tumbling across pages. Skin is such a startling thing. Fingers and toes and noses in profile... 

(You think I'm kidding, maybe? But every time I pass a mirror, I'm like oh!! Look! I have a face!)

Momentum. Gosh I love it. It is my best friend when I'm in the midst of a project.

It doesn't mean that I necessarily know what I'm doing... It just means that every page, every scene, every chapter feels like I'm running down a hill. You can forget about picking up your feet and putting them down again (and you're not super aware of any obstacles--say, trees--that loom ahead).

Instead you just concentrate on flying, just relish the feeling of your hair slapping around your face.

The only danger (besides the trees) is when this delirious, daydreaming, word-drunk girl gets her hands on a calendar. That sense of word-urgency meets those blank little boxes, and I start dreaming dangerous dreams. I start thinking violent writing thoughts, like:

I could write the last pages today. Probably I have 180-ish still to go.

I could totally do that.

Okay, okay. I could take tomorrow too, I guess. A day and a half? Absolutely. 

So what if my hands are sore? So what if I'm only barely coherent in this blog post? So what if I don't know what happens next in the novel? We find out by writing! Let's keep writing. 

MORE WORDS! FEED THE DRAFT!

I think my all-time record was 45 pages in a single day. (After which I basically fell over on the floor with my four paws in the air, as rigor mortis set in.)

So 180 is a heck of a stretch. And okay, I guess I know it's not possible. I guess.

Kinda.

But it just feels possible, right? Right? You think it's possible. I can totally tell. You're nodding at me.

OH MY GOSH I COULD. Oooh. Let's go finish it. Let's just finish the whole book. RIGHT NOW.

Yes. YES. Okay. Excuse me.

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There is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. -- Eugene Ionesco

Feed the bears.

Artists, makers, writers, and deep thinkers, take note:

If you throw darts at your subconscious self, she will show up at your desk, gather all your notes and turn them into gibberish, and then disappear.

I don't recommend this.

So much better to send your subconscious brownies, mochas, flowers, wine, kittens, knitting patterns, cozy socks... Send it some love. Big floppy valentines and silly movies. Love your subconscious, and bless its heart, the subconscious will love you right back.

Last week I had this tiny little tantrum about not knowing what the heck I was doing. I glared at my manuscript and my manuscript sent me a scowl of its own. Meanwhile, my subconscious, that most versatile and helpful of sidekicks, stood to one side with her arms folded.

They're so difficult at this age, she said as she watched my fits and shrieks.

I'll just admit right here: I'm not that comfortable talking about THE SUBCONSCIOUS all the time. Makes me feel a little goofy, like I'm just two steps away from dressing up in ridiculous head scarves and ropes of pearls and spending my time whispering to windows. 

But there has to be some way to talk about that sense of otherness. This story isn't coming from the same place that scribbled answers to trigonometry quizzes and chemistry equations. Stories come from the murky mysterious side of things. Call it the subconscious or don't: it's still there and it's still essential.

Stephen King famously refers to that story-making side as "the boys in the basement"; Heather Sellers talks about the compost pile of ideas and experiences from which the best stories rise.

Whatever it is, you have to take care of it. 

So after my tantrum, I finally quieted down enough to remember: 

When the unknowingness gets frantic, I have to decide that it's okay to not know what comes next. 

It's okay. To not know.

My job isn't so much based on knowing; my job is just to write some words down. That's really it. 

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So writing is dreaming. But how do you get the right dreams? Jack London said, you can't wait around for inspiration, you have to "light out after it with a club."

With a club, my friends. 

And that's how I turned my manuscript around over the weekend. Not by working hard, not with blood or sweat or tears. I lit out with a club, with butterfly nets and mousetraps, checking every trap and hole I could find for the inspiration I needed.

I watched movie trailers compulsively, paying attention to anything that sparked my heart, any premise that I found fascinating. There you go, I thought. Let's see what you make of that.

I listened to Pandora radio and assigned every song to a character. The best songs were the ones that didn't seem to fit anyone. So I'd toss them at a random character and make a case for why that was the right character and the right song. 

I drowned myself in poetry before falling asleep, mixing and matching the images in my head. And I asked myself a story question each night before bed, sticking it in my subconscious's inbox. Take a look at that overnight, if you have the time, I thought. No big deal. Just see what you think.

I was a little nervous this morning. Mondays. They always take a bit of extra oomph, right? But I sat down and wrote ten pages without breaking a sweat.

Ten pages?? Without any bleeding? And after a meltdown last week? 

I can't say subconscious one more time without needing to slap myself in the face. Compost is smelly, and "boys in the basement" hits me weird. So how about this for an out-there metaphor:

Feeding the bears.

Those are the bears that come up with the stories. I don't have to force them to do anything; I just find all their favorite treats. I light out after inspiration with a club; I catch it and bring it back home and give it to the bears. 

I have no idea what story they will come up with. It's always wilder that I expect, always startling. And yet--I'm thrilled and breathless, being pulled along by something much bigger than I am.

And if I keep the bears happy, they're going to dream up the rest of this crazy, untamed story. 

So if you'll excuse me, tomorrow is coming, and I've got some traps to check. 

I am not epic.

At the risk of sounding like a snark (which I am, so I guess that's fair), this rampant use of the word epic is starting to grate. 

Probably I've just spent too much time on the Internet. If you keep clicking all the links of here is how to become amazing at writing ... well, you hear a lot of advice about being epic.

Make it epic. Write at an epic level. It needs to be epic.

And I kept nodding while reading this, yes, yes, yes, I want to write something EPIC. But today I snapped or maybe just got tired. 

I know we need an all-purpose word to capture amazing/rad/fantastic/awesome, and since it's all purpose, we go through it really fast. Use it a bunch, wear it out, toss it, and find a new one. The word life cycle: I am familiar with you.

But all this hype about becoming epic, becoming legendary... it's a little wearing? 

So I want to bellow back at these articles, something like, I sing of the rage of Achilles!! And then I'll blabber about gods and monsters and heroes, about metamorphoses and ill-fated love stories, and then I'll make up a joke about a satyr.

Pfft. Satyrs. 

All this to say, at the moment I am profoundly ordinary. 

The draft (at 39,600 words) isn't quite at the slog stage, but ... slog threatens. The mad dash through the opening chapters has turned into more of a trudge. It's just plain old hard work, that's all, unraveling that skein of story every day, hoping I don't find a knot, a snarl, a fray, a break. 

Okay. Here's the honest truth. I have no idea what happens next. 

I've hassled my poor cast of characters through a fair series of early obstacles, and it's time for them to catch their breath--just long enough to hear how the stakes are higher than they knew, their enemy stronger, and their time to act shorter. 

And then I'll catapult them into . . .

Into . . . 

Hmm. 

The unepic writer scratches her head, wanders around her house, thinks about the laundry, and eats an apple. Thinks about those villains, and tries to chew more menacingly. 

I know there will be a mystery person in the next chapter or two. And I know there will be something of a prison break at the midpoint of the story. 

Prison break? I'm going to write about a prison break. Never mind that I wouldn't be able to break my own self out of a locked closet if I needed to.

Oh, and the climax of the whole story? Yeah. Complete mystery to me. Ditto the ending.

I am trying to remember that I knew this was coming. The wide blank howling fields of I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm remembering that my job is to just show up. To lighten my grip.

So I'm not hyperventilating. I'm just a little edgy. And anyone who screeches GO BE EPIC is asking for a cool reply involving centaurs.

The one good thing? Even though I've no clue what happens next in my story, my imagination is still firing on all cylinders. I keep seeing things that aren't actually there.

The lynx slinking across the street. A picture of buildings turned into a boy alone at a train station, a wall of raincoats behind him. I keep seeing shadowy shapes walking past my window. Little things flitting past at the edges of sight. I hear phantom footsteps all through the house.

If I wasn't actively drafting, this kind of thing would make me dial an emergency number or two. But for now, it means that my writerly brain is still churning up images, tossing out ideas, sparking new scenarios. Twisting what it sees into something intriguing.

So I'll show up. And I'll keep going. 

And write my way forward, one ordinary word at a time.

This post is about guts: spilling them, getting them, keeping them.

Writing fiction has its surreal moments. No surprise, right? After all, I'm immersing myself in an alternate reality. If I'm doing my job right, it should leak out and get tangled up in real things.

Today I worked up a nine-page section where my eleven-year-old protagonist is facing the (really really really mean) antagonist. And I have to write both of them. As realistically as I can.

So on the one hand, I'm pulling up as many memories of being scared out of my brain cells as I can remember... What does it feel like, to be paralyzed with panic, but trying to brazen your way out of it anyway? What's it like to be small, and realize that the world is bigger and worser (yes, worser) than you knew? 

And then, I switch sides, and create the most menacing, monstrous, cruel, and unpredictable character I can muster up today. So: it worked. He's awful.

On my writing break, I ran to look at myself in the mirror: checking my face for scales or wicked yellow eyes or... I don't know. VILLAIN TEETH. Because who walks around in society with this kind of thing chuckling away in her head?

The scene itself worked well enough for a first draft. But now I'm a bag of emotions. I have well and completely freaked out my inner eleven-year-old. I want to break into my story and go apologize to everyone. I'm all jittery and anxious.

I can't tell if I need a gin & tonic or a teddy bear. 

Meanwhile, in real life, the business side of my brain has been tallying up my word count each day, looking at where I'm at on my "outline" (can I call it an outline if it's basically blank?), and where I'm hoping to end up.

The good news is that I've cranked out 27,101 words in 12 days, which is none too shabby. That translates to over 72 typed pages, or 106 by hand. (Because I write it first by hand. All part of my plan to burn out my wrists and fingers before I'm 35. Stay tuned on that.) 

72 pages! That's some heft. Send up balloons! Sing songs!

Okay, but the bad news is, that's 12 days out of a scheduled 30, and I'm, um, a fifth the way through my outline. (You can laugh. It really is funny.) 

Do I change the schedule and double my time, or amp up my daily totals, or both, or just let it play out, or ....

Okay. I decided. I want the gin & tonic AND the teddy bear.

And if that all doesn't have me uncertain enough, I'm dreaming up a bunch of big, exciting projects to shape the future of this blog. I hope it will be awesome, I hope it will be fun to follow along. I hope you really like it. 

I also hope I don't pass out from sheer nervousness.

So I made this sign. And I'm gonna plaster it to my forehead.

Or, at least, put it above my desk. 

I need it. My main character needs it. And I thought, heck. Maybe you'd want to see it too.

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It's more than just a nice idea. I've heard over and over again: if you fake fearlessness, you eventually end up ... fearless.

Which sounds like a good direction to go.

And that's what I'm going to be doing around here. 

You too? High five. Let's do it together.

Let's go be brave.

How to keep going.

The first bout of writing momentum has worn off: that first big oomph that carries me over the hurdle of the deaf-and-dumb blank pages, over the hurdle of it's-been-too-long-since-I've-done-this. 

The first few days of a draft are a brass band clanging through the heart, and all the trumpets are blaring, YOU CAN DO IT! 

But now it's week two. I've waded over 13,000 words into this story. And while there's still a fair amount of oompah-oompah going on, I'm also faced with the general suckiness of the first draft.

The characters are first draft characters, which means they are shrill, they don't argue enough with each other (or, terribly, all they do is argue), or sometimes they drop out of the story all together. They move in fits and starts, jerking around, and I get into hovering-author mode, meaning I write breathtaking sequences such as: She stood. She moved near the door. She bit her lip. She sat down again. 

This makes for thrilling fiction.

Not to be outdone, the settings are first draft settings. I've scrounged around in my imagination and come up with a few dusty props: some old trees leftover from a deleted chunk of a different novel; a tent that I imagined up for half a short story a few years ago; and then a weird taxidermy deer that appeared out of nowhere but seemed useful after I brushed off the cobwebs...

In other words, I'm blocking out the story in big broad strokes. The details are pretty darn hazy, which means the writing fills up with adverbs and adjectives: the discount construction paper and paste of the fiction world. 

I begin each session by rereading what I wrote yesterday, which means I'm all grounded in my storyworld again. Yay.

... But which also means that my toes are still curling from the awkward word choice and totally goofy dialogue that came out of no human mouth ever, not for this story or any other. 

I get discouraged, is what I'm saying. 

And I feel very sure that the knack for dishing out good words--if I ever had such a knack--has completely left me. The talent-o-meter readings are negative.

So it's good to remember this quote. (Yes! A quote! You knew where this was going.)

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Well, that is all kinds of cheering.

It's not about busting out beautiful prose on the first try, but more about being so darned stubborn and bullheaded that I will keep practicing, and practicing, and practicing.

Stretch out my toes, from that strenuous toe-curling, and then practice some more. 

It's too easy to take a look at the crappiness of a first draft, sling my desk chair through my computer screen, and decide on another career.

But I think I'll be stubborn. I think I'll keep practicing.

I think I'll stick with this one. 

The most important talent might be the talent for practice itself. -- Atul Gawande

Side effects.

I stare like a lemur at anyone who asks me a question. Confronted by a grocery list, I try to remember the name of something--anything--that I eat. I decide never to leave the house for anything, ever again. I'll just learn to photosynthesize. If I can remember what that means.

... In other words, it's Day Three of the first draft. Of trying to live more in the story than out of it. And it's bringing on all the usual symptoms.

I get a bit dizzy. I put things in the wrong places. I try to make sense when I'm around other people, but what I'm actually thinking about is how the protagonist's aunt manages to bring up three very important bits of information without sounding like blah, blah, blabbity-blah.

Basically I'm trying to get myself to breathe the air of an alternate reality. 

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I love this quote so. 

I'm no opium fiend, I hate injections, and I've never had the slightest desire to inhale smoke of any sort. But I have been deeply and persistently and unshakably bookdrunk, for days on end. 

And right now, I'm pretty much tumbling back down that rabbit hole. 

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. -- Rudyard Kipling

(I heard what you said.)

They were around the corner, talking at normal level as I sat there.

And then he came back and said, "I know you're a nice person. So you didn't eavesdrop."

I gave a panicked grin.

Because while I'm a nice(ish) person, I am trying to be an excellent writer.

So I absolutely eavesdropped.

(They were only talking about giving up cheese, anyway.)

Opening day.

That's right, it was today: Day one, chapter one, page one, line one, take one.

I love a good kickoff.

The writing was extremely workaday. The sentences clunked a bit, shuffling forward in stop-start fashion. But those were my characters on that page, picking up the pieces after Book One, and deciding where and how they will start this sequel.

I planted some nice little tension bombs, I pushed my main character into confrontation, I threw in a surprise, and oh, I revenged myself on my own worst-ever piano teacher.

All in a day's work.

Rather amazed that the terror monsters didn't line up for this morning's drafting session. Maybe part of what kept fear at bay was that I focused on telling my own self a story.

Isn't that what we are really doing, when we make anything at all? Don't we make the art we want to see, and write the books we want to read? 

While I hope to goodness that this story entertains other people someday, it starts by entertaining and delighting me. (Though it feels a little self-serving to scribble a sentence that makes me snicker, or to slam-dunk an image that makes me grin at my pens and desk and window, as if they're all applauding.)

And so yes, there is plenty to fix after day one. But there will always be plenty to fix.

So I had a little dance party of one, and I might even have clapped and shouted a bit. Celebrating good beginnings, first days, the first ten pages written, and the realization that:

Before it can be the book a reader can't put down, it has to be the story that I can't put down. The story that grips and energizes me, first of all.

Which means I'm in for a load of fun over the next six weeks. Hard work, and deep crazy fun.

Jiggety jig. (Home again.)

I handed my passport and declaration form to the U.S. Customs officer, and he asked me, "So how do you make a living?"

Which is my favorite question, especially from scary-faced men in super official uniforms. 

I said in a rush, "Well, it's not actually a living, I'm a writer, writing novels, but, yeah, I'm not paid for it or anything. Not published. Still learning. Kind of." 

At which point he scanned my passport and said, "It'll pay off."

He gave my passport back and I took it and sort of floated down the corridor.

It will pay off. The scary man said so. Which is SUPER news since I'm starting a new book on Monday, right? Right.

I met that Customs official on the way back from Bermuda. I spent a week and a half on that tiny island with pink beaches and sharp sunlight and mopeds zipping about and playing card games at night with the doors open so we could hear the waves. 

So good to be away for a while, good to let that to do list shrink and atrophy a bit, right? 

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This is the between week: post-vacation, and pre-drafting. Full of unpacking and laundry and returning emails. All that good catch-up stuff.

But I have to admit, I also envisioned a kind of super-charged version of me, running around on all that vacation energy and mid-Atlantic sunshine, getting some long-neglected projects taken care of before the new project starts...

Instead I'm fighting off the cold that the guy sitting in 11B gave me. (Thanks for that, mister. Three hours of being coughed on? I finally succumbed.)

Spent today in pajamas and my favorite pair of socks (they are ten years old, don't tell anyone), pottering around the house and sneezing. Ruffled my notes for the draft, looked over all those paragraphs hopefully. 

Not so much ultra-productive super-charge super-anything. 

Maybe that's okay. 

I always feel like I should have everything just so before starting a draft. That I should be ready for it, whatever ready means. I'm building an imaginative universe out of my brain on Monday morning at 10 a.m. ... how can anyone be ready enough for that?

Maybe it's better to just drink hot toddies and nap. Because the beauty of the novel and the crazy roller-coaster thrill of writing a new draft... it doesn't come from my having every thing perfectly in place.

It comes from the wildness of inventing something new, day after day after day.

So it's probably fine that I didn't deep clean the closet, clear the junk out of that one corner, or scrub down the bathroom. And whoops about that shopping and errand running I was going to do. 

This baby novel doesn't really depend on the rest of my life running perfectly.

All I actually need is a stack of blank notebooks and a very deep, persistent desire to tell myself a new story. 

And of those two, it's the desire that's more important.

Does that quote give you chills? It does for me. (Or maybe that's being sick. No, no, I think it's the quote.) Tenacity. Even the word sounds tough, full of muscle. 

I have the notebooks. A fresh crop of new pens. And I'm starting to hear my characters around every corner. 

Paper, pens, ideas, and tenacity.

So I guess I'm ready? 

Yeah. Totally. I'm ready.

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity. -- Louis Pasteur

Let's go get it.

In one week: I start working on the first draft of a new book.

New book. First draft. 

Cue the butterflies in my stomach, performing their usual air-show feats. 

Oh first drafts. So much excitement, so much rush, so many ideas in my mind when I sit down to work, so that I feel like a little god over my fictional universe... and then all the brilliant ideas flee.

Like roaches scattering when the kitchen light turns on. 

And the whole world narrows down to me, and page one.

And I can't always remember why I'm doing this at all. Or where my ideas went. Or why I ever thought they were good. Or if I even have a decent working knowledge of language, period. 

But hey. This is my fifth first-draft-of-a-novel. I know the process.  

And I know that if you want to find those ideas, you might have to get down on your hands and knees and crawl to those hard-to-reach corners. You get to the places with all the lint and dirt and raisins-that-rolled-away and toast fragments and very old cheese crumbs. 

And you find the ideas and drag them out. And put them to work.

So. If, in a week, I start feeling panicky, I'll just remember this brilliant quote from Charles Baudelaire: 

The ideas come when you put your time in. When you show up.

When you get cobwebs in your hair and sweat prickling your scalp and smudges on your knees and goop from who-knows-what on your cheek. 

I know it works.

And it will work this time around too.

Inspiration is to work every day. -- Charles Baudelaire