writing life

Working Hours

It’s theoretically a holiday — government offices and schools are closed — but I’m treating it as a semi-work day. I’ll probably do about the same amount of work as usual, but I’m doing it on a more flexible schedule. I let myself sleep in and had a leisurely breakfast. I’m gearing up to starting the first draft of a new book, so there’s some prep work to do.

I’ve been trying to work out my best work routines. A book I was reading on forming habits said that one reason people in Germany have a shorter work week while Americans are working longer and longer hours is that in Germany there’s a culture of work time being limited to work — no chit-chat, no personal e-mails or phone calls, no spending time on social media — and then when they go home, they’re completely off work. In America, the culture is that you’re expected to socialize some at work (you may even get criticized in a performance review if you’re not friendly with coworkers), and it’s okay to make the occasional personal call, check personal e-mail, etc., but employees are also expected to work longer hours and answer e-mails and calls after hours. I’m not entirely sure how true that is. My brother works for a German company and works crazy hours, including being more or less on call at all hours of the day, on weekends, and on holidays. That may be because he works for the US office and his customers are in the US and/or because he’s in sales and a lot of his work is “leisure” stuff like dinners, golf games, going to sporting events with customers, etc. There’s also a bit of chicken-and-egg going on in the US — are we expected to work longer hours and be on call because of the goofing off and socializing during the workday, or is the goofing off during the workday an attempt to balance things out because we’re expected to work crazy hours and be in touch by phone/e-mail at all times? If the boss can call or text you when you’re at home in the evening, then you figure that you can call/text/e-mail your friends when you’re in the office. I do know that when I started telecommuting a couple of years before I got laid off in my last job, I was working fewer hours (because I took a pay cut to go “part time” in a way that kept a cap on the number of hours I could work) but actually doing more work once I was no longer in the office and having to deal with all the meetings, people stopping by my office to chat, etc.

Anyway, it gets tricky when you’re working for yourself at home. I’m never really fully off work, and never really fully at work. As I write this, I’m also doing laundry. But when I’m “off” work tonight and reading, my pleasure reading is somewhat work-related because I’m reading in my field to get a sense of the market. When I go on vacation, I don’t feel entirely like I’m completely off because I still check social media and e-mail for work purposes, and of course the writer brain never shuts off.

I like being able to multi-task the household drudgery. I can throw in a load of laundry and write a blog post, set a stew to simmering and write a few pages. I need to take some breaks during the day to move and recharge between scenes or to shift gears between projects. But I would like to do a better job at feeling like I’m on and off work, so that in my leisure time I don’t have that nagging sense that I should be writing. It may help to get my office back in order so I can work in there. I can put in my writing time, then come downstairs and be “off” work. And I really need to learn to take real vacations without feeling like the world is passing me by if I don’t check in online.

TV

What Might Have Been

I’ve been rewatching the entire series of Once Upon a Time, an episode or two a week, with an online group, with discussion and analysis along the way. Last night, I rewatched the finale for the first time since it aired, and it has to be the most bizarre way to end a series that I’ve seen. Really, the last season was a mistake, and this ending felt oddly tacked on, like it was what they always wanted, and they just stuck it on the finale without any setup.

The final season jumped ahead at least ten years for most of the “flashback” bits, with the character who was an early teen (12-13 or so) at the end of the previous season all grown up and played by a different actor, and then the “present day” bits were at least 11 years after that (since he had an 11-year-old daughter). But there were still some of the adult characters who carried over, and they didn’t change at all even though, based on ages of various characters that gave us some kind of timeline, nearly 30 years had passed since the end of the previous season. And there was never any explanation given for them not aging or changing. They were treated as though they were the age they looked, generally 30-something, even though they had adult children. To complicate things further, these events were taking place in the present, with them having been sent back in time by a curse that took them from the fairytale land where they’d been living to our world (for no reason other than that the premise of this series involves fairytale characters living in modern America, and it would have been a strain on the budget to try to create the setting decades into the future). The season mostly focused on new characters rather than the returning characters, though one of the problems was that there was no clear protagonist.

When that storyline was resolved, they didn’t send these characters back to their world and their own time. They came to the original setting for the series, to live among the past versions of themselves. And then they merged all the fairytale worlds and elected the original villain to be queen of them all. That would be the future version of the original villain, who did become a good guy along the way, but still, when you’re redeeming the villain, you don’t give them their original villain goal as a happy ending. You give them what they really needed, deep down inside, which is probably the opposite of their villain goal. When someone starts the series trying to seize power and never actually gives up power in spite of turning good, except when the responsibility is inconvenient, you don’t end the series by giving her ultimate power. It was even weirder given that this character had barely played a role all season. She hadn’t done any big thing to save the day, hadn’t made a huge sacrifice, so it felt very weirdly tacked on.

That series is so frustrating because there’s so much about the concept that I love — fairy tales, magic in a modern setting, mixing up characters from different stories — and most of the characters and the casting were great, but the writing went way off the rails. I could write essays about how they messed up. There was no coherent worldbuilding, so their magic never made a lot of sense, nor did how their society dealt with magic. And their morality was so screwy. The really frustrating thing is that the premise is pretty unique, so I can’t really find a way to file the serial numbers off and do it right and have it still be those elements that I find interesting. The best I can do is take some of the things as inspiration and go off in a different direction with them.

The first season is still really lovely, fleshing out the story of Snow White in the flashbacks and dealing with a cynical modern-day Disney princess who doesn’t know she’s a princess in the present, set in a small town with a real fairytale flavor. And if I get bored, I can amuse myself by mentally rewriting the whole thing, fixing where they went wrong and imagining what might have been.

writing life

Pushy Characters

One thing that’s helping in my current idea explosion is that only two of these projects competing for mental attention involve actual characters, and in both those cases, I’ve already developed those characters and written an entire book with them, so the characters aren’t being particularly pushy about telling me their stories.

With the other idea, it’s more about the world right now and the kinds of stories that might take place in it. I have roles that will need to be filled, but they aren’t yet actual characters. I just have one real character telling me stuff about himself and demanding attention. The weird thing is that he’s mostly a supporting character until he eventually gets his own book. My plan for this series is that it’s mostly about the world, with loosely interconnected stories taking place in that world. You can jump into the series at any point and still understand that book, but there are crossovers and things woven in and out, so the more of the books you’ve read, the more you’ll get out of them. I had in mind a character who would appear in a usually minor role in all the books and be someone kind of intriguing, so you’d want him to get his own book, and then we finally do get his book and learn who he really is and what he’s really been up to.

Well, he’s started telling me all that. I guess it will help if I know the details before he makes his first appearance.

I can deal with worlds and stories trying to flesh themselves out in my head and with plot events and scenes coming to mind. It’s the characters who get distracting when they start telling me about themselves and I hear their voices in my head. Owen was one of those characters. He took over my brain as soon as I started writing the first book in the series, and I knew it was time to wrap up the series when he left me alone at the end of the last book.

I won’t even be ready to start writing this other series until maybe the fall, so it may get annoying having this guy leaning over my shoulder, giving me hints. It did help to write out what I know about him so far. I haven’t come up with anything new about him since then.

But since it’s a good cold, rainy, dark, gloomy day (my kind of weather, as long as I’m snug at home), I may do a movie afternoon of movies that might inspire me, and that means I’ll probably get new ideas.

writing

Idea Time

I’ve made the mistake of having multiple projects all in the same phase at the same time. I often work on more than one thing at a time. There may be something I’m editing/proofreading and getting ready for publication, something I’m drafting, and something I’m researching or brainstorming. I’ll do the editing in the morning, writing in the afternoon, and research in the evening.

That how things were working recently. I was doing market research reading for one thing (I’m going to rework something I’ve written to go after a different market, so I’m reading books in that market to get a sense of the style and pacing), revising another thing, and researching another thing. Usually there’s a flow, so that after I finish revising one thing, I start drafting the thing I’ve been researching. But I’m in a unique circumstance, in that the thing I’m researching is a bigger project that’s taking a lot of research, so it’s nowhere near ready to be written, and I’m moving straight to drafting the sequel to the book I just finished revising.

The idea phase for all these things blew up at once yesterday. I got the idea for the sequel and got it decently fleshed out, so I can start doing serious development on it. Meanwhile, although I’ve been doing background research on the world for that other project, that research sparked a bunch of ideas yesterday, including an entire plot, and that world is starting to come into focus. And then I also started to get a sense of how the thing I’m reworking might go in this new structure.

I had three books trying to write themselves in my head last night. Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of sleep. I’m surprised that I don’t seem to have dreamed any of them, and I wasn’t getting them muddled. They all remained distinct. It was more like a music player on shuffle, where a song from one album would play, and then it would flip over to a song from another album, then over to a song from a third album, and then at random among all three albums.

I may have to do some massive brain dumping today, writing out everything I know about all three ideas.

Tomorrow is supposed to be the kind of cold, rainy day I’ve been longing for, and I don’t have to go anywhere or do anything, so I may treat the day as a kind of retreat, with some brainstorming and some viewing of related movies to help spur more ideas.

Hibernation Season

We’ve reached the time of year when I really just want to hibernate. I joke about being part bear. In January and February, I want nothing more than to wrap up in a blanket with a cup of tea and a good book (that I’m either reading or writing). It’s not a seasonal depression because I absolutely love it and it makes me very happy. It’s that Danish hygge thing. There’s a similar concept in Norwegian, koselig. It loosely translates to “cozy,” and it has a lot to do with enjoying warmth in the midst of winter. Some nice, fuzzy socks, books, candles, maybe a fire in the fireplace, a hot drink, and a blanket, and the nastier it is outside, the better. When I first read about this concept, I had a big “That’s it!” reaction, so apparently it’s genetic. My Norwegian blood must run true.

This works great if you make your living by reading and writing books. It’s perfect working conditions, and I tend to get a lot done at this time of year.

The problem is that the rest of the world doesn’t conveniently stop, and the interruptions that require dealing with the outside world feel even ruder. I really don’t want to go anywhere or do anything, but I still have to get groceries, return library books (I also need books, but I have enough of a stockpile at home that I wouldn’t suffer), and teach children’s choir.

Today I’m trying to psych myself up to either go to the library, go to the grocery store, or go see Frozen 2 (I have to deal with small children, so I really need to be able to communicate with them about things that matter to them). But it’s gray and foggy, and the blanket is calling. I seem to have missed my chance at the early showtime for Frozen, and the fog is lifting, so maybe I’ll walk to the library and take care of an errand and get exercise in one fell swoop. Then back to my blanket, even though it’s actually fairly warm today.

What Season is it Today?

We had a rather crazy weekend around here, starting with warm weather and severe storms on Friday. It was also the weekend of the Choristers Guild workshop, so I actually had to leave the house. It was supposed to rain off and on all day, then a line of storms would come through in the evening. I decided to play it safe and skipped the last session, since it was just sight reading through a bunch of music and I was losing my voice (the session is intended to let choir directors hear some music they might want to select, so it doesn’t really apply to what I do, but it is fun singing in a room full of professional musicians). I managed to drive home between cloudbursts, so I was fine, but then the tornado warnings started.

The first warning expired right before the storm reached me, but then there was a new warning, and on TV, they zoomed in on the radar to show where there was rotation in the storm, and I could see exactly where my house is, and they mentioned my street. So, I headed into the downstairs bathroom (the closest thing I have to a storm shelter). They lifted the warning soon after that, and the storm moved off to the east. It seems to have just been a radar tornado that didn’t actually hit the ground, since I drove through the area it hit and saw no damage.

After going to bed with thunderstorms still going on, I woke the next morning to the sound of sleet. And, yep, it was another day when I had to leave the house (for day 2 of the workshop). But, again, it worked out okay because it was clear while I was driving, and it was above freezing, so the roads were okay. In the middle of the first session, it started snowing. It was rather distracting, all the lovely snow dancing around in the sky. Apparently, farther north and west from there (like, at my house), it actually accumulated a little. Where I was, it was just flurries, with nothing sticking to the ground.

Then the sun came out and it warmed up, and I drove home on a nice, sunny day.

So, yeah, the two days out of the month when I absolutely had to be somewhere, we had the kind of weather that usually has me hunkered down at home, refusing to leave the house. I wouldn’t mind a nice, snowy Saturday morning that I could spend sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, watching it snow.

Really, that’s the best way to have snow when you’re an adult, just flakes fluttering around in the sky but with no impact on the ground.

There’s a chance of another rainy day later this week, and I’m planning a reading/movie day because I’m at just the stage of work when that will be perfect. Now, watch the forecast change.

My Books

New Book Day

It’s new book day! My Audible Original book (which means it’s only available in audio), Make Mine Magic, is available today.


This is a fun contemporary fantasy with a touch of romance, along the lines of the Enchanted, Inc., books, but in a different fictional “universe.”

A woman taking her dream vacation honeymoon on her own after getting left at the altar does a good deed that leads her into a strange and magical side of New York that tourists don’t often get to see, and she finds herself in the middle of a magical power struggle.

The germ of this idea came from something that actually happened to me, though the outcome was very different. When I was in New York doing my location research for the Fairy Tale books, I was waiting for a “walk” signal to go from Columbus Circle to Central Park, and the woman standing next to me asked if I could help her cross the street. She was blind and using a white cane. The funny thing was, when I was in college, I volunteered for the services for blind students office, which mostly meant recording textbooks and exam questions by reading them out loud, but I sometimes was asked to escort students around campus, so I knew how to assist the woman. I found it interesting that out of all the people who were at that intersection at that time, she managed to ask a person who knew how to assist her.

When I was brainstorming ideas for a book proposal, that incident popped into my head as a good “what if” — how did she know, what if she had some way of reading who/what I really was, and what might have happened next? In reality, we went our separate ways after I got her safely to the other side of the street, but what if …?

Incidentally, this was an “oh, by the way” idea. When they asked if I’d like to write an Audible Original, I gave them several ideas. A couple of them were story ideas I’d been playing with for ages. I had chapters already written and had thoroughly developed those worlds. Right before I submitted the proposal, this idea popped into my head, and I added it as an “oh, by the way” thing. It was the idea they chose.

There may be a print version coming later, but it’s exclusive to audio for at least a year.

writing

Taking My Time

One of the most common bits of writing advice is to set aside a manuscript for at least a couple of weeks (or months) before you go back to work on it so that you can see it more clearly and be less attached to the process of writing it, but I’m not sure how many people actually do it. We end a book with great enthusiasm and can’t wait to get it revised and finished, or else we’re impatient about being able to submit or publish it, or we’re on deadline and don’t have the time to wait.

I will confess to being guilty of all of the above. I seldom have the luxury of being able to let a draft sit, and even when I do, I usually feel like I already have a good sense of the problems and know how to fix them.

Without really planning to, I ended up taking a more than two-week break over the holidays when I was in the middle of a revision round, right at the point where things needed to be fixed, and I have to say, it made a big difference. I’ve been able to see a lot more clearly where the plot problems were, and it’s been relatively easy to see how to fix them. Some of that may be because I’ve had time to mull it over, but I think a lot of it has to do with being hazy on remembering exactly why I wrote things the way I did in the first place. When you know why you wrote something, you’re more resistant to changing it because you can justify it to yourself. Once that memory becomes fuzzy, you’re just reading what’s on the page, as though you’re a reader or editor, and if what’s on the page doesn’t work, you know you need to fix it. There’s no arguing with yourself or rationalizing.

That’s especially valuable with humor, where the joke that might have made sense while you were writing it because you understood where you were going with it no longer works without whatever was going on in your head at the time, and that means readers won’t get it. You know it has to go.

Really, as much as I hate it, giving myself more time and slowing down really does make books better. I trained as a journalist, so I’m very deadline focused. Worse, I worked in TV news, so our deadline was absolute. We had a newscast going on at six, whether or not we were ready, so we had to be ready. In that world, being able to work quickly was valuable. I had a reputation for being able to sketch out a story in the car on the way back to the station, so I could get the script written and get it to the editor to cut together the story right away. They’d send me on the late-afternoon stories because they knew I could get back to the station after five and still have something ready to go on the air at six. When I was working in PR, my boss used to brag about me being able to “turn on a dime and give change” because they could throw an urgent assignment at me and have something written within an hour or so.

That can be helpful when writing novels because it means I hit my deadlines, but that sense of rush, rush, rush isn’t always for the best. I’m so focused on getting it done quickly that I may not be doing it as well as I should. I can still write quickly, but giving it a bit of time between phases would probably improve the finished product.

Since I’m developing a new series, I’m writing the first few books before I publish anything, and that should give me some time. After this draft, I’m going to write the next couple of books before I go back and do another draft on the first book. That way I know I’ll be setting up anything I need for the first few books, but I also will have plenty of time to let the first book rest so I can really revise it and make it shine. After all, I’m hoping this book will suck people so deeply into this world and these characters that it will make them eager to keep reading the series.

My Books

My Award Eligibility Post

It’s award season for books as well as movies. Ours aren’t quite as glamorous as the Golden Globes, but it is nice to be recognized. My books cross genres, so there are a variety of areas where they might be eligible for awards, but probably fit best in science fiction and fantasy, where the main awards are the Nebulas and the Hugos. The Nebulas are given by and voted upon by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (of which I’m a member) and are more of a peer award. The Hugos are nominated by and voted upon by members of the World Science Fiction Convention, and although there are probably a lot of writers voting, they’re considered more of a fan award. People who were members of the previous year’s convention and those who have already registered for this year’s convention are eligible to nominate.

My only publication last year was Enchanted Ever After. I don’t have any expectation of it being nominated for best novel for either the Hugos or the Nebulas. It’s not the kind of book that tends to get nominated, and the final book in a series most people haven’t heard of is a long shot.

But the Hugos have an award for best series, and the Enchanted, Inc. series would be eligible for that, and since the series has ended, this is the last year it would be eligible. I think it’s a series worthy of consideration, with nine volumes ranging from 2005 to 2019. It’s mostly flown under the radar in the SF/fantasy, but it’s been consistently well-received critically, and even the first book in the series is still in print and selling steadily.

So, if you were a WorldCon member last year or have registered this year, I hope you’ll consider nominating this series.

There are supporting memberships available, so you don’t have to be planning to go to New Zealand in order to nominate and vote. All voting members get access to the voting packet, which generally includes electronic versions of all the nominated works. In the series category, it often includes the entire series, so it’s more than worth the money just for all the free books.

So, that’s my awards pitch. Thank you for your consideration. I don’t know what difference a nomination would make for sales. It might boost my profile a bit and help me sell other books. It might even revive chances of a TV show or movie based on the series. But it would be nice to have all these years of work recognized.

Looking at 2020

Happy new year! After taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays for the first time in years (usually I have a deadline early in the new year, since editors and agents love to clear their desks before they go on holiday, and they expect the revisions they requested soon after they get back to work), I’m ready to get back into the swing of things and charge into the new year.

I’ve got a book launching this week, my first Audible Original. That means it’s an audiobook only for the first year. If you’ve been thinking about giving Audible a try, now would be the time. There may be a print edition coming after that, but that will depend on a lot of things.

I’ve also heard from the narrator for the audiobooks of the Enchanted, Inc. series, and book 9 will be coming soon. She was getting to work on it last month.

I’m developing a new series that I hope to launch later this year. I’m trying to get a few books written before the launch so I can make a bigger splash. This one is structured more like a traditional mystery series, but it still has magical elements and a dash of romance. I have a first draft of the first book and am revising that, as well as starting to plot book 2.

And I’m starting to do the research to build a new fantasy world where I can set a series of semi-standalone novels — the connecting tie for the series would be the world, with some overlapping characters, but the plots of each book would more or less stand alone. You’d get more out of the story if you read all the books, but you wouldn’t be totally lost if you hadn’t. At least, that’s the idea.

I don’t have a lot of book events planned this year. I’m still waffling on whether to attend the Nebula Awards conference or possibly the World Fantasy Convention. I’m not really getting invited to conventions or other book events these days. But I think this is mostly going to be a year for buckling down and writing. You have to have something written before you can sell or promote it, so there’s not much point in going to a con for either promotion or networking unless you’ve got something ready to go.

So, off to work, and here’s to a fabulous 2020.