Author of award-winning, adventurous realistic and historical fiction

What’s Up Wednesday, 12/4

Dec 4, 2013 | , , , , , , , , , ,

WUW Winter Holly 1What’s Up Wednesday is a weekly meme that helps readers and writers touch base with blog friends. If you’d like to join in, you can find the link widget on Jaime’s and Erin’s blog posts. I love this idea because it gives a structured, easy way for me to keep up with blogging. Also, the buttons are cute (especially this winter scene). Thanks for the idea, Jaime and Erin! 

What I’m Reading 
All the ARCs. Right now, I have copies of Open Road Summer, All Four Stars, What the Moon Said, and Ask Again Later on my desk or en route to me. It’s a smorgasbord of 2014 debuts!

What I’m Writing   
So, November is over. The status of the project I was kinda sorta NaNoing? Done! I definitely limped to the finish line, but as of Friday, November 29 I have a completed first draft. I wound up writing about 42,000 words in November, which I’m really proud of. It was  fun to try to write without a filter and kick out a fast first draft. This WIP is one I wanted to write just for my own enjoyment and creativity–it’s not something I’m going to work actively toward publishing anytime soon. For that reason, I didn’t want to take too much time to write the first draft. I started writing it in early October, making this the fastest I’ve ever completed a draft–70,000 words in a little less than 2 months. And I’m usually a fairly slow writer!

That said, I’ve realized that for me to be happy with my writing and the overall process, I should allow myself a little more time in the future, or at least do a better job of outlining before diving in. (This was also my first largely pantsed project.) I’m glad I did my pseudo NaNo, though, and I’m looking forward to sometime revisiting this WIP in between other projects. I also believe that it’s never a bad thing to try a new way of working–even if it ends up not being your thing, it can teach you a lot about your process and preferences.

What I’m writing now (and for the rest of the month): Nada. It’s time for a break and IRL holiday stuff.

What Inspires Me Right Now

Holiday stuff: I held off until the day after Thanksgiving to get out decorations and fire up my playlists, but from now until the 26th, it’s Christmastime.

I’m also inspired by all the people who shopped at their local indie bookstores on Small Business Saturday. Particularly these shoppers! http://whitehouse.tumblr.com/post/68607360338/president-obama-sasha-and-malia-shop-for-books

What Else I’ve Been Up To 
Listening to my nephew coo and gurgle in the background when I call my sister. He’s pretty adorable; I’m a happy aunt.

And eating pie. Lots and lots of pie.

So what have you been up to lately?

Thankful for Booksellers, Teachers, and Librarians

Nov 25, 2013 | , , , , , , , ,

When I was growing up in Madison, WI, there was a wonderful children’s bookstore on Monroe Street called Pooh Corner. It’s been gone for decades, sadly, but I still can remember the way it felt to grab a book and plop down on the carpet to read it. When I was little, the real bear doll that A.A. Milne’s son Christopher owned was on display in the store (and secured in a bank vault at night). Pooh Corner wasn’t just a store but both a second home and a wonderland for book-loving kids like me. I would beg my mom to stop the car and let us go in whenever we drove past.

In fifth grade, I loved to write and illustrate stories. (A lot of them were about opinionated bunnies, for some reason.) Sometimes these stories probably distracted me from whatever the actual lesson was. But my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Gerlach,  always encouraged my creativity. Sometimes she’d ask for more, telling me that she loved to read what I came up with. It made me feel so proud of myself, and it spurred me to keep creating. I still have an assignment from that class on which we had to write our goals–I wrote that when I grow up, I wanted to publish a book. Mrs. Gerlach made me feel like that was totally something I should do, and she’d be cheering for me as I tried.

Like a lot of shy and bookish kids, middle school was a place where I rarely felt comfortable. One big exception was my middle school’s library. I knew that whenever I walked in, I would get both a hug and a new book to read from Mrs. Holt. She always had something waiting behind the desk for me, and she every book she put in my hands was curated especially for my reading tastes. She would even order certain books for the library because she thought I (or my best friend, Megan) would like to read them, which made us feel like Very Important Readers. Even if I dreaded going back to school in the fall, I couldn’t wait to get back to the library and see which books Mrs. Holt had found for us over the summer.

So among the many things I’m grateful for this time of year, I’m thankful for booksellers, teachers, and librarians. Partly for how they support authors like me now, but mostly for how they use literacy as a tool for compassion, acceptance, creativity, and growth. Turning kids into readers is a great thing.

Free-Fall-Leaves-Images-GraphicsFairy

I’m posting this as part of the Class of 2K14’s Thanksgiving blogfest. Check out what other debut authors are giving thanks for on our website: www.classof2k14.com

What’s Up Wednesday, 11/13

Nov 13, 2013 | , , , ,

 

WUWAutumn

What’s Up Wednesday is a weekly meme that helps readers and writers touch base with blog friends. If you’d like to join in, you can find the link widget on Jaime’s and Erin’s blog posts. I love this idea because it gives a structured, easy way for me to keep up with blogging. Also, the buttons are cute. Thanks for the idea, Jaime and Erin! 

What I’m Reading 
I just finished two great MG reads, Rachel Searles’s The Lost Planet and Jane Kelley’s The Desperate Adventures of Zeno & Alya. Now I’m reading South of Superior–I loved the author’s MG book, Prairie Evers, so I hope I’ll love this, too!

What I’m Writing   
See yesterday’s post about the project I’m kinda sorta NaNoing.

What Inspires Me Right Now   
This post from Natalia Sylvester on revising her approach to NaNo, and this one from Leila Austin at YA Highway about what isn’t failure. They’re great perspective for the craziness that is writing in November.

I was also super excited to read the Kirkus review for my friend Michelle’s debut, I Heart Band. They loved it!

What Else I’ve Been Up To 
Well, mostly writing and working. But I’m excited to head back to the Midwest to meet my new nephew this weekend.

So what have you been up to lately?

 

On NaNo, ten days in

Nov 12, 2013 | , , , , , , ,

In the past, I’ve used the NaNo energy and camaraderie to write lots–I think last year I did about 30K in November of the project I was working on. But I’ve never done NaNo “for real” before. Truthfully, I’m not even doing that now–I had 28,000 words of the project I’m working on written before the month began. But I did decide that I wanted to NaNo to finish or hit 50K, whichever comes first. And so ever since the clock struck midnight on November 1, I’ve been working for my average of 1,667 words a day, with the 50K goal in mind. (I think finishing this project will take about that many words.)

How’s it going so far? I want to travel back in time and throw a parade for everyone who has finished NaNo in the past because WOW is this hard. When I am drafting, I typically average about 1,000 words a day–but I am not usually able to write every single day. Maybe I do 2,400 on a great Sunday and the following Monday through Wednesday I write nothing. Regardless of how often I write, the 7,000-8,000 words/week average seems to really work for me. At that pace, I’m writing fast enough that my first-draft antsiness isn’t a problem, but not so fast that I get burnt out.

Naively, I thought that upping my average to 1,667 would not be so bad. And while it isn’t terrible–I’m not crying into my pillow every night, and so far I’ve been keeping up with that pace–I’m learning a lot about what makes me a happy writer and a successful drafter, namely: This is too fast for me.* I need a little more time to think things through and to let myself recharge. Of course, there are benefits to the NaNo pace, too–when I hit the middle of my story, I didn’t have the option of muddling in it. I got creative and kept going. The choices I made in forging ahead might have created a hot plot mess, but at least I’m moving forward instead of stalling and starting to second-guess myself, which has been a problem for me in the past.

Because I’m a perfectionist type who loves goals and deadlines, I’m going to keep trying for the 50K goal (also because I want to take December off from writing to read and do holiday things). Even if I don’t make it–and some upcoming travel might derail my plans a bit–I’m proud of how much I’ve already done, and happy with what the NaNo experience is teaching me about my sweet-spot for a writing pace as well showing me how I can use goal-setting to boost creativity.

If you’re doing NaNo, how’s it going? If you’ve done it in the past, how was your experience?

*Duh, right?

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