My Journey #7: Reflections on the Writing Process

Wow, it’s been a while since my last post. For that, I apologize. I came to the realization after my last post that I just need to shut up and write if I was ever going to get my book finished.

Well, I can very happily say that it’s finished…almost. It’s actually with my editor right now. I should have cover designs in the next week. Then the book still needs to go through a copyeditor and formatter. So the release date is still TBD depending on when I can get those scheduled.

As I look back over the last 6 months that it took me to birth this book, I have learned a few things from the process. I’m sure I will continue learning as I enter the publishing stage, but I wanted to share my take-aways on the writing process.

•  I heavily researched how to write a book before I started this process – how to outline a novel, how to write engaging dialog, how to write fantasy (rules around magic, creating creatures, etc.). I even attended a writer’s conference. The research and outlining alone took me 6-8 weeks before I even produced the first line of the novel. As a first time writer, I think all of the research was helpful. It was hard to keep track of and implement every piece of advice, but it gave me the confidence I needed to get started.  As I start on my second book, I don’t expect I will need to go through this process again.

• I had taken the approach of writing chapter at a time, editing it, and sending it out for beta feedback. As I embark on book 2, I plan to write and edit the entire book first before sending it to beta readers. I found that I couldn’t keep up with the feedback because going back and fixing was delaying my forward progress. I also found that as I wrote, the story would take a different direction that required me to go back and make some significant changes to chapters that had already been beta read. I don’t want to waste my beta readers’ time by asking them to re-read chapters. It also made it difficult for them to continue reading forward because they future chapters were now out of context due to the changes made earlier.

• Rather than making sure every chapter was perfect before going on to the next, I stopped editing each chapter in favor of just continuing to write. Whenever I would hit a roadblock – couldn’t think of a word, or thought writing a description of something would take too much time – I would insert a place-holder in the text and keep moving. Then after the first draft was complete, I went back and filled in all of the place-holders. This kept my forward momentum going so I didn’t get stuck in a rut. 

I have starting outlining book 2, but it is already a quicker and easier process. I am very excited to be entering the publishing phase of this journey, and I will share that experience as well.

In the meantime, don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter so you can get updates on the cover reveal and the release date. I’ll also be offering special pre-release promotions for readers get on board early!

My Journey #6: Pitch Slam

This past weekend I attended my very first writer’s conference, the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in New York City. I am only an hour from Manhattan, so I felt like I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to check it out. It had a varied agenda over the course of 3 days that included sessions dedicated to improving your writing technique, marketing your books, and discussing self-publishing vs. traditional publishing.

However, the real draw of the conference was the Pitch Slam – an opportunity to pitch your novel to literary agents. You get one hour to pitch to as many agents as you can get to in that time. It was a lot like speed dating for writers. I spent days preparing the perfect pitch that had to be delivered in less than 90 seconds. Then the agents get 90 seconds to respond to your pitch.

Approximately 50 agents were in attendance and the key is to do your homework in advance and select the ones that are interested in your genre. Since I was vying for their time with a few hundred other writers, I managed to get to 6 agents in my allotted 60 minutes. I was thrilled when all 6 agents were interested enough in the pitch that they asked me to submit my first few chapters for their review! I have sent everything in, and now the waiting begins.

In the meantime, I wanted to share my pitch with you and would love to know what you think of it. Please post your comments to my FB page. Thanks!

My Urban Fantasy novel, Unhidden, is the first book in a trilogy about Emma Hayes, a 28-year-old woman with a long forgotten past whose choices will impact the fate of worlds.

Emma, a former military Special Forces soldier turned deadly mercenary for hire, was told she had been in a terrible car accident 10 years prior that left her with no memory of her life before the crash.

The meticulous and highly calculated world she has created for herself comes undone while carrying out a routine mission, when she is attacked by supernatural creatures intent on capturing her. As Emma fights to survive the next few days against the growing hoard of monsters that are in pursuit, she discovers that they are being controlled by a frighteningly powerful mage who she finds herself strangely drawn to.

Emma realizes these attacks are somehow connected to her forgotten past.  In order to save herself, Emma must unravel the mystery of who she was and why she is both feared and coveted by her enemies and allies alike. As she embarks on the journey to discover her true identity, she learns that the lines between good and evil are sometimes blurred, and she’s not sure which side she falls on.

Unhidden is a fast-paced, suspenseful, action-packed novel about a woman struggling to uncover the secret hidden in her past. Her ability to come to terms with who she is and what she is capable of may decide the fate of the coming war between humans and supernatural creatures.

Unhidden Teaser #3

Unhidden Teaser #2

My Journey #5: Be Brutally Honest

I have been up to a lot over the past few weeks in the way of writing this book. It all stemmed from a desperate need for feedback. I have 8 chapters in the bag and the only person who read the entire thing was my husband. Don’t get me wrong – he is absolutely awesome and his feedback has been invaluable, but I just needed more of it. So where does one go to get such needed commentary? A few different places…

One of the first things I did was check out a website called Meetup.com. For those of you not familiar with this site, it is a place where people can create or join groups on pretty much any area of interest that someone can think of. I went on the site looking for writing groups where I could connect with other authors and we could talk about each others’ work to make us all better at the craft. I was able to find a group in my area and I joined.

It was an interesting experience. I live in a fairly rural area, so the group has so far consisted of only about 5-6 people…and they are quite an odd cast of characters. We meet every other week in a local auto body shop and we each read a segment of our work and provide feedback. It’s been okay so far, but it’s difficult to get really substantial and useful commentary when it is based on only a small segment of the book at a time, and occurs so infrequently. I really needed some folks to read the entire set of chapters and let me know if I was headed in the right direction.

My next step was to enroll in an online course through Writers Digest University called Writing the Paranormal Novel. The course is lead by a published author, so I was very excited to get input from someone knowledgeable and experienced. The cost was $199 for a 6-week course and there is an online forum available to post assignments, share your work and collaborate with the other students in the class.

I am 4 weeks into the course and have found the reading assignments to be very helpful (our “textbook” is Writing the Paranormal Novel by Stephen Harper). I have also gotten some useful advice from the other students on the assignments I have posted. Again, they only consist of 500-700 word excerpts from my book, but the comments have been sound. The biggest drawback is that the professor has been almost entirely absent. He has been weeks behind on grading our assignments and hasn’t been actively engaged in the dialog…and hearing from him was the entire reason I signed up for the course. But I do still think it was a worthwhile step to take in this journey.

I then turned to Facebook for beta readers. I posted inquiries on my FB page, but this didn’t net me much because I am still building my network and didn’t get any takers. So I reached out to my sisters who run the Love Between the Sheets book blog and tried to leverage their network. This worked out much better for me and I was able to find a few beta readers. The feedback is still coming in, but so far the consensus is that I’m on the right track.

Here is some feedback I just received on my last graded assignment from the online writing course. The assignment was to write a scene of conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist.

A good action scene and the dialogue crackles. Your protagonist is good at martial arts and other combat stuff. I think you have a real talent for action. Lots of tension, jeopardy, conflict, and drama comes out of this scene, but it is not melodramatic. Possibly some of the dialogue is too elaborate for the situation, one person having a choke hold on another. I think if you pare down the talking a little, that problem might go away. Make the exchanges short and terse. There isn't usually any long-winded sentiments in a situation like that.
Otherwise, your writing really flows. The personalities are thrown in sharp relief. This is a really terrific story you have here, and it really engages the reader's attention. It's a good old pulp fiction tale that could have been in Thrilling Wonder Stories or Unknown or any of those science fantasy magazines. 

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Unhidden Teaser #1

My Journey #4: And Let the Writing Begin!

In my prior to posts I talked about where ideas come from and outlining your novel. I think I spent about 6-8 weeks preparing to write my book, from researching how to structure a novel, to developing an outline, to building character backstories. I probably could have gone overboard and continued to refine my outline, but I wanted to leave some wiggle room for creativity and change as I developed the story. In any case, I was getting antsy to start writing, and so I did.

On my first day, I was able to squeeze in about 15 minutes of writing in the early morning before my kids woke up and found me on the patio with a cup of coffee. On the second day, I grabbed 20 minutes at bedtime after the kids when to sleep and before I passed out with exhaustion. My first efforts produced 1,500 words. This made me feel a bit inadequate after seeing authors on Facebook post that they wrote 10,000 words in a single day. It’s hard to put that into context until you start writing.

I have read that there are approximately 200 words per page, and the average novel should be between 300-500 pages, or 60,000-100,000 words. That might put it into some context. It ended up taking me two weeks to write my first 2 chapters – 8,422 words. That’s less than some writers produce in a day! I might have been slow in comparison, but it was more for lack of available time than writers block.

In fact, I found that I was able to write the first few chapters fairly easily. The story flowed out of me, and I attribute that to having done the outlining work in advance. The outline gave me guidelines, but I still found that I left myself enough flexibility to make modifications as I went along. Also, my first three chapters are heavy on the action to draw the reader in. The next two chapters involved more dialog and character interaction. I found that writing the action scenes came fairly easily to me, but I struggle a bit with the dialog.

I have found myself hitting spots where I can’t easily find the right words, or just the right description, or even the right sequence of action. But rather than getting stuck in those places, I make a note in brackets at that point in the text, highlight it so I can easily come back to it, and then I move on. I refuse to allow myself to get bogged down trying to make it perfect the first time. I figure that I can always come back later and fix it – it’s more important just to get the first draft down on paper. My method is to then return to those highlighted sections after I finish the chapter and clean them up before moving on to the next chapter. This process seems to be working well for me so far.

As of this blog post, I have completed the first five chapters. The biggest challenge I have had so far is in finding people willing to read it and provide me feedback! I have given it to all of my family members, but no one has yet had the time to read it (running Love Between the Sheets is a big job after all). My husband is the only one to read the entire story, but I would prefer someone more objective. If there are any beta readers out there interested in helping me out, please PM me!

Given the challenges I have had in getting feedback, I started seeking out local writing groups in my area. In my next blog post, I’ll tell you more about that experience. Talk to you next week!

My Journey #3: Brainstorming

I began fleshing out story ideas for my book the old fashioned way – writing by hand using a gel ink pen in a college ruled notebook. I found that handwriting during the brainstorming phase was much more beneficial than typing ideas into Microsoft Word. When I use a word processor, I have the tendency of re-reading, rearranging and editing what I wrote. This is not a very useful thing to do during brainstorming.

The whole purpose behind brainstorming is to go with the flow – do not censor yourself, do not second-guess your ideas – just get them down on paper. You can come back later and go through them to decide which ones are worth keeping and which ones won’t make the final cut.

I had probably scribbled down about 50 notebook pages worth of ideas. When I thought I had enough, I started to formulate the ideas into something more cohesive, making a general timeline of events and describing scenes at a high level. Once I had a better idea of where the story was going, I wrote a short, one-paragraph synopsis of the book, which I will continue to refine as the story takes shape:

A former Special Forces operative turned mercenary, with a mysterious past she can’t remember, is being hunted by deadly otherworldly creatures, the government and an evil mage who she is inexplicably drawn to. She finds allies in this battle who are trying to help her uncover her past, which holds the key to her current situation. But can she trust her allies? Are the bad guys really as evil as they seem? Or is she being played as a pawn in a game bigger than any of them?

At this point in the process I realized I now needed to start really organizing my ideas, and a notebook probably wasn’t going to be the best place to do this. This is the stage that requires fleshing out ideas, which means selecting concepts, editing and ordering the sequence of scenes. I decided to download a software program that would help me in the outlining process. There is nothing wrong with just using Microsoft Word or Excel, but again – anal planner here! So I settled on Scrivener because it was a highly rated program that works on a Mac. It cost me about $45, and so far it has been well worth it.

Scrivener has allowed me to create chapters, scenes within chapters, describe locations within the story and build character bios. You can think of it like writing ideas onto individual index cards. You can then shuffle the index cards around until you build the right sequence of events, adding and removing index cards along the way.

As a first time author, I really found that I needed structure and organization to help minimize the intimidation factor of writing a full-length novel. I’m sure there are plenty of authors out there who can just start writing on a blank page and figure the story out as they go along, but outlining has worked best for me so far.

My Journey #2: Where Do Book Ideas Come From?

So many authors talk about how their successful story ideas came to them in a dream, or how their main characters had been talking to them in their heads for years before they put pen to paper. I had been waiting for years for such natural inspiration, but the only voice in my head was my own, expressing doubt and negative self-talk.

I finally decided that I would just chase down the idea, rather than waiting for the idea to find me. When I started this particular book I really only had a very high level concept – one scene, actually. My starting point was a simple interest in not writing a traditional story with black and white characters, good vs. evil, predictable romances. I wanted to show shades of gray – a heroine who fell for the bad guy because even though he was evil, maybe he had a good reason for it.

I had also given thought as to what genre of fiction I wanted to write. Through the Love Between the Sheets blog, I read a lot of romance. However, before working on this blog with my sisters, I had never read any romance. I am a sci-fi/fantasy geek at my core. At a very early age I got hooked on authors such as Piers Anthony, Raymond Feist and Terry Brooks. Very recently, my passion in this genre was re-kindled by Larry Correia’s Monster Hunters International series and my true inspiration, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series.

Fantasy is really and truly where my soul and passion lie. I finally decided that if I was going to write a good book, it had to be within a genre that I felt passionate about. So I settled on urban fantasy. Don’t get me wrong – I am planning to include a steamy romance – but the story is bigger than just the relationship between two people.

So once I had settled on the genre and had a scene in mind, I started doing some research. I downloaded two books written by K.M. Weiland – Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success and Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story. I’m sure that many authors just start with a blank page and begin writing. One thing you need to know about me is that I am a planner – I need structure. It was too intimidating for me to start directionless, with just a blank sheet of paper staring at me. What if I got halfway through and realized the story didn’t work? I needed to know where this story was going to start, end and everything in between – at least at a conceptual level. So I chose to start with an outline.

Outlining Your Novel was a very helpful place to begin. I didn’t follow Weiland’s instructions exactly, but I did follow them closely enough in the beginning to give me the confidence to find my own way when I reached about halfway through the book. I bought myself a college-rule spiral notebook, found a nice gel ink pen, and started scribbling. I do agree that handwriting your ideas is a much better way to brainstorm. It avoids that temptation to edit and delete ideas.

With my very high level concept in mind, I started writing “what if” statements. This is essentially a brainstorming exercise to let all of the ideas flow, regardless of how crazy they might be. “What if my character wasn’t human?” “What if my protagonist had amnesia?” And so on. It helped me explore ideas I may not have considered otherwise.

So don’t wait for that blast of inspiration to slap you in the face, or that recurring dream to reveal all, or for characters in your head to whisper the entire story in your ear. If you have experienced any of those things, I am incredibly jealous of you! But if you haven’t, don’t be afraid to hunt down that idea and wrestle it to the ground. Sometimes great ideas just don’t come easy, and you need to work a little bit for them.

My Journey #1: Aspiring to be in the Minority

I read somewhere that 81% of Americans feel they have a book in them – that’s about 200,000,000 aspiring authors in the US. Although I don’t have any statistics to prove it, I would bet that this propensity is particularly high among followers of book blogs and readers of self-published books. I certainly count myself as one of the 81%.

I then found a rough statistic that there are about 200,000 published novelists in the US (both self-published and traditionally published). That means about .001% of aspiring authors actually sit down and write a book. That number is staggeringly low. However, I plan to count myself among them as well, and I am finally doing something about it.

It’s been a long path to finally get to the point where I was ready to move from one of the 81% to one of the .001%, but at 40 years old I have worked up the courage and determination to at least give it a try. And I would like to take you on this journey with me.

If you are like me, I have always been fascinated with the process of writing. Where do authors get their ideas? How do they start formulating their stories? Do they outline or just start writing? Did they use beta readers, editors or proofreaders? How many times did they get rejected from publishers before getting selecting or deciding to go the self-published route? How long did it take them to write their book? How did they find the time to write with so many other priorities competing for their time (full time jobs, kids, husbands, etc.)?

I finally decided to put the questions aside and try to find the answers myself through my own personal experience. I was an English Literature major and Journalism minor in college. I wrote on my school newspapers from junior high school through college. During school and over the summers I worked in public relations writing press releases. I held jobs in magazine publishing, corporate communications and web development, writing and editing content. Then when I moved into the healthcare industry, I spent a lot of time writing policies and procedures. So writing isn’t new to me, but writing fiction and writing at length is.

I always had dreams of writing the Great American Novel, but I never knew where to start. I would shoot down my own story ideas before I even let them get off the ground. I knew how hard it was to become a successful novelist, so I was afraid to even try for fear of failure. I’m not sure if I finally hit my mid-life crisis, but at the age of 40, I decided to give it a shot. Maybe I’m old enough now not to really care whether I am successful. Maybe I’ve just decided that I have to go through the process before I can judge whether I or not I’d be good at it. Maybe with the advent of self-publishing, it still gives me a way to get my book out there even if I can’t find a traditional publisher. In truth, it’s all of those things.

So for all of you aspiring writers out there who aren’t sure where to start, or what the process of writing looks like, I invite you to take this journey with me. Over the next however long it takes, I will be blogging about my experience writing my first novel. Since I am just starting the process, I can’t even guarantee that I will finish it, but hopefully you will all help keep me motivated along the way. I’m sure there will be starts and stops as I deal with competing priorities (I work a very demanding full time job at one of the largest companies in the world, I have two kids (ages 6 and 8) and a dog, and my husband travels for business 3-4 days a week). But I think this describes many of us out there – we all lead busy and complex lives, but it shouldn’t stop us from following our dreams.

Along the way I’d love to hear from you if you have questions for me, or if you want to share your own experiences, so don’t be shy about posting comments. In my next post, I’ll tell you about the first steps that I took to get started.