With NaNoWriMo just around the corner, I am seriously trying to stop myself from writing. It seemed like a good idea at first: after eight months of intense revision, a 20k-rewrite of the ending to The Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice, and the excitement of sending off the first query letters, taking a break before November sounded like a smart thing to do. The Muse, I thought, needed a break, and I needed some sleep, and I’d start over refreshed and merry on the first of November.

Only it’s not like I imagined, and I should have known. This is going to sound slightly insane, and maybe funny, but while I can’t argue against insane, it’s not funny in the least: writing is an addiction. It’s every bit as addictive as alcohol or drugs can be (though a lot healthier, of course). Writing regularly makes me a balanced, pleasant, diplomatic person with infinite patience and an attitude my friends, colleagues, and the children at school appreciate equally much.

And then there’s the dark side, and let me reiterate, it may sound funny, but it’s really not. When I go periods without writing, I get cranky. I start feeling restless and unfulfilled, I sleep badly, my patience goes down the drain, and though I do usually stay nice, my thoughts will be a whole lot darker than they usually are. Yes, it sounds like a First World Problem (I guess it is). Yes, it sounds like I should probably be looking into therapy. Yes, it may sound amusing if you haven’t experienced this yourself. But I’m serious. Writing  is an addiction, and the more I do of it, the more I crave. I used to go months and months without writing in the past. I could still do weeks a year or two ago. Now, three weeks off writing, I’m starting to feel it, and the eight days till NaNo suddenly feel like a very long time.

I’ve spent some thought on why this should be the case, and I think it comes down to this. We all have experiences in life which we don’t appreciate, or which make us so happy that we could burst. Both types of experience need to come out one way or the other. For the majority of people I know, this means talking to as many people as possible and going over the story until all emotions connected with it have paled and they are back to feeling balanced and relaxed. Others I know take to exhausting themselves by doing sports, by punching something, by having the occasional fit of anger or tears.

These things happen to me very rarely. Instead, my emotions go straight onto the page where they come alive in what my characters experience. They don’t need to be exact translations of what happens in my life–not at all. I can be filled to the brim with happiness and make myself cry over my saddest scenes. I can, on the other hand, be upset or hurt or angry and still write light-hearted, and it’ll be okay. What matters is not what I feel, but that I feel, and that my pages are charged with emotion. I think this makes me a good writer; it also makes me a balanced person. It’s a win-win situation.

Except when I’m not writing, I feel horrible. The worst of it gets me when I’m entirely stuck and frantically looking for a way out. This explains my mad drive when it comes to trying and trying every possible way to solve a ‘writer’s block’ situation in my stories. I’m not even sure I believe in writer’s block. For me, so far, there’s only been ‘being stuck’, and ‘being stuck’ can be solved, although I don’t claim to always know how. But seeing as I’m addicted to writing, there’s no waiting around for inspiration to strike. When I do get stuck, I go after it with a club and drag it back kicking and screaming, even if it takes months. There’s no giving up, and that’s not because I’m especially ambitious or driven, but because it’s essential to my mental health.

So there you have it. The secret of my balance, and why I’ve been sleeping badly lately.

I’ve come to the conclusion, though, that a self-imposed ban on writing is about as stupid as it gets, now that I’ve spent some thought on it. I’ll still leave my NaNo story untouched so I won’t miss the rush. But I’m going to sit down right now and write the alternate ending to The Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice which my friend requested.

Onward, and here’s to writing for my sanity.

Tags: at a cost, Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice, NaNoWriMo, writing

Yesterday, I received my first rejection letter for The Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice. It was a form rejection, but so politely written (and even with apologies for not responding individually) that it didn’t really hurt. In addition, following other writers’ progress in all the different stages of writing, revising, querying, and publishing has prepared me well, I think, for this step which, after all, most writers agree is inevitable. So I wasn’t disheartened. I took another look at my query letter, revised it a little, and sent it out again, and I felt good about it.

I’ve heard the term ‘rejection pride’, and I’ve seen writers talk in forums about how they celebrate their rejections, frame them, and even put them up on their walls. I can relate, but I don’t think I’ll be doing any of that myself. Pride isn’t in line with what I feel. I’m not down; I realise there are a lot more factors than just my writing involved in this, and some of them are beyond my control. But it’s not feeling proud, either.

I suppose you could argue that once you receive your first rejection letter, it means you’ve written a novel, you’ve worked hard to make it good, you’ve revised it until you were sick and tired and proud to death. You have then researched the industry and learnt what query letters do and how to write them, how to craft the perfect synopsis, how to really get to the core of your story, and a ton of other useful skills to be proud of–but none of that is really a prerequisite for receiving a rejection.

Let’s face it: anyone with the skill to send an email could write a query. It doesn’t need to be good. It certainly doesn’t mean your manuscript is good, or in fact even that you’ve even got one. When I was 15, I sent a query letter (or rather a pleading letter) straight to a publisher begging them to ‘give me a chance’ and to ‘take a look at my writing because I’m sure it will convince you’. Needless to say, it didn’t. I didn’t even get a reply. But I might have, and it certainly wouldn’t have been one to be proud of.

However, I’m not saying there’s no ground for pride at all. There’s definitely something to be said for gathering the courage to send the manuscript out at all (provided you don’t already have an ego the size of Australia). So yes, I’m proud I dared to do it, and proud to have got to the point where I consider this baby good enough to be seen by the world. But again, it’s not really the rejection itself I’m thrilled with.

But. That letter did trigger a whole chain of emotions which had nothing to do with pride or defeat. I became aware, right at that moment, that this is the real thing. From talking about writing, I’ve gone to sitting down and writing a novel. And then another. And another. From a handful of messy first drafts, I’ve gone to revising and perfecting. From talking about trying for publishing in the distant future, I’ve gone to presenting the story, and it’s the best I can make it right now. At some point, and without really being aware of it at the time, I stopped talking and started doing.

And that was amazing. Understanding, really understanding that this is it, and it’s serious, and I’ve set out on my road to publication (no matter how long and winding and even unsuccessful it may be), and this is me working for my dreams. So that rejection, though it didn’t make me sad or proud, had me in awe. I sat in the stillness of that moment and looked at the words sent back to me from across the globe and realised that this dream isn’t out of reach. It started with a rejection, but I’m young, and I have so many stories I long to tell. Even if this book won’t sell, the next one might, or the one after that. If nothing ever sells, I’ll still be writing and making my life meaningful by it.

Somewhere in that moment, I stopped doubting myself.

Tags: dream, Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice, professionalism, publishing, query, rejection

They have given me a journal and a quill to dip in an ink jar. It feels old-fashioned to me: I seem to remember that my fingers have held other instruments for writing, and have touched paper smoother than the parchment before me. But the memory is like a dream; it slips away the moment I reach for it, and cowers in a distant corner of my mind, taunting me.

So I write. I write my name over and over and over to see how it looks on the paper, to see if it triggers anything of my past: Liya. Liya. Beautiful letters which come to me without effort. I don’t need to strain to shape the individual parts, but the name as a whole eludes me. It resists my hand as though I had never written it at all.

I have a distant memory of a saying spoken by someone who once seemed important, something about a rose being a rose no matter what you named it. So whether I am Liya or not, I ought to be the same I was before I came to Darklight Rest. I ought to be at ease, knowing that even if I cannot remember myself now, I will in time, and I am still who I used to be. But it’s not true, because roses don’t have memories, and they don’t have longing, and whoever said that didn’t know how it hurts to be nameless and mute and lost in a world that doesn’t care who you were.

Tags: Darklight, Liya, NaNoWriMo, November, writing

It’s two weeks until NaNo starts. The official ruling is that you start writing your novel on Nov 1 and you write until latest midnight on Nov 30. No sneak-starting, though of course you can finish the novel (though not count the words for NaNo) after it’s over. But the NaNo folks are adamant on the sneak-starting rule: you start in the mad rush of the first of November, right along with hundreds of thousands of other writers around the globe.

I love and hate that rule. The rush of that very first day (or even the very first seconds, minutes after midnight) is incredible. Words fly off your fingertips, and there’s a crazy energy going all around the world, uniting all those mad, passionate, beautiful people who set out to create new places and people simply because they have the power and the will.

The past years, I’ve attended write-ins on October 31: a get-together with other NaNoers where you eat and chat until the time approaches midnight, and then, right on that first second after midnight, everyone starts writing at that shared table. It’s brilliant. It’s exciting, it’s amazing, and I don’t want to miss it.

But just today, I hate the rule, because I’m sitting here with my first scene, even my first sentence in mind and I’ve got two weeks to wait. My planning is nearly done. I’ve got as much (some people would call it little) as I need to go into this. Always on the low end of the plan-or-no-plan scale, I have a couple of character sketches, a rudimentary setting, and vague ideas for a handful of scenes. I have my Sentence (a technique courtesy of Holly Lisle) which goes as follows:

When her only friend chooses to forget her, a mute refugee must fight for their shared memories to save them both before their former caretakers’ magic wipes out their minds.

I’ve got a main conflict and a very vague idea of where this story is headed. I’ve got a working title: Darklight. And that’s it.

I know some writers love (even need) to have maps, histories, religions, systems of magic, even every single scene planned before they start, but I’ve always been a lowbie-planner. I used to go in with a lot less than this before I took How to Think Sideways, but I’ve since picked up a few essentials which have made my writing easier.

Writing the story without knowing where it’s going is a harrowing, maddening, exhilarating experience. It’s like reading your favourite book, adapted exactly to your needs, and being able to decide how it ends. Except harder, and more fun. Watching the loose threads of a story come together in a magical way is one of the most satisfying results of writing. This is what writers live for: that brief moment of brilliance when you look beyond the world and see the entire glittering web of fate, and your own place in it.

Maybe it sounds pretentious. Maybe it is. But that’s what makes writing so worthwhile, and so addictive that you can’t stop even when it wrecks your life because you can’t work and you don’t sleep. It’s not so much a hobby as it is an obsession, a need. I’ve seen it put very eloquently by Z.N. Hurston: “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside.”

This story will remain untold for another couple of weeks. Forgive me if I seem distracted at work.

It’s roughly two weeks until NaNoWriMo–the National Novel Writing Month. I’m excited! I’m so excited, in fact, that I can hardly keep myself from sneak starting my new project. If it weren’t for the mad rush of the first NaNo day, I would, but I’m really trying to restrain myself here.

I assume that if you came here because you are interested in writing, you already know about NaNoWriMo. But if not, here’s the short info: 30 days, 50,000 words to write, over 300,000 participants writing a total of several billion words during the rainy days of November. You win if you cross the finish line, that is, you write 50,000 words of a ‘work of fiction’ during November.

The question I (and thousands of other NaNoers, I’m sure) inevitably get is: What’s the point? This is especially true when you mention that there’s no ‘best winner’, ‘first prize’ or anything of the sort. You write for yourself, you win for yourself, and you get a shiny certificate to print out and stick on your wall to show off to your friends (I’ve got four of them now and I’m really proud of them).

So what is the point of NaNo? There are dozens of good reasons, but these are my personal Top Five:

• NaNo makes you write. This is big. It’s bigger than it sounds, especially if you are plagued by writer’s block or you have lost (or never got into) the routine of writing every day. NaNo forces you, gently and with fun, to sit down every day and write.
• NaNo makes you imperfect. Does this sound bad? Think again. If I had a penny for every time I have heard a writer say, ‘I would write, but I can’t go on until this page is perfect!’ I’d be living in a beautiful villa with marble floors and someone doing the cleaning for me. Writing 50k words in a month forces you to get over your need to be perfect, beautifully in line with the saying ‘You can’t edit what’s not written.’
• A brilliant writing community. Seriously. I have in all my days on the Internet never seen a forum where pro-choice and pro-life, Mormoms, Christians, Muslims and Pagans exist so peacefully side by side and discuss their different opinions for research purposes.
• Peer pressure. Don’t underestimate this one. There’s nothing so embarrassing as having told twenty people about how you’re going to ‘write a book in November’ only to have to confess that, in fact, you ended up with 4,200 words before you gave up. If you’re planning to do NaNo, tell as many people as you can about it, and be happy to report your word count to them every day.
• NaNo is quality Me-time. This, too, is a big one. We should all have the time and the right to pursue our hobbies and passions, but honestly, how much time do you take for yourself to do what really makes you happy? When life gets in the way, NaNo is the excuse for setting aside time for yourself, take the phone off the hook, and disappear from the world (except for emergencies). And having done NaNo a number of years now, I promise that once you’ve started, it gets easier to claim this time for yourself even when November is over–and the people who care about you and who matter will understand and cheer you on.

This year, I’m looking forward to guiding a group of 15 children aged 8 to 10 through NaNo. They won’t be writing 50,000 words, but NaNoWriMo offers a variant for children, the Young Writers Program. The kids get to set their own goals and report their word count progress every day. We’ll be working with stickers and a poster to track progress, and of course we’ll have our weekly writing sessions to write together and solve story problems. I think it’s going to be fantastic!

With that, I’m back to planning now. A new story is in the making, and my Muse is jumping up and down with excitement at getting to plan some upcoming scenes. For now, I’ll say only this much: it’s going to be fantasy, and I’ve got two main characters, a desperate friendship, and an obscure place of healing which takes your memories when you leave it.

Write on!

Tags: NaNoWriMo, November, passion, stories, writing

This year, I learnt how to do revisions. Not that I haven’t tried revising before, but if you are just starting out with your very first novels, you probably know how easy it is to start line editing, only to find after hours and hours of wasted time that your problem was far bigger than typos, and that you still have no idea how to fix it.

Enter Holly Lisle’s How To Revise Your Novel, and no, I’m not getting paid to say this, and no, it won’t do the work for you. I did the work myself, every day for eight months (though admittedly about half that time went to figuring out my new ending, since the old one no longer fitted). What the course does, though, is teach you a system to revise a novel without getting lost in the jungle. It tells you where to start, how to work out your problems, how to prepare for fixing them, and then how to actually fix them one by one, biggest to smallest. Still, I won’t deny the work was gruesome–I imagine it gets easier the more novels you write, but this first time, it was mind-blowingly exhausting.

But now I’m here. I’m setting here with my beautifully printed manuscript of The Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice at my side, my first query letters in the mail, and thinking, “Wow. I did that.”

And it’s amazing. It’s so amazing that the big drop in motivation which I had feared didn’t come. I didn’t think, “Do all that work again? Start over? No way.” I didn’t think, “There’s no way I can tell a story like this again.” I just admired the manuscript for a while, then sent out my queries, and moved on to the next project.

For those of you who are setting out on the path of revision thinking you can’t do it, I have a couple of pictures. They’re not pretty. They’re probably not even encouraging. But at least, they’ll show you just how much was wrong with my first draft, and that it was still possible to fix, no matter the amount of time and work it took.

So, enjoy, gloat a bit at my massacred manuscript, and then return to your own knowing that if I got through this, you can, too. I’m sure it helps if you can afford Holly’s course, but if not, just keep working one step at a time, and don’t give up. I’m told the next revision will be easier. I’ll let you know if that is true.

Without further ado, here are the pictures. I feel like a true professional now!

The massacre, part 1.

The massacre, part 2.

Tags: Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice, Holly Lisle, HTRYN, professionalism, revision

With writing, and being stuck, there are many tricks that help some of the time and some tricks that help most of the time, and then there are times when nothing helps at all and you just need to step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

When not even that helps, I know that I have reached the end of the story. It’s a point I have hit with every single story so far, so I suppose I shouldn’t despair. The ending will come along eventually as other endings have done before. The thing is, I always expect The Right Ending to come in with a bang and trumpets, proudly announcing itself as the right choice. But in all cases so far, the Ending has come sneaking quietly in through a window and then seated itself somewhere furthest back, humbly waiting to be noticed. At the same time, you’ve got the Big Bad Loud Endings screaming for attention on the centre stage, waving flags of red and gold so you can’t miss them. It’s hard, through all the racket, to hear the quiet whisper from far back which says, ‘I’m here. Please see me.’

T.S. Eliot put it so eloquently:
‘This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.’

Well. In case of Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice, I have fended off time travel, space travel, necromancy, parallel dimensions and a battle for the mainland in favour of a quiet, sorrow-filled story about one girl on the path to her true destiny. I think I have found it now. With only two scenes to go, the big cutting revision should finally come to an end within a few days. I have been working on it for over four months now, I think. Holly Lisle’s process is thorough and intense, and though I sometimes struggle with a bad conscience for not completing it sooner, I am also glad not to have rushed things. This is a learning process for me, and I want to do it right so that the next revision may, perhaps, turn out smoother.

I’ve got work left to do, of course. Once the ending is in place, I have smaller revisions to do to foreshadow what I only just found out myself. There are also at least two new scenes still to write, though I am looking forward to those. One of them involves Thilkhan, and it’s no secret that I’m in love with him, as I hope some of my readers will be.

So hopefully despite my slow working pace, my goal of sending out my first query letter this year is still not out of reach. But that’s in the future. For now, I’ll stick to 500 words a day, every day, no excuses, until this story finally ends.

Write on.

Tags: Endings, Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice, Goals, revision, writing

Today I wrote the ending for The Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice. It was such a shaking experience that for a few hours, it made me wonder if I ever wanted to write a novel again. After Thalanien, which I finished in April last year (2011), I was afraid that Thalanien was the only story I ever had in me; the only story I could ever tell; that my writing would end with the last sentence of that project.

Then I began an online writing course despite all my usual suspicions. After all, how can someone else teach you how to write the stories that matter to you? And how, I wondered, should someone who did not know me be able to teach me something I had not already learnt in almost fifteen years of trial and error?

I’m glad that I overcame my arrogance and invested the money (admittedly, not very little for someone with my salary). In retrospect, I would have paid the price for the whole course just to receive the first three lessons, because they taught me how to find new ideas when I thought I had none. Right now, I feel as though I will never run out of stories that will be close to my heart and full of all my passions and longings. If you write and you think you may have lost your direction, I recommend this course with all my heart – and no, I’m not getting paid to say this. It’s an honest recommendation. Here’s the link: Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways.

But back to today. I started this novel in June 2011 and took it through Holly’s course, and despite her great guidance, it’s been a stubborn story. That wasn’t her fault–though I think perhaps the techniques she teaches in turn made my muse want to tell a story that was not just all right, but that mattered to me. As it turns out, this story mattered enough to make me cry while I wrote it, and that has only ever happened to me with Thalanien. So in every way, Holly kept her promise. She didn’t forget to mention that such fulfilment comes with a cost, but I forgot to remember it.

I wrote the sad bit of the ending yesterday, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to finish it today. My muse knew, though. I cleaned the flat today, washed the dishes, did the laundry, and all the while, my heart was racing. It was a reaction as if to a physical danger. Apart from being in actual danger, I’ve had this reaction in only one situation before, and it wasn’t writing-related. I’ve never to this point been physically afraid of writing.

In the end, I gave in. I sat down in my little writing corner with a cup of tea and listened to Loreena McKennitt’s Raglan Road on repeat and high volume. Every story I write has a song that goes with it and inspires me. This is the one for The Sacrifice. It took me a good hour to write 1200 words, which isn’t the greatest of achievements. But every one of those words mattered. I poured my heart out onto those pages and it bled and hurt like hell. It’s no wonder I was afraid. My muse knew what we were getting ourselves into.

For a few hours afterwards, I was numb, stunned, unable to feel. It was as though by putting and end to that story, I had also put an end to myself. Perhaps that is, in a way, what happens when you write: you put a part of yourself into the story and once that’s done, it’s gone forever. It belongs now to the ones who will read it, or to the characters who lived and suffered through it.

I’ve no doubt that I will be writing more stories, and I hope that all or at least some of them will matter as much as this one. But for today, and perhaps tomorrow, I’ll just be grieving.

Tags: at a cost, Endings, Fourth Rule of the Sacrifice, Holly Lisle, HTTS, music

I am reading All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland. After my writing year 2011, I am getting back into the habit of reading a lot, and I notice how much I have missed it. I used to–and still do–get so lost in books that I ended up not sleeping and being more dead than alive for school or work the next morning. I never regret it. One of the guidelines of my life is ‘set priorities’, and reading a book that emotionally feeds me is worth more than a few hours of sleep. And those who know me will testify to the fact that I love sleeping.

Back to the book. It is quite a comical story about a family whose members have fallen apart years ago and whose lives have crashed into chaos. HIV, robbery, selling an unborn child, a letter from Prince William to Lady Di, a mad chase for a woman named Shw (yes, really) and chaotic love triangles are only some of the complications this family faces. Through it all runs a thread of love that, while thin and worn, still keeps them together somehow.

I must admit that it was hard for this book to intrigue me. I’m reading it on recommendation from a colleague and I’m not usually into comedy. However, Douglas Coupland succeeds in weaving the comical aspects into other threads that are emotional and even philosophical, and all of this without slipping into preaching. This book is one of the few that has made me laugh out loud while reading it. It’s made me teary-eyed, too.

And it makes me think. I love it when books make me think–in fact, I consider a book which doesn’t make me think a waste of time. The underlying theme, to me, seems to be something as cliché as ‘love conquers all’, while steering clear of actually being cliché. While I have never been much of a family person, this book makes me think of my own family, the things that went wrong, the things that went right, and that the former is worth fixing because of the latter. I love my family, and this book reminds me not to give it up easily.

I set new priorites yesterday to give my writing the time it deserves to have in my daily life. Douglas Coupland makes me want to set new priorities today in order to give my family, too, the time it deserves.

In my mind, books are so much more than words on paper. The best of books can impact your life to the point where they save it. Less dramatically, they can steer it into a new direction, make you happy or sad, open your mind further, and make you think. Make you set new priorities.

All Families are Psychotic did that, and it is a book that was well worth the time I spent reading it. Apart from that, though, it is also entertaining to read, and I recommend it.

Tags: books, family, passion