Why Writers Like the Rain

It's raining now. The forecast is rain, baby, rain for days. The enemy to writing is beautiful weather. Warm, balmy days, blue skies, birds singing, people telling you to get outside and enjoy the day - bleh.

It's a guilt sandwich. Go outside and feel guilty that you're not inside getting words down. Stay inside and feel guilty that you're wasting a gorgeous day. 

Rain fixes that. 

I'm currently at work on book five in the St. Ives Book Club Mystery series, The Body in the Ravine, and I'm having a blast. It's due for release on July 12, 2022 barring Acts of God that knock out the power at the eleventh hour. Ontario was pretty badly hit by a major storm on the weekend and many people are still without power. 

This one is a little different for Elliot Marks and the St. Ives Book Club. 

While birdwatching with her group, Veronica Wakefield-Brice discovers a body hanging in the ravine behind her stately Ontario mansion. She is put out that the man chose her ravine in which to kill himself when there are so many other trees in St. Ives. His death is ruled suicide but when Elliot Marks finds a pair of shoes in Rainbow Lake, Veronica finds herself in the middle of the book club's murder-solving hobby. 

---

A few more weeks of crappy weather and I'll be finished. My significant other bought me a new electric lawnmower yesterday. (I am the mower of the lawn in our household) Fortunately the rain prevents me from leaving my desk for a few days yet. 

Hah! Foiled again, you people who want me outside!

My Secret Weapon for 2022 - Plottr

I've always been a pantser. I'd get an idea for a story, see the end or the main point in my head and off I'd go writing myself in and out of corners until I lurched to the finish line. 

The "finish" line was followed by weeks of (hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing) editing until I could declare the book complete or too stupid to live. 

My process was long, tedious and increasingly joyless. Worst of all, it did not result in book that was as tight as I would have liked it to be because I was exhausted and hated the thing by the end. 

There has to be a better way, right? Well, there is. It is called drafting an outline which is something normal people do. I've tried to nail that sucker down for years without success. The act of writing an outline to write only led to me hating my story faster. 

I can't even remember when I heard about Plottr or where, but on impulse I signed up for the online demo of the software. I am cheap. Some might even say stingy. I am immune to impulse buying or sales pitches. But I loved the demo. I could see instantly how this program could work for me. I could play with it, I could manipulate it to work the way my brain works. Sometimes I plot very tightly with it. Sometimes I follow one of the templates. Sometimes I use it for the timeline to shift scenes where I need them to be. I can see how the story is progressing in each box where I jot down everything from dialogue to clothing to weather.

The random bits that flesh out a scene get plugged into Plottr and make writing faster, easier and stronger. Less editing, less time wasted hunting around for where I put what. My daily word count went from an exhausting 2K day to a relaxed 5K a day.

I'm not sure how it does what it does. It's visual so that's a huge help when you're trying to figure out what comes next. It's also liberating because it's easy to plug in the bits that come to me and dump them if they're not working. I can move stuff around. It's not set in stone. There's room for some pantsing but I get a look at the dead ends before I start writing. I waste less time and brain energy when I'm cranking out the words. 

To make a living in self-publishing, we have to produce and Plottr is my secret weapon to amp up production. I have five books planned and instead of feeling overwhelmed and discouraged, I have this cool little tool at my side to get the stories out. 

If you are interested and want to check it out for yourself go to www.plottr.com. There is a rate for a lifetime license which is what I bought. The service is excellent. The thing works. 

Unpublishing a book is like....

Getting a divorce.

It smarts. But I had to do it.

My foray into the fast-paced world of writing fast and dirty was a bust. I conceived the idea for Razor Wire for the brand-spanking-new Kindle Unlimited program. It was designed to be read in installments, ending in a cliffhanger like a thriller television show. I'd outlined 6 'episodes', wrote 3, and then Kindle Unlimited changed its royalty structure for payment and the serial format lost its value overnight.

I bundled the installments, thinking I would come back to the series in future to write Razor Edge and Razor Close.

Heh. Well, here's the thing. I lost steam or my mojo or whatever that thing is that makes a writer connect to a story long enough to get it out. I tried many different methods to get going again but my brain wasn't having it. Creatively, the series was dead in the water.

And dead sales-wise too. I think I sold less than 10 ebooks and 5 print books that were mostly pity sales. A local fan said it wasn't anything like my other books. Yeah, well, a girl's gotta try new things or she becomes stale. I'm not sorry I wrote it because it pushed me out of my comfort zone to explore a new sub-genre. I think of Razor Wire as a creative experiment in writing to market, in which I proved to myself that the book market is a moving target.

Razor Wire is unpublished (or is in the process) at all retailers as of today. CreateSpace will still sell the print edition. My plan for the thriller is to go back to my original idea and publish it as a trilogy. I'll beef up the story, explore some themes I rushed through and go deeper into the psychology of the characters. I believe there's a good story there and I didn't give it its due. I'll release the serial in July in three complete installments. CreateSpace will get the complete edition for print at the same time.

Writing fast is dandy for first drafts, but the process has to slow down after that to get to the good stuff. Lesson learned. It only hurts a little. Lives were not lost.

Takeaways:

1. Stick to your vision.
2. The story wants to go the way the story wants to go. Be the pencil.
3. Slow down. You are creating worlds not making a cheese sandwich.

Daniel Razor and his troubling sidekick, Charlotte Dawson, will return new and and improved in the summer. Bigger and brighter in three juicy installments. 

A Writer's New Year's Resolutions

1. Write better books.

2. Get more exercise.

3. Write more books.

4. Make more money (anything above poverty level will do)

Resolution 4 used to top my list. Year after year, making money was my number one priority and year after year, it was never enough. I make more now than I did last year but at the expense of my body, emotional well-being and the joy of writing. So I'm ditching Resolution 4. 

Selling books is a crap shoot. Writers can spend years crafting novels and never make enough to pay the Hydro bill. Or they can spend 14 days writing a novel that lies there like a dead dog in August and never sells a copy. Or they can spend years working on craft and net thousands upon thousands of dollars from one book, or the exact same result could be achieved after a weekend of booze-induced scribbling. Total crap shoot.

I hereby resolve to ignore sales reports, do my best and let the money take care of itself. Sink or swim, the book is on its own. 

Next!

Resolution 1 and 3 can grow to like each other with steady, daily application to the word count. 200 words a day for 365 days equals one reasonably-sized book. 200 words is a walk in the park. For me and other writers, the demarcation between "good writing" and "cranking it out" is 2000 to 3000 words a day. 2K for me is a good day's work. A friendly, patient approach and good books will come in great quantity.

I resolve to write good books and more of them with daily dedicated application of 200 to 2000 words.

Which brings us to Resolution 2. All of us who sit in front of a computer for hours at a time need to stand up. Right now. I can see you. You're not standing. It has become life-threatening to sit for hours. (It probably always was but we're just learning about it.) I've restructured my office to allow me to stand and work. But that's not enough. Daily exercise outside improves just about everything.

I resolve to take a daily walk, which will help me stick to Resolution 1 and 3 and increase the odds of number 4 happening in my lifetime. 

I'll report back on December 31, 2016 (God and Blogger willing) on how my 2016 Resolutions panned out. Because that could be fun. Or not. We shall see!

Venosta, Quebec Writers' Retreat

I am off on a Writers' Retreat Sept. 25th to 27th in gorgeous Venosta, Quebec. I have never taken a retreat before due to lack of time and money and a deep-seated insecurity about the work. None of which has changed but I'm a sucker for a heritage farm house in the Gatineau Hills and I have a new series I'm struggling to get locked down for 2016.  

Mark Frutkin is the artist-in-residence. I read Erratic North and loved it. Thus, I am excited by the work ahead, tempered with rational dismay by the work ahead. 

Here is where the retreat is being held:  

http://www.venostawritersretreat.com/

What else is happening in my writing life?

I'm trying to zero in on the titles that did well since I began self-publishing, the titles that show promise and the titles I should put to bed. It's finding what interests me, what appeals to the market (readers) and the time I have available all in one place and then directing my energy there. Some writers nail this out of the gate and others (me) are slow learners. Onward!

Have a blessed weekend and don't forget to download your free copy of Heathcliff today on Amazon.

Because it's June! June, June, June!

You would have to enjoy Broadway show tunes to get the reference. Or live in a cold country.

I'm too busy to enjoy the summer. I have a writing schedule that would fell a horse. To help me out, I recently acquired a headset with microphone to use the Speech-to-Text function already loaded on my computer. It is an amazing tool for getting out that all-important first draft. I can talk out a lot of the subtext in the story and edit it in later. My wrist and back have been killing me from sitting long hours hunched in front of the screen. But it's not like a car that parks itself. My first go at it was only modestly successful. I had to do a lot of editing because APPARENTLY I talk a lot about stuff of absolutely no interest. I bored even myself.

In other news, my daughter is going to have a baby at the end of November. So that will be three grandchildren. Let me tell you something about kids. You tell them to do something and they don't do it. You tell them not to do something and they do it. I specifically said I wanted my fifties to get my ducks in a row before I became a grandmother. Did they listen? No.

I'm thrilled, but also under the gun to get the house finished so I have room to put them all up when they come to visit. Between us, we have four children who are all married or getting married and starting families of their own. Still, after spending ten days with my two-year-old grandson, I'm glad my kids didn't listen to me. That little guy wore me out.

My goals this summer:
1) A rough draft of a new series
2) Daily exercise (I should just 'cut-and-paste' this every month.)
3) Get over snake phobia and weed garden.

Write More. Write Fast. Write Now.

I'm hard at work every day on two new short series for Kindle Unlimited. I write 3000 words a day. It's not easy. The back is the first to go. The wrist is next. I have 20 years of writing experience. There's no excuse for a pitiful word count anymore. (Except blogging. Blogging is a good excuse.)

Tips For Increasing Word Count:

If you're just starting out, the best thing you can do for yourself is just write like hell. It's going to suck. But it's easier to fix words than it is to come up with new words. Write out of sequence if that helps. Write the bits you're interested in. You can knit it all together later. Revision is your friend. Don't worry, you'll get there. But not until you have a first draft with a beginning, middle and end.

If you have years of writing experience and just want to squeeze more productivity out of your writing time:

1) Know that you can write more. If I can do it, you can do it. Don't listen to the voice that says you can't. You can. You already know how to tell a story, it's a matter of typing it.
2) Don't think when you're writing. You can think later. If you get stuck thinking, skip to the next most interesting thing in your story and think about that. You'll want to write it and hey! there's no reason why you shouldn't.
3) Revise as you go along. Hah! I thought I couldn't do this either. But it's amazing how the brain will cough up corrections to scenes, adjust dialogue, add details, etc. if you just let it do its job.
4) Set a word goal and keep a beady eye on the number. It's your cookie--your validation--it loves you. Feed it and watch it grow.
5) When you get to the end of your novel and it resembles a novelette, DO NOT PANIC. This is where the fun happens. Go back to the beginning and flesh out the chapters with description, deepen dialogue and character, add bits of business. You'll be amazed at how painlessly word count grows to full-length novel.

To Outline or Not to Outline, That is the Question.

Some very prolific writers swear by their outlines. Based on my own experience and hearing from other writers, I think the outline works for a particular type of brain. Many authors start with an outline and then scrap it. I start by writing a first draft and the outline emerges from there as I go along.

If outlining exhausts your creativity when it comes time to write, don't bother with them. If you are inspired and excited by outlining and write like a white hot genius when you get to work, count your blessings. Keep what works, chuck what doesn't.

Is it possible to write a book in one month? I think it is but I think first and foremost, it's better to learn your own mind and take the time to say what you want to say. Ultimately, that's where the real joy of writing lies.

P. D. James and Me

I've been reading P. D. James for so many years, I can't remember a time when she wasn't "my" mystery author. I have a handful of authors I read over and over again for comfort or to make sense of the world or to just take care of me after I've had a crap day. P. D. James was one of those authors. She delivered the perfect blend of literary fiction and detective novel every single time.

When I started writing mysteries of my own, I felt a kind of obligation to her, to try to be as brave and intelligent. Her writing became the gold standard by which I measured my own work. I knew I wouldn't measure up but striving to get there was making me a better author. So when I read about her death, I cried a little because I felt like I'd failed her because I'd lost faith in writing, and in my writing in particular.

And then, on the same day, I got an email from Smashwords saying a review had been posted for The River Bride. Here is the link:

Review of The River Bride

It is hard to express the impact one thought-provoking, critical review can have on an author. In order to write well, we need the intelligence of the authors who came before us. And to continue to write well, we need the critical faculties of readers to guide us when we've lost faith.

I am grateful to the reviewer for taking the time. I am constantly amazed by the co-creation that is writing and reading. It really is something to have faith in.

The Frugal Author

It's Sunday. It's November. We've had snow flurries which I love. I am not one of those November-haters. I love November. Because:

1) It's hunting season.
2) It's quiet.
3) It's not too early for Christmas music.
4) It is too early to stress about Christmas shopping.

I woke at 6:00 am. Wrote/edited/swore at my latest manuscript. Then popped downstairs for televised church, then back upstairs for a teeny bit of writing. Just enough to keep me from sticking my head in a gas oven when I open the file again.

I joke about the gas oven. As if I could afford a gas oven.

Which brings me to The Frugal Author. I've been following an online discussion about how to weather the lean times in writing---a subject I consider myself an expert in as I've only known lean times. If you are considering chucking your job to write full-time, read on.

The Frugal Author: Tips to Living the Dream.

1) If you are currently spending money, stop. Break the habit of spending money while you still earn it. This will lessen the trauma to your central nervous system when you have no money to spend.

2) If you can save, save. If you can't save---see above.

3) Brace yourself to work hard. You will write every day, all day. Plan to write genre fiction even if you are working on The Great Canadian Novel. It will comfort you when no one buys your lit-fic and possibly pay some bills.

4) No. 3 does not apply if you are a New York City journalist, a plastic surgeon, or in the entertainment industry.

5) Don't worry about eating, it's overrated. But if you must, then learn to cook, shop local and (it goes without saying) don't shell out money for junk food (incl. booze). (I know, I know, this one hurt me too.)

6)  Do not go into debt for your books. Ever. You will be tempted. Resist. Hundreds of thousands of authors will back me up on this. Do not get so deep into debt that you can't write. This is the best advice I didn't take when I was starting out. I didn't take it and I still owe money for Living the Dream.

7) Self-publishing, you say? The temptation (and pressure) to spend is even higher. Do not spend more on your books than you can realistically expect to earn from them. And then ratchet those expectations down by about fifty percent. I'm not being negative. I'm being positive. You will positively have a tough slog to sell 100 copies of your book. Pace your expenses accordingly. Your market will grow ... but baby steps.

8) Agents reject you. Publishers don't respond. Your savings have dwindled and your life is shit. You never see your kids/husband/wife/mother/friends and your body is falling apart. Was it worth it? If your answer is no, then please do not quit the day job. Not a living soul will fault you for it. And if they do, send them to me and I'll set them straight.

9) The last frugal tip I have is for your ego. You'll have to adjust to working without reward. And don't kid yourself that the joy of writing will be enough. It's a hell of a joy but it's rarely enough to replace the validation, income, and society of the workplace. Think hard. There will be no reviews of your work. No feedback. You will have to accept silence for a very long time and write anyway.  

10) You took the red pill. You're all in and today is the first day of Living the Dream. You've got such a tiny economic footprint that you barely register on the grid of household expenses. You're eating rice and beans but on the upside, you've lost 10 pounds. The price of gas is something you never think about because you never drive anywhere. You write every single day. Even Sunday. And you are happy. Frugal living is a walk in the park. So the last tip is, this is the money shot. This day. This moment. Work hard. Give it your all. Enjoy every minute and give thanks.

I'll race you to the bestseller lists.

Phone calls, deadlines and the self-employed writer

I don't like it when the phone rings in my house. But I like it even less when the call is for me. A woman I met at a party this weekend has called and left a message for me. She wants to talk about something we enjoyed discussing at the party.

Now here's the thing.

I've talked already. I went to the party and I did all the talking I plan to do for a full week. Now I am writing. I write all day. Not always happily or willingly or with mad love in my heart for writing. Quite often I hate it. But it's what I do. Over years I've learned when the writing sucks, when I hate it---that's when I'm in the most danger of losing it. I've learned to dig deep and shut out all distractions and potential derailments. I've learned to stick with a troubled book like a fireman sticks with a person in a burning building or a mountain climber sticks to a mountain.

I have to get this book and another one finished in semi-finished draft form before the end of August. It's a deadline no one cares about or values except me. So do I keep working or call this person back? Now you know why writers are considered arrogant, nasty brutes. I feel like biting somebody. Where's the bloody phone number?

BOOK READ THIS MONTH: "Up and Down" by Terry Fallis. Funny, goofy read. I liked it. Book club was meh. I think you have to be in the mood for light satire and I was.

You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Book is About You

Dear Disgruntled Former Friends of Novelists Until You Were Betrayed,

Our book is not about you. You are not featured as a character. We didn't write about you now and we are not likely to write about you in the future. This isn't because you aren't interesting. You are!  It's the nature of writing itself that prevents a novelist from taking hold of a character (even a real life character such as yourself) and forcing that person to live inside a fiction. The fiction always wins in the end. Characters take on traits common to all human beings. Even the writer takes second place to the demands of the story which is universal or there is no point in writing it.

So take a deep breath and trust me on this. Just because you know (or did know) a novelist, it doesn't mean a thing. You are you, and a fictional character is fictional. Not real. Or as I like to think, people in novels are a reality we haven't experienced yet but are chasing after. We don't know why they attract or repel us but they do and such is the power of fiction. 

We didn't write about you. Or anyone else in Creation. We wrote about all of us. 

Sincerely,

Novelists Everywhere 

The Power of Churn

My first lesson (again, this lesson comes back to haunt me) is to NEVER throw anything out. Words, I mean. I don't care about other stuff. Other stuff can be replaced. Words not so much.

See, what the average author does is write and write and write and so much of it is rubbish that the writer despairs of ever being anything more than a hack. It's disgusting garbage the writer churns up in an effort to get at what the story is all about. The essential truth of the thing. The purpose, the meaning, the freaking point.

And then, eventually, it becomes clear. This is the point I reached at the beginning of September with THE RIVER BRIDE.  Now that it's clear though, I realize a lot of my earlier churn contained shards of gold. In whole pages of dreck are one or two useful observations. A couple of truths. I remember writing them. Can I find them again? NO! Because I cut and deleted and said, "Oh, lord, you'll never want THAT again."

Churn. Never underestimate its power.

Enough about me

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. 
”

Ernest Hemingway

I had a conversation with a woman at a wonderful gathering held recently at a historic stone mill in our village. She asked me about writing. Was it a huge undertaking to write a book and how did one start? I blinked back tears. How did one write a book. I wish I had asked myself this question back in 1995. Is it a huge undertaking? No, unless you consider your life an undertaking.

Books are sneak attacks. They take an unsuspecting soul by stealth. How does one write a book? By ceasing to care about anything or anyone until the story is out. At which point you throw it at an agent who will try to midwife it into the world.

Sounds glamorous. It's not. It's not showering. Teethbrushing is forgotten. Writing means you stop doing the things normal people do. When you do find yourself out somewhere where you're expected to enjoy yourself, all you can think about is the work in progress. It's putting on a smile for family and friends when the rejections are rolling in. It's finding peace only with other writers who are suffering or musicians who are always suffering. It's a blinding obsession that in our current culture you're pretty sure you need to be medicated for.

But the book demands to get out. Is it a Great Novel? Hell no. Stephenie Meyer didn't wonder if her fledgling unknown was the Great Novel either as it pulled her out of sleep and drove her to write where ever and whenever she could,  with little kids and a husband in tow. She wrote. Obsessed. That is what it is. And it is lonely.

I haven't read the Twilight saga. The success of the final product isn't the point. Because you have no idea what that success might be. Meyers didn't know. Anymore than I do. That's the point. To be a writer, you have to surrender to the unknown and write anyway.

So to the lady who asked: How does one start? One doesn't. One is taken by force.

Enchanted April

Rain. Rain. And in case I forgot it's April ... more rain.

I wish I could report that I have a garden of tulips, daffodils and crocuses blooming. I always plan to buy bulbs in the fall to make this magic happen in the Spring but ... I'll be honest, it's hard to push oneself to labour for a reward that's 6 months away.

Hey! Much like writing a novel!

I'm working on Book #3. My original title was scrapped and for good reason. I don't miss it at all. After a bit of brainstorming I came up with THE RIVER BRIDE which my agent liked, so that's the one we're going with.

THE RIVER BRIDE is about jealousy and murder, art and forest fires, marriage and lust. A tangle of passionate, but doomed attachments, playing out in the high heat of summer.

It was going well until Easter. Then family dinners, children home from university, phone calls to siblings, shopping, chocolate, visiting--LIFE--knocked me out of my flow, and now I'm stalling, stumbling, and generally zoning out. It's as if my brain suddenly realized there was a world outside of my imaginary one and it ain't going back.

It would be easier on my brain if there were no holidays at all. Writing is turning me into a feral animal. A hermit who never gets out of her bathrobe. A person who will never have spring flowers in her garden because that would mean thinking about something that wasn't writing.

The most non-writer thing I've done since Christmas was lose 12 pounds. Yes! The 12 pounds I gained when I started writing in 2004 I have FINALLY lost. And you know? It was fun thinking about something that had nothing to do with writing. It was fun mooning about my diet instead of my word count, and going for hikes with the dog in the morning. Le sigh.

Time to wrestle my brain back into the car. Bathroom break is over. We've got a long way to go.

PS: Congratulations Prince William and Kate. I hope you will be very happy. (I get all weepy for Diana, like a faucet, whenever I see her little boy on television.) (Arghhh! Damn it! Brain, get back to work!)

A day in the life of a writer

7 am: Wake up. Remember last night's resolve to go for a walk first thing in the morning believing it will help with the writing today. Drink coffee instead.

8 am: Bring the laptop to the living room where it's warm. Put on a Celtic music CD. Boot up computer. Still in bathrobe.

10 am: Looking at my page count; fight the urge to check email instead. I want to finish this Act and I've got 3 pages to go.

12 noon: Incredibly, I'm finished. 5 pages and the Act is done. Now I've got something I can work with tomorrow. I'm tempted to keep going but past experience has taught me that the first Act "informs" the second Act. Why write cold if I don't have to? I'll revise what I have so far and from that I'll get the foundation for Act II.

Still in my bathrobe with the dog staring at me, I check my email. Nothing there that requires attention so I do a little surfing around writer blogs because writing is a lonely gig ... and that's my day.

This is my "first draft" writing life. At this point, sheer discipline is the only "talent" I'm drawing on. It's the most exhausting phase of the process and the most dangerous. Distraction is ever present. Resistance to the work is high. As for income ... uh, well, there isn't any. I work for the local bookstore and newspaper on an on-call basis. When they call, I come. The constant pressure to make money is a gnat that I have learned to ignore. I live cheap instead.

Time to get dressed! The dog awaits.

The importance of carrying on...

I was watching the movie, Salt last weekend. Angelina Jolie fighting full out--a joy to watch and I thought: Gad, she must be soooo exhausted. (The character, I mean, although Angelina was probably whacked out too.) But slowing down is out of the question--she'll be killed. The nail-biting tension of most suspense/thriller movies comes from that place of knowing the character cannot give up, never, not even for a moment.

Ah, the life of a writer--so similar to an Angelina Jolie action movie. The bad guys we're fighting are demons of doubt, bad news, and a mean-spirited inner critic. And we must never, never, ever give up. We must get up, dust ourselves off and turn to the page. Over and over and over again.

Natalie Goldberg says it best in Writing Down the Bones:

"Okay. Your kids are climbing into the cereal box. You have $1.25 left in your checking account. Your husband can't find his shoes, your car won't start, you know you have lived a life of unfulfilled dreams. There is the threat of nuclear holocaust....it is twenty degrees below zero outside...and you don't have even have three plates that match to serve dinner on....You lost your favorite pen and the cat peed on your current notebook.

Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write."

In fact, Natalie Goldberg says everything about writing best. Stop reading blogs. Read Natalie Goldberg.

How's the writing going you ask?

Um. Slowly. Thanks for asking.

I have approximately 20 decent pages and the rest is crap--78 pages of crap. Non-writers don't get it. Why would we spend our day writing pages that we'll just throw out later? Why? Why?

How can I explain it? If we don't write the pages that will have to be tossed, we won't get to the story inside. Writing is a boring, painful process and anyone who tells you different is lying.

It's not that the sentences are terrible--they are but they can be fixed later. It's the story, the plot--my reason for living that is bogging me down under this growing pile of slag! So much that is of no use! I'm spinning my wheels, losing confidence that I'll ever know what this book is about.

A walk with the dog is in order.

The answer will come singing through the wilderness and I'll feel fabulous again. For at least one page.

So this is what a writer does all day....

Thinking about characters, sprawled on my bed under a quilt, rain pummelling the roof. Tea and cookies on the nighttable. The dog is asleep in the bathroom having given up all hope of a walk. I've spent the morning thinking about the main character in the story I'm working on. Thinking about his name, what he looks like, what he wants and why he wants it. I didn't expect the main character to be a guy, so this is all news to me. I thought this story was about a young woman, but here he is, impossible to ignore.

He came to me when I was walking the dog earlier this week. The dog and I walk the trails behind my house to a nearby lake. At the very end of a dirt road is a cottage with a weather-beaten dock. No one is ever at the cottage so the dog and I have adopted the dock as our own personal goofing off space. It's a lonely spot. Silent, except for the wind and birds and the lake lapping the shore. Very peaceful. It was in a moment of not thinking, planning, plotting, that this character came along. A more intriguing, complex character than I could have devised on my own, bringing with him a more intricate and dangerous plotline.

My little critique group starts up again October 1st so I have to have the first 25 pages ready. I'm glad I didn't rush into what I thought I was going to write. Sometimes it pays to procrastinate.

The dreaded first draft...

Plugging away at the new novel. I've found a title but for the first time since I started writing 15 years ago, I don't have a fix on the ending. I usually know how a story opens and how it ends. Today I had a glimmer of where my character is going but I'm not sure.

I don't write from an outline because it never, ever works. I'll spend days outlining a story only to have the whole thing go off the rails as soon as I begin writing. These days I begin with a character and try to follow the character's trajectory to the end.

But first drafts are hard. So much is unknown at this stage. Some writers edit as they go along or go back over the previous days work to carry them forward. I write in scenes. Once I know a bit about the character and what his or her problem is, the scenes start to take shape in my mind when I'm walking or doing housework. I write them down in longhand. Each scene reveals a bit more about character which in turn drives the plot. But as the plot isn't clear at this stage, lots of writing is done in the full knowledge most of it will be chucked out.

The first draft is called the Discovery Draft for a reason. The term is from The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray (Dell Publishing, 1994), a book I stumbled across when I first started writing and have used as a reference ever since. Ray breaks down the challenge of writing a novel, explains plotting using Aristotle's Incline and the value of writing your novel in scenes. He covers a number of other facets of the process one weekend at a time, and does so in clear, concise language.

Here's the power of words: by calling the first draft the Discovery Draft, I am liberated from needing to know what I'm doing. Whenever I'm tempted to figure it out, I remind myself this is a discovery, an adventure. Just keep writing and soon you'll know what you're writing about.

This is a challenge. Tossing a thousand words a day into the computer with the vague idea they'll add up to a story one day in the distant future is crazy.

But the even crazier thing is that they always do!