Haha. It’s saved as version 26 on my computer. Please God, let it be done. I’ve been perfecting it for a year! Not going to lie, for the first time, I feel 99.999% sure it really is there.
We’ll see what my two awesome, amazing critique partners say!
Writer friends, you know when you’re working on that novel and the ideas are flowing and it’s just magic and you’re in the zone?
You just know what you’re writing is amazing and it’s just this rush of excitement and energy and brain juice and you just cannot stop. I dub this…the Writer’s High. Then you look at the little clock in the corner of your of your computer screen. It’s 2 AM. Oh, crap. I should probably go to bed
Those of you who don’t have the fortune of being a full-time, unpaid writer like me feel this the hardest. You just know, as you lay your head down on that pillow, that tomorrow…is…going…to…suck. (If it makes you feel better, writer friends, I usually end up waking up around 7:30 anyway cuz that’s my brain; hence this blog post instead of working on that WIP). If you’re like me, you still not going to be able to shut your brain off. Oh, the sacrifices we make for our craft.
The antidote? (for me anyway)
Okay, so my coffee is nowhere near that fancy this morning. Just good ol’ American drip coffee. After I ingest enough, hopefully I’ll be able to get to the many (many) writing tasks I have on the docket for this week.
Who’s with me? Has this ever happened to you, writer friends?
Writer friends, I know this has happened to you. You have that block of time to write, protected from all the world save some kind of zombie and/or asteroid-crashing-to-earth Apocalypse. Spouse, children, dog, co-workers, whatever normal pesky real life (and I say that with all the love in the world, cuz we love them all) things normally get priority, they’re gone. It’s just you and your computer and all those ideas always popping into your head when you’re with all of the above mentioned. But…then…you just can’t.
You want to write, but your brain’s foggy and your eyes are droopy and your body’s just not cooperating with its master. Those precious protected minutes tick by and the blinking cursor and empty page space taunt you.
A non-writer friend might say, “Just take a nap.” NO!!! But, but it’s the only hour I have all weekend.
Or sometimes it’s the reverse. Like it’s seriously late, well past your bedtime and you have to do that whole real job thing tomorrow, but you’re on that writer’s high and your brain just won’t shut up and the ideas keep flowing and flowing. An amazing feeling…at the time…but not so much the next morning. I shall dub it “writer’s hangover.” Oh, there’s my next meme! So stay tuned for that one.
Writer friends, what do you do when you want to write, but your body doesn’t cooperate? Make some coffee? Try to power through? Just succumb to it and take a nap?
Friends who did NaNoWriMo, does this happen even more in November as you’re trying to crank out those 50,000 words?
Hey, writer friends, what’s up? I was recently tweeting a fellow writer and she mentioned her latest editorial struggle (as depicted in above meme). This is totally me. I am a verbose person. Good for reaching the target word count, bad for keeping it under…. I try to set a goal of keeping my YA contemporary around 80,000 words. Which is almost impossible for me. So I start slashing words. A lot of words.
I go through my MS line-by-line, word-by-word, slashing whatever is not absolutely necessary. …and while cutting things, I’ll realize I need to have more internal monologue or emotional reaction or non-verbals to really convey the impact of a particular scene or the character’s progress on an internal or external story arc. And–tada!–not only have I failed in my goal of cutting X number of words, I’ve actually added 2000. …which leads to another edit.
But I trust the process. In the end, my story will be better for it!
Writer friends, what is your focus when you edit? Too many words? Too few? Those pesky adverbs? Telling instead of showing? Commas and semi-colons?
My title sounds a bit psychopathic, doesn’t it? I’m not a sadist or anything, I swear! It’s just, there are few jobs in the world where it’s a good thing to make a working partner cry. Not only is it a good thing, it might be like the best compliment you can get! (If you are writing something with sad things in it that is)
So the inspiration for my slightly creepy Sponge Bob meme… I was told this week by an awesome, amazing new critique partner that the end of one of my manuscripts made her cry. This was totally me:
That means I was able to create characters that were real and rounded enough that at least one reader cared deeply enough to be emotionally moved by imaginary events happening to fictitious people. All that hard work on characterization and pacing and plot construction (and redoing all of it several times) paid off!
Writer friends, what do you think is the best kind of compliment you can get on your manuscript?
Sarah J. Carlson 