Every now and then, young writers contact me for advice on writing and publishing and/or to interview me for a school assignment. In these cases, I try very hard not to terrify them. Recently, one of these young writers asked me a question that resulted in me ranting a bit. I hope I didn't terrify her, but it was an important rant on a subject I myself often need to be reminded of. So I'm going to repeat my rant (in expanded form) here.

She asked me of procrastination and how it would effect her goals. And I said:

Well, yes. Procrastination is bad. But you already know that! I'll put it plain and simple: Procrastination means you don't get things done. If you don't get things done, then things don't get done. That sounds stupid but it's true. Here's the thing about writing that a lot of aspiring writers weirdly don't seem to understand. They seem to think that all they have to do is THINK about writing. No, seriously. You wouldn't believe how many people never get beyond this point. But if you want to have written, you first have to WRITE. It doesn't work any other way. Little elves do not come into your room at night and write your book for you. Believe me, I've left out cookies for them and they never show up. Unless you are a famous celebrity and can afford to hire ghost writers, the only person that is going to write your book is you.

So. To overcome procrastination, you must decide what it is you want the most: Do you want to write a book, finish it, get it published, have people read it and e-mail you and tell you how much they adore you and your work and also get a check from a publisher that you can cash and use to buy yourself things like food and other lovely stuff? Or do you want to play Farmville?

For a writer, this is entirely up to you. You do not have any boss but yourself. Nobody is going to stand over you with a stick and force you to write. The world is not waiting for you to write your Great American Novel. The world doesn't particularly care if you do or not. There are plenty of other writers out there who are writing and getting things done. So if you want to be one of those people, you must do this on your own. There is simply no way around this.

Here is the expanded part: I actually had a revelation about this years ago. Is it ridiculous that I would need to have a revelation that in order to write, you have to actually...er..write? Well, I did.

The revelation came during a particularly brutal revision on my first published novel, Raising the Griffin. I was so horribly stuck on a difficult problem my editor had raised and that I could not find a solution for. I remember actually, literally banging my head on my desk because I couldn't figure it out. I was working late into the night, bruised forehead and all, writing and rewriting the same scene from one dead end into another. The rest of the family had long gone to bed and the house was quiet and I was pretty sure I would never be able to do what needed to be done. I was done. I was quitting. I even said it out loud.

"I can't do this!"

And this is where I begin to sound delusional, but remember, it was quite late at night and I had recently suffered a self-inflicted head injury. But I swear I heard a voice quite distinctly say:

"If you don't do it, it won't get done."

There it was. The plain, simple fact. No one was going to do it for me. And nobody but me was really going to care if I didn't do it. And why should I care? Because I'm not afraid to admit that I'm one of those writers who loves having written. I love having written because I love to be read. To be read, you must be published. And 99.99% of the time, unfinished books don't get published. And so it must be done. And so I must do it. And so must this young writer. So far, nobody has figured out how to get around this. Except rich celebrities, that is.

So for the last little while, I've been working on revising HOS. To do that, I had to finish up HOSvision. (What the heck is HOSvision?)





I'm so glad I set this up because it's been enormously helpful for revision. It gives me both a broad view of the balance of the plot but also a very quick chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene accounting of the story. So as I'm going along revising, I can track just where certain things happened without relying on memory or flipping through 500 pages.

The chart is color coded by the characters that dominate each scene. For some reason (and it would probably be a good idea to figure out why,) this made more sense for me, helped me keep things clear. There are little star stickers in a variety of colors to give me the emotional feel of the scene. The larger dark stickers are actually cat stickers because I could not for the life of me remember where the cat was in this story and it was important to know where she was.

Of course, the thing that jumps out is the long string of blue stickies near the end. That's the climax (and the lead up to the climax.) This seems long, right? Six chapters of buildup and climax. But it's a fifty-chapter book. Also, this is when my MC is drawn almost completely into the world and secret hell of the character represented by the blue stickies.

In the end, this method helped more as an organizational tool than an aid in helping me move forward as far as figuring out the plot. But since I am a massively disorganized mess at the best of times, I'm definitely going to try this again with the current WIP, especially since that is from two different POVs. I'm going to need a lot of stickies.

1. Uh, nowhere, actually.

2. I have, though, been head down in revision on HOS. It's gone very well and I'm so excited about this book. I love it dearly, dearly, dearly. My first two published books had male MCs and while I adore them still and loved writing them, I feel a kinship with Eddy (the female MC of HOS) that is different. Well, there is a difference between adoration and kinship.

3. I've also been working on a new WIP. Bits and pieces and trying to plot as much as I can. I've got two MCs this time, a boy and a girl, and this girl is a little slow to let me in, so I'm giving her time to reveal herself.

4. And eventually, I will relaunch WIP Diary 2.0, if only to help me keep track of what I'm doing. Hopefully next week.

5. And I am embracing the digital age. I was given an ereader for Christmas and I love it. For me, it does not replace physical books. There are pluses and minuses to it. Chiefly--and this may be a quirk of my own--I miss flipping through pages with ease. Ereaders do not flip. Other issues include protecting it from extremes in temperature which aren't all that extreme, like ninety-eight degrees. And a sudden new concern that it could be stolen, so I can't leave it in the car, something that never worried me with physical books. And many of my old favorite books--the books I love to reread--are not available in ebook form. (Hello, Dorothy L. Sayers estate, get on the ball.) But on the plus side, as a multi-book reader (reading more than one book at a time,) I do love carrying a truckload of books around with me in the palm of my hand.

I enjoyed doing these throughout the process of writing HOS, so thought I'd see what the final one looked like. Here it is:

We went on a little research expedition last week, hoping it would trigger some inspiration and help me figure out what project to work on next. We visited the closest "old growth" forest preserve, this one at Snyder-Middleswarth State Park. It had rained all day the day before and was overcast, foggy and with a steady mist the day we went. And you know what? In some weird way, walking in the woods in the rain (which I have somehow never done before) was an oddly addictive thing. I really want to do it again, soon. Maybe it was an elemental thing. Here you had earth, water and air all around you and pretty much nothing else.



Old growth was not what I expected. I expected a dense, dark forest, but the big trees inhibit sapling growth. And unfortunately, deer overpopulation has decimated the undergrowth in a lot of these forests. Still, it was very different than many of the other state forests we're familiar with. For one thing, there was no dirt visible. As rainy and wet as it was, we emerged without a spot of mud on us, even though we slipped and fell and had to clamber over hillsides and rocks and fallen trees. The trail was either rock (so covered in lichen they were solid green) or a black peat of hemlock bark and needles so thick and soft, it was like walking on a sponge.



Oddly, it didn't smell like anything. I had gone prepared to collect sensory details and fully expected a catalog of fragrances and odors to take with me. Especially in the rain, you would expect the place to be redolent of earth and moldering leaves, spicy with the scent of fern. What it was, instead, was utterly clean.



The place was lush with ferns and a rich variety of mosses, including this wonderful shaggy moss that covered an entire hillside of rocks:



The mist and fog were perfect for the story I have in mind, almost like it was intended. We only had this one day for our trip and it turned out to be perfect weather:



The trail was challenging and made few concession to ease of hiking. You wanted to see this forest, you had to work for it. Here the trail disappears into a spring. You had to figure out how to get around it.



In other places, we hopped from rock to rock (wet rocks) and had to figure out if it was easier to go over or under trees. In some cases, neither option was ideal. And then there was this:



On the stump of this fallen hemlock, other hikers have left a cairn of stones. I don't know why or what it means, but if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's to take note of details like this because sometimes, they are a gift from the universe. And so, we'll see....

Hoping to go out again to another old growth preserve in a couple of weeks (if it isn't freezing cold.) This one definitely shook something loose and the ideas are starting to simmer. Setting was definitely a strong connection in Funny How Things Change, a connection that built the plot. And I think it will be with this idea as well.

Now as for the other front runner idea, that research is quite a bit different, and I'll be doing some of that this week.

I took a week off to wallow in the plight of Dante and Lulu over at General Hospital*. (Please, General Hospital! Please stop putting holes in Dante! I can't take it!)

I'm so out of practice in sending mss out into the world, but I do remember how important it is to become invested in a new project as soon as possible. So today is going to be "What Next" day. I've got a file full of ideas but nothing that's really jumping up and down and saying "Write me! Write me!" Maybe it's too soon after finishing TDB to have that excited feeling. It will come, I'm sure. Maybe I just need to open a couple of them and work on each one a bit until one of them takes off. That sounds like a plan. And right now, a plan sounds good.

The problem is that the three front-runner ideas are sooooo sketchy, and that terrifies me. See, TDB (aka HOS) started out very sketchy, just an assemblage of pretty things I wanted to toss into a book and twirl around with. Plot? Who needs a plot! We have carriages and balls and pretty dresses! Yeah, that didn't work out so well.

So this week might be about taking each idea out for a test drive, a little waltz across the floor and see if one of them takes off.




*And one of these days, I have to write about what I've learned about storytelling from soap operas. But right now, I feel like I'm learning more from reading the message boards than from the shows themselves. It's so interesting to gauge what works for viewers and how they interpret the characters and their actions and motivations, what works for them and what doesn't.

You know why? Because I finally finished This Damned Book!!! That's right, at 9:00 last night, this monstrous, out-of-control thing finally wrapped up. I'm thinking it might have one of the longest, most drawn-out endings in YA history, but I don't care. I love it. It makes me happy to see it all tied up in dozens of pretty pink ribbons.

And I managed to finish it while distracted by day job angst, Christopher Plummer's loin cloth, a jackwagon neighbor who seems to believe that the way to fix a car is to repeatedly rev the engine right outside my window all flipping day long, and my deep concern over the fact that Dante Falconeri currently lies bleeding to death on the floor of Sonny Corinthos' coffee warehouse! That, my friends, is dedication.

At this point, I choose not to think (too much) about how many years I spent writing this thing. (Because A#1, I choose not to make myself any crazier than I already am.) Though I do wonder why I stuck with it. It's not like it's going to rival War and Peace or change anyone's life or anything. It ain't that kind of a book.

But it is my book and my characters and once they had taken life inside my head, I couldn't walk away from them. Oh, I tried. There was a whole year in there where I just completely abandoned them. But I kept thinking of them, home alone, living off of saltines and ketchup, and I had to go back and take care of them. Because that's the thing my writer friend keeps telling me. You are your characters' only chance. If you don't care about your characters, nobody else will. You owe it to them to give them every chance to live and breathe.

At this point, I'm not going to think in terms of revision or the possibility of having to cut drastically. (Maybe it's a blessing it did take me this long because if I'd finished a book this size five years ago, no one would have considered it. Now, a door stopper like this doesn't raise an eyebrow.)

But it's hard not to wonder if it will sell, if anyone but me will love not just the characters, but the frivolous details, the relatively pointless asides and extraneous interactions.

Whether it sells or not, it's done. It pleases me. It pleases me that I finished it. And now my terrier brain can move on to the Next Damned Book.

Final Statistics:

506 pages
125,089 words
50 chapters
6 kisses
1 death
3 sisters
1 cat
2 balls
1 muselar
3 handsome men
1 cold mama
3 dresses made out of curtains
1 snippy housemaid
and a curse

So stuff keeps happening to draw this ending out. I am violating every rule and tenet of structure here but I don't care. I'm just letting TDB roll out the way it wants to.

But I must say that at this point, I am rather tired of describing kisses. You see, there's been a bit of a pile-up of kissing in the last quarter of this novel. All of a sudden, everyone wants to kiss my MC.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy kissing. It's a very nice thing we humans have lit upon. But after about the fourth or fifth one, you run out of ways to describe the texture of lips and the spreading warmth of sensation a really good kiss can provide. In short, breaking kisses down into technical description gets annoying after awhile.

Today, I'm going back through the last couple of chapters to add in some details that I skated over. Oh, I know, you're not supposed to write this way. But you know what? This is the way I write. My mind won't be happy until we go back and make sure we've made it clear that James's shirt has been ripped open there in chapter forty-eight.

And then...and then...I might be able to finish today. Do you think I will??? Is this E-Day? (Ending day!) Stay Tuned.

So the other day, I'm all angsty about how there won't be a happy ending to This Damned Book because I was so smugly certain it just wouldn't work out that way.

Well.

I was wrong. Once I shut up, let go of the anxiety of rushing to the finish and just let my characters do what they wanted to do, guess what they did? Well, I probably shouldn't tell you, but it wasn't what I fully expected to happen, what I was actually planning to write.

Once again, this is the kind of stuff that makes you sound like a prime candidate for the laughing academy, but it's not as freaky weird as it sounds. It's about listening to the characters. Wait, no. That still sounds freaky, like you think they're actually real people or something. But that's getting closer to it.

Look, I know they're not real but the thing is, I want them to seem like they are to the reader, so I have to remember that when I'm writing, remember that they have reactions according to their own feelings that may not necessarily fit into where I think the story should go and I fail to listen to them at my peril.

Must go to the day job. Hoping to get to the end by early next week!

(I know these entries are coming fast and furious now, but that's because I'm nearly done!)

So, as feared, the denouement is spinning out of control, heading into the third chapter of tying things up. The big problem is all the explanations. There was so much my MC didn't know that the reader also didn't know and it all needs to be explained clearly, quickly and realistically. Man, I hope this works.

And then there are all of the relationships to resolve. There is no room here for a romantic happily ever after. It wouldn't be realistic anyway. It would take a whole 'nother book. (And no, I ain't writing no sequel to TDB!) So I have to somehow set up a satisfying close that is really an opening, that will let the reader know that yes, this will happen in the future. Is that going to be satisfying enough? I don't know. I guess I'd better go work on that and see how it turns out.

One of the great things about writing--the things you can never admit to non-writers because they will look at you oddly and back away very veerrrrrrry slowly so they don't startle you into a violent act--is when your brain knows more than you do. When it does stuff without telling you why. You know what I mean? (Please don't say "Nooooo, Melissa. Nobody else is this weird.")

So here are a couple of examples from this damned book (which I'm thinking of abbreviating as TDB) I'm working on:

Early on in the book, a cat showed up. I like cats a lot (I just can't live with them--the hair, you see.) So I figured a cat was a good thing to have in a book and I'd let her stay. I didn't think she was important and from time to time, I'd consider just cutting her because it was sometimes difficult to remember to keep her in scene. But my brain knew she was important and wouldn't let me cut her.

And damned if my brain wasn't right. Come the climax, the cat was a key to getting my heroine out of a sticky situation.

And then there was the cloak. At the beginning of the climax, one of the characters put on his cloak. Now this is a big old bloated book and I'm looking to trim words anywhere and wherever I can, so I was going to take out the bit about the cloak. It wasn't important. It wasn't needed. Who cared if he was wearing a cloak or not (sexy as cloaks may be.)

But no, my brain said. Do not touch the cloak on pain of screwing this thing up yet again! So I left the cloak. Now it didn't turn into some pivotal plot point, but there is a moment that would be far less poetic if this guy hadn't been wearing a cloak.

So you see, my brain knows more than I do sometimes. I try not to take it personally and I'm learning to just do as my brain tells me as much as possible.

I had this happen to great effect in Raising the Griffin, too. I had provided Alexei with a horse because I like horses and guys on horses are very sexy. But again, the whole horse thing was taking up a lot of room and I started wondering if it was really all that important. Then I reached a point in the story where I needed something that the people of Rovenia could give to Alexei and whoa! There it was! The horse! They could give him back the horse he had to leave behind.

If you read that book, it looks like I had that all planned out, doesn't it? Maybe I'm being stupid for publicly admitting that it was a huge surprise to me. But there it is. This is one of the cool cool things about writing for me, these secret brain surprises.

But back to the WIP (TDB), this week, I am working on the denouement and trying to ignore the feeling that it is spinning out of control. I was comfortable with the idea that it would be a long denouement that would nicely tie up all of the loose ends of the story into pretty little bows. (I think it's the kind of story that calls for that. You can't leave nearly 500 pages of painstakingly detailed fluff on a spare, stylistic question mark.)

But right now, I seem to be in a mire of explanation and that feels a little deadly. But I'm going to go ahead and write it all out and then go back and see how it feels. The problem is that it's a kind of secondary character who is doing all of the explaining and it just feels weird for some reason. Just not quite sure why, yet. But we'll see.

So today is "work my way back in" day. I work three days a week (the horror, I know) and there is little time to think of writing on those days. Work consumes me entirely. And it's hard for me to just leap back into the writing after a break of several days like that. If anyone has any tricks on how to do that efficiently and quickly, I'd love to hear about them!

The Book: The Princess Bride by William Goldman

So I was properly appalled this weekend to learn that so many of my writer friends had never read The Princess Bride. Bad writer friends!!! They had all seen and adored the movie but had never been moved to read the source material. So now I'm going to tell you why you should and hope that you will rush right out and do so and report back to me about how right I was. There's time. I'll wait.

( Enter here for lengthy reasons as to why you need to read The Princess Bride even if you loved the movie and think you don't need to read the book. )

I finally finally finally worked my way through the climax of this story. I think shifting a load of coal would have been easier. Dirtier, but easier. This was bloody hard work.

I was trying to describe the process to writer friends, thinking there ought to be a very good analogy for it. The best I could come up with is having a massive snarl in your hair where you have to go back and comb and comb this bit and that bit until you get it all worked out. But that's not quite accurate either.

See, here's how my process works. (And "works" is a very loose term.) I write largely linearly. In that I start at the beginning and write to the end. Ideally, that is. I do occasionally write out scenelets and snippets out of order as inspiration strikes. And I do spend an awful lot of time backtracking. This usually happens when I get stuck. I get stuck because something I've written previously is wrong and I just have to go back and rewrite until I figure it out. This is why the shitty first draft has never worked for me. My brain just doesn't work that way.

Now the problem with the climax is that it's not only the point where the action of the book leads, the point where the problem posed to the main character is resolved (or not, as the story desires,) but it is also where the theme of the book--er--crystallizes. Or something.

My problem is that I almost never know what my theme is. No different with this project. Naturally, that complicated figuring out how the climax should play out. I had to keep writing out thoughts and dialogue that weren't going to end up in the scene in order for me to understand what was really going on with the characters.

The climax was the first time we really "see" this pivotal character. Her presence has been felt all along, but now she finally gets a voice and the opportunity to give her side of things. I don't think I realized until I started writing it out just how important that was. Suddenly, I couldn't make her do what I thought she had to do in order to bring my climax around to a resolution.

Instead, I had to go back to this event that had happened long before the action of the book, an event that I had already described from another character's POV. I had to understand it from hers. Even though she takes up such a small amount of page space, understanding her is important. Understanding why she is doing what she's doing is crucial for my MC because the final choice is going to come down to her.

One of the great challenges of this book has been letting go my notions of what a book should do and be (structurally, mainly) and allowing this book to roll out the way it needs to roll out. Be what it wants to be. I think I've been resisting that all along. First, I've been resisting the length the book needs to be. And maybe I've been resisting what the book is really about. That I'm not sure of because I think that will be revealed as I work through the denouement.

So that's the next challenge. I'm still not sure what my MC thinks about all that has happened! If I can figure that out, I may very soon be able to write "The End!"

Deep in the muck of unregarded doom,
Where none can make a conquest, none have room
To stretch an aching muscle,--there might be
Interstices where impulse could go free...
There, where accomplishment cannot achieve,
Valour defend, religion quite believe,
Or vengeance plot behavior,--there may still
Be cracks, uneasy instinct well might fill
And even worm it's way along, until
All might begin again; and Man receive
In prospect, what he never can retrieve.

So I thought I'd start a new series of posts in my neverending quest to understand plotting. I'm looking at movies (and the occasional TV episode) that I love, instead of getting all outraged over movies I didn't love. This time, instead of picking apart what didn't work, I'll pick apart what does. Starting with...
)
The Movie: All Through the Night (1942) starring Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt and a bunch of other great character actors (no big name female co-star in this one.

The Plot

"Gloves" Donahue is a happy-go-lucky Broadway gambler with underworld connections who gets really upset when someone murders the baker who makes his favorite cheesecake. So he sets out to discover the murderer. In the process, he incriminates himself and entangles his sidekicks Sunshine and Barney in a nest of Nazi spies. So Gloves' quest shifts from finding a bakery murderer to stopping Nazis from blowing up a battleship in New York harbor.

And that's it. That's the plot, which is really pretty straightforward. Most of the film involves Gloves and his friends running away from the police and then the Nazis, escaping from the police and then the Nazis and collecting clues along the way.

What Makes It Work

Pacing

It's a romp. These people never slow down. There was maybe one scene where Gloves and his friends stood still in a domestic interior for a quiet conversation that lasted more than three minutes. (And that was only because Gloves had leapt into the East River and had to go home and change his clothes.) But the rest of the time, they're chasing Nazis through giant warehouses, getting lost in Central Park (which was hysterical) and leaping into rivers, as mentioned earlier.

Humor

Oh, it's so easy to say that humor is the key but humor is damned hard. And it's a different animal in novels than it is in movies. In movies like this, you've got William Demarest and Humphrey Bogart with his uber dry delivery to bring your humor to life. (A line like "There's more here than meets the FBI" would have landed with a thump, delivered by anyone else.)

A lot of it has to do with the type of humor. It's rapid-fire and smart, but much of it was very subtle (in this weirdly un-subtle way) so that you had to be paying attention and really think about what they were saying. (Barney's honeymoon was interrupted by this Nazi hunt and at one point, he desperately wanted to use the phone to call his wife and explain why he was late for their--er--you know. Sunshine says to him "Okay, but make it a quickie." Heh. Or in the clutches of the Nazis, Gloves brazens it out and insists that he's going to walk out with this torch singer girl. "The young lady and I are going out," he says and then gets cold-cocked and knocked out. And the movie starts out by telling you flat out "Hey, this is cheesecake! Get it???")

But the humor was also very human. It wasn't like the humor in His Girl Friday. That humor is great, but nobody talks that way. It was also rapid-fire and smart, but it was studied and artificial. This humor is very natural and self-referential in charming ways. Like when Gloves gets lost in Central Park and is nonplussed. "Imagine that. Me! In the middle of New York. Lost in the woods." Or when he expertly shoots out a panic button the head Nazi is reaching for. Head Nazi says "Did you learn that in one of your gang wars?" And Gloves says "No, that's a little trick I picked up in Benny's Shootin' Gallery in Coney Island." You believed that these people were just a hoot.

Characterization

These guys are terrific. I may go so far as to say they're adorable. Adorable two-bit gamblers. It is very quickly established who and what they are and they are unapologetic about it. They like who they are and so you can't help but like them. So you've got non-traditional good guys. They don't look like good guys on the surface, but when in extremis, they are exceptionally good. They put personal concerns and desires aside (Hello, honeymoon!) to solve the problem. But they aren't so poisonously good and noble that you can't relate to them. That's hard to resist.

How It Nearly Fell Apart

THE MOVIE KILLED A DOG!!!

I was with this movie up until the end. See, the head Nazi had this little dachshund named Panzer that he took with him everywhere--including on his suicide mission to ram the battleship with a speedboat loaded with explosives. Damned Nazis. The Nazi guy is forcing Gloves to drive the boat at gunpoint. At the last minute, Gloves swerves so the boat heads towards a lumber barge and hits that instead and Gloves jumps off the boat just before it hits, saving himself. Why couldn't he save the dog??? The movie didn't even have to show it. He could just be holding Panzer at the press conference at the end. But no. Poor little Panzer. Glub, glub, glub.

Don't kill the dog, y'all.

I'm still working on the climax but wow, things are falling into place. It's actually a cascade of little thoughts and ideas and let me tell you, it is a freaking fantabulous feeling.

See, I feel like for the last 100 pages, I have been laboriously piecing this story together. Or constructing it brick by brick, lugging the things and heaving them into place and slapping mortar all over them to make them stay where I want them. It has been bloody hard work.

But something clicked recently, and my brain seems to have decided to stop acting like it has no idea what it's supposed to be doing ("Wut? Write? Words? Ideas? Sorry, none of this is ringing a bell. Let's watch Judge Judy.") and is making with the ideas like a clerk on commission in a fancy dress shop. ("Look at this? What do you think of this one? Oo! I have something you're going to love in the back! Wait a sec!")

What happened? Once again, I don't know. Maybe it was simply a matter of powering through the parts where inspiration had dried up--the brick-laying parts--until I had worked out the construction issues that had been niggling at the back of my mind during the whole writing of the book. Maybe that's what had made inspiration dry up. And now that I have figured out how to make those parts work, my brain is rushing in, now that the hard work is done--like it was participating all the time--and going "Yeah! Let me help you with that! Here's some stuff! And here's some more! How much of a percentage am I getting for this?"

So maybe it's a confidence thing. I have restored my brain's confidence by proving that we could figure this damned thing out after all and that makes my brain feel secure enough to start churning out ideas again.

Am I completely insane? Maybe just sort of.

Thank you to the teen services team at the Lexington Public Library for including Funny How Things Change on their awesome high school reading list. I'm kind of blown away and seriously honored to find my book among so many of my very favorite books.

Had a major breakthrough on a plot element that had been hanging over my head for a good part of the book.

Conventional writing wisdom says to jump over it and write on, come back and figure it out later. This approach has never worked for me. I wish it did, but I have to work with what I've got. And for me, I need to know how things work before I can move on.

In this case, the solution is so beautiful (I think so, anyway) that it changed the way I felt about the whole scene and my approach to the next plot element. If I'd jumped over it, I'd have screwed up the rest of the scene anyway.

I wish I could articulate how I finally figured out the solution to this particular problem, but I can't. I have to put this one down to the subconscious again. Or, to be fair, a combination of the subconscious and staring at the page while thinking through various scenarios until one of them clicked. That sounds like it should be easy but it's not like leafing through a handy selection of story solutions. It meant thinking through every character's motivations and possible reactions to what any of the other characters might do. I did write out little bits of those reactions and things so they were there in front of me to help me along. Okay, so this isn't very subsconscious-y at all, is it? Except I do think my subconscious did a lot of the work while I was doing other stuff. Like sleeping.

Now I'm hoping that over the last week, my subconscious has been at work on the next hurdle in this scene. Someone's gotta die and I'm not quite sure who is going to make that decision. It could be any one of three characters and each one would change the meaning of the book itself, maybe.

I have a day (well, possibly five hours) to myself today and I mean to make the most of them. So I thought I'd keep a running log of my writing day here, hour by hour, to keep myself honest. I've done a couple of chores so that "There are so many other things I need to dooooo" feeling is at bay. I've had a slice of blueberry quick bread. I've got a big bottle of water, three peanut butter creams and the TV is OFF. Time to start.

11:00 AM: Where I am (in the story, that is. Physically, I'm at home)

It's the climax, at last. But I'm going to backtrack to where the literal "journey" to the climax starts because I've got that itchy feeling that I've been pushing my characters around again and that always leads to disaster. If I don't get that right--if I don't go back and let them say and do the things they would naturally say and do rather than what I think they should say and do in order to move my plot forward, I'm going to hit a brick wall. I know this from bitter, repeated experience and I'm going to try to avoid it this time. I'll be back to update in an hour (unless I really get caught up in what I'm doing.) So here we go. Eddy and Hugh are in the subterranean cavern beneath the castle...

12:00 PM:

Making slow progress. Smoothed out the kiss scene. Specifically, Eddy's reaction to the kiss. The scene still leans heavily on Hugh's POV, which is odd since this is first person from Eddy's POV. Memo: don't forget your main character. Duh. Back to it.

1:00 PM:

Scene working well enough to make forward progress. Two new pages into the climax. There's a ton of backstory that has to be worked in here. And more backstory to be worked into the denouement, but I'll worry about that later. Right now, I'm going to focus on action, the actual physical events that need to happen in this scene.

2:00 PM:

Wrote actual new words, even leaping ahead in the story as a character reveals herself and her motivations. I write those bits out and stick them at the bottom of my file so they're handy when I need them. There are about three pages of such notes at the moment. They might not all be used in the finished text, but they help me think through understanding the characters, so it's useful to have them at hand.

Took a lunch break. (Peaches are divine this year!) Now back at it.

3:15 PM:

Got caught up in the scene. Lots of good stuff happening. I have given myself shivers. (Delicious Man-in-Jeopardy shivers!) Characters are saying unexpected and delightful (awful, but delightful from a literary standpoint) things that have brought the POV back around to my MC and I think and hope may actually relate to some sort of theme. See, I never know what my theme is while I'm actually writing and I don't worry about it too much. Sometimes, even when I'm done, I still don't know what the theme is and leave it up to the reader to decide. Still, it's very hard to juggle dialogue between more than two people while keeping the MC's thoughts, reactions, emotions in mind. But it's falling into place in that mysterious subconscious kind of way. I love this kind of crap. Back to it!

4:30 PM:

Well, my men are home, so my writing day is interrupted. I'm still hoping to get more done after dinner. I'm not going to post a word count because I've cut a lot of notes from the bottom of the file that I incorporated into new writing today, as well as rewriting that journey scene, so no way of knowing the real word count. But in terms of forward progress and discovery, it was a very good day. The climax is moving forward at a good pace. But more importantly, what the characters are doing makes sense. This is such a bugger of a complicated book with its own mythology that my first person POV MC doesn't know about that it's been a massive mess to bring in all of the information necessary while still keeping the MC and the reader guessing. But it's making sense! Hallelujah and pass the potato chips.

Wrapping up:

So I managed a little more work this evening, but must admit that I am stuck on something that needs a little thinking time. Plus, it's late and I want to watch the rerun of Friday's episode of General Hospital, so. Y'know. There is that. But I'm quite pleased with what I accomplished today. More forward motion than in a long time. Keeping track of my progress like this was really helpful, too. Might try it again.

Can anyone point me toward a message board or forum for SF/F writers where a teenaged writer can find good discussion and make connections without having to deal with a lot of trolls? Thanks!