Sheila Rambles

What I have so far: 1. A tentative title. ( Catbooks and Other Methods: Free Writing for Mood Improvement, Problem Solving and Making the Waiting Room at the Dentist's Office a Better Place to Be ) 2. A draft manuscript. I cranked out an early draft in Scrivener and later transferred each chapter to my Wonderbink blog as a series of entries there. 3. A potential publisher. As I've mentioned earlier, my parents set themselves up as Lullwater Press and my father is willing to add my little book to their catalog. I could also just as easily set up my own gig through LuLu and simply lean on their expertise in the process. Still deciding. I guess that's as good a place as any to start. Next step is revision, I think, as well as getting a feel for what I'll need in order to render these words into a booklike form.

Two and half years ago I wrote a blog post called The Wrong End which asserted that self-publishing was less than ideal for the aspiring writer. Obviously the landscape of publishing has shifted in the intervening time. Now that there are more ways to publish and distribute books in electronic formats than there were in 2008, one can set up shop as a self-publisher and not be saddled with boxes of books to lug around and wave in people's faces and you can have large corporations like Amazon and Apple do the heavy lifting of making your work available to the world. This doesn't mean I entirely rescind what I said previously about the hard work from the wrong end. The ease of distribution still doesn't mean that the hard work of polishing the work to be the best it can should be ignored. Even having the wonders of social media to tell the world about your book won't help much if the book isn't that good to begin with. But I am curious about the possibilities of eb...

So I've snuck Soft Places just under the wire for Open Door Month at Angry Robot Books . I had a month to perfect it but, true to form, I just put it off instead until there was no other choice. The thing I've come to understand about my tendency to procrastinate such things is that in a weird sort of way the part of me that puts things off is trying to protect me from the disappointment of failure. The imaginary victory of contemplating what you could have done can be pleasurable in its way, while the pain of genuine defeat is not one that anybody I know rushes to embrace. I came across a rather odd insight that has changed my perspective on a lot of things- -what I can imagine will inevitably surpass what reality can provide . This seems a bit obvious when attempting to become a writer of fiction, particularly fantasy-type fiction but it hit me that this doesn't just apply to stories but also to the imaginary conversations I have with people I'm on my way to meet...

I have recently resumed the practice of a mere minimum of twenty-five words a day on my current project. (Again, the luxury of the amateur to slow things down to that level without anybody but myself to worry.) Usually a few more words get in before I set it aside to tackle the rest of my day. But what even that tiny effort does is get me in the regular habit of thinking about the thing, figuring out what happens next and how to get there. Last night I did a little bit of brainstorming and two stuck places cracked themselves open and a stream of ideas came forth. If this, then THIS, and, oh, what about THAT? It feels good to have that again. Even at a mere twenty-five words a day.

So in the early morning hours of today, I pounded out the last few words of my efforts for National Novel Writing Month . It's a bit odd to see how controversial the thing seemed to be this year. There were dismissive articles about NaNoWriMo and, unsurprisingly, a number of people leaped to its defense in response. Some of the criticisms seemed to be along the lines of Stop Having Fun, Guys and a curious and unproven allegation that the slush piles of December are glutted with NaNovels. But there was also the concern, and I think it one that needed to be addressed, that people who fall short on NaNoWriMo wind up getting mauled by their internal gremlins, the ones who threw everything at them to get them to stop and then turned around and kicked them for not succeeding. (Nasty buggers, those gremlins. Every word I write for the world to read is a tiny victory against them.) This year I almost didn't make it. Part of it was perhaps simple overconfidence--I'd done it f...

Steven Pressfield's The War of Art is one of my personal creative scriptures. The eBook is available for purchase and if you buy it between now and Thursday, October 21, 2010, it will be a mere $1.99. Buy it. Now. Even if you don't have an e-reader, you can grab it as a PDF. You can thank me later. http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2010/10/two-days-only-war-of-art-ebook-for-1-99/

I first signed up for NaNoWriMo in the year 2004, and started a novel called Sam and Charlie Go On A Roadtrip , which was about two girls, Samantha (Sam) and Charlotte (Charlie) who took a roadtrip down to Florida. I stalled out at 8,881 words. My usual line is that I got my characters as far as Florida and got stuck. I've been told that Florida has a reputation for that sort of thing, but there were other factors involved. 1. Not actually having a plot in mind. The novel was written as alternating diary entries and I figured that just rambling about travel from place to place would be an easy way to rack up words. Wrong. That's not even what we read novels for, anyway--we pick up books and keep reading them because we want to know what happens next. If there's no tension, no conflict and no potential gain or loss, there's nothing to drive things forward. I almost made the same mistake in 2005, starting on a fantasy story that was supposed to be somebody dictating...