Authors Electric

This has been a crazy week--words I say while knowing that many of you have had weeks as crazy...or worse. In the home stretch of my WIP these were the time crunches life threw me this week: --4-day siege on the phone and in person trying to renew my ADA van transport.  --5-hour trip to my hematologist for labs, a phlebotomy, and a consultation.  --Three trips to the YMCA to keep building my surgical leg strength and flexibility. --2 days sorting through old resumes dating back years, and arranging the relevant experience for positions as a cashier, a bookstore clerk, and a customer service rep. --1 day deciding which online resume builder to try and which template to use, then completing a cashiering resume.  --3 hours attempting to forward that resume to the UPS store that does all my printing and engaging in online chats. --Trip this morning to pick up the results. I don't complain. I bless my lucky stars that I'd completed a beta copy of my WIP's first 200 pages and a...

That was what my partner asked me.  ‘Do you have writer’s block?’ A couple of weeks ago. After I told him I’d not written a word on my work-in-progress since early May. And before that, not since February. My instinct was to say, ‘No, of course not.’ And so I did. But I wondered. Did I? No. Not at all. When I sat down to write in February, the words flowed. Plenty of them. A virtual torrent. The same in May. On the train back from a family and football weekend (the best kind, I find). Having safely finished the talk I’d set out to write on the train down to London two days before. And that’s the problem. I only really write when I have no distractions (no chores, no Internet, no family concerns, nothing to plan), which tends to be when I’m away from home – on train journeys (what a blessing the quiet carriage is!), on holidays. But even then, only when I don’t have a talk to write, an event to prepare for, when I’m prepared… ‘Distractions’. I guess that’s really shor...

I'm  a writer who's been living on the edge of her one remaining nerve for the past couple of months. The look of panic on my face, as deadlines came screaming towards me, was something to behold. Did you note the plural nature of my word choice? Not deadline, but deadlines. Somehow, I got through them all, and was able to take a deep breath and relax. What did I learn in the process? The answer is I learned a lot, hence the reason I am able to give you this sage advice regarding deadlines.   1. Start early and give yourself time to do the task. Agreeing to write a 90,000 word novel by next week may seem like a good idea. Trust me, it aint. Full disclosure here, that's not what I did. It's an example.  2. Keep a detailed planner of when to do what. This may sound simple but setting clear blocks of time for each project will help you manage your deadlines.  3. Remember there are only 24 hours in the day. Filling up your diary with other projects or ev...

In our modern hustle and bustle world I would venture to say that one of our most precious commodities is time. The more labour saving devices we acquire, the more we seem to fill our days and the minutes just slip by. As the picture suggests our time just slips away.  My last post on this blog was Motivation Matters and this post takes that theme further  Whilst the principles are the same for everyone, this is a writing blog so I am going to focus on time and our writing. By using even just a few of these you will find your writing time expands and your word count will rise. 1. Schedule important tasks - while this might seem like a no brainer, how many of us actually do this. My regular contribution to this blog is a perfect example. I know I am scheduled for the 16th of each month and yet the date sneaks up on me and can often slip by unnoticed. This should have been out at 00:30 and here I am at 09.40, still writing it. So, taking my own advice, there is...

Don't even try to tell me you don't know the meaning of GAWD. If you write,you do know--and if you don't, you're not right in the head. So let's man and woman up and admit the existence of GAWD: Goddamned Awful Writing Decisions We've decisions to make, of course, every day about writing as both art and business: matters of style and plotting, promotional tactics and price points, fine tuning our queries, etc. There's no end to it--and we don't mind, not really. It's all part of being a writer, we know. In fact, we take morbid pleasure sometimes in comparing our stresses and blues with our pals. My best guess is that 98% of these decisions aren't life-threatening. Any query can always be further fine-tuned. Any botching of a plot can always be corrected. But that's not our issue. Our issue is: GA WD And, oh yeah, you know what I'm talking about. These are the life-threatening forks in the road where no mercy is show...

I sometimes swear I'm caught up in some kind of bizarre Dr Who -style time-bending experiment. I don't know what's happened to the space-time continuum, but it just doesn't seem to be functioning as it once did. I can remember a time when the temporal gap between one Christmas and the next lasted for about - well, about twelve months, actually: twelve long, glorious months that were stuffed full of exciting possibilities. Now I sometimes wonder if it's even worth packing away the festive decorations; before I know it, it'll be time to put them all back up again. Time is a peculiarly elastic thing. When you're miserable, or trapped at a particularly dreary social event, or waiting for a delayed flight, it hardly moves at all. When you're actually doing something enjoyable and/or worthwhile, like writing, it zips by. Hardly seems fair, does it? This problem becomes even more striking when you're trying to forge a career (I use the term loosel...