that time I shared my writing process

hey! first and foremost, let's pretend that eight months hasn't passed since my last post on here. I'm going to better. probably.

so one of my twitter faves, jamie adams, asked me to participate in this writing process blog. I was equally surprised and flattered when jamie asked, and then on her blog she called me artistic AND charming, so she basically just moved up to the top of my favorite people list. also, follow her on twitter, because she's cool.

this is a "tagging" hop, and this is the quote that started it all: "We writers share these things, but informally during workshops and at conferences (and, for a handful of established writers, in printed interviews), but not so much through our open-forum blogs. With the hashtag #MyWritingProcess, you can learn how writers all over the world answer the same four questions. How long it takes one to write a novel, why romance is a fitting genre for another, how one's playlist grows as the draft grows, why one's poems are often sparked by distress over news headlines or oddball facts learned on Facebook..."

so here is the part where I answer four questions.

what am I working on?

this question really should be, what am I NOT working on, because it's always everything all the time. well I'm currently querying my newest completed ya contemporary. it's a little dark, and I don't want to give away too many details because I'm weirdly superstitious when it comes to my writing. other than querying, I am writing a new ya contemporary that has all the sads with a tiny bit of quirky mixed in. again, not gonna get into those details, because the silly superstition thing blah blah blah. but I both laugh and cry while I work on this ms.

how does my work differ from others of its genre?

oy vay. I guess I don't know that it really does. I write mostly ya contemporary. I fought against that for a really long time because I was determined to write fantasy, but then all these contemporary ideas kept flooding my head and wouldn't go away and now I have more than I can ever hope to write. I try to stand out among my genre with voice and I try to spend a great deal of books dealing on families, which seems to be lacking in a great deal of ya books. bust mostly I just write what I love and hope that others love it too.

why do I write what I do?

oops. I sort of already answered this in the above. I write ya contemporary because it won't leave me alone, try as I may to write a million other things. contemporary just calls to me like a lighthouse, beckoning me home. and also, I love writing about normal kids going through normal stuff. and also, I like making people cry.

how does my writing process work?

it generally starts with me having a dream about some ridiculously crazy idea that I jot first thing in the morning. then by the end of the day I realize that only about 10% of it will work in a story, so I start plotting.

NO, WAIT, I don't plot. All my cps just laughed so hard at this. I pants through everything, all the books I've written. I mean, what even is plotting?

so my writing process works like this: I write. then I call my cps and bore them to death with all my ideas and make them validate me and tell me I'm doing a good job. and then I write more. I try to write 1k a day, but that's basically a joke because I either write one sentence or 5k words. there is no method to the madness. only madness that I try to reign in on a daily basis. I make notes on post-its and stick them all over my room. I eat lots of gummy worms and drink too much wine. and then I write some more.


for this thing, I get to choose two more peeps to participate. I'm happy to announce I'm tagging one of  my #nerdherd loves, mandie, and my lovely CP (and very old friend) brianna. make sure to check out their posts next monday!

that time I made resolutions (and hopefully stuck to them)

I know what you're thinking. This blog is just wasting space on the internet, because I NEVER blog. Unless I'm super ranty or entering a contest or participating in something on twitter that requires a blog. I'd like to say that in 2014 I'll blog more, but that would be a big ole fat lie, so I'm not even go down that road.

But I do have a few writerly and readerly resolutions for this year. And some of them actually do require a bit o' blogging, so it's possible I MAY actually blog a little more this year than the last.

Writerly Resolutions:
* Last year I set a goal to write 1k a day. I did really good until about May, and then I fell off that ship so hard and drowned in an ocean of my own making. So, this year my goal is to just write every day. Even if it's just one word. That's better than none.

* I want to write three novels this year, from start to finish. Last year I wrote two and revised one, so I feel like this is totally attainable.

* Query my newest contemporary by February. IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN, I TELL YOU.

Readerly Resolutions:
* My friend Nikki and I are doing a book-a-month book club this year, so I vow to read at least 12 books this year. I mean, I'll definitely read more, but at least twelve.

* As part of that book club, I vow to blog a review & excerpt of each book.

* In 2014 I won't be starting any new series, unless every book in the series has already been published. I hate having to wait years for an entire series to be released, and honestly with all the books I read, I can't remember half of the plot lines, so when I pick up the second book in a series and it's been a year since I read the first one, I spend a good few hours online trying to find recaps of the first book. So this will be the year of finishing series that are published and reading stand-alones (which I've become a very big fan of).

that time I was bold

My good friend Nikki wrote a post on BEING BOLD in your writing today over at The Writer Diaries.  This post correlates with Veronica Roth's most recent published book, ALLEGIANT. Just FYI, if you read the post, THERE ARE spoilers, but I won't spoil anything over here. But I WILL say, Veronica Roth was VERY BOLD in how she ended the series. And there have been a lot of people giving her crap about it all over the internet. But SHE'S THE WRITER. Therefore, she gets to do whatever she wants with HER story.

Nikki and I have been gushing about Allegiant since we finished reading it. And when Nikki told me she was going to write a post on being bold, it made me think. Am I bold in MY WRITING? A year ago, the answer to that question would have been a NO written in the sky by an airplane. I didn't take chances or risks. I stuck to the rules.

Almost a year ago, I finished writing my first YA fantasy novel, something I thought was groundbreaking and just all around AMAZING. And while I loved the book, agents didn't. And it puzzled me. But a couple months after I got a handful of rejections on the full manuscript (see the query made it sound MUCH better than it actually was), I decided to reread it and see what was missing. And I realized EVERYTHING was missing. It had an interesting story. It wasn't about a "chosen one" or the farm boy who realizes he's really the king's long lost son and the one meant to save the world. But it lacked conflict and the stakes weren't high enough. And it ended on a pretty big cliff hanger.

About three months ago I decided to revise it. I changed SO MUCH about the plot, and I felt good about it, but every time I sat down to write, the words just wouldn't come. Yes, in my head it was a totally different story. But in the Scrivener file, nothing had changed. And I found myself avoiding my computer because I didn't know what to write.

So fast forward to about three weeks ago. I watched the premiere of CW's new show, REIGN. I don't expect much from the CW, but I enjoy a few of their shows. And let me just tell you, I was blown away by the REIGN premiere. Nothing about the acting or the story was particularly fabulous, but it seemed to light a fire under my butt in my own writing.

So I came up with this incredibly GRANDIOSE idea. I'm talking, GAME CHANGING idea on how to make my fantasy better. Not just better, amazing. No, BOLD.  I'm not ready to share it just yet. I'm still feeling a bit protective over it, because I've never been struck by SUCH GENIUS in m life. But this idea has absolutely changed my writing life. I've written four books in the last year and a half, all of them I pantsed my way through.

I DON'T PLOT. And by that, I mean I don't plot. Like maybe a sentence summary here or there, but I mostly soar by the seat of my pants and rely mostly on my memory. But I've spent 22 days plotting this book. I've written on over 500 post-its (which are now covering my walls). I have a character web on one wall (I've never done of those before). And I have a 69-chapter timeline on one wall and it LITERALLY took me nearly eight straight hours to do that. I was fairly certain my brain might explode. And last night, I scaled a map for over four hours, figuring out how long it might take my characters to get from one city to another in my made up world.

I could have spent those 22 days writing. I mean, I've written 10k, so it's not been a total waste, but I just don't spend time plotting. But it's changing EVERYTHING about my story. AND I LOVE IT. This is SO different from anything I've ever written. It's so different from anything I've read. And I'm basically in a state of euphoria over this, even though it is stretching my brain TO THE MAX.

But, here's the thing, I'M BEING BOLD, and I really think it's going to pay off. I mean, I can't say that for sure, but I *do* know that when I put my confidence one hundred percent into a BOLD writing piece, I just know it won't fail.