Maybe.

So Zoo’s alarm clock (aka my cube) woke me up to La Isla Bonita.  And you know when you’ve got a lyric in your mind wrong and you know it’s wrong but you can’t stop singing it wrong?

Yeah, I keeping hearing, young girls with eyes like potatoes, in my ear.  And I know that can’t be right.  Who has eyes like potataoes?

It’s like when my friend told me she thought the song, Big Old Jet Airliner was really, big ole chad had a rhino, and ruined the song for me.

There’s also a line in Cinderelmo where I swear the king says, cake and eat it (because, hi, cake – who wouldn’t want to eat cake?) but Zoo’s like, he’s saying, take an edict.

Granted, the edict line makes way more sense, but it’s Elmo.  He’s always got too many questions, he’s always scared of something and he’s always screwing up, so common sense isn’t really his friend.  So I’m sticking by my cake and eat it line.

Anyway, I have a lot to do – some last minute revisions on Zane and I almost can’t bear to drag myself through the manuscript again.  Don’t get me wrong – I love the book – love the way it’s turned out and the edits will only make it stronger but…I don’t want to!  (mature, I know) I want to work on shiny new stories, like Mace, where things still make sense and I have a lot to discover.

But I will be good and finish Zane.  I’m armed with candy.  A large, price club mixed bag of candy that includes Twix.  The Twix will inspire me.  If I can stop singing about the young girls with eyes like potatoes to myself…

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But some of it – very specific parts of it – piss me off to no end, especially since they are so absolute about it.  And since most of the authors who bust publishing myths don’t worry about the other side of the coin and being politically correct, I won’t either.  But please do know that I respect everyone’s method.  (couldn’t resist.  i’m like that – it’s my Libra rising – fair and balanced)

Myth #1:  Butt in chair, hands on the keyboard and forget the muse.  There is no muse.

Um, hey, I have one!  It’s not someone who flies down in flowy white robes (oh, that would be cool, though) but there is something that separates me from the zillions of people who talk about wanting to write a book and never, ever do.  My muse / imagination / mystical thing inside my brain pushes me to sit in the chair and write it all down.  I’m not saying it’s easy or that I want to write all the time.  But I have to believe that people who write or paint or sculpt or whatever have something that differentiates them from the rest of the population who doesn’t write or paint or who can’t write or paint.  I laugh and cry with my characters – I’m way sensitive (probably too much so, some would say) but all of that enables me to write books.

Myth #2:  From readers point of view:  Authors who ’see’ their characters and talk about them as such are doing something kooky and weird because they want to draw readers to their kooky weirdness. From writers point of view:  Please stop being kooky and weird so I won’t be labeled kooky and werid.

Why do we want to strip away the kooky, weirdness that it artistic creativity?  Why is that necessary?  Does it really stop your enjoyment of a book if the author claims she channeled the characers?  I’m not sure why this annoys some readers so much…the author isn’t asking you to channel them.  The author who talks about it is just answering a question asked of her and frankly, the author that first said, I hear voices in my head of my characters, brought me great relief.  Because I wasn’t alone anymore, wasn’t the only one seeing movies in my head or hearing the voices whisper to me.  Dude, seriously, it happens to me.  Can’t explain it, don’t really want to, but I’m not sure how or why this should bother you so damned much.  Get over it.  My process.  And my process is a hell of a lot of fun most of the time.

Myth #3:  The book of your heart won’t sell, so get over it.

Really?  Because I’ve got the trilogy of my heart coming out.  The problem is, I think we need to redefine terms here.

I’m not saying the book of your heart is the only thing you should ever work on.  But if you’ve got books / stories / characters that have been with you since you were, oh, let’s say 10 years old (hello!) then why not write them?  I chose to wait until I thought I had the experience, the skill and the chops to execute my books of the heart, because otherwise yes, they can turn into self-indulgent messes.

But stop telling unpubs that they can’t write the book of their heart.  Instead, let’s tell them they need to be a little smarter about it.  I’d much rather tell unpubs to back away from the craft books until they’ve actually written something, to stop relying on contests scores so much, to finish a book and move onto the next instead of polishing one to death.  Move on, listen to your muse and let yourself go.

Whew.  I feel better now.  Hi, I’m Stephanie Tyler, I have a muse and I write much better when I’m inspired.  That does not always mean that I wait around for inspiration.  But I have to tell you, my writing is thousands of times better when I’m writing from inspiration.

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I understand it can differ for ePubs, because they use actual computer count, so you can check Word or whatever program you use and get your actual word count there.  Easy enough.  So if the publisher says they want manuscripts of 40K, I’m assuming (I know, I know…) that they’ll get anywhere from 38K to 45K (or maybe a bit more).

But most print publishers – well, at least mine – still use the page count thing and I’ll explain why in a second.  On the contracts, publishers expect anywhere from 85K to 100K, although these days going over 100K is slightly more problematic than coming in a bit under.  Publishing costs and all, I’m guessing, although I do know that most editors will not trim away an extra 20K if it is fabulous and not simply filler.

So it goes like this – for every 20 pages, it’s assumed that it’s 5K.  So 200 pages should equal 50K, half a manuscript for a NY single title.

Here’s the rub – if you write lots of dialogue (like me) you’ll have low word count but a regular page count.  For instance, on the current WIP, I have 193 pages and 38K.  My manuscripts run anywhere from 400 pages to 424 pages (my highest, I believe) and they all log in around 90k – 93K.  For the record, when I hand it in, I use Courier New 12 point, because that’s an equal font and can give the publisher an idea of how long the book will be when printed.

For me, this all works out, because I don’t worry about word count – I know if I get close to 400 pages, I’m good.  I’ve told the story. And it seems to take forever – there’s a point when I think, I can take the words Larissa cut from her recent Demonica book and add them in – who will notice?

As always with advice, your milage will vary.  And btw, no one in NY will reject your manuscript if you don’t use Courier New 12. Just use a readable font and you will be fine, I promise.  Personally, I hate Courier New and I write in TNR 14, but I always convert so I can see the pretty page count.

The things we do to trick ourselves.

With this current WIP (aka PROMISES IN THE DARK aka Zane’s story), I have about 45K more to go (I’ll get the rest through revisions.)  I’ve lost ground as I mentioned yesterday, so I need at least 5K per day for the next few days to make up ground.  For today so far I’ve got 2K, which is good – I usually can’t get that much done during the day.  And I’m trying to work on Sydney book 6 at night, since that goes faster with two people working on the story.

Oh, and another Zoo train story – he IM’d me today to tell me that there were high school kids on the train this morning drinking beer at 7AM headed to the Yankee Parade and those were the days.  My response?  That was us – a looooong time ago. We’re old.

His response?  I know.  I almost gave them money to buy more beer.

©2010 Stephanie Tyler's Weblog. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve always been contrary.  And maybe my insanity will help comfort a few of you who don’t do things in order when you’re writing.

Anyway, I’m sort of unofficially doing Nano.  I say unofficially because this is a contracted project that I started back in August because that’s when the proposal was due.  And until now, I’ve been working in my dribs and drabs way and then realized, oh, wow, this book is due like, soon.  And Nano rules (hate rules) say you must start a story and have 50K written in the month of November.

Hence, Nano-ish participation.  I need 60K.  Well, right now it looks like 60K.  I’ll know more after today and tomorrow, when I stick my hands into the mess and try to piece it together like Frankenstein did to his monster.

(I can hear my students arguing with me – Mrs. T, you’re wrong – Frankenstein was the monster. Same kids who thought Al Gore’s first name was Algore.  And they never worried that he didn’t have a last name because they thought he was cool like Madonna.  Teaching can melt your brain, but they never tell you that in the MAT program.)

Back to process.  What I end up doing is writing longhand, especially at the start of a book.  My synopsis is as vague as my editor will let me get away with – I’ve gotten some great guidance from PBW on quick and painless outlining that helps me do a bare minimum without killing my love for the story – if I know everything, I don’t want to write it.

And I write and I write, out of order (which drives many of my fellow writers insane, which is an added bonus!)  And then I type it all in, out of order, random scenes and it’s a big old mess.

Since I’m now on a Mac, I use Scrivner software.  I was using WriteWayPro on the PC (although most of my books were done in Word before I discovered the beauty of the writing program – I recommend both HIGHLY, especially if you tend to write out of order.)

So today, it’s all about moving the stuff around, seeing what I’ve got.  It’s pretty fun because I get to watch my word count burgeon without doing much more than cutting and pasting random scenes together and seeing what works.

This will not be fun later, when I have to mesh said scenes, realizing that this means there are pov jumps every other sentence. But hey, there’s a price for out of order freewriting, but for me, that’s where lots of magic happens.  I’m not willing to sacrifice magic, no matter how messy.

(Remind me of this in the coming days when I begin to whine excessively about how much CRAP I have to wade through in order to find the story)

Because here’s the thing – no matter your process, no matter how many books you write, it will never, ever get easier.  You will get better, and that’s why it never gets easier.  You will be faced with thinking, Holy crap, how did I get from beginning to end of that last book and the book before? Because right now, faced with the mess, it seems impossible and insurmountable and has me glaring at the pretty books on my shelves and hating them.

So don’t worry if your process is in order, out of order, synopsis, no synopsis, not like any of your crit partners or publisher writer advice.  If it works for you, that’s all that counts.  Because creation is messy – it should be.  It needs to be.

So, how are you doing? (Ali?) I believe I got close to 3K of new stuff today in between wading through the mess.  More tomorrow. Oh, and a HARD TO HOLD mini-countdown starts in a few days with some behind the scenes stuff!

©2010 Stephanie Tyler's Weblog. All Rights Reserved.

SJ Day (aka Sylvia Day) had a great post up on Murder She Writes a couple of weeks ago about how changing routines can sometimes screw up a creative process.  I chimed in my agreement, mentioning that for the past year or so, I’d had to change my writing routine.  And how that new routine isn’t working nearly as well as I’d like it to.

Instead of writing late at night, like I used to, I was going to sleep earlier and writing all day.  Or, trying to write, that is.  Because I’ve discovered that I’m not all that great writing in the day, especially during the week.  Weekends are a little better because the house is quieter.  For me, during the day is good for things like working on revisions, reading galleys, doing copy edits, writing blog posts and generally attending to the business end of writing.

But the night?  For me, that’s where the real magic lies.  Give me my music and the laptop and something changes.  Worlds open up.  Words flow.  New words.  New ideas.  New stories.

Worth the lack of sleep?  Yeah.  Plus, since I’m not trying to force daytime writing, it leaves more time for things like…rest  So a win/win.

I worked all day on revisions.  Got a lot done.  Tonight is for working on the proposal.  I’ve got some great ideas that began to generate as the 9PM hour hit.

I think there are morning people, afternoon people and night people and when you find a time that works for you, trying to change it can be really detrimental to your creativity.  it was to mine and I don’t like to mess around with that stuff.  And while I think it’s always good to try out new things  / add new things to your process, you’ve also got to be willing to bend to the way your creativity rolls.

What about you?  Do you – both writers and non-writers –  have a time of day that you just know you’re more ‘on’ than other times?

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Some books are like that.  Most of them are.  And so I’ll revise and send, revise and send, but for now, the book is done.  And when I finished, I honestly couldn’t see straight.  Larissa and I also completed the Sydney short story that will appear in the Mammoth Book of Special Ops (Pub Date TBA).  

And even thought I was spinning, and I left my computer behind to go hang out outside with Zoo and the kid and the dog, convinced I was taking the rest of the day off, a few hours later, I felt it. The niggling in my brain of the story I’d pushed aside.  It was saying, you’ve got some brand new Claire Fontaine notebooks waiting for you.  And nothing to do for an entire day.

So I wrote about 2K on the story – it’s one that will probably be just for me and that’s okay.  My way of refilling the well.  Of letting my muse know that she gets to tell me what to do and I usually like it.  Because I’m not one of those, there is no muse, I just sit down and write people.

I recently read this great story about Alice Walker, about how she was given a grant and a year’s sabbatical to write, The Color Purple.  And for something like eleven months, she sat in a vacation house and she knit.  And knit.  And knit.  And didn’t write.  And the grant people were getting very nervous because the was no writing there.

But when she did finally write, the story was there in front of her.  She simply had to let it grow before she could start.  Really, the writing was happening – it just didn’t happen on the page.

My writing works very much the same way.  I might have a deadline that’s six months out – and I’ll definitely tinker.  And write scenes here and there and collect music and just think.  And then I begin to panic when I can’t or don’t write on it.  Inevitably, the month before it’s due is when the writing gets done.

Is that the best way to work?  Absolutely not.  Is it my way?  Absolutely.  It’s my process.  It scares me and it humbles me every time I write a book.  Sometimes I think, I can’t pull this one out of the fire – nothing’s happening.  But somehow, the muse arrives.  Granted, I do think the real work is in the revisions, but that first pass, that’s the storytelling draft.  The one the muse and I want to write – if we don’t put it all down, we’ll never be satisfied, always wondering, what if...

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I tell her that I’ve been following all of this forever at this point and say yes.

Then she’s like, you know, I was washing dishes when I heard it and I stopped to watch the story.  And then I turned back to washing the dishes and I thought, you know, this is something Stephanie should write about.  She should write about the SEALs.

(This is the point where I tell my new readers that my mom has never read any of my books.)

She continues, And then I thought, wait, I think she does write about Navy SEALs.  But I don’t think you have a plot like this. You should write this exact plot.  It would be so timely.  And all the work is already done for you…

©2010 Stephanie Tyler's Weblog. All Rights Reserved.

I’m guessing he doesn’t realize that he’s not going to have much of a choice.  

So I’ve got that going on, coupled with several days in a row of no nursing for the kid.  Add in a book due soon, copy edits and two different sets of revisions and well, I might’ve just hyperventilated. Seriously.

If everyone would simply go to sleep at a decent hour and sleep through the night, I could make some real progress. Which brings me to my next point.

Okay, I personally do not like the Teletubbies. But the kid does. Loves them. Finds them soothing. They help her sleep.  

And the DVDs are being discontinued.  

We kill DVDs around here.  Mainly, because my daughter likes to grab and bite them and then, well, they don’t really work all that well. My mom’s been searching eBay for them but man, come on Teletubbie people – it’s so not right to pull the plug on these little dancing idiots.  Think of the children!

Think of the parents who can’t get their children to sleep.  Like me.  A sad parent with a pissed off Delta Force hero just waiting for me to get him out of trouble.  Or into it.

I’m going to have to start a, bring back the Teletubbies, club or something.  

I’m betting Delta Force hero wouldn’t mind helping.  I’m imagining him marching into the Teletubbie offices (well, not offices with Teletubbies in them because that would just be silly.  And kind of funny) and demanding their secret stash of unsold videos.  Maybe I could send a team in on a covert mission to recapture the little dancing idiots.  

What can I tell you – I’m desperate.

©2010 Stephanie Tyler's Weblog. All Rights Reserved.

Don’t you think it’s time you toned down your manic aspirations? Aren’t you curious about the sweet, sensitive success that could be yours if only you got really calm and peaceful? Wouldn’t it be interesting to explore the more manageable opportunities that might become available by accepting your limitations with humble equanimity? APRIL FOOL! Don’t you dare do any of those things, Aries. Your spiritual duty for the foreseeable future is to be a brave initiator of ingenious experiments . . . a high-powered self-starter who competes primarily with yourself . . . a pioneering warrior who’s in quest of transcendent exploits that make it unnecessary to go to war.

I don’t think I’m reading these horoscopes anymore.  They exhaust me.  Mainly because I was excited about the whole getting calm and peaceful thing.  

This week requires a major writing push on Cam’s book (you’ll meet Cam in Hold On Tight, trilogy book 3)…like, a lock myself away with chocolate and don’t come out until major progress is made.  Although I did have a great brainstorm on the way to dinner last night.  If I can pull this off, I think it will be awesome.  But there’s a big if.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.  Somewhere, my editor just let out a silent scream.

Hey, have you been watching The Unit?  I like the new guy, but Mac is still my favorite…

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You know, I’ve often thought about the whole, writers / artists / etc can’t afford to wait for the muse – put your butt in the chair and just write thing.  I hear authors say that habit / practice leads to better and more frequent writing.  And while I truly believe that’s a huge part of any endeavor, I have to think there’s more to it than that.

See, I believe in the muse.  I truly do believe that you can show up for work and type your heart out and still get total crap on the page some days.  But there are days when, even though you’re not doing anything differently, somehow the words / the scene / the characters just shine.  You lose track of time, you feel like you’re possessed, almost a scribe.  And I’ve experienced that and I love it and I pray every time I sit down to write that the muse comes to find me.

Anyway, this video really subscribes to the notion that you must come to work every day, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your muse does.  She finds a way to take some of the angst off the creator and instead, talks about how the muse lends us the inspiration…I can’t explain it nearly as well as she does, but please watch.  It’s about 20 minutes long and very worthwhile!

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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But I feel like that’s such an appropriate word for what’s happening with me these days – lots of recalculating.  It’s rarely straightforward writing, although to me those days are the best.  No, it’s more like, write a little, find copy edits for a different book at your door, stop, do those, write new book, get a revision letter on another book, stop, figure out how long that will take and can I still get the new book in on time and oh, look, email and website things and…so yeah. Recalculating.

Of course, if you talk to my mother about the GPS, she will inevitably bring up the time the GPS directed a car directly onto the railroad tracks.  So here’s a tip, don’t mention GPS’s in front of my mother.  Or sailing.  Or really, just tell her you never leave your house and that will make her happy.  :LOL:

If all goes well, the proposal for the 6th Sydney Croft book goes out the door on Monday. One

less thing on the plate.  That book is tentatively named Firestorm, which is a really great name (Larissa’s picked it) because it ties in the Storm and the Fire from all the books and I so hope we get to keep it.  Now I’ve got to get moving on Cam’s book, tentatively titled, Don’t Look Back. But none of my own titles ever seem to stick, so don’t get too attached to it

And, fingers crossed, you’ll be seeing a brand new website up later this coming week. It is SO awesome and I love it. I hope you all will too.

Any big weekend plans on your end?

©2010 Stephanie Tyler's Weblog. All Rights Reserved.

And I’m sure there’s a better description than marker-like pen, but I’m having one of those months where I can’t think of the right word for anything or the right name for anyone and I’m doing a lot of calling for Gus, Zoo, Lily…until I get to the right name. My grandmother used to do that. I used to think it was funny.

Felt tip! But that’s not exactly right either.

So anyway, the downside to all this longhand writing is that I have to obviously type it all into the computer. And I’m usually pretty good about keeping up with it and not letting it get past 20 pages or so. But I think at this point I have about 50 pages to type in. And the thing is, I change things / add things / flesh things as I’m typing, so in a way it’s good but I’ve been putting it off because OMG, a lot of work.

Before I bought the Mac, I’d bought myself Dragon Naturally Speaking, which would allow me to talk the words into the computer. (Talk the words into the computer – WTF?) You know what I mean. But the Dragon version is for windows and although my desktop is still windows I was thinking I should probably get a Mac version and then I was like maybe I’ll load it into windows and try it out for these 50 pages but then I sit there and go, oh look, a Real Housewives of New York marathon is on and then, well, yeah…

Anyway, I guess I should probably try the speech recognition program. Soon. But then I’d have to train it to recognize my voice. I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t have a funny accent like Larissa or Maya or Amie.

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