The Writer's Life: So What Do You *Do* With All That Time?

Whenever I talk to my mother, invariably the topic comes around to the fact that I'm currently not working full time and (with my husband's blessing and generous financial support) am dedicating myself fully to this writing thing. And her main response is always, "So what do you do with all that time?"

If she only knew.

Writing full time sounds great, and it is (holy crap, but it really, really is), but especially once things start happening with publishing, there are all these little things that need to get done. I am so, so blessed to have four pieces under contract right now (3 shorts and 1 novella), but man. There's just all this stuff.

For example, yesterday I didn't manage to write a single word on my manuscript, but I sure did manage to kill some time. Things I crossed off on my to-do list include:

• Proofing the galley and blurb for Bug Boy (my short story for Dreamspinner's upcoming Higher Learning anthology)
• Writing long and short blurbs for A Gift of Trust (a Christmas story that will be releasing in December)
• Cold-emailing blogs asking to guest blog in support of Unacceptable Risk
• Keeping up with all the author blogs, book review sites, and writer discussion lists I stalk
• Editing a short for a critique partner
• Editing my own short story so I could send it to a critique partner
• Scouring the internet for calls for submission so I can hopefully keep getting my work out there.

It may not look like a ton, but especially since I'm new to all of this (and terrified of people) all the blurb-writing and editing and cold-emailing seem to take forever, and it's super easy to have a day just fly by.

All that said, I'm really not complaining. I love this life. But seriously, Mom. There is never any lack of things to do.

Purgatory Is An Unedited Manuscript

Anyone who follows my ranting and moaning on Twitter knows that I've spent the better part of a week now looking at edits for Unacceptable Risk, ignoring edits for Unacceptable Risk, procrastinating in order to avoid looking at edits for Unacceptable Risk, and occasionally, in rare fits of productivity actually working on edits for Unacceptable Risk.

(Unacceptable Risk being the new m/f cyberpunk romance I contracted with Samhain Publishing, coming to an eReader near you this winter!)

A lot of this hand-wringing has involved going through little stylistic issues. Do I really need the 'that' in that sentence? Is a 'dangling modifier' really just an opportunity for a TWSS joke? Could I start any more sentences with conjunctions?

Some of it is content. My editor wanted to see some adjustments to one of the character arcs, and while I completely agree with her analysis and suggestions, actually making the changes has given me heart palpitations. Will the new stuff suck? Will it stick out like a sore thumb? Am I overthinking everything?

And some of it ... some of it is just plain sitting there shaking my head at myself. Everything that seemed brilliant six months ago is a lot easier to look at now with a healthy dose of bitchbrow. I still love the story, but did I really not notice that I started six sentences in a row with the same basic phrasing? Did I not see that I used the word 'back' five times in two paragraphs?

Seriously.

Anyway, the good news is that I'm mostly done. I still need to take one last pass through to make sure the edits flow and I haven't made too many new problems while trying to solve old ones.

But I will be so, so, so excited to leave the purgatory of editing to return to the welcome, familiar hell of writing from scratch.

What The Writer Needs To Write / What the Reader Needs To Read

The writer needs to write to tell the story. The reader needs to read in order to enjoy it.

Sadly, they don't always need the same words.

The biggest breakthrough I've made as an editor has been realizing that that's okay.

Personally, I'm the kind of writer that processes things through the physical act of writing. I learn about my characters by writing them. I figure out my plot by writing it. But just because I needed to write something in order to grasp it doesn't mean the reader needs to read it.

The biggest consequence of this epiphany has been that I've been letting a lot more of my words hit the cutting room floor. Yes, I needed to write all of that backstory in order to make it come alive in later chapters. But if I leave it where I wrote it, it slows my story down and bores the reader with too much information.

Words that I edited out aren't wasted. They're just not necessary for the reader to ever read. And that doesn't make it any less essential for me to have written them.

My First Writer's Conference, Part Three: The Dreaded Read and Critique

The scariest thing I did at the Penn Writers conference this year was attend a read and critique session. It was me, five other writers, and a panel of people waiting to rip me to shreds.

And it was easily the highlight of the conference.

Listening to a panel of professionals offer up advice and praise to other authors was so inspiring, and it helped me put into focus was is important in writing salable fiction.

My take-aways from listening to the critiques:

• Have a killer opening line.
  
• If the novel is anything other than contemporary, specify the setting (time and place) before the first line. (example: Boston, 1815)
  
• Get into the head of the protagonist right away. Forging an emotional connection in the reader's mind will keep her turning pages.
  
• Edit mercilessly. Decide on the focus of the scene and cut out whatever is not critical to it.
  
• Every word should move the plot forward. Don't dump in backstory at the beginning; you have plenty of time to slowly reveal it, and keeping the reader guessing keeps the reader invested.
  
• Build tension from the first word on and keep building it.

I'm happy to report that my own critique was overwhelmingly positive. The panel was super enthused with the quality of the writing, which was such a relief. They were very critical of some issues with pacing, and while it wasn't easy to hear, their suggestions for resolving it provided another 'eureka moment,' when I recognized opportunities for strengthening my writing and my novel as a whole.

In the end, I am so glad I went and put myself out there. I left encouraged, bolstered by the fact that professionals in my field loved my writing, and inspired with new ideas for how to make it better.

What about you? Any critiques stick out in your mind as game changers? How did feedback affect your process?