Head Down

I'm going to be head down this week, trying to complete the revisions on my partials so I can send them out to the agent and editor I met with at RWA Nationals. I'm being pretty picky but when it comes time to send stuff out, I think that's the only way to be. Submissions need to be your absolute best work. And, yeah, that synposis for my fourth book ... I'm still working on that.

I love both these stories (Guardian and Here Be Dragons) and, naturally, I'm hoping the powers that be will love 'em too.

Tough Decisions

As much as writers like to moan about how challenging it is to write a book, most of us will admit there are plenty of things more difficult. One of them is making the decision to write a book in the first place. And I'm not talking about that brief impulse that encourages you to open your word processing software and jot down a few pages. I'm talking about the decision to start and finish a book--the point at which you make a commitment to yourself to really do it.

I don't know the stats, but trust me when I tell you that there are many, many people who have an idea, sit down to write it, but never finish. I know because for a very long time, I was one of those people. I had a full time career, and like most folks who work, I wanted to succeed at my job. So I put in lots of hours ... lots and lots of hours. Then I started a family. Compared to my writing, which I deemed a hobby, almost everything else was more important. I worked on a story for six years--yup, that's right, six years--and never got to THE END. Heck, I never got past page 235.

The difference between wanting to write a book and actually writing a book, in my very humble opinion, is making the decision to do it--making the commitment to yourself to finish a manuscript. And then writing it, no excuses. For me, there was always something more important, something more pressing, something more urgent than working on my book. But when I finally made the decision--and I mean really made it--I finished that 6 year long story in four weeks. And then I wrote the first draft of my next book in four months.

Finishing was a huge high, and I highly recommend it.

Building Relationships

Yesterday, I spent the day building relationships, but not the ones in my book. Real ones. I did write, but not nearly as much as I usually do, and not nearly as much as I probably should have. And I feel like I should have done more for my cp.

On the other hand, I had coffee with my sister, watched my daughter perform in a summer-drama-camp rendition of the Wizard of Oz, and had dinner with my parents. In other words, I made a few deposits in the family-bond account ... where I might add, I'm frequently overdrawn yet they never bounce a hug.

The Synopsis

Writing a synopsis is my least favorite task as a writer. Writing a tagline is fun, writing a brief pitch paragraph is rewarding, writing the synopsis is just plain painful. I mean think about it--you're supposed to write the bare bones of the story. Doesn't that sound a lot like 'suck the life out of it'?

I know, I'm exaggerating--it's not as hard as I'm making it out to be. I've actually managed to write a few of them. But I struggle to get each new one completed because I find every excuse imaginable not to sit down and work on it. I have some wonderful advice from synopsis pros and some great tools from experts at my disposal, all of which make the process very straight-forward and rigorous. But they don't make writing one any easier, nor do they make it more fun. At least, not for me.

I'm going to have to conquer this dislike, though, because most published authors sell on synopsis. In other words, they write the synopsis first. Then, when a publisher offers a contract for the book, they write it. And since I fully intend to be a published author, that means there's a lot of these dratted things in my future.

I wonder if I can make a game out of it?

Finding Forests

One of the greatest things about the internet, in my humble opinion, is the number of people who kindly post their photos. I've been to Scotland, the setting of most of my books, exactly once. It was a whirlwind trip made primarily in the name of research (not to satisfy a lifetime yearning to go, no way ), and I was able to visit a number of strategic places, including the very spot where my hero's ancestral castle is built. This was great until I wrote my second book, and my third, and now my fourth. I haven't been to all those places, so how can I accurately describe what people would see?

Enter the photos. Through a combination of historical maps, regular maps, terrain maps, and photos taken by tourists and professional photographers alike, I have been able to visit the locations of my books. Lochs? Cliffs? Caves? Hills? Trees? Flowers? You name it, and someone's probably taken a picture of it. There's nothing like a picture to show you the lay of the land. Yeah, a few things have changed in the last 800 years, but a lot has remained the same.

So I say ... people of the world, unite. And post your pictures.