Reading Your Work Cold

April 26, 2012 By 3 Comments

The Philadelphia Writer’s Conference is coming up in June. I’ve already registered to go, and am in the process of gathering the submissions for the critiques and contests. What’s been interesting is my reaction to reading the excerpts I am preparing to send.

Before I get to that, let me dump a little backstory in here.

I have a toddler. She takes up most of my time. For a while I tried to cycle my writing projects, trying to work on all of them at once. But that just made me feel like I wasn’t accomplishing anything, because I never got to the end of anything. So I decided for the sake of my sanity to focus on one project at a time.

The project I have been working on is a middle grade dystopian steampunk mashup. It will come as no surprise that this is one of the works I am sending in to the conference. I have gathered notes from beta readers and crit partners, and reworked the first 2500 words thoroughly. Then I got more feedback from my crit partners and reworked it again. The opening is significantly better than it was, and I can’t wait to get to work on the rest of the book to bring it up to the same level.

The second excerpt I am sending in is a YA novel—I’m not sure if it would be called a fantasy or a paranormal for genre purposes. The girl’s got supernatural abilities (paranormal) but they come via her father, who is a Greek god (fantasy). So take your pick.

I haven’t worked on this story for many months, so I came to it with very fresh eyes. And I was pleasantly surprised—mostly because I had made changes to the story that I had forgotten I had made. The edits I had made definitely improved the story, and I found myself excited by it in a way I hadn’t been last time I worked on it.

We always hear the advice to put a work aside for a time and come back to it fresh. Usually, this advice is intended to allow you to see the errors and mistakes you’ve made. We rarely hear about the flip side of that coin: Coming to it fresh also allows you to see the strengths of what you have written.

My YA wasn’t perfect, by any means—my crit partners still had some suggestions. But it was so much stronger than what I had remembered having, that I found myself thinking, “This is good—almost like a professional wrote it.”

When I find myself thinking that, I know I’m on the right track.

So if you have the luxury of time, put your work aside before doing a final edit. And when you do come back to it fresh, don’t just focus on what’s wrong. Allow yourself to see and revel in what you’ve done well.

Enjoying those gems in your writing will energize you to bring your A-game to the final edit, and that passion will make your words shine.

Juggling

April 28, 2011 By 3 Comments

Life is all about juggling, right? We’re always prioritizing something because our to-do lists never seem to get any shorter. We also have to juggle because so many things on our to-do lists require input from other people—and other people are not always as on top of things as we’d like them to be.

So I, like all of you, am juggling. I’ve got my 18-month-old daughter’s needs. I’m buying a house, so I’m neck-deep in the needed inspections and paperwork. I do have a husband, too, although sometimes he’s hard to see through the piles of diapers and mortgage paperwork. There are, of course, the hundreds of things that crop up that can’t be scheduled—like the air conditioning going on the fritz. And amid all that, there is my writing.

My writing time is precious (about 2 hours a day). In that time I not only have to write, but I have to keep up with the social networking that is so crucial for every author today. I read blogs (and write them!), as well as check in with Facebook and Twitter. So even within my slice-of-heaven writing time, I must prioritize.

As far as the actual writing goes, I am juggling two projects. They are both novels in the later draft stages. One is a middle grade that is undergoing a seismic shift into a different genre. The other is a YA fantasy that is in the middle of a post-beta-reader revision. Two very different projects that have the same deadline—December.

As an unpublished writer, I have the luxury of being able to work on what I want when I want. But as a serious writer, I know that giving myself deadlines and sticking to them is necessary to get ahead in my career. I wondered how best to break up my week between the two books—in chunks such as 3 days in a row each or alternating days.

I chose to alternate days. I think springing back and forth between the two plots and the two genres will help keep my mind nimble and my enthusiasm fresh. And it allows me to always have a feeling of forward progress on both projects. So far, it is working for me.

I’d love to hear from you. How do you juggle multiple projects?

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