Month: January 2015

  The library in my elementary school was half the size of a classroom, but as full of books as they could make it. Still I’d read nearly every book in it before I escaped to middle school and more books. In middle school and high school, I read a book a day most days. I read through the middle school library in just over a year, and the kind librarians let me into the high school section early so I wouldn’t starve for books. On a rare trip to the county library I looked like a contestant in one of those “all you can stuff in the cart in ten minutes” contest winners. When I got home I always needed help with my stack of treasure—especially since I was generally eyebrows deep in the first book while I tried to carry the rest. In those years, pretty much if I wasn’t reading, I was writing. I had an old electric typewriter on a table in my room, and a bunch of notebooks for when I needed to hide somewhere else (and a 35-acre farm full of places to do the hiding!) and I loved to write the stories that I couldn’t find to read. (Stories I can now identify as self-insert Hardy Boys fanfic? Yeaaahhhh…there might be a reason that stuff wasn’t in the library.)

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I turned Grave Touched in to my editor on Jan. 1st, and have been between projects since then.  I wanted to work on something, anything, so I started thinking about what I could work on until my edits on GT hit.  I decided to write a novella in the Reaper Girl universe and resurrect a languishing novel that needed a rewrite (but only on Sundays.  It’s a long story).  I also wanted to start Fey Touched book 3, Ever Touched, sometime soon so there would hopefully not be three years between it and GT.  With me so far?

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There’s been some years where, here on the blog, come January, I’ve talked about some grand plan I had for the new year. I think the last one was the year I was going to finish all the books I’ve started and not gotten through. Do you know how many I read off my list? Not a one. And one year I gathered a posse of other creative types and was going to check in on them all year, to make sure they were accomplishing what they wanted to get accomplished and give them encouragement along the way. Which lasted til March.

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I have a confession to make: I’ve lost my way as a writer. It’s been a struggle to write for several years now. I struggle a lot with motivation — I set goals and miss them, I bribe myself, I procrastinate, I feel guilty, I beat myself up. All of those things are normal for many writers, but if it’s this much work to make myself write…something’s very wrong. And when I do write, I struggle with editing and go around in circles and brainstorm fruitlessly until I beat the story into the ground. It’s not fun anymore.

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