Oh-So-Clever Title

My annual year-end post usually opens with a bit of self-deprecating humor about how my annual year-end post usually opens. Maybe I try to place this moment of personal reflection in the appropriate context by acknowledging the insignificance of my writing life against the vast scale of horrors in the world, as well as my continued gratitude for all that cushions me from the bulk of these horrors. But I avoid bringing down the mood too much, because I'm writing this to provide a smidge of delight and human connection to my readers.

The introductory spiel tends to go on and on. There's always a link back to the previous year's annual year-end post. Usually that leads into commentary (increasingly self-deprecating, decreasingly humorous) about the similarity of these annual year-end posts and the circumstances they describe. This part also calls back to the recurring bit about previously made statements that now appear ironic and/or hubristic.

Eventually it's necessary to address the ostensible topic of the post by summarizing the year's writing accomplishments. Links to writing updates from throughout the year allow both me and my readers to recollect that in fact words were written and progress was made. The progress must be referred to as "slow" in a resigned but cheerful manner. Any intentions that were stated but not followed through on also get a positive spin, for instance by renewing those intentions for January.

At this point in the post, I occasionally offer some philosophical musings about writing lessons learned, or re-learned, in the course of the year. But more often, having already produced enough paragraphs for a minimum viable post, I move on to the closing.

The closing includes at least two of the following words: wish, hope, bright, joy, forward, better, future. The sentiment is always a bit sappy, but it's genuine.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Walrus, Tajja Isen reports on the publishing industry's gambling problem: "Sales track—or simply track, in industry parlance—is an invisible force shaping contemporary literature. Much depends on that number. On the basis of track, published authors struggle to keep going; those just starting out fear their careers will be severed at the root. Track shapes how an agent pitches a book and how editors assess whether to buy it. Track restricts reader choice by dictating which books are served up as the next big thing (and the next, and the next) and by kneecapping writers deemed insufficiently commercial. The primacy of track, in other words, is a barometer for the health of literary culture. Right now, when the industry is especially skittish, the obsession with finding the next blockbuster hit privileges the survival of the few at the expense of the many."

Briefly

I have fantasies in which I blog all the time about writing. (Wow, Lisa, what an exciting fantasy life you lead!) I wish I was both speedy and insightful enough to produce regular essays with peeks inside my process, explanations of craft questions I've pondered, and other such writerly gems. Alas, "speedy" is definitely not the type of writer I am, and my constant surprise over this fact suggests I'm not too great on the insight, either.

I don't have time to write all that stuff, and on the plus side, you probably don't have time to read it, either. We all have a lot going on, what with the various firehoses of real life that just keep spraying.

So I'll keep this brief: I'm still over here, writing my little sentences, or actually my overly long sentences. In the months since I blogged something other than reading recaps, I've also had a lot of not-writing time, with a busy period of traveling, turning 50, and living real life.

I continue to be pleased with how my novel is shaping up. I continue to be impatient about it not being fully shaped yet. Et cetera, et cetera, since I'm saving you time here. Go read something else, or take a moment to grab yourself a breath. I'm going to get back to my fantasy life, and/or my novel.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Sam Weller recounts the origin story of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: "In the storefront window of the United Cigar Store, he saw John Steinbeck's newly published novel The Grapes of Wrath and purchased it. Heading home by bus, literally traveling through the dust bowl, he read the book. He was particularly drawn to its structure, with its alternating narrative chapters and brief, intercalary passages of contextual information, setting, and social commentary. As he read, he thought about one day using the same architecture, but setting his story on Mars."

Working Like a Dog

This is how I start writing a blog post. Or anything, really:

It seemed about time to provide an update on how novel writing has been coming along so far in 2025.

I haven't posted a writing update yet in 2025, so I thought I'd do that, but then I

Every few months, I like to post

It's that time again on Lisa's blog when I try to find a new way to say I'm still writing, still slowly writing, to provide an update on my writing progress and hopefully a bit of entertainment.

The way I write involves a lot of piling up stacks of candidate sentences, whole or unfinished, until eventually I hit on something promising. Then I can delete the rejects, or strip them for parts. If I'm lucky, once I have a good opening, further sentences follow naturally, and I only need one version of each. Until I get to the next tricky point. Which might not come until the end of the scene, or might be in the next paragraph.

But even when I'm on a roll, I tend to type out words and phrases multiple times as I put sentences together. For example, I was about to delete these strays that appeared after the previous paragraph:

The next tricky point might

After I've piled up a series of candidate sentences, whole or unfinished,

Eventually I

When I'm making good progress, I barely even notice this aspect of sentence assembly, unlike the aspect where I slow way down to actively grasp for a workable idea. I suppose I must type a great many more words than I end up with, even when I don't have to delete a chunk of writing that I replace with a better idea.

I'm reminded of hiking with a dog, who runs ahead up the trail, then back down to check in, then eagerly uphill again, over and over. Does that make my fingers the dog? And the human hiker is... my brain? The story? This is probably an example of a paragraph I'd delete and replace with a better idea, if this were my novel.

But this is a blog post where I'm letting you in on the workings of my writerly mind, so I'll leave it in, along with a final selection of accumulated cruft to test your patience with this shtick:

Unlike the slower

is something I barely notice doing.

Now that I'm thinking about it, my writing process (if you can call it that)

I usually don't even notice how much my writing process (if you can call it that) involves typing even identical phrases

So, anyway, my novel. I'm writing it! It's slow going, but it's coming along! There are frequent tricky bits where I have to stop and figure out how best to set up a character conflict, lay the groundwork for a plot point, or convey a piece of worldbuilding. But I think what I'm producing is pretty good.

Like a dog on a hike, I spend a lot of time going over the same stretch of ground, and I want to be advancing so much faster. But like a human who can read the trail map, I know how far I've already come and that I'm incrementally moving toward the destination.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Laura B. McGrath looks inside the slush pile, analyzing data on a writer's odds of being discovered: "Any agent will tell you that finding a writer in slush is like finding a needle in a haystack. It's so difficult, and with such diminishing returns, that even agents who maintain slush piles still look for clients elsewhere. Still, we like to talk about the needles—those books that made it, against the odds. We can name them: Catch-22 on the one hand, Twilight on the other. But we know quite little about the haystacks in which they're found."

Upon Reflection

It's become my annual habit that prior to the final week of December, right before switching from work mode into vacation mode, I write a post looking back on the year. I sum up writing accomplishments, consider the state of the novel, try not to overly dwell on the slow pace of progress, say something that will be unfortunately ironic later, and so on.

This year I was particularly pressed for time when I would usually put together such a post, but with the way the calendar works out this December, I decided I could wait and post in the very last days of the month that are my frequent posting window anyway. I reasoned that during some of my vacation downtime, I'd have plenty of opportunity for the review of previous blog posts, novel progress notes, and other records I tend to consult when figuring out what the heck I did in any given year.

Though I am in fact following through on the year-end wrap-up, because here it is, I didn't spend a single minute in preparation before the afternoon I'm posting it. During a lovely beach getaway with family, I also didn't write any novel scenes, make any novel notes (well, one note—it's four words long), or put any thought into maybe finally redesigning my website.

Of course I didn't do any of that. I was on vacation, and while all those tasks are enjoyable in their own ways, they are work. Instead, I walked on the beach, I played games, I read with a view of the ocean, I spent time with people I love. And I felt grateful for my incredible good fortune in getting to take vacations as a break from a life of enjoyable work that falls far outside the common criteria of work.

I'm back home but still in vacation mode, really, and I sure resented committing myself to turning my work brain back on to get this post out. I remained resolved, but I had to motivate myself with the promise of just how minimal the post could be. I really only wanted to make sure I had a record for myself that the first half of 2024 involved a lot more planning, including a concerted effort at crafting complete character arcs, and that in late July I finally began a new, for-real draft. Progress has been predictably slow, but I'm not dwelling on that. Despite my real life often pulling attention away from my fiction, I've consistently returned focus to the novel whenever I can, and that's a significant accomplishment.

My first step for this post was to see what I had to say at the end of last year. I was surprised to discover how much I wrote, and how detailed and useful a record I'd made of my work and intentions throughout the year. My ambitions for today's post shrank even further in comparison.

Still, I got to work, with a plan for how I might eke out three or four paragraphs of reflection. By a couple of sentences in, I'd already changed that plan multiple times. By the third paragraph, I was contemplating deleting everything and starting over, only I just wanted to be done and post something, anything half-decent.

Now here I am in the eighth paragraph of what is certainly not my best writing ever but is probably at least three-quarters decent. The post has achieved the goal of capturing an accurate record of my writing state of mind, currently and recently. And it might sneakily have arrived at some broader truths about my writing year that can serve as useful lessons for the year ahead:

→ While I constantly wish I'd written something sooner, often by the time I write it later, I've come up with a different and better idea, so there's no sense in despairing over not writing faster.

→ But also: Usually I just need to get writing in order to figure out what I'm trying to write.

→ Writing time is important to me. Not-writing time is also important. Even after all these years, I'm still far from expert at distinguishing and prioritizing these times sensibly, but I can continue to learn.

Best wishes to you all as we move forward into another year!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Atlantic, Jordan Michelman explains the phenomenon of The Most Coveted Screenshot in the Literary World: "It is the Publishers Marketplace book-deal social-media post, a screenshot of the charmingly retro-looking blurb from a publishing-industry trade website that announces the details of an author selling their book."

Progress Is Progress

I tend to go months without posting anything here about my writing. That probably isn't news to the regular readers of this blog, and to those regular readers: I appreciate your attention to my occasional musings! I maintain the blog partly as a record for myself, but I don't think I'd keep doing it if nobody was reading.

A big reason for the long gap between updates is that I always feel like there are only so many ways to say I'm still doing essentially the same thing as last time I posted. Except whenever I finally start an update and look back at the previous months-ago post, I discover I've actually made more progress than I realized.

For example, back in June I was sticking notes onto poster boards to figure out the big picture of the plot, and this month I'm filling in the rows and columns of a table to figure out the big picture, so that's completely different! Ha, no, of course it's different. Probably. No, really, I did in fact read that post and think, "Wow, that was ages ago, I've done so much since then."

So the record-for-myself aspect of the blog is working, but sharing how I've progressed is trickier. A lot of what I've done lately is intently brainstorm and make decisions about one aspect of the story for a week or two, then shift abruptly to something else. It's not very linear, and I'm not always sure I'm moving forward, but I have to keep trusting that it's all building up to something.

One concrete thing I did last week was to reread the previous draft (or draft-ish pile of text). I hadn't looked at the whole thing in many months, and I've had many new ideas about the story since then. It was useful to revisit the old ideas with all the context around them, and I'm starting to get a better sense of how to reassemble the pieces that are working.

So, yeah, I'm still figuring out how to write a real version of this novel, and I'll probably be doing that for a while, but I've also made a lot of progress.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ I met my friend Christopher Gronlund through his writing blog, The Juggling Writer, which he's been keeping for 14 years. Chris posted about how he's also blogging far less frequently than he once did. But in his case, the big reason is that he's busy writing and recording stories that he puts out into the world regularly through his fiction podcast, Not About Lumberjacks. I am in awe of the ever-expanding scale of this project, and I've so enjoyed witnessing Chris's writing and audio progress over the years.

Getting Real

I accomplish very little that isn't motivated by an item on my to-do list. Sometimes I accomplish very little, period, but the to-do list keeps that from being all the time. What motivates me more, though, is deadlines, but I've learned they need to be at least in some way real and external, not arbitrarily self-imposed.

I don't expect even the people who consistently read this blog to put much thought into when exactly I publish posts. But there's an easily detectable pattern in the posts that are about my own writing, not other people's books. In recent years, these writing updates always appear in the last two or three days of the month. That's because they grow out of a to-do list item optimistically called "mid-month update" that gets postponed day after day until the end of the month looms. And it's because the end of a calendar month provides a real and unalterable, if silly, deadline that's made visible in the number of posts per month on the Archive section low in the blog's sidebar. I know my readers don't look at or care about these numbers, but I do, and it's a real enough deadline that I usually can't stand to miss it.

Only just, though. I delay writing about my writing because I approach the prospect with such ambivalence. I keep this blog to provide myself with both a record and accountability, and to give the people who care some insight into what I'm up to. For all those reasons, I want to post updates on my writing life, but the reflection involved is intimidating. And that's not only true when I'm feeling bad about not having any writing to report on.

I have been doing some writing work lately! In admitting that, I've created more pressure to follow through, augh!

First, I used a really real external deadline to push myself through an intense round of final edits on the short story I'd been fiddling with for a year. On the last day of a submission window, I submitted my story to a magazine. It was rejected. I immediately submitted it somewhere else, like a legit short story writer. Rinse, repeat. Someday this could end in triumph.

Second, I am just starting to noodle around with a new story idea that I like a lot. I know that sounds great, but it's scary and intimidating and pressure-filled, too. It's going to be hard work to get from the page of scattered notes to anything even vaguely story-shaped, and I never feel like doing hard work. But here it is on my to-do list, so I guess I'm off to try and accomplish something.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The New Yorker, Daniel A. Gross covers The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books: "I read more books in 2020 than I had in years. I was not the only one; last year, more than a hundred library systems checked out a million or more books each from OverDrive's catalogue, and the company reported a staggering four hundred and thirty million checkouts, up a third from the year before."

Where Do I Get My Ideas, Please?

Recently I've been putting focused time into brainstorming in hopes that I'll think up some viable story ideas. Writers are often asked, "Where do you get your ideas?" to which my instinctual answer might usually be a panicked "I don't know, I don't have any!" Many other writers seem a lot more full of ideas than I've ever been.

A more accurate assessment, though, is that without further qualification, ideas are easy, and I have a million of them. I have opening scenes and configurations of characters and a more interesting spin on that thing that happened in real life. Maybe I'm as full of ideas as those other writers I'm envying, but the thing I'm too often lacking is an idea that transforms some of this random stuff into a story. I don't have enough ideas about middle scenes or plots to send the characters on, so I'm left with no coherent shape to assemble the existing ideas into.

I have of course had viable story ideas before, and that suggests I surely will again. Most often, the good ideas come to me in a way that feels out of the blue, but very often following a period of despair and maybe a public proclamation that I'll never have another good idea again. So I figured I'd better make this post to move the process along.

I went looking through old blog posts to see what I'd written before about the search for ideas. I was thinking of this post on how to write a short story, though it turned out to focus less on the pre-idea stage than I remembered. I also found a sort of sequel post that's really more about procrastination than anything else.

I ended up reading through a lot of other old blog posts (speaking of procrastination) and was kind of amazed to discover how much I used to post and how much more full of ideas I seemed back then. I once came up with a whole story outline to use in a discussion of plot for a column I used to write, and then there's this other detailed invention for the sake of example. Possibly the answer is to get my ideas from Past Me, so I guess I'll be writing a story about the stress of unemployment and dolphin training.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At CrimeReads, Taylor Adams explains What Makes a Killer Plot Twist: "While out-of-nowhere problems are a great way to intensify the story's moment-to-moment suspense (I often delight in imagining things that can go wrong for the main character), it doesn't land with the same visceral impact as a plot twist because the groundwork isn't there. A complication can be simple bad luck, but a twist is inevitable. The clearer the reader can recall these 'signposts'—and the longer they've been embedded in the story—the bigger the exhilaration when you circle back on them to deliver an unexpected (but fully unavoidable) revelation."

Keeping You Posted

A short general update, and then a technical update for the handful of people who receive this blog via email:

In general, my life is going pretty well, for which I remain grateful. Thanks to vaccines, I was able to travel to see my family, and I feel so fortunate that I got to have those happy reunions. I know that most of the world is not so lucky, and that insufficient vaccine uptake in this country means our window of increased safety could be receding.

In writing, other than occasional continued puttering on a story revision, I haven't been doing much. I don't have any specific writing goals at the moment, and that's keeping me somewhat adrift. I've been feeling more excited lately about the idea of diving into a new project, but I'm not yet sure what that project would be, so I have thinking to do.

And now, the boring announcement for my dozen or so email subscribers: The service (Feedburner) I've always used to automatically send my posts as email messages is discontinuing that feature. I've migrated my subscribers to a new service that will email the posts instead, but I'm still figuring out the details. If everything goes as expected, you'll receive this post from both services (probably at different times). Subsequent posts should only come from a new service, but the look (or the service itself) may change. Hiccups are of course also possible, because technology is fun that way.

Since this has required me to start messing around with the technical workings of my blog after years of barely touching it, I might even get inspired to make some bigger changes. So if there's anything (or everything) about my decade-old design that you think desperately needs an upgrade, let me know your thoughts.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Maria Kuznetsova offers Writing (and Life) Lessons from Finishing Two Novels That Didn't Sell: "Find the axis that your novel turns around. You can have as many plots and subplots as you want, as long as there's a clear focal point. In my first book, I lost track of the fact that it was about how Chernobyl affected my narrator—every scene, whether it was her love for her friend's grandpa, or the friend's accident, should have revolved around that. When I lost track of Chernobyl, my narrator was aimless."

The Annual Reckoning

This year I finished my novel, twice, once in February and once in November. That's pretty cool, but it's not unprecedented. In my long history of finishing THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, there was another year I reached The End twice, way back in 2013.

I wrote last December about the repetitive nature of my year-end posts, but it's not every year I complete this novel even once, so 2019 was definitely a year of accomplishment. One consistent feature of my annual wrap-ups is the belief that the following year will bring a much more triumphant accomplishment, though I think I stopped stating this explicitly way back in 2011. So I'll just say that this time, I'm extra optimistic.

This particular end of the year is also the end of the decade, and everyone's been reflecting accordingly. I started this blog in 2010, so it's easy to check back on what I was up to at the beginning the decade. I was preparing to embark on a revision of this same novel. As much as the world has changed since then, I guess it's nice to find points of stability.

Here's to a new year, a new decade, and progress in positive new directions. I wish you all much happiness!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Adam O'Fallon Price decides to face the horror of rereading his first novel: "One thing that struck me on this reading is just how much there is going on. It's a common feature of the debut novel, in which an author takes decades of reading and thinking about novels and compresses it all into their first try, as though it will also be their last. Some of it works here, and some of it doesn't. If I were to give critical advice to the person who wrote this, I might tell him to think about losing at least one of the component parts--maybe the Vietnam sections--and to also not feel like he has to conclude all of the proceedings with quite such a bang."

Wrapping Up and Winding Down

The end of 2015 approaches, and I'm ready to switch my brain to vacation mode. Before I sink into a revel of books, knitting, and sugar, here's an update and overview of my writing year.

At the end of October, I mentioned I was a month into a new novel that I was writing with very little plan in mind. Yesterday I completed that first draft. I brought the characters and situation to a reasonable point of closure a bit past the 50,000-word mark that defines a novel in NaNoWriMo. The manuscript concludes with a self-indulgent epilogue that gives every character a happy ending, which was my reward for pushing through to the end.

Nobody gets to read this story. It's not at all good. Though I didn't restrict myself to writing in a single month, I basically NaNoWriMoed this first draft, and in true NaNo fashion, there are some tiny brilliant bits that emerged as surprises in the course of writing, and the rest is discardable. The premise turned out to be only marginally fruitful, and everything interesting happened in the subplots. I do like how many of the characters evolved, and some elements of the story have potential, so maybe certain parts could be salvaged and turned into something else. But that's a concern for another year.

At least I can report that I wrote a novel this year. I learned some things in the process and reminded myself what first drafts are like (bad). I derived some satisfaction from following through on a large project. It kept me from running wild on the streets or the internet for a couple of hours each day.

The more significant and satisfying writing endeavor of 2015 was yet another revision of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, which occupied me for the first half of the year. After confronting the fact that my manuscript was just too long, I shortened it by over 20%. By now I can't even remember how I possibly achieved this feat, so I'll have to review my series of posts about The Incredible Shrinking Manuscript.

All throughout the year, I've continued fiddling with the outline I keep talking about that I hope will eventually become another novel. This has been mostly a background project, and while I'm making gradual progress with it, I don't have any exciting milestones to announce.

I had a lot of fun this year composing blog entries that explore my childhood writing. Reading and analyzing the bizarre things I wrote as a kid has provided me with great amusement each month, and I'm glad my readers find these posts entertaining as well. I have more gems to share in 2016.

My final ongoing writing project is producing reviews of every book I read. The monthly recap format has been working out well for me, and I'll probably continue with that next year. Stay tuned for a January post with my favorite books of 2015, reading stats, and so on.

I'll wrap this up with two non-writing notes. First, for those who didn't see it elsewhere, check out the sweater I finally finished knitting and assembling this fall, a year and a half after starting it. And lastly, let's not forget that in 2015, we learned that I am a treasure chest once owned by the Visigoths.

May your 2015 wind down with some moments you can treasure. Here's to the end of another year!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel considers genres and the myths of popularity, with statistical analysis and an overview of ongoing debates: "There is an odd cognitive dissonance that happens in these conversations, where we are simultaneously supposed to believe that literary fiction is 'mainstream fiction' and genre fiction is 'ghettoized,' and also that literary fiction is a niche nobody reads while genre authors laugh all the way to the bank."

Half-Baked Ideas, Mashed With Butter

Last night I dreamed that I wrote an awesome blog post. It was fairly short but extremely clever, and I was pleased at the thought of how much my readers would appreciate it.

This is not that post. Alas, I have no recollection of what the dream post was about. And frankly, if I did retain a clearer memory, it would probably turn out my topic was something uninspiring and utterly irrelevant, such as sweet potatoes. Though I really do like sweet potatoes.

Anyway, I've been making a start at the new year, slowly but surely. I'd fallen out of many of my work habits in recent months, so I've set myself a new schedule, and it's proving more or less effective. In keeping with my mission statement, I've gotten up to some reading, some writing, and some revising, and I'll have more to say about all of those soon.

Today I took my first swim of the year, outside in the California sun. (Yeah, I'm telling you this mostly to gloat.) While I swam laps, I mused over novels and stories and posts and dreams. Many of these thoughts aren't fully formed yet, and I'm still working out the details of all my writing plans, but it's nice to be back to work.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Janice Hardy suggests that Small Changes in Your Writing Process Can Lead to Big Results: "It's easy to keep writing when the writing is flowing, so don't do anything to break that momentum. If you run into a detail you don't know, or you aren't sure how to describe something, but that detail will make no difference whatsoever to the plot, try making a note and moving on."

Fit to Print

It's well into October (in case you haven't noticed), which means that the bulk of the year is over. The most substantial thing I've accomplished in 2014 to this point is that I've read a lot of books. I've done some other stuff too, of course, but most of that remains stalled in a state of incompletion.

Reading books is great. You start at the first page, you move forward through the (hopefully wonderful) story, and then you get to the end, and it's over. Maybe you're sorry it's over, maybe you're a little bit relieved, but in any case, the book is done. You've had the experience of reading it, you get to add it to your list, and you can tell other people what you thought of it.

This is why all my posts for the past few months have been about books I've read. Reviews are a nice concrete chunk of prose representing a specific accomplishment that I know how to tell the world about. While I sometimes struggle to accurately (and diplomatically) express my opinions of the books, these are feelings I'm comfortable sharing.

The rest is trickier. I am still making gradual progress toward the new novel. I'm still actively seeking an agent for the completed novel. I'm always contemplating what other sorts of things I could write, or should write, or might do with myself and my time. It's all kind of vague.

I had hoped my accomplishments would be more thrilling by this point in the year. Any day now, I could have exciting new things to post about, and in the meantime I'm going to work on coming up with a bit of variety, even if it's not too new or too exciting. But when all else fails, it's a comfort to know that there are always more books to read and discuss.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Edan Lepucki studies the metaphors in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: "Throughout the novel, Offred continually turns her body into something other than a body in this way. At the same time, she also regularly personifies objects. In this passage, for example, while she is a piece of a toast, the ceiling has a 'blind plaster eye' and the moon shines on 'the breast of the new-fallen snow.' In Offred's imagination, everything is turned on its head, or given one." (Thanks, The Millions!)

This Is Just To Say

I leave a lot of notes for myself. Occasionally the notes are on paper, stuck places where I'll see them ("Car needs gas!"), but mostly they're typed into my computer in a ridiculous number of applications and files.

I make detailed to-do lists and use them to plan my days. Because of all my lists, I more or less accomplish what I need to, and I rarely forget stuff.

I write down ideas for my novel whenever they occur to me. I keep these carefully organized so I can consult the notes and incorporate the ideas when I get to the right place in the story.

All these notes get to serve their purpose in life when I eventually act on them. But I've also been creating a very large body of notes that sadly never get to progress to the next stage of existence. These are the ideas for future blog posts that I record and never look at again.

I have multiple files containing notes for blog posts, I guess so I can feel organized as I type things into the appropriate black hole. Obviously I'm posting to my blog on a fairly regular basis, but it's never thanks to these notes. Most of what I post (besides book recommendations) is sparked by some thought I get inspired to write about immediately. That's just fine, but I'm curious about all those other topics I wanted to explore.

I've started looking through my notes, and there's some decent stuff in there. The ideas I've noted for later are mainly either too big (they'll take a lot of time and maybe multiple posts to cover well) or too small (I may not have more than a sentence or two to say). It's the medium-sized ideas that most often make it to actual posthood.

What with it being the beginning of a new year, I thought I would try digging through my idea files and turning some of them into posts, even if the writing situation that provided the original spark is now lost to the mists of time. I think I'm sometimes reluctant to go back to the old ideas because they feel too random if the topic isn't currently on my mind, but since I'm sure that for you the readers, this whole blog is pretty random, that's a silly concern.

That said, if there's any particular subject or type of post that you the readers would like to see here, please let me know. I'll make a note of it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Evan V. Symon presents 10 Deleted Chapters That Transformed Famous Books: "Bram Stoker's iconic novel is by far the most influential horror book. But what many don't know is that the final chapter was taken out by Stoker at the last minute. In the deleted chapter, Dracula's castle falls apart as he dies, to hide the fact that vampires were ever there." (Thanks, Louise!)

I'm Back!

Hello out there. Remember me?

If your memory stretches back far enough, you'll recall that in my last post, I announced my intention not to focus my attention on this blog over the summer.

"I still expect to post at random intervals," I wrote. "To be honest, you probably won't even notice a difference from my usual sporadic posting." Well, as it turned out, I haven't posted a thing in the last eight weeks. And many of you did notice and mention it to me, which I appreciate.

While I was away, I traveled to what felt like everywhere, even if it was really only a few U.S states. I had a whole lot of wonderful quality time with relatives from many branches of my big old family forest. I got to play for hours with my amazing little nephew and help put together his second birthday party.

I had adventures. I rode the Coast Starlight train down the California coast. I saw the northern lights from an airplane. I watched a lightning storm from a Manhattan high-rise. I learned to rewire a light switch, comprehend the Tour de France, and play the ukelele. I suffered through what seemed like more than my fair share of airline ticketing mishaps (though I didn't get stranded in an airport overnight again, happily).

While out of town, I didn't do any work on my novel, and I only managed a little writing in the gaps between the different trips. I definitely didn't spend any of my travel downtime on blog renovations and planning, the way I tried to convince myself I might. I did read a bunch of books, which I'll post about soon.

In short, I had a lovely summer vacation, and now it's lovely to be home. And I'm looking forward to getting back to blogging as a nice balance to the novel writing sessions I'm even more eager to resume.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Sunny Chanel asked her six-year-old to guess what classic novels are about based on the covers: "It looks like a book for kids. I think it's about a donkey and a pig that do not like each other and they both live on a farm for animals. The same farm. It looks like it would be a funny book with a good really nice ending."

→ Gabe Habash at PWxyz does a roundup of Ugly Covers for Great Books: "I'm not sure Faulkner’s had a good cover printed since he was alive."

Summertime, and the Living Is Hectic

I have a lot going on in the next couple of months, and I want to cram as much work on my novel as possible between all the distractions. For that reason, I'm taking this blog off my list of priorities for the summer.

I still expect to post at random intervals. To be honest, you probably won't even notice a difference from my usual sporadic posting, but trust me, it makes a difference for me to let myself off the hook in this way.

This week marks two years since my first post. I guess I wouldn't bother keeping a blog if it didn't fulfill my own creative needs, but I also wouldn't do it if I didn't imagine all you out there waiting to read what I have to say. Thank you once again for following along with my adventures in reading, writing, and revising.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Amanda Nelson at Book Riot confesses, I Say Awkward Things to Authors: "I don't hero-worship writers, but I do try to think of something to say other than, 'gee-whiz, your book was great, by golly.' I imagine they get bored of having that conversation over and over, so I try to come up with something else. This is my hubris. This is my doom." (Thanks, Josh Christie!)

→ On the #amwriting blog, Jason Black asks, Is your manuscript complete, or is it finished?: "The other day I finished one of Michael Crichton's lesser-known works, Pirate Latitudes.... It's one of his lesser-known works for a couple of different reasons. One, it was published after he died in 2008. Two, honestly, it’s not very good. As we'll see, though, those are the actually same reason just in different guises."

Hello Again

I'm back from my blogging hiatus. I missed you all! And I missed writing the blog while I was away, so I hope I'm returning with some new energy to inject into the project. I have various post ideas lined up, including several book recommendations for the upcoming weeks. (I'm going to skip a monthly recap and cover two months of books at the beginning of April.)

No, I didn't finish revising my novel while I was away. I didn't even complete the current storyline, but I did accomplish a lot of good writing and planning that will take me through to the ending of this story. As I've written about before, endings involve plenty of extra thought and notetaking, so they tend to go slowly.

Well, I should specify that it takes time to craft a reasonable, satisfying ending. When I wrote the very first draft of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE back in National Novel Writing Month 2007, I whipped out the three ending chapters in a single day, because it was November 30, and I had to.

My notes from that day explain: "I wrote all day long, except for breaks for meals, and it was my wordiest day EVAR (8597 words). I wrote the final chapter to each of the three novel storylines, producing three rather cheesy endings. I finished with only 15 minutes left in the month. Woo hoo the end!"

We're talking endings so weak and implausible that one character is basically like, "Well, I have this drug addiction that was supposedly ruining my life, but you and I kind of started this relationship a couple of days ago, so maybe I could get over it and be okay." In the current version of the novel, none of the plots resolve the same way they did in the first draft (and thank goodness for that).

Writing a decent version of that novel I originally bashed out in 30 days is obviously taking a little bit longer. And then a little bit more. But it's going to be so worth it when I'm done.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Anna Solomon writes at Beyond the Margins about why focus is overrated: "I've gone on countless runs, determined to figure out a problem in a story, and every time, it's the same: only when I get so bored that I forget my purpose does the answer come to me. At my last residency, I spent as much time staring at deer as at my computer, yet I churned out a record number of words on a daily basis."

Brief Blog Break

I have a couple of chapters left to go on the revision of my novel's middle storyline, so I've been focusing a lot of time and attention on getting the words out. Most days lately, I've also been planning to make blog posts, and even more interestingly, planning to contemplate some bigger ideas for the blog, but those items keep rolling over to the next day's to-do list.

My obsession with fiction often extends to the time-management expectations I fabricate for myself, but I think it's time to inject a bit of realism here. I'll be taking the next week or two off from the blog to concentrate my energy on the novel.

When I return, I'll get to the reader requests from last month's call for feedback. In the meantime, feel free to leave additional ideas.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Gabe Habash writes at PWxyz about The Wonderful and Terrible Habit of Buying Too Many Books: "There are just too many books to read. And while one might make the very good point that you could just wait to buy them when you have more room, there's something about putting them in a row with other books, read and unread, that creates the cumulative impression of your reading self."

Busy, Back Soon

This week I had to do some terrible things to my characters. I arrived at my novel's most horrific event and revised the scene that destroys the characters' lives. As I got closer and closer to this scene, I'd been both dreading and looking forward to revisiting and improving it.

I'm glad that I got through this scene, and I'm pleased with the way it turned out. The aftermath is shaping up nicely, with some good new changes from the previous draft. I have some hope that the rest of this storyline will flow out pretty quickly from here, so it might not be so very long until I move on to the next and final storyline.

All of which is to say, there's been a lot of intense revising around here recently, and not too much else. I'll work on coming up with some more interesting blog content for later in the month.

But I figure this is a good time to ask you, my loyal blog readers: Is there any particular topic you'd like me to discuss? What types of posts are you interested in seeing more of? Please weigh in with any feedback, and thank you so much for reading!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Henriette Lazaridis Power writes at The Millions about acknowledgements: "Everyone reads the acknowledgements. In fact, for many of us, the first thing we do when we pull a book off the store shelf is to flip to the back. The writers among us might be searching for the agent or the editor we can query, or we might be seeking our own name in the list. But we certainly read the acknowledgements for the drama and the human story revealed therein."

Now, Where Was I?

In June, I reached the blogging milestone of one year since my first post. After much deliberation, I decided that the best way to celebrate the anniversary would be to completely ignore the blog for over a month.

No, of course that's not exactly what happened. In June, my regularly scheduled creative endeavors were interrupted by higher than usual levels of reality. These conditions persisted right up until some previously planned weeks of vacation. For the sake of my sanity, I let the blog lapse into an unannounced hiatus.

I'm back now. And I'm just as unsure how to go about this blogging thing as I've been all along. As I feared at the beginning, I'm a slow blogger, and the time I spend writing posts usually comes at the expense of time I would have spent on the novel. After a year, blogging hasn't become easier or turned into a more natural part of my routine the way I hoped it would.

Still, I'm glad I started this blog, and I intend to continue. I'm happy with the posts I've written this year. I think some of them have been useful or inspirational for other people (and I always like hearing when they are, hint hint). Some favorite posts:

→ Index Cards for Fun and Planning

→ Getting the Story Right

→ Why I Quit NaNoWriMo But You Shouldn't

→ Recommended Books on Writing

→ What We Write About When We Write About Love

→ Just 10 Minutes

→ All of the columns originally published in WritersTalk, which are longer and more in-depth than my standard blog posts

I'm pleased with my system of monthly reading plans and recaps that encourages me to read more books and post about what I read. I still find it tricky to compose more detailed book recommendations, but I'm gradually figuring out how to review and discuss books.

I have some vague ideas about possible new directions for my blog. For now, though, expect things to remain as haphazard as always around here. If you, my loyal readers, have any thoughts about what you'd like to see more of (or less of), please let me know. Thanks for reading.

What I've Been Doing Instead of Blogging

I haven't posted here in a couple of weeks. This is what I've been doing with myself in the meantime:

→ Staying off the internet for much of the day. I decided to disable my computer's wireless connection before bed each night and not turn it on until finishing the day's writing work. To my surprise, most days I haven't been particularly eager to get back online, and after writing, I move on to reading, housework, etc without stopping to look at Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader. As a result, I've been more productive than usual in the non-internet world. As another result, I've only had time for "essential" online interactions, and I've regretted missing out on my normal levels of consumption and engagement. Such are the problems of our modern world (or not).

→ Engaging repeatedly in pointless turmoil that goes like this: I think of a brilliant blog post I'll write later that day and compose a few sentences in my head. I run out of time in the day for writing a blog post, due to accomplishing so many other productive tasks (or not). I tell myself I'll write the post the next day. The next day, I have lost all enthusiasm for the topic but have another brilliant idea. The cycle repeats. I do not write any blog post at all. I feel guilty about neglecting my blog and letting down my devoted readers. I berate myself for the narcissism of imagining that my readers, however devoted, are actually sitting around thinking about how I have let them down. I feel guilty about my narcissism. I feel narcissistic for posting about my guilt. I marvel at the fact that I do not yet have any posts tagged "guilt".

→ Thinking about patterns, habits, and cycles, both in my own life and in the lives of my characters. Despite my real or imagined narcissism, I far prefer to analyze these as they apply to my characters.

→ Making excellent progress on getting the story of my novel right by writing a synopsis. I'm sure this advice appears many places, but I know that in REVISION & SELF-EDITING by James Scott Bell, he recommends drafting a synopsis (or several) as a way to assess a story before revising. I've been writing what I expect will be about a 15-page document that lays out the plot of my novel -- not the plot as it exists, but as it should be. This has been a slow, extremely useful process that is forcing me to come up with answers to all the questions like "How did that result in him believing that?" and "Why wouldn't she have told him that years ago?" Once I'm done with the synopsis, the idea is that I'll know what I need to change in the next draft, and I'll have some confidence that those things won't need to be changed again. I keep feeling like it sure would have saved a lot of time if I had simply created this synopsis before ever writing the book in the first place, but I know I wouldn't have come up with most of this stuff without writing it a couple of times. It would be awfully nice to develop the skill of doing it in the other order, though.

→ Smiling at my reorganized book collection every time I walk down the hall.

→ Rewarding myself for getting rid of 150 books by -- yes, you guessed it! -- buying more books.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Paul Collins at Slate studies a Victorian writing guide and observes what the first how-to book for fiction can still tell us: "[Sherwin] Cody tells would-be Victorian writers to show and don't tell ('To say your heroine was proud and defiant is not half so effective as saying she tossed her head and stamped her foot'), to kill their darlings ('sacrifice absolutely everything of that sort'), and write what they know." (Thanks, Dick!)

→ Parker Peevyhouse at The Spectacle puzzles over When Writers Don’t Read: "Reading a chapter of someone else's book is like taking a shot of espresso -- it keeps me going. It puts me in the right frame of mind, like the author is sitting there with me waiting for me to jump in with my own story."