Tomorrow is a good day for a new start

Tomorrow is NaNoWriMo. (That's National Novel Writing Month, if you don't happen to already know)

I’m particularly excited about it this year.

I’ve landed in Saudi, and I’m finally starting to feel settled. The household has been set up and is starting to flow the way that it should. Brandon’s MBA is done and is no longer swallowing our lives whole like it has for the past two years. In the next week, I’ll be arranging a housekeeper to come in twice a week and do everything for me from scrubbing toilets to washing and folding all of my laundry.

But the very most exciting thing? The boys start school tomorrow.

For the first time in eight years, I will have 7 ½ hours a day to myself without interruption, five days a week.

I will be able to go exercise without arranging a babysitter. I will be able to leave my house without having to hurry anybody up into their shoes or their coat. I will be able to play my guitar without having to fight off little hands. I will be able to make salad for lunch and not hear a single whining complaint from anybody. 

I will be able to think in a straight line, and then go on, and think some more.

I love my kids, but they are a handful. And that’s putting it mildly. They are good boys but socially, they are both extroverts. My oldest especially. He has absolutely no idea what to do with himself in an empty room alone, except to find somebody to be with. It’s painful to him to not spend the day at another person’s side constantly, constantly interacting.

I, however, am quite the opposite of that. I relish solitude. I long for quiet hours and peaceful, silent, unoccupied space. I’ve always been that way.

When I was in elementary school, I used to climb onto the garage roof just to get away from the constant flow and noise of people in my house. I was the second oldest of six children. Five of us were born in five years, one after the other, after the other. There was always a lot of flow and noise. I used to climb on the roof and tell myself stories for hours. It was the ultimate escape up there, with nothing but the clouds and the silence to keep me company.

Tomorrow, I’m going to miss my kids. My little one loves crafts and will sit and color with me all day long. My oldest is funny and has discovered that he’s nearly big enough to wrestle me to the ground. We wrestle a lot.

But having them both in full day school is going to be like getting my garage roof back. I’m going to have hours to myself again to stare at the clouds and dream of hero’s and battles and far off lands, and I’ll have all the time in the world to get it all onto paper. 

I’ve got a Writers of the Future win beneath my belt. I’ve got my kids off to school. I’ve got a housekeeper doing my laundry.

At this point, if I don’t start writing, there aren’t a whole lot of excuses left to hide behind.

Tomorrow I am going to start writing. I’m going to produce novels and short stories, and I’m going to see what I can sell, and learn from what I can’t.

Tomorrow is the day that my career starts.

Day One of Writers of the Future

Day one of my Writers of the Future adventure has come and gone, and I'm feeling pretty great. Well, technically day one is today I guess, so I should say that Day Zero of my Writers of the Future adventure has come and gone, and I'm feeling pretty great. When I call it day zero it makes me think that there's going to be something uber-exciting like a typhoid Mary or a zombie apocalypse.  But mostly, all the winners arrived and we had our orientation.

Brandon, Scott Parkin and I were the first to arrive. I'd been warned ahead of time by a previous year's winner to expect cameras. Holy cow, they weren't lying! They filmed us driving up in the car. They filmed my feet as I walked into the hotel. They snapped pictures as we checked in and said our first hello's to the other winners. It felt a little like I'd stepped onto the set of a reality show. Only without having to vote anybody off the island by the end of the week. Which is good. Because I really like everyone I've met. :)

We spent the entire day hanging out in the lobby of the hotel, so we could say hello to everyone as they arrived. At about 7 last night, we were taken upstairs for a run down of the week by Dave Wolverton and Tim Powers. They'll be the main two instructors through the first part of the week. It was really intimidating to be told that we'll be expected to write a completed short story in just 24 hours. Dave is an excellent teacher, I've taken a workshop from him before. Tim seems like he's also going to be a great teacher, and they actually managed to present the idea in a way that took the edge off the fear.

I hope I can hold onto that in the coming days.

We were also handed a beautiful hard cover book about L Ron Hubbard's writing career and his thoughts on how to be a professional writer (our text book for the week), and a magnetic name badge that has our name, the year we won, and the name of our winning story engraved on it.

I have to say, seeing the name of my story, engraved in gold, and absolutely real, actually made me want to cry a little bit. Even though I've been through this process, and I've seen the galleys and I've known for awhile that this was coming, seeing my name and the title of my story actually written down like that, made it all suddenly become very real. That surprised me.

It felt pretty awesome.

How to watch Writers of the Future from the comfort of your own home.

One week from today, I head out to Writers of the Future.

I am excited. I am nervous. I'm still in a bit of denial. I still haven't given any thought to what I'm going to say onstage. So I can't promise what I say will be witty, coherent or in any way representative of actual human speech. I have some limited experience of speaking in front of crowds, but never to an audience so large. And never as a guest of honor. I may get to the front and hyperventilate myself into incoherence. I may say something so unforgivably stupid that I'm thrown out of the contest and stricken from the records. But if any of you would like to see me try not to embarrass myself too badly, you can watch the awards ceremony online, Sunday night at http://www.writersofthefuture.com/.

I really do recommend you tune in! I watched last year's ceremony and  I really enjoyed many of the speakers. And if you happen to be entering the contest yourself, watching the ceremony is an excellent chance to dream big. Imagine yourself up on that stage! Write out your own acceptance speech. It's OK to admit that you've written at least one at some point in your life.

Or maybe that's just me. :)

Finding time to write

Since placing in Writers of the Future, I’ve been in a bit of a panic. That was all I had ready, so now what? I can’t be a writer on just one published story. Shortest career in history.

So I’ve been trying to find ways to slip writing into my schedule more than I have. Which is tricky. I go to conventions and sit in panels filled with men who tell me that finding time to write at home is easy. All they have to do is focus and if the kids act up, they just send ‘em to talk to mom!

Well, that’d be a lot easier, if my name wasn’t mom.

My reality, that I’ve had to accept, is that I simply won’t ever have 14 hours a day for three straight months to focus on spitting out a novel. I just won’t. I’m not the primary breadwinner. I am the primary caregiver. And it's pretty much going to be that way until the youngest leaves home. The best I can hope for is 8 hours a day, 5 days a week during the school year once my little one hits first grade. Only somebody still has to do the laundry.

Anyway, in my quest to find time to write, I bought the NanoWrimo Writing Tools Story Bundle as advertised by Dave Farland. It’s a bunch of e-books about writing, one of which was Million Dollar Productivity by Kevin J. Anderson. In his 25 year career, he’s written something like 130 books or so. I’m assuming that number is higher by now because that man never stops writing!

I was a bit skeptical at first. I was expecting things like, “Think about your story all the time.” That one was in there and it wasn’t a surprise. But do you have any idea how hard it is to follow even the simplest thought from point A to point B with “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!” interrupting your thoughts every 30 seconds? It’s like wearing the thought canceling earphones from Harrison Bergeron, designed to make even the brightest of person below average in less than a day!

But then there were some other suggestions that really caught my eye. Keven J. Anderson hikes A LOT. Which, when he first mentioned I was a little jealous of. I love hiking and it’s one of the things that have given way in the face of all the rest of my life’s responsibilities. But as he hikes, he dictates into a voice recorder. He can dictate several chapters of first draft in a day, then he sends it out to be transcribed. There are times when he employs 3 typist full time to keep up with him. Cool Huh?

Wasn’t sure it’d work for me, but I thought I’d give it a go. For the past 2 days, I’ve turned my phone off and hiked into the nearby national forest. I’ve always talked to myself anyway.

Total breakthroughs on the story that I’m working on! I’ve been stuck for a week. This afternoon, I took my laptop, got as far as a picnic table and pumped out 1200 words of the climax in about an hour and a half. When I got stuck, I got up, hiked around and brainstormed into the recorder. When I figured it out, I sat down and wrote. Not quite his method, and I haven't exactly climbed any 14ers, but 2 days in, it’s working for me.

And bonus, because I was 20 minutes from home, there were no looming chores to bother me. Everybody else’s needs got left behind. All I had to focus on was writing, brainstorming and enjoying an incredibly beautiful fall day. Now all I need to do is figure out where I can go in the winter time where I can walk around, talk to myself and not get kicked out for weird-ing out the other people in the room.  

I’m a fan. Even though I have an office, I’m going to keep leaving the house to write. I’m going to start carrying my voice recorder everywhere I go. And I’m going to keep taking advantage of the little moments I can find in the day. Eventually progress will be made, right?

I’m hoping to get my story finished before NanoWrimo starts so I can spend the month doing first drafts. Only 7 days to go. NanoWrimo has made November the best month of the year!

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Holy Freaking Cow, I still can't believe I've won!

Monday night, I got the phone call I’d been waiting for from Writers of the Future. My short story “The Graver” won second place in the third quarter. I am so excited! Come April, I will be flying to LA for the awards ceremony and book launch. But the real prize is the week long conference leading up to the ceremony where I get to learn from professional editors, agents and authors. From what I've read on other blogs, classes in the past have consisted of things like "how to give radio and television interviews" and "how to decipher contracts". But mostly, I get to network with all those editors, agents and writers!

It’s been a weird couple of days. You enter a contest like this, and you spend a lot of time fantasizing about what winning would be like. At least, you do if you're like me. You picture yourself getting off the plane. You imagine conversations you might have with other winners. You think of questions for the editors and agents that you might not otherwise get the chance to ask. You pre-write an acceptance speech about a billion times in your head.

But then, you make yourself forget everything because entering isn't winning and there are literally a thousand other stories that are bound to be better than yours. And all this is empty fantasy anyway. It's wasting time you could be using to write your next story that might actually have a chance of winning. Because this one was awful and it's a good thing the judging is anonymous because no one wants to be laughed at by a professional.  

Only, since the phone call I've had to put my brain into reverse. I actually get to get off that plane. I have to start thinking about how I'm going to interact with the other winners. Editors and agents will happily answer my questions and Holy Freaking Cow, I actually have to write a real honest to goodness acceptance speech!

So, so weird.

I keep telling myself that it's real. At some point in the next few months, I'm sure I'll come to believe it.

This is the moment when it starts. I'm a Writer. Technically an award winning one. Someone wants to pay me money for my words on paper, for my imagined characters and worlds. And sooner or later, someone else will pay me a second time for the same. And then again.

There will be rejections. This is going to be hard. No writer starts a career with nothing but acceptance. Writers start with 2ft tall stacks of rejection letters and then struggle up from there. But with this first acceptance, it's begun.

The first act of a story has always been my favorite part!

Patience - Not my virtue

It’s been two and a half weeks since finding out I was a finalist in Writer’s of the Future. Sometime in the next week and a half I’ll find out the final results. I’ll have to admit, every day that goes by, I’m a little more nervous than I was.

When Writer’s of the Future posted the names of the eight finalists on their blog, I was excited. I cyber-stalked a few of them. A couple have already published. So you know, I’m like, not intimidated at all, right?

Well I knew intellectually what it meant to get this far in the contest. From what I understand, they have somewhere between 800 and 1200 entries per quarter. So to be at the top of that list is pretty good for the self-esteem. Even if I don’t place, my story made it to the top eight and that rocks! But last night, they posted a list of all the finalists, semi-finalists and honorable mentions. I read down the list and it just kept going, and going, and going… Suddenly I started to realize just how many people 800-1200 must be. And the names on that page that kept scrolling were the very best of all of them – just a fraction of the stories submitted. It sort of made it real, if that makes any sense. I was terribly humbled to be included in that top group of writer’s in any capacity.

So now I wait. And I’m really not very good at waiting. I know so many people who are so good at patience. My neighbor across the street is one of them. Nothing seems to ruffle her. You should see her with kids, she’s amazing. Patience seems to be one of her primary virtues. I’m so not like that. I’ll keep chewing at my fingernails and try not to snip at my poor kids while they just try to get through their own day.

My husband likes to remind me that whether I’m good at waiting or not, the same amount of time will pass. Worry won't alter the time stream. I’ll still have to wait, so I might as well not worry.

Wish I could actually apply that wisdom. :)

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Writer's of the Future Finalist!

As of yesterday afternoon, I am officially a Writer's of the Future Finalist! I'm vacillating. One minute I'm consumed with despair that the other 7 finalists have all got brilliant stories and my inclusion in the group was some sort of Carrie-esque practical joke. The next minute I want to run screaming through the streets that my story was awesome and I'm going to win I just know it!

These next 2-3 weeks are going to be very long. . .

It's finally September though, and my kidlets are finally back to school, which means I can finally get back to writing. I started the summer really believing that I was going to be able to fit some writing in here and there. I was going to submit a story once a month, get ahead on some publishable works. Yeah. Didn't happen. I have two boys. The younger one, I could raise twelve of. He's sweet and adorable and listens to every little thing you ask him to do. Then there's my older son. Who feels very much like twelve children all wrapped up into one. He's sweet when he wants to be and he's incredibly smart, but all the really impressive qualities like independence and out-of-the-box thinking that I hope he holds onto as an adult make him exhausting to raise. He's a perfect personality clone of his dad.

But the summer wasn't a total loss. In fact, it was kind of awesome. We spent time in Colorado with Brandon's family. I took the boys to Ontario for three weeks to see my parents. And I got a surprise trip to London. How awesome is that? I came home with a double decker bus shaped notebook filled with ideas that I'm dying to start fleshing out. Hopefully I can keep my brain busy writing while I wait to hear back from WotF.

Two to three weeks isn't that long right? And even if I don't place this quarter, being able to land a finalist position on the very first story I've ever sent in has to count for something. A lot really. It means I'm on the right track, and this little dream of mine isn't quite the delusion I've always feared. Especially considering that this is the very first story I've ever actually finished. I've written completed first drafts before. Lots of them. But this was the first time I've ever gone through and actually rewritten a story. It's something I'm going to have to practice more of.

Here's crossing my fingers!