Making the yarn pretty and hoping for the best, or why I love seemingly useless electric gadgets

Well, it's happened. My agent has received my latest revision and rubber-stamped it.  After seven years of writing and revision, my book is "done." I've worked my tail off on this book, going so far as to welcome a slight case of what may or may not be carpal tunnel. It has gone from thesis to novel-in-stories to novel told in chronological order to novel told in stages by multiple narrators. The end has changed a minimum of five times. Two storylines vanished entirely. It took everything in me to shut my creator's brain up and make the needed changes, but at this finish line, I really think the book is better for it. It gained a depth, a cohesion. I somehow took the tangled thread of its beginnings and made it whole, but it wasn't easy. It wasn't fun. No part of this has really been fun. It's just work. But you can't weave a yarn without effort and you can't write one without work.

I think it's important for people who decide to embark on this journey toward novel publication to know what they are in for. I certainly did not and still don't. What lies ahead? I really don't have a clue.

In the meantime, I have a new story idea and a novel idea percolating, and while they percolate, I'm spending my leisure time on other endeavors, among those tidying my yarn stash thanks to the new yarn ball winder I got with the gift card my mother-in-law gave me for my birthday.

I never knew what it was to have a yarn ball winder until now and I can't understand
 how my knitting life could have felt complete without it. In minutes, it takes a tangled mess of yarn and turns it into a tidy, center-pull ball. The effort I put in is minimal and the output is so satisfying. It's just the mind-break I needed.

The first day I got it, I spend the entire evening until bedtime turning my yarn stash into center-pull balls while my husband looked on and watched shows on Netflix. Really, the joy of a seemingly useless electric gadget will take one's mind off the worst of stresses.

Themed

The new edits are in on the novel, ladies and gents, and no, I'm officially not done with it yet. Which I'm coming to terms with. There's a fine line between revision and over-revision and I'm hoping I see that line before it's crossed.

So one more revision. And while I revise, I need to be thinking whole-heartedly about my theme, which I have given a lot of thought already, so... yeah. I'm discovering, as I go through this process of trying to get a first novel published, is that about 60% of the process is about facing disappointment. It is definitely not for the meek. I figure sharing this process with you can only help to prepare you, because this part is not what I expected it to be. I thought it would be mostly waiting on editors to respond, but I'm not even there yet.

Be warned. The process of getting a novel published (to my knowledge so far) is this:
1. You write a novel.
2. You revise the heck out of that novel until you feel like it's ready to be published.
3. You submit to agents.
4. You wait.
5. You hear back and hopefully, they like it and want to help get it published.
6. You get edits back from your chosen agent.
7. You re-revise based on those edits.
8. Repeat 6 and 7 repeatedly.
9. I'm not sure what 9 is yet but I'm hoping it's that the book gets shopped to editors.

This process is long and it's tedious, but I'm hanging in there. Time to give this one more go.

While I'm doing that, on this nice New Year's Eve, note that, starting now,  January 2014, my story "the Godmother" will be available for purchase in the 12th issue of Midwestern Gothic. Go buy yourself a copy, either in a print or ebook version.

And speaking of theme, my son's big Christmas present this year was a steampunk-themed bedroom (or the start of one anyway), with bright orange paint, black curtains, furniture re-painted in a paint color called "Tuxedo Tie," maps, brass, copper, cast iron, cogs, a green steamer trunk, and what will become a model airship once we get it put together.

Revision comes in many forms.

Here's how it goes...

Here's how it goes: you write like mad. You write because you can't seem to stop yourself from writing and really, you have so much to say. People notice. Someone recommends you go to grad school. You start filling out applications, but picking literature apart doesn't hold the same value for you. You keep writing, writing for class and then writing what you need to write. You graduate and apply for an MFA.

Stuff happens and life feels hard for a while, but you keep writing through it and for once, what you're writing is the same as what you have to get done for class. You write your way through that MFA with a novel at the end. You submit it to an agent, get accepted, find gainful employment writing, and somewhere along the line, you stop writing in the same way. Writing becomes a forced thing, a job. You second guess yourself. You struggle. The agent comes back with edits, then more edits, so you edit. You stop writing. You forget how to create a new character. You forget how to write that first sentence on a blank page. Sometimes you write a poem and this makes you feel like maybe you aren't quite a fraud.

One year passes this way, then another six months. You edit old stories. You edit your novel once, twice, three times. You re-alphabetize your book collection. Then, you decide: enough. You submit to journals and accumulate rejections. You start a writing group. Then, one day, one of your stories gets accepted. You know that if one story can get an audience, another one can too. You stare at that blank page and you stare it down. You start writing. Six pages later, you look up. It's not the best thing and it's rough, but it's yours and it's new. You know now that you can start again.

Writing Post-Novel and some HP Cosplay Mayhem

As hard as people say writing after finishing an MFA is, I find writing again after finishing a novel to be infinitely more difficult. It's not just that I can't seem to find the right material for a second book-length project. I'm finding it hard even to muster up words for a poem.

To make up for this, I've been reading a lot, several books at once at times, in the hope that something will spark my next writing endeavor, though this is starting to abate a bit. I hope that means I'm about to find words again. As of two days ago, I finally settled on a possible book idea. The two previous ideas I had, one a young-reader friendly ghost story and the other a more adult-themed book, both dimmed in the time since dreaming them up and finishing the previous novel. I'm hoping this new idea sticks around long enough for me to find the words to write it down.

Currently, I'm reading the new Jhumpa Lahiri, entitled The Lowland. Unlike most of what I've been reading lately, it has retained a "currently reading" status on my Goodreads account longer than a few days, a sign that the reading frenzy is starting to let up. If you haven't read it, I recommend you do. It's beautifully written, real, and heartbreaking and combines political unrest and private family life in a way that only Lahiri can. Her characters are always complex and even the worst of them have plights with which I can't help but empathize.

This oddly connects to something I found out this week. Apparently, the more you read, the more empathy you have for other people. This makes a lot of sense to me, considering how much I read and how much my brother doesn't read and the differing amounts of empathy we seem to exhibit.

So if I'm not yet writing the great American novel, at least I'm gaining a better ability to understand people.

Happy Halloween 2013. I'm currently dressed as Moaning Myrtle. In fact, I won the costume contest at work today, thanks in part to my knit-on-the-bias Ravenclaw hip scarf, which I used as the required uniform tie.

And yes, that's the face I have when I think about the fact that I will have to take my son out trick or treating in the rain. Tally ho.

Another Draft Done

If any of my former composition or creative writing students ever wonder if I practice what I preach, here is the proof right here: another completed draft of my novel. This one is chronologized with time monikers replacing chapter markers and the narrator listed in a subhead whenever the point of view changes. The entire process was equal parts Mrs Dalloway and Louise Erdrich, with a smattering of Wells Tower, I like to think. (If I've never recommended it, run out and read Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. It is the single most narratively diverse and broad in subject-matter of any story collection I've ever read. Ever.)

While it sounds rather complex and was rather time consuming, the result seems simple and straightforward. It definitely looks more like a cohesive novel,which is what my agent was looking for, but I guess I'll find out if I succeeded to an acceptable end when I learn whether or not it needs further revision.

And I'm game for revision (within limits). Why? Because I practice what I preach. Now, if you are currently a composition student and your teacher has recently commented on your rough draft that you need to reorganize to fit your thesis statement, go do it. Right now, because your teacher is right. 100%. Listen to him/her. They know.

In literary news, I am now reading the sixth 44 Scotland Street novel, The Importance of Being Seven. I am just as smitten with this installation as I have been with the last five. It appears as though there are still two or three books in the series, so I'll have to seek them out at some point. They were not on the shelves at my new local library. I'm still keen on serialized novels, both writing and reading them, so if you know of any modern or postmodern literary authors writing in this format, let me know. I'm interested in reading them.

"Children were no longer made to learn poetry by heart. And so the deep rhythms of the language, its inner music, was lost to them, because they had never it embedded in their minds. And geography had been abandoned too -- the basic knowledge of how the world looked, simply never instilled; all in the name of educational theory and of the goal of teaching children how to think. But what, she wondered, was the point of teaching them how to think if they had nothing to think about?"

-Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

Time is on My Side... right?

In the midst of all this novel-restructuring, I have finally reached a point of calm. The hard part is always finding a way to begin. For me, the answer came when I thought of some advice I once received from a professor a few years ago that still sticks with me. She said, essentially, that unless there was a very good reason not to do it, the most logical way to structure your fiction is in chronological order.

This makes sense for obvious reasons. With the novel-in-stories, I had organized the novel by story, meaning by narration of the character involved, whether in first, second, or third person. To tear apart those stories, for the last few weeks, has been my task, and it's a task I don't fancy. Consider it the epitome of "Murder your darlings." I couldn't fathom a way of doing it until I thought about my former professor's advice. Would it work in this case? By Jove, it just might.

And so, the task has been creating a detailed timeline that outlines when exactly in time each event of each story occurs. I have nearly reached the conclusion of this, but it has been slow going. Because each chapter had a story in and of itself, a separate entity, I never gave a lot of thought to how the time sequence of one might impact the time sequence of another. Alas, when something vital happens in one story and is also glimpsed in another, it can become problematic to chronologize them when that means that the majority of what happens in the second story, given the amount of time it takes to drive from Ohio to Pennsylvania on I-80, happens several hours later than I need it to, considering certain events that are supposed to happen after that in a third story that, in fact, happen a few hours too soon given this new travel-time revelation. These are the things we grapple with for our art.

When I finish grappling with these dilemmas and follow up with adequate solutions, which I anticipate managing to do by mid-week at the latest, the next task involves pasting each time-noted piece in chronological order in a new document. For this to work, the narrative with get a bit wild for a bit and I'll have to go through and decide how best to handle that particular situation. The book has a lot of narrators and they will end up thrown willy-nilly throughout the novel, depending on when they are occuring in the timeline.

At first, I was concerned about this. However, I've been reading a lot of Louise Erdrich lately, working my way through her collected works (in chronological order no less), and Erdrich has multiple narrators per chapter, sometimes several if I recall correctly. Moreover, sometimes these narrators are in first person, sometimes third. There may even be a second person or two. The thing is, it works, or at least, it works for her. It gives me hope that what I attempt will not be in vain and that, at the end of all the toil, with some editing and some rewriting, I can make this novel-in-stories function as a plain-old-novel.

Like the little engine that could, I will hope that my "I think I can" attitude will lead to success. Here's to chugging along in blind faith that things will work out in the end. Optimism, don't fail me now.

What's in a Novel?

It's tough out here for a writer trying to get a foot in the door of the publishing world. Getting the agent, finding an editor, I knew that it would not be easy but also thought that for me, it wouldn't be. I think we all think that on some unconscious level. I know I write well, but there are many who write well. There are all these stories about what people had to go through to get a book in print. Horror stories really. Even Peter Straub's daughter had to peddle her wares like a regular carnival salesman to get her books published. I am one of many, and it just sucks.

The word from my agent is that the five editors who have seen my book thus far were into it. Two or three (half the panel isn't bad odds) really liked my writing and my character development. They thought I showed promise. They were very invested...

And they'd love to see a novel from me if I have one. Short stories, even interconnected stories, are not commercially viable. None of them seemed to appreciate the novel-in-stories overarching narrative. When it came down to it, my book went down as stories. And stories don't sell.

Now I know that stories are a hard sell, but I didn't see that story stigma carrying over to the novel-in-stories format. There have been a great number of novel-in-stories lately that seemed to make a fairly decent go of it: Olive Kitteridge, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Knockemstiff. Take a look a little farther back and there's Jesus' Son, Later at the Bar, Trailerpark, and the old classics of Winesburg, Ohio and Dubliners. Apparently, I was wrong in assuming that meant anything.

I have one of two options: keep it as is and hope or rewrite it, organizing it into a "real novel." I'm going to try my hand at the "real novel" option. Lord knows it would be an easier sell. If not, I don't know. It's sad to think that despite the praise it received, my book won't get an audience, not because it's bad but because it's not easy. I have no idea how to go about this rewrite, but I'm trying to figure it out. I'll, of course, save a copy of the book as it is now just in case. I know there comes a point when the rewriting because a detriment rather than a benefit.

Here's hoping.

Writing, or lack thereof, While Researching a Novel

I'm in the midst of novel research. This consists mostly of reading haunted house stories and the nonficitonal tome the Golden Bough. So far, I've finished Richard Matheson's Hell House, started in on Shirley Jackson's The House on Haunted Hill, as well as the first few chapters of Bough, which doesn't even begin to put a dent in this encyclopedic book.

I haven't restricted my education to books either. I've watched and rewatched Del Toro's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, which is where the inspiration for the book sprouted from in the first place. This past weekend, I took in a Netflix-sponsored viewing of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, as well as innumerable episodes of Ghost Hunters International, which has already filled my head with potential hauting phenomena.

Yes, all of these things are, in my case, legitimate work-related activities. This is one of the reasons I love being a writer, even on the occasions that the act of writing makes me want to hurl my pricey macbook across the living room.

As I accumulate ideas, reading and reading, I have not done much at all of writing. This is to be expected, but it still feels as though I'm not accomplishing anything. By that token, I thought perhaps it might be time to begin some character sketches on those people I know will be occupying my novel. As of yet, I know some aspects about them, but not one yet has a name to call his or her own.

To learn about my characters, I find the exercises focused on characterization in the Fiction Writers Workshop and What If? come in handy as long as I adapt them for the situation at hand rather than using their scenarios verbatim. For literary fiction, the characters are key, because without character, you have no real conflict. That means it's just as vital to research them as it is to research my subject matter.

Additionally here are a few character sketch templates free online:
1. http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1569061-Character-Sketch-Template
2. http://sx9eiw8ieu.wordpress.tal.ki/20101018/character-sketch-template-3-176317/

And for general writerly inspiration when I feel like giving up, Word Work has some sage advice for the weary writer and the importance of avoiding procrastination.

I'm anxious to start putting my fingers to the keys and getting chapters banged out, but I know that nothing salvagable will result until I have a basic plan, not a play-by-pay, mind you. What I do need is a little bit more than I have now, an expert knowledge of the characters, their motivations, backstories, thoughts. I need a deeper foundation of the tropes of the haunted house novel and legends on a certain type of folkloric creature (which I'm hoping the Bough provides), both of which require more reading and notetaking. It might be a while yet before I can really start in on page one.

In the meantime, I'll have to satisfy myself by sketching house blueprints and characters, scenery descriptions and notes on potential plot arcs. It's a matter of slowing down and letting the story come to me.

You Don't Choose When Inspiration Strikes

It was a half hour past my strict ten o' clock worknight bedtime, and I was not asleep. In fact, I didn't even feel tired. I blamed this mostly on the fact that I put too much coffee in my coffee slightly before noon that day and thus, spent the majority of the day in a perpetual state of jitteriness that left me without control of my shaky limbs, though staying up a little to finish watching "Hysteria" (great movie by the way) right before bed probably didn't help matters any.

I tossed and turned, taking some care to avoid completely disheveling my hair, while my mind failed to deactivate into slumber. That's when it happened. Something clicked and suddenly, images of the novel I am next going to write invaded my night. I tried to turn them off, fearing a groggy morning at work that required yet more coffee, thus perpetuating the cycle. My inner muse took no notice of my grumbling and, begrudgingly aware that I should not pass up such a gift horse, I got out of bed, grabbed my notebook and a pen, and put the kettle on for some required sleep-inducing chamomile tea for when the madness was over. Then, sipping my tea, I began scribbling.

On the page, there it was, everything I needed to get started: main character, minor characters, basic precise, major plot points, setting, situation, motive. Then, I set the paper and writing impement beside the bed, gulped the dregs of my tea, and flopped my head down on the pillow. I hit the snooze button three times come morning, but I'm ready for novel two. All the waiting, the wondering, the worrying that maybe I only have one novel in me, it collapses into this livid late night deluge of prewriting and suddenly, I'm back.

Since that night, I have been compiling a list of required reading for my next book. That list I include below as the first real hint of what I have planned:

Fiction
The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Bad Things by Tamara Thorne
Ghost Story by Peter Straub
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Hell House by Richard Matheson
Reread "Stone Animals" by Kelly Link
Reread The Princess and the Goblin

Nonfiction
American Hightmares by Dale Dailey
The Golden Bough by James George Frazer

That Moment Where Things Come Together

Novel writing is not an easy business. In fact, for most writers, myself included, most of it isn't even a fun business. It's something to contemplate, power through, and struggle over. Every word becomes an act of second-guessing. Should it be "contemplate" or "ruminate on"? Is this character blonde or brunette? Sometimes, it takes everything you have to keep going.

I'm made it no secret that I've been having a hard time with this writing thing post MFA graduation. I felt deflated. My time to write got so condensed down that I started pretending it didn't exist at all and watching reruns of TV shows on Netflix instead. I got really into my knitting, focused on that, because I'll be darned if I was making any progress on this whole writing thing. A small voice inside my brain started suggesting that perhaps I chose the wrong calling. Maybe I was meant to be a knitwear designer or a piano bar singer or a stay-at-home mom.

I'd wager that this second-guessing is part of the process of becoming a Writer rather than just being a person who writes.

The big problem for me is that I tend to write a lot of my stuff subconsciously. I'll sit in the car staring blankly out the window and it will look much like I'm zonked and dreaming. That's when I'm writing. I'm writing in the kitchen when I make dinner. I'm writing when I clean. I'm writing when I walk down the street. I'm writing when I'm sitting in my office chair, tapping my pencil to the beat of "Semi-Charmed Life." Still, the writing I do in my head doesn't always translate well to the page at first. I have to sit on an idea for months sometimes before I get the beginning right, and I can't keep going until I have somewhere to start.

A few days ago, though, something happened. I found that place to start for one of my new story-chapters. I've been thinking about the main character, a woman older than me going through something I can't begin to fully understand. I've been writing scenes of her in my frontal lobe… or wherever the words go before I write them down, but I haven't been able to get at the core of her. Not until that day. I wrote a first sentence on that spiral-bound, lined paper and I just knew instinctively that it was the right first sentence,  that this was the sentence that would take me on to everything that comes after this first sentence.

Then I wrote a second sentence and a third. I could hear dialogue in my head. It all started coming together, and in this moment, maybe 30 seconds long, maybe less, I felt it, that joy, that exhilaration, the thing I feel that makes me sure once every month or so (if I'm lucky) that I was meant to write and write often.

What was the key to this beginning place? It's always hard to pinpoint inspiration and impossible to recreate it when you're alone with a blank page and you just need to write something. I knew bits and pieces of her, this elusive main character, but the thing that finally clicked it all into place for me was in that first sentence, and she didn't become real until she spoke to her son. This is a woman whose son calls her first. Not dad, not best friend, not girlfriend, but mom. When the crap hits the fan, he calls her. That bond, I didn't quite see it before, but that's what I'll need to write the rest of the story. That's the one thing that will take me through to the end. I also have an end point, one paragraph I scrabbled through that is giving me a direction. Now all I have to do is fill in the middle.

I haven't made extensive progress word-count wise (a couple pages as of yet), but I've been taking note. I've been reading the right things. I've been quiet. I have a beginning and I have a place to end. Lately, I've been feeling like a Writer, and it's days like these that keep me sustained through all the not-fun that I know is coming to get this story from thought to final draft.

The Fortune Cookie Portent, or How to Live with Stability in the Fictional Universe

A few weeks ago, we ordered Chinese for a working lunch. My fortune cookie read: "Your life gains the stability you desire." This is the second time in my life that a cookie seemed to be more aware of my immediate future than I was. Six years ago, I dined at a Chinese buffet with a group of college friends. My fortune cookie read: "Happiness is right in front of you." Across the table from me sat my then good-friend and current husband.

What does this mean other than the fact that I am continually afraid of the sixth sense inherent in Asian-inspired baked goods?

It means that last Friday I signed a contract and Monday, it became official. I have an agent. I am a represented writer. Do I feel a little more stable? Yes I do.

It also means I'll be re-revising a novel I had, in the core of my being, proclaimed "finished." Now, it is not-so-finished, and I have some new chapters to write and some old ones to revise and at least one that gets the giant delete button (well, the cut/paste button anyway, as it will stand on its own perfectly well for literary magazine submission purposes).

What I have here is the stress of my thesis-due-in-a-month days but multiplied by fifteen. Maybe twenty. There's a lot at stake here, whereas before, if I didn't gethergone, it just meant paying for another thesis credit and graduating in the summer instead of the spring. I mean, think about this. When I finish revising this book, I have an agent who will be showing it to publishers. Editors will hear about and/or read some of my book and decide its fate. I'm trying not to let this impact my productivity, but really, it makes me want to sit down and cry. This is a lot. Then again, it does make me feel like a writer (agent + crying= writer?), because someone wants my book. Someone thinks it's good enough. Someone was willing to take a chance on it without the revisions even being done yet, and that's pretty amazing.

All I need to do is get beyond this feeling of being completely overwhelmed. I have a lot that needs written. I have research to do and reading to do that I think will inspire me for this particular project. I need a plan. Once I have that, I just know the ground will feel stable beneath me, and it will only get better from here. On the writing front, I've begun some preliminary character sketches, so I can start living in these new stories.

On the reading/research front, books on the to-read soon list include: Winesburg, OH and re-examining Olive Kitteridge. Maybe Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips (she always inspires me). The list will grow.

Just slashed off the list: the entire Charles Yu Oeuvre. I picked up Charles Yu from the library after reading a story about him in the last Poets and Writers. The article was enchanting, intriguing, and written in the second person (I have new respect for Kevin Nance). The approach seemed to be an attempt to mimic the work of Yu himself, and I wanted to know what it was all about. The first book spine I cracked was the short story collection Third Class Superhero. The first story had an interesting premise, but in the end, didn't really say a lot. I am not much for the hip style-based, angst-filled first person antihero tales, except when I am. The rest of the stories were equally uninteresting to me, so I put it down and picked up How to Live Safety in a Science Fictional Universe. This book had the style and the substance. It said a lot about humanity, regret, living in the past (in a very literal sense), and the relationships of fathers and sons. Of course, with its science fiction meta-fictional bent, I had a huge crush on this book throughout.

With renewed faith in the Yu, I'm about halfway through Sorry Please Thank You. Though I did skip a story so far (for which I will flog myself later), these stories feel more substantive somehow, with a more relatable emotional core. There's one story about characters in a fantasy online RPG that I got a kick out of for personal reasons. It even had a nice twist, in which it's made clear that maybe the protagonist just might be heroic, unlike the first tale from Third Class Superhero. Despite this, I'm going out on a limb and saying I'm more of a Yu novel fan. What about you?

Five Years in the Making

Five years ago, my friend Michelle called to tell me she was driving the turnpike back to Toledo from the Cleveland area. While driving, she saw an Amish girl sitting in the passenger seat of a passing car, and she wondered why. Then, she told me to write that story, the story of the Amish girl driving on the turnpike. I thought about that Amish girl for months. Who was she? What was she doing? Michelle had no idea what she had started up in my mind. It was the beginnings of what would become my first completed novel.

Of course, I wouldn't write a word of it for another year, when, upon finishing my Masters in Literature, I would find myself mostly unemployed, save for a part time adjuncting gig two to three times a week that was almost an hour away. I was not meant to have a literature degree. I loved reading and still do, but I didn't enjoy tearing a great work of literature apart to stare at possible meanings the writer likely never considered. I hated analyzing a poem one word at a time. I wanted to appreciate as a whole. I didn't want to examine and dissect like some literary surgeon.

More than that, I wanted to create. This was no small feat with a kindergartener to provide and care for, so I'd set small goals, writing between nine and noon, before he got home. My dear friend Andrea gave me prompts and I would have a day to a week to write up a story based on whatever came into her head and send it back to her. It was enough to keep me in practice and it gave me a small portfolio with which to apply for an MFA. In one of these prompts was the beginnings of the Amish turnpike rider. I got the first page or two of another two stories based on a prompt requesting me to write a story entitled "Escar-ago-go." Inspiration comes from many places.

I found out I got into my MFA program a few months after a lot of heartache and grief entered my life. As a teacher, I became afraid of my own students. The world stopped making sense. It seemed hostile suddenly and I wrote to find some sort of answer. I wrote to keep the world at bay, and so, we moved. I started my program, took the bits that seemed to be leading somewhere, and fleshed them out into stories, connected with one common thread. A novel but without having to write it as a whole. I wrote it in segments, separate but somehow they started to connect, all of them circling the same themes: my fears, my confusion, and oddly, a lot of snails.

I finished one draft of each story, twelve in all. Then I revised them once, twice, a third time. I presented them as my thesis, got approved for graduation. I revised them again. And then again. Last night, exactly 17 hours ago, I finished it. My book is done, and all the heartache that went into making it, well, it might be healed a little. The world is still a scary place, but there's good in it too.

Did I need to write a novel to understand that? I'm not sure, but it feels pretty great, accomplishing it. It might never amount to more, and that might be okay. Of course, if it ends up published, all the better.

I just finished reading a novel-in-stories that one of my professors said reminded her of my book. She thought I'd benefit from reading it and I think she was right. The book is "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout. Ms. Strout actually visited my school a year ago and I'm sorry now that I was not able to attend (parental obligations come first). I got out of Olive that same feeling that I have now post-book, that the world doesn't make sense but is no less wonderful because of this. Horrible things happen. Life gets in the way and runs out before you notice it's passing you by. But the little moments, they matter. The triumphs matter. Five years ago, I thought about writing a story and this morning, I had a finished novel.

"It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet."

Finishing that Thesis

April first. That is my deadline. Twelve chapters, one big revision. One month. And only my evenings are free for writing fiction. My days are for tech writing. I have four chapters done so far.

The thing is, as a mom who has been in college for the entire duration of her son's life, I have gotten really really good at scheduling. I list and I plan and I scheme out my days, to the hour if necessary. I have to, I always have, so I have a schedule in place.

I'll admit, though, that my schedules don't always pan out when it comes to writing. My process is at least fifty percent inspiration, and if it's not working, nothing I write is worth saving. Tonight is one of those nights.

There's so much work left to do and a very limited amount of time, but there's nothing I can do about it tonight. And I am okay with that. For now. I have a few nonfunctioning nights scheduled into my plan.

When the voice in your head leaves you (and it's a bad thing)

I am one chapter away from completing the first full draft of my novel. I've been one chapter away from completing the first full draft of my novel since September. You see, I had a brilliant system. I pledged to finish a draft of each chapter before going back to revise, and while what I consider a usual first draft has been revised quite a bit already (I'm an as-I-write-it reviser), that left a lot of work to get to a solid first draft at the end. A lot of time passed me by. I wrote the first chapter for my first workshop class back in 2009, if that provides some scope.

As a result, I've been having a bit of difficulty, despite saving all my workshop notes written by myself and others, in remembering what it was I needed to revise. I puzzled everything back together for eleven stories over the summer, but I haven't been able to get through the twelfth. It's a first person story, you see, and no matter how I reorganize and freewrite and plan, I can't get the narrator's voice back inside my head. For third person or second person, its easy. I write the words and usually, the narrator just ends up sounding a lot like me. When I first a story in first person, though, I do it because I can hear someone speaking to me.

And this lady, I can't hear her anymore. She's just gone.

I'm trying to get her back by writing scenes of her life before the present moment of the story and forcing her to tell me what it was like for her. I'm hoping it works. I'd really like to put this draft to bed, so I can start in on the next one. After all, it has to be done for graduation in the spring.