Meg's comments
(member since Apr 22, 2009)
Meg's comments from the A WEDNESDAY SISTERS Tea and Talk group.
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Just did the drawing for this week, and Cyndi is the winner of a first edition of Brenda Rickman Vantrease's The Mercy Seller.Thanks again, everyone!
>OMG! I think that I will take a separate journal with me, for when I am walking and people watching. The whole 24 hours is so emotional and so movingGreat idea, Cyndi! I carry a piece of paper and golf pencil in my pocket when I run. Maybe one of those nifty tiny versions of the kind of journal Hemingway made famous (forgetting what they are called, although I use one myself).
I have to head off myself, to take my car in for service (bleh!). I'll come back this afternoon to draw a name for The Mercy Seller, and will post the winner here.
Thanks, everyone!
I do sometime have my dear friend, Harriet Scott Chessman, read things for me on occasion. She's an amazingly thoughtful reader. She read a draft of TWS after I'd been trying to make it work for an agent who was representing it, and she gave me the courage to hang on to my view of the novel and leave the agent, rather than letting go of what I wanted the novel to be in order to keep working with him. For which I am forever grateful.
>Have you found anyone in CA that you like to write with? Or that you kick around ideas with? I do have a wonderful network of writer pals in CA. We get together for dinner once a month to share ideas about writing and the writing life. And I have writer friends I hike with, play poker with, etc.
And several of us occasionally get together just to write quietly for a morning or an afternoon and then share a meal or a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.
It's really nice to have companionship like that. Definitely gets me through the publication process, which is wonderful but also shockingly stressful.
But I still go to my Nashville gang for critique. I tried a critique group with some writers out here whom I love, and whose writing I love, but for whatever reasons, the group dynamic for critiquing wasn't quite right.
BTW, Cyndi, I think the Chicks on Lit group has started a Chicks on Writ writing group. :-)
>I'll be doing Relay for Life with the American Cancer Society a month from today. Bravo!
I ran the Nike Women's Half Marathon with Team in Training last fall, raising money for Blood Cancer research and treatment. It was a great experience: doing something good for myself and others at the same time, and in a supportive environment.
>I just have never looked at myself as having the "creative juices" it takes to write. But now I see that I don't have to write a novel, I can just put my thoughts on paperExactly. This is how I see myself as well. I don't think of myself as uniquely creative at all. One of the reasons I do a lot of research is that it gives me ideas that I can then build on.
> Unfortunately, most of the girls I went to high school with weren't at all good at the encouragement and not being jealous and catty. Guess it just shows how times change. I think this is a problem of teenagers, that often falls away as time passes and life experiences pile up. Lots of amazing women out there, most looking for good friends, too.
Although I have to say that much as I thought I'd like to have a new writing group in California, where I now live, I've found my Nashville group impossible to replace. I think that has something to do with having started together when we had no clue what we were doing.
Another really amazingly moving thing that one group of readers did was undertake to walk the Avon 2-day Walk under the team name The Wednesday Sisters. And they've not only reached their fundraising goal, but exceeded it.
Really, one of the nicest comments I get from readers is that they've been inspired to write or paint or do whatever they dream of doing. It's the first step to reaching a dream, to commit yourself to trying to reach it.
>I will be breaking out the journal and jotting notes down from now on. Yay!!!! Do it!
>I loved that the ladies never showed their jealousy towards the others accomplishments.One of the things that I love about Brenda is that we can admit to each other that we're green with envy, and it only makes us closer. I know her successes inspire me, and I think mine inspire her as well. it's pretty special to have a friend you've been critiquing with for - man, almost fifteen years now! - and both have success. Another member of our Nashville writing gang has also just published a book:Execution's Doorstep True Stories of the Innocent and Near Damnedby Leslie Lytle.
Actually, I expect I'll deliver it on time, if not early (although I don't have a complete first draft yes, so who knows?). Not sure how long after that it will be published, but we're likely looking at the summer of 2011. Wish I could write it faster, but there it is.
>Do you have a goal date as to when it will be out?My contract requires me to deliver a manuscript by April 1 or next year, but I'm reserving the right to claim that was a well-planned April fools. ;-)
And she is still my best writer-pal. She and my husband Mac are my go-to readers. They were the first two to read The Wednesday Sisters.
>Did Brenda's novel sell before or better than yours? Is that a bit of "real life" in the novel?My first novel sold first, at a time when she'd queried and been turned down by so many agents that she was at the give-up stage, I think. But then if Meg can...
And then hers sold better, in a two-book deal for six figures, with a splashy full page NYT Book Review ad when it came out. And I thought, if Brenda can...
I kept that Illuminator ad taped to my wall for inspiration for a long time, and I still keep it in my center desk drawer.
I'm writing it under contract with Random House, so I threw out a couple proposals for a next novel, and they chose this one. I'll dig out the description and post it in a minute.
And it's set in Maryland, where my first novel, The Language of Light A Novel, is set. Although that one was set in the Maryland horse country north of Baltimore, and the new one will be set in part on an island in the Chesapeake.
>I would love that! I think the kids were growing up in such a wonderful time in their parent's lives. There ought to be a million stories that they could tell.I should say that isn't the book I'm working on now though. But the one I'm working on now, called The Ms Bradwells, is a friendship story, so thematically (at least in that way) shares a couch with The Wednesday Sisters.
>I was surprised that Frankie's book didn't do so well, but in the end, I liked how it ended up that way. So this one, I'll admit to. Frankie's writing story is very close to mine. The way she starts writing - the little bag of interesting things - although Frankie has been writing for a long time before that scene, just not admitting it to anyone. Her experience with her first book. And the importance of having friends to help her through, absolutely. TWS is dedicated to, among others, my "Tuesday Sister," Brenda Rickman Vantrease, author of The Illuminator and The Mercy Seller A Novel (which I'm giving away today).
A WEDNESDAY SISTERS Tea and Talk
