Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 137

I Love Love

While I was sick and not up to doing much of anything but thinking -- and even then in more of a daydreamy way -- while I was also having to make some career decisions, I found myself taking a good look at what I like and what I'm good at, and I came to some conclusions that rather surprised me.

One of the biggest is that love stories are my thing. I think about 95 percent of my reader mail involves the romantic relationships in my books or the swoonworthiness of my heroes. When I'm plotting or planning books, the relationship part is usually what comes to me first and is the easiest part for me to figure out. While I try to avoid being a real "shipper" in things I read and watch, a good romantic plot gets me every time, and the possibility of one will capture my imagination.

But I've tended to resist all this because I don't really like "romance." I failed at writing romance novels, though I suppose having any at all published wouldn't count as failure. It just wasn't my thing. I finally admitted to myself that I don't like "romance," as much as I enjoy a good love story. It's the structure and form of the romance novel that I dislike, not the fact that they contain love stories. Romance novels generally don't tell the kind of love story I find romantic. They're about people who have conflict with each other that keeps them apart, and they're mostly about the physical attraction even when the emotions are also dealt with. What I enjoy is a love story that develops along the way while the characters are doing something else, where it's a seasoning in another plot rather than the main plot. So, give me characters having to work together on a quest and very subtly and gradually falling in love as they get to know each other in difficult circumstances, but I'm not at all interested in the guy and the girl who bicker while lusting after each other.

This has given me some challenges in my career. I don't know if it's my Harlequin past or the fact that the Enchanted, Inc. series was published as "women's fiction" rather than fantasy, but the fantasy editors seem to have me pigeonholed as a romance author. Most of the books I've submitted to fantasy editors have been criticized and rejected for being "too romancey." That's one reason Rebel Mechanics ended up in young adult. I initially wrote it as an adult fantasy, but it was rejected, with some editors suggesting I try a romance publisher instead. I knew it wasn't a romance, and I knew enough about the romance market to know it would never sell there. I also knew I wasn't willing to do what it would take to turn it into something that would sell as romance. So since the characters were young and it was basically a coming-of-age story, I aged them down a couple of years, emphasized the youth, and we resubmitted as YA, where there aren't the same silos of books. The constant attempts by fantasy editors (many of whom were already fans of the Enchanted, Inc. books) to pigeonhole me as a romance author baffle me, since I've read books published by some of these same editors that are far more romantic than what I write and that could easily have been published as romances, when my books never could have. I don't know if it's just that mindset because of my history that makes them see things that way, or if that's what they pick up on from my writing, or what.

But I've decided that this is what readers like about me, so I may as well go for it. That can be part of my "not going back to a publisher until I'm the one with the clout" plan, since one of the benefits of independent publishing is the ability to break down barriers between genres and not adhere to genre rules. I'd been holding back on that side of the story for fear of yet another "maybe you should consider a romance house" rejection, but I'm going to write things the way I want them to be without holding back. It's probably not going to change things that drastically. There just might be a bit more of the stuff that's already there. I don't like writing sex scenes (so boring). I do like writing subtle attraction and slow build and partnerships growing out of adversity. If I do it right, the people who like my books for the romance will be happy, but it won't turn off people who aren't reading for the romance. In my grand revenge against the publishing industry scheme, if I do become successful, this will be part of my formula, so they won't dare tell me not to do what's been working for me.

I think I can also make this part of my viewpoint as a writer. One thing I've noticed in analyzing people with careers I envy is that they often have built a kind of cult of personality around themselves based on the things they talk about. This can be one of the things I talk about, finding the love stories in nerdy things -- like my saying that I find Aliens to be deeply romantic. So, yeah, I love dragons and quests and wizards and space battles and people falling in love while doing all these things.

Torturing Characters

It's hard to force myself to move forward on huge career goals when I'm still recovering from being sick. I walked to the polling place to vote yesterday, and while the exercise felt good, it utterly flattened me. I managed to re-read the last week or so of work, but I could barely keep my eyes open. I ended up going to bed shortly after nine, reading for a while until I caught myself drifting off over the book, then turned out the light at ten. And then slept until almost ten. But I feel a lot more energetic today.

I also realized late in the day yesterday that I don't have children's choir tonight. I had a mental lesson plan, but it's a children's worship service tonight. I have even more lesson plan ideas after last night, when I had a very vivid and realistic dream about all the activities I'd set up for tonight, only to realize that we weren't having choir. We have one session next week, then spring break, and then I just need to get through April. Woo hoo!

Now to get back into the book. I'm at the good part when things get really intense. Oh, my poor characters. It's probably a good thing that I can get the sequel to this book out as soon as I have it written because I suspect people will want it as soon as possible. I don't have an actual cliffhanger planned, but I think this book will end with the characters in a difficult place.

Bad News, Good News, and a Publishing Manifesto

Now that I'm back to being more or less moderately coherent, it's time to get back to normal business mode, and that means I have something to announce, both good news and bad news.

First, the bad news: the publisher doesn't want another Rebel Mechanics book.

The good news: you'll get one anyway. I'll just go ahead and publish it myself. The good news about that is that instead of having to wait a year or two, it will probably be coming this summer, soon after the paperback release of Rebel Mechanics. The down side is that it likely won't be a pretty hardcover and won't be in bookstores. You'll have to get the e-book or order a book online. I don't yet know about an audiobook.

I will admit that I was disappointed about this. I was rather unhappy about the degree of support the publisher gave this book. They did such a wonderful job of producing a beautiful book, but they did no publicity. Every guest blog post or interview I did, every event I did, was something I set up or that came to me rather than through the publisher's publicist. The publisher presented me with a publicity plan of what they said they were going to do, but none of it got done, and I didn't know they weren't doing it until it was too late to do anything about it. That meant it didn't show up on any of the genre news sites where I've seen authors of other books like this interviewed. Even on social media, they made one tweet and didn't use any of their other in-house vehicles for promoting books. The book was generally well-reviewed and well-received, and librarians loved it. But too few people knew about it, so they didn't think it sold well enough to warrant a sequel, and they were uninterested in trying to support the paperback to see if it took off.

They were interested in looking at something else from me, but I figured why tie myself to them for another year or two (or more), only to get the same old thing? So I said this book was the only thing on the table, and if they didn't want it, that meant they'd passed on the option and I was no longer contractually linked to them.

That led me to make another career decision: I won't deal with another publisher unless I'm coming to them with enough clout to get them to support my book with a full promotional campaign. Otherwise, why should I bother with a publisher? Promotion and distribution are what they bring to the table that I can't do as well for myself. I'll admit that I have mixed feelings about independent publishing. It's saved my career. Without it, I'd have had to get another day job years ago. It's wonderful to have the option. But I really don't like doing it. I just want to write. I don't like having to make all the decisions and deal with vendors and artists and do all the marketing. But right now, I don't have a lot of faith in publishers. They make very poor business choices based on outdated models. I'm sick of having books that readers love but that no one knows about, and yet the publisher acts like the problem is with the book when it doesn't perform up to their hopes. They throw a lot of things against the wall and see what sticks while applying lots of glue to some things and nothing to others, but they still judge everything equally, as though it's all had glue. So, until and unless I have a book that's up for auction with competition between publishers, so that I can make promotional support part of the bid and get it in the contract (so that I'm the one who gets the glue), or until I'm so successful that they come begging to me (or both), I don't intend to deal with a publisher.

The trick will be to get to that point. I'm not sure that writing better is the answer, though I always try to do better. I don't think the quality of my books has been an issue. They've been favorably reviewed, and the people who read them really seem to love them. They may not quite have the same mass appeal or don't hit the right market niche, but that may not be something I can fix because I'm not exactly a mass appeal kind of person. A lot of it has to do with luck -- the right book hitting in the right way at the right time with the right people. There were bestselling books at the time the first Enchanted, Inc. book was published that have already been remaindered and that probably sold fewer total copies than Enchanted, Inc. has, but they got the push and sold those copies quickly and got the bestseller status that led to more support, while my series got dropped, only to keep plugging away.

But what I can do is dig in and deal with the things I can control, which means this is going to be the Year of My Career. I'm going to really focus on writing and getting a number of books in the pipeline because the more books there are, the greater the chance that something will hit, and publication frequency is also good for momentum, and I'm going to force myself to step out of my comfort zone and try to promote myself more, whether directly to readers or by networking more with peers. I've identified some trends of behaviors I see in the authors in my field who at least have the outward measures of success (I can't look into their bank accounts) and will see about applying those things to my own career.

So, look for news about when the next Rebel Mechanics book will be coming, as well as other books that will soon be in the works.

Leaping out of the House

I seem to be on the upswing now. I skipped yoga because I don't think that bending over that much would be all that fun, and I also desperately needed to get groceries, and I wasn't sure I'd have the energy for both. But I did survive a trip to Target and the grocery store, and I don't feel too bad. I'm going to try writing this afternoon and see what happens.

I think just leaving the house was the big hurdle. I very seldom get cabin fever, no matter how much time I stay in the house. What happens with me is that the longer I stay in, the harder it is to make myself leave, to the point it almost becomes a fear. That's why I make sure to be involved with things that obligate me to leave the house regularly. With choir, I have to go out on Wednesday night and Sunday morning, and that's frequently enough that I can't get to the point of being afraid to leave the house. Unless I'm too sick to go out, and that means I can stay in for a whole week until I'm no longer sure how much I don't feel well enough to go anywhere and how much it's that dread of being on the other side of the front door.

But now I've gone out, so I've broken the pattern, and I have plans and goals for work, so I want to get back in the swing of things. Also, I've watched every documentary I can find on demand that I'm remotely interested in and also everything I'd recorded. I knew I was starting to feel better last night when I watched a couple of movies and could follow the plot, though one was a biopic, so it was borderline documentary.

Meanwhile, flowers are blooming, and it turns out that when they pulled up the rose bushes they had in the medians in my neighborhood because of rose rosette disease, they planted tulips, so now there are tulips all over my neighborhood, and tulips make me happy.

Medicinal Television

I'm getting better -- managed to sleep last night without any cold medicine! -- but still not 100 percent. Most of the sniffles and stuffiness are gone. I just have a slight "throat" cough (as opposed to chest cough). I'm still rather weak, but I hope that will be improving as my appetite seems to have returned. I never had any stomach-related symptoms. I just wasn't interested in food at all, and so I concentrated on fluids with nutrients. I suspect that plus the fever have something to do with the weakness. I got hungry last night just before I went to bed, and then I ate a real breakfast this morning. So maybe my strength will start coming back.

I'm still really iffy on being able to sing tomorrow. I get a bit lightheaded from sitting up for too long at a stretch, so I couldn't stand all the way through an hour-long concert, and I don't have a lot of breath or breath control. If I take a deep enough breath to sing, I cough. I'll have to see if I have any contact information for this group to let them know. Given the way the director was treating me, he may take it as a relief that I'm not there. I think if I'd felt a little more welcomed or valued, I'd push myself to make it, but this isn't worth killing myself over.

I've always said that when I'm sick, what I want to do is watch fluffy romantic comedies. Oddly, though, I'm finding myself watching documentaries. I don't really have the focus for reading right now -- I read a page, then find myself wondering what that was all about -- so I've been watching TV, and I suppose history documentaries don't require you to follow a plot. I know the general gist of events for most of the things I've been watching, so these shows are just filling in details or providing new visuals.

Here's a rundown of my sick week viewing:
On the Travel Channel, I've recently become hooked on a series called Mysteries at the Castle. They discuss and dramatize anecdotes related to various castles, manors, mansions, and other buildings that might roughly fit the description of "castle." Sometimes, it's a bit of a stretch, as the story might take place somewhere else entirely and involve someone who once lived in this place. The stories are fascinating, but for a show on the Travel Channel, there's disappointingly little actual travel content. I'd like a little more info on the place as it is today and what you can see there. If there's something in the show that makes you want to visit the place, the show doesn't help you know even whether it's a place you can visit.

Yesterday, they were marathoning what appears to be a sister series, Mysteries at the Hotel, which does the same thing, but about events relating to hotels. Again, it seems a little lacking in actual travel content. For the hotels still in operation, they might make a passing mention of what the hotel is like now, but if the show intrigues you, there's not much to show you what you'd see if you stayed there. I love interesting hotels that aren't obvious cookie-cutter chains, so this intrigued me while frustrating me. If I'd felt better, I might have made a list and then googled.

I'd recorded a series from BBC World News about the Art of Gothic, getting into the rise of industrialization and how that contributed to the Gothic Revival movement in art during the Victorian era. I think that has a lot to do with the Steampunk movement, so I figured that counted as work-related research.

There was a show I found on demand from Military History (which I don't seem to have as an actual channel, just an on demand setting) about the architecture of Ivan the Terrible -- they were examining the surviving buildings constructed during his reign and looking at how they were made, as well as talking about the context of their construction. And there was a show on Smithsonian about Hitler's will and what his assets/estate really were -- his last will claimed that he had very little, but he had to have had millions in book royalties alone, since he'd passed a law that every newlywed couple was given a copy of his book, so the state was buying millions of copies a year and he was getting the royalties, and that's not counting all the other copies that were sold when having a copy was just about mandatory.

There was something about a search for sunken pirate ships near an island off the coast of Madagascar. And there was another show I found on demand, I think on the Travel Channel, called something like Expedition Extreme, in which a guy tracks down the possible truths behind various legends, looking for archaeological evidence. In the ones I watched, on Robin Hood and King Arthur, it mostly amounts to him talking to local experts and getting excited about ground-penetrating radar showing that something exists underground, but ends up with no actual conclusions. Still, there's pretty scenery.

Today, I'm pondering either a Galavant marathon or Doctor Zhivago on TCM on demand. I've seen that movie multiple times, including on the big screen, have read the book, and have also seen the PBS/BBC miniseries (that's closer to the book), so if I fall asleep, I won't miss anything. I miss reading, but even just a little while ago, I re-read the same page three times because when I turned the page, I was baffled by what was going on and had to turn back to refresh my memory. So, maybe "good for me" TV is the best thing for my brain right now.

Feverish Thoughts

It appears that my earlier complaints about sniffles turned out to mean I have a particularly nasty virus that's been going around town. It combines the respiratory symptoms of a mild cold -- sniffling, sneezing, some coughing -- with the aches and fever of the flu. I seldom ran fever as a kid, which was kind of a pain because that was the main yardstick they used to determine whether to call your parents and send you home if you got sick during the school day. If you weren't running fever, you had to either pass out or throw up to be taken seriously. I ran into a similar problem as a young adult, when I had to call a nurse screener to get a doctor's appointment with my HMO. The first question was always what my temperature was, and if I answered 98.5, they didn't think anything of it, even when I told them that my normal resting body temperature is 97.9.

Well, yesterday, I indulged in a little magical thinking about the sniffling and sneezing and said that if I just took a nap, then I'd wake up feeling fine. But I woke up with a temperature over 100. I had to throw in the towel and tell the other choir teachers that there was no way I could or should make it to children's choir. Not only was it probably a bad idea for me to be around children, but I wasn't even sure I could drive. Since I seldom run fever -- this was maybe the fifth time in my whole life I've had a temperature that high -- that particular kind of misery was new to me. In fact, I took notes because in one of my story ideas, there's a scene in which the viewpoint character is really ill, and that illness generates the desperation for him to do the thing that kicks off the story. So I was paying attention to just how it felt, that sense of shivering while my skin felt hot, and I wanted to simultaneously huddle under a blanket and hold a cold soda can against my face.

Fortunately, I did wake up feeling better this morning, after sleeping nearly 12 hours. My temperature is back to normal. I'm still a little stuffy, but the worst of the sniffling and sneezing seems to be over. I'm just really, really weak and tired.

I'm afraid my planned potential trip to Oklahoma early next week isn't going to happen. For one thing, the illness cut short my productivity, so I'm not going to finish the book in time and I won't have time to prepare. But aside from that, it looks like it's going to be cold and rainy most of that time. I wouldn't mind that so much, but on the day I'd be coming home, some of the weather models are calling for potential ice and snow, and I don't think that being in the mountains north of here when there's a chance of ice and snow would be the best idea ever. So maybe I'll let myself have an at-home retreat on those days. Cold, rainy days are good for reading and thinking.

I'm also not sure about the concert I'm supposed to sing in this weekend. Right now, I can barely stand up for a few minutes, so I know I wouldn't make it through the concert, and I don't think I have enough breath to sing with any quality. That's irritating after having made it through all the rehearsals up to this point when I kept wanting to quit.

Problem Characters: The Scene-Stealing Sidekick

I'm continuing my discussion of "problem" characters, and this week's almost falls into the category of "good problem to have": the scene-stealing sidekick. This is the secondary character who leaps off the page and threatens to take over the story, eclipsing the protagonist. Individual readers will always have their own preferences for characters and may like secondary characters better than the heroes, but the scene-stealing sidekick draws the attention of just about everyone who reads the book.

How is this a problem? It may mess with your plot if you as a writer are falling in love with this secondary character and becoming less interested in the hero, so you end up with a bait-and-switch that leaves readers wondering who this story is really about. That makes the story very unfocused if you establish an arc with one character and then sub in another character off the bench for the conclusion of the arc. You may get feedback in rejections like "this other character was more interesting to me, maybe you should write a story about him" or "I just didn't fall in love with your hero."

What do you do about it?

If you have a character who really comes to life as you're writing, you can change your plans and make this character the main character. This can work if you consciously do it and really revise the story to reflect the change rather than unconsciously changing mid-stream. You might be able to give the character with the strong personality the background and situation of the hero so that he can play that role in the story. It's not a good idea to try to write a whole book with a main character who doesn't interest you all that much. Follow your instincts.

Or if that doesn't work, you can raise this character's prominence and make him a co-protagonist, like maybe a buddy-cop situation. You still have the hero's arc with your original hero, but you also have this other character playing a major role in the story.

You can also make your hero more interesting. I would seldom recommend making the sidekick less interesting. The more characters in a story who jump off the page and grab readers' hearts, the better, so what you need to do is make the main characters just as interesting. A lot of this comes back to the things I said about writing the "good guy" hero. Secondary characters are often allowed more leeway while the heroes are stuck in some mold of perceived "goodness," and that keeps them from having a sense of humor, an attitude, and many of the other attributes that make a character interesting. What is it that makes the scene-stealing sidekick so interesting? Can you find that sort of thing in your main character? Let your main character have complex layers, a few shades of gray, and some good lines. Be sure that you're writing scenes that give strong conflict to your main character.

Sometimes you may need to dial back the scene-stealer to keep him in the proper perspective. There are times when too much is too much and a strong character may work better in smaller doses. I'm sure we can all cite examples of TV series in which a minor character struck a chord with audiences, so that this character was given bigger and bigger roles until he took over the show, and the show was weakened as a result. No matter how much you like a character, that character needs to be appropriate to the story you're telling.

If you're the one falling for the sidekick, make sure you're not writing a Mary Sue, a wish-fulfillment self-insertion. Make sure the rules of your universe apply equally to all characters. If your hero can't get away with a particular behavior, the sidekicks can't, either.

As I said, it's a good problem to have when a character comes to life like that. The trick is to maintain the balance in the story. Some characters do just spring fully formed to life and some take a lot of work to gradually develop them. It's worth it to do the work on all the other characters. Readers may not be able to tell which ones were easy for you and which ones were difficult.

Fear the Look

Today is cool and rainy, so I'm hoping for good writing progress. I was really on a roll yesterday afternoon when I had to stop to get ready for a chorale rehearsal. The performance is this weekend. The group is still sounding rather shaky, so I have no idea how the performance will go. The concert is being held at my church so they can use the organ, and they're hiring our organist to play. Last night was our first rehearsal with her, and the director got really strange with her. She's Korean, but she speaks and understands English perfectly well. I guess you could get the impression that she isn't fluent because she's very shy and considers her words very carefully, but he seemed to decide immediately that she didn't understand English, and so he started speaking to her only in Italian musical terms, mixed in with German (for whatever bizarre reason). I started recognizing facial expressions I've seen before when I had her kids in my choir group and they were acting up. She would slowly rise from behind the piano and give them this Look.

So, yeah, this could get interesting. We rehearse with the rest of the orchestra Saturday morning, and if he acts with them the way he acts with the singers and the organist, we'll be lucky if he doesn't end up with a viola bow through his throat. And that's if the organist and I don't manage to turn him to stone or set him on fire if we both give him that Look at the same time.

Needless to say, I will not be joining this group on a long-term basis. And maybe I should touch base with the organist to plan a cue for simultaneously giving him the Look.

But as of Saturday night, I'm free! No more Monday-night rehearsals.

I've also counted the number of children's choir sessions I have left this semester, and we're in the single digits. Wow, time is flying. And I have so many books to write.

Tea Tirades

I did try taking the laptop downstairs when I went to lunch on Friday, and while there was still some goofing around before I got around to writing, I'd written 1,000 words and washed dishes before the time I usually would have started writing, so I'd call that a win. I'll have to try that again today.

I managed about 6,000 words on Friday. I had grand plans to do some writing on Saturday, but I was hit by what I assumed at the time was allergies, but then I started running fever, too. Now the fever and most of the allergy-like symptoms are gone, but I feel really tired and weak. I skipped yoga this morning because I suspected sleep was more important. We'll see if I feel up to going to the Requiem rehearsal tonight. It would be annoying to have made it to all the rehearsals up to this point and not be able to sing in the concert because I got sick right before the final rehearsals.

I want to get writing done today because I'm at a good part in the story. I got to write a scene I've been visualizing for years. Oddly enough, it came out very different from the way I'd visualized it. That may have had something to do with putting it in context, which changed the setting and circumstances slightly, and that then altered the scene itself.

In other weekend news, the preschoolers had to sing in church, and this time they actually sang so that they were audible. It was an achievement. They were very, very cute. Bonus: All the clothing stayed on. No one ran off or cried or tried to jump off the chancel steps. So, all in all, a win.

Weekend movie viewing: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. These movies are basically extended sitcoms for the PBS crowd, but they work when you need a good feel-good film and are craving a chance to watch Maggie Smith and Judi Dench act together. There's a scene near the beginning of the film in which Maggie Smith's character and the young hotel owner are meeting with executives of an American hotel chain, trying to get funding to expand the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel into a chain. Maggie Smith's character asks for a cup of tea, and then she launches into a tirade about how tea requires boiling water to release the flavor from the dried leaves, and yet all she's ever served in America is a cup of tepid water with a teabag on the saucer, and she has to dip the teabag into the tepid water and see if it changes color or flavor at all. I was shouting "Amen!" at that scene because that's exactly what you get. Even if you bring your own tea, trying to get actually hot water for brewing it is a challenge, and you're lucky if you don't get water that has at some point come in contact with a container that's previously held coffee, so that you get coffee-flavored water for brewing your tea. I need to get a recording of this scene on my phone so I can play it at restaurants when I'm served "tea," since it sounds so much better when Maggie Smith says it (even if it's in the voice of a character who's a former maid rather than in the voice of the Dowager Countess).

A Day in the Life

I was thinking through my daily routine yesterday, looking for ways to improve my time management, and I thought it might be interesting to share a day in the life of a writer -- well, this writer, anyway.

I don't have a particular wake-up time. That tends to vary by season. I'm not a morning person, but that doesn't mean I don't wake up early. I just don't get up and become functional early. That time between waking up and full consciousness is the best time for brainstorming, so I may lie in bed for an hour or so after I wake up, thinking. One of the nice things about not having a set schedule is the luxury to do this. When I get hungry or am out of thoughts, I get up and have breakfast. I make a whole pot of tea and put it in a thermos to have throughout the day. I'll linger over breakfast and a cup of tea while I read the newspaper (except for the comics). That's another luxury from not having to get up and go every morning, and I enjoy it. Afterward, I get dressed and head upstairs to my office.

I'm still sort of easing into the day, so I make the transition to work mode by checking e-mail and dealing with anything urgent, skimming through the Facebook and Twitter feeds, and checking in on sites about industry news. I'll get my second cup of tea and then allow myself a little "fun" reading online, then I write my blog post for the day and do a little social media stuff. The morning is also when I do business stuff like bookkeeping and when I try to do some publicity. If I have extra time before lunch, I may let myself do a little more "fun" online stuff, but this is where my personal weakness tends to kick in and I start doing what I call "doom looping," where I check e-mail, check my social media accounts, and check in on message boards. I may post something at various places. And then I go back around the same sites over and over to see if anything's changed. I'm trying to make a conscious effort to check once and then walk away. This is also the time when I try to run any errands, like going to the bank, library, or post office or running to the grocery store.

I eat lunch while watching the second half hour of the noon news and reading the newspaper comics. When I'm done eating, I'll work the New York Times crossword in the newspaper. After lunch, it's back to the office to check e-mail and social media before disconnecting from the Internet and going to write. This is another spot where doom looping can kick in, and I'm considering just taking the computer offline when I go to lunch. Starting to write is the hard part of the day. This is one reason why I don't have wi-fi, though I know I could probably get the same effect by turning off the router during this time. If things are going well, having Internet or not makes no difference. The trick is when I hit a hard spot where I don't know what happens next or I'm not sure how a scene should go. If I'm not online, I force myself to work through it. If I'm online, it's way too easy to decide to just check my e-mail, and it snowballs from there as I put off dealing with the difficult thing. So instead, I take the laptop somewhere else in the house. On nice days, I work on my patio. On cold days, there's a chaise in the loft over the living room. In the summer, I sit under the ceiling fan either on my sofa or on my bed.

I try to work in half-hour increments, getting up in between to do things like laundry, dishes, exercise, music practice, etc. If I meet my word count or time goal before it's time to make dinner, I'll plug back into the Internet to check in on things. I generally try to get my writing done in the afternoon, but if I don't and I don't have an evening activity, I may do another session in the evening. If I did get it all done, I'll either watch TV while knitting or I'll read. I'm really trying to stay offline at night, though the temptation is there to do some socializing. I guess the Internet is my water cooler, since I don't have co-workers in the normal way. I just need to be better about how and how much I use it.

I've told myself that if I finish this draft by the end of next week, the following week I may take a few days and go back to the mountains in Oklahoma. It's off-season, but should be warm enough for a little hiking. I need trees and hills. And then I can sit on the porch and brainstorm another book. That may be a good test of my plan to travel and try to write in the evenings in my hotel room. I got my new passport in the mail yesterday, so now I can go when an opportunity arises.