Rani Divine's Blog, page 2

Seat of Your Pants: The idea

Hey guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. As it’s now March (how did that happen?), it’s time for a new series! And I’ve chosen something that I think you’ll all really enjoy. It’s something I actually get a lot of questions about, from many of you. I think because it’s not something many people really think of, when they think of writing. Sure, writers know what this is and a little bit of how it works, but other people don’t. And some of you, I’m sure, aren’t actually writers.
So let’s talk about writing by the seat of your pants.
That’s how I write.
See, there are two main ways of writing a novel. There’s the outline method, which I’m really not adept at telling you about, because I don’t use it. And there’s what I like to call the “seat of your pants” method, which I know a great deal about—because that’s the way I write. The majority of writers either use an outline or they don’t, but for those of you who cannot fathom writing without an outline, stay tuned. I’ll tell you all about it, over the month of March.
Seat of Your Pants: The idea
Usually, writing always starts with an idea. Whether you’re outlining or pantsing, it always starts with an idea. If you don’t have an idea, then you probably don’t really know what you want to write about. But that’s beside the point.
We seat of your pants writers often come up with an idea, and we think, “oh, that could be a cool story”—but it’s from there that things get different.
Unlike outliners, who would then (I assume) sit down and come up with an outline for their idea before they start writing, pantsers just start writing. We just type up the idea we had, and we roll with it. We see where it takes us.
Sometimes that means we’ll write a few lines, delete them, and rewrite the same lines with slightly different wording. Sometimes it means that we’ll just sit down and flow out more words than we know what to do with—and that’s what we’re usually hoping for. More words are better than less, when you’re writing by the seat of your pants. We want more words, because if you have too many words, you can always cut them. It’s harder to add words, after the fact.
I don’t know if this is true for all seat of your pants writers, but for me, this part is all about discovery. It’s about meeting some characters, whether they be our primary characters or not, and getting to know the world a little bit.
It can also be a challenge, which I often enjoy, because sometimes the idea we have is for later in a story, or for what we think might be the end of a story, and so we have to backtrack and think of a beginning that we think might match with the ending we’ve thought of—and to be honest, I’m not often right. I have a whole pile of endings that I would love to use someday, that I’ve backtracked from in an effort to give the story a really good start, but none of them worked out the way I wanted. And you know what? That honestly made it a lot more fun.
That’s how it begins. That’s where we start from. We get an idea, and we roll with it—wherever it takes us, whatever shape it turns into. And we love the discovery of it, the experience of finding out what this idea can turn into along the way. Why? Because it’s very rarely what we thought it would be, when we started.
And how fun is that?
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Writing Cleanly: Realistic dialogue

Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me in Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. :) All month long, we’ve been talking about writing clean fiction, and the things that are sometimes difficult for clean writers to get right. There’s a stigma against clean writing, one that says if you’re writing cleanly, you’re not writing well—and that just doesn’t have to be the case. Sure, we have to be a little more picky with the way we word things, with the amount of details we give when it comes to certain topics, but that doesn’t mean we have to compromise in terms of story. (which, by the by, is RAD Writing’s motto)
This week, for the end of our series, I chose a topic very unlike the rest of the topics in this series. I chose this topic because it’s something that I see in writing in general, but something that clean writers get a bad rap for, more than others. It’s something that I pride myself in being quite good at—and so it’s something I like to share about, whenever I have the chance.
Writing Cleanly: Realistic dialogue
It’s difficult, I know. While exposition often flows off our fingertips like fine silk, dialogue comes out clunky, overly wordy (or underly), and just plain wrong. It happens to the best of us, whether we’re clean writers or not—but there’s one aspect in particular, for which clean writers get a really bad rap. And that's where I'll place my focus, today.
When real people talk, they curse.
And clean writing avoids cursing, at all costs.
And you should! If you’re writing clean fiction, then you should avoid cursing. Please. Clean readers don’t want to read cursing, no matter how you’ve written it. They don’t want those words in exposition, and they certainly don’t want those words in dialogue. But there are a great many non-clean readers who expect to see cursing, because it’s in their day-to-day.
Personally, I don’t see what the problem is. As long as you’re writing good dialogue, realistic dialogue in general, then the curse words aren’t necessary at all. The vast majority of the time, in any sentence that includes a curse word, that curse word could be removed without altering the sentence in the slightest. So, why does it matter if we don’t write them? It’s beside the point though, because the argument has already been made and lost. Readers, even clean one sometimes, want characters to be fully realistic. Which means that some of them really ought to curse.
That being the case, I have two fairly simple options for you, for including curse words in your writing (without actually including any):
“He/she cursed.”
Easy, right? And it actually works rather well, most of the time. In many stories, especially sci-fi/fantasy, it bothers me when “normal” curse words show up in dialogue at all—because what are the odds that curse words are exactly the same on this world as they are right now, and on Earth? Maybe these people think hands are offensive, so they use hands as a curse. It just works better, in these cases, to use phrasing like “he/she cursed”—because then the reader can infer from the line before, what the curse was involving.
A new set of deity
This one is my personal favorite, and it works extremely well when you’re writing fantasy—but can work in alternate Earths as well. Make up a new set of gods, and use their names when people are cursing! Brilliant, eh? AC Schafer did it extremely well in The Wraith and the Wielder, if you ask me. Tsaw rahk, her characters say, when they’re cursing. And the meaning of it isn’t lost. We all know they’re cursing. We all know it’s a curse. But none of us are turned off by it, because that’s not a curse in reality. If you said that to someone, they’d probably just ask you to repeat yourself, because they didn’t understand what you said.
These, my friends, are my two favorite ways to include cursing in story, without ever actually including a curse word. And sure, there are times and places when a “minor” curse or two can be appropriate in your writing, but most clean readers don’t want to see any at all—which makes these methods far more appropriate when you’re writing in this arena.
Have something specific you’d like an opinion on, when it comes to cursing in clean fiction? Send me a message and let me know! I’d love to help!
In the meantime, have a lovely week—I’ll be back in March, with a whole new series!
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Writing Cleanly: Realistic injuries

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you’ve stopped by, for the next in our series on writing clean fiction. It’s a subject that I think we really ought to talk about more often, because there’s a stigma against clean fiction. It’s a stigma that says clean fiction just can’t be as good as its unclean counterpart. And you know what? Most of the time… well, they’re right. Clean fiction just doesn’t get the hard-hitting nitty-gritty that a lot of readers are looking for out of their fiction. Which is why we need to spend a little more time honing our craft and perfecting the way we write, so our work stands up to the cultural norm.
This week, we’re talking about something that I touched on just a little bit in week one, but one that I thought we should come back around to, because of how important it really is in the long run.
Writing Cleanly: Realistic injuries
There’s a distinct lack of realistic injuries in television and film as well, and nobody seems to mind, but in the written word… believe me, they mind. They mind a great deal. So it’s extremely important that we take the time to write those injuries properly, and that we do our research so we know what we’re talking about.
Again, I’m going to remind you that there’s no way to please everyone. Clean fiction readers tend to be a little more intense of an audience, in that they can be far more difficult to please. They don’t know what they want, but they know what they don’twant and they’re not afraid to bash you online for doing the thing they don’t like. I know, it’s annoying. But you made the choice to write clean fiction for a reason, and there are ways to ensure that fiction is still amazing. I promise. It just won’t be able to please everyone who reads the genre. In fact, with a lot of the things I’m telling you, you might do better in some ways to notmarket as clean fiction. Other readers will love your books as well, and not even notice they’re clean.
When it comes to injuries in clean fiction, it is vitally important that you say what you mean. It’s a common trope of writing in general, that someone must be injured in the story, at some point along the way. So you’ll need to know who’s getting injured, how they would correctly respond to the pain of that injury, and what effects that injury will have upon them for the rest of the story.
This isn’t easy, and for some reason, many clean writers just don’t bother to do the research. There’s this stigma that says clean readers don’t want to see any blood at all, even if someone gets stabbed in the stomach. Well, that’s just not true. We don’t want to see the gore of it. We don’t want to see sinew unless it’s entirely necessary (if a character falls and breaks his leg, we’re more apt to be okay with seeing that sinew—if he’s sliced open by another character, it’s harder for us to stomach). But most of all, we really do want it to be realistic. We don’t want someone to break their ankle in one chapter and three chapters later have that same someone walking around like it’s nothing.
Now, the easiest way to make sure you’re doing this correctly is honestly to find a friend. I’m willing to bet, in this day and age, that you know a nurse (or someone else in the medical profession). And if you don’t, well, it’s not that difficult to go into a hospital and meet one. ;-) Point is, a medical professional would be able to tell you exactly what effects that injury would have on a person, tell you how long they’d expect for recovery, and even tell you whether or not that person would be likely to pass out when the injury is inflicted.
Of course, if you don’t have a friend in the medical field and don’t want to make a friend for the sake of your writing, there’s always the internet—and it really is a treasure trove of information. Point is, you need to do some research, either way.
And like I said before, the rule of thumb for showing detail in injury is whether or not it was an accident, and the level of gruesome in the injury. Clean readers very rarely ever want to see spilled intestines, but we’ll handle smashed skulls, broken bones, shredding muscle, and very much more—as long as it happened by accident, or happenstance. Intentional injuries are much harder for us to stomach, and you’ll have to use your best judgement to decide how far you’re willing to go.
Have a specific injury you’d like an opinion on? Send me a message and let me know!
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Writing Cleanly: All aflutter

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. This week is Valentine’s day, the whole reason why I decided not to write a series on love, and I hope that you all have a marvelous one.
Because it’s Valentine’s and I didn’t want to be talking about love in two separate blogs, we’re talking about writing clean fiction—and some of the things that writers struggle with, when writing clean fiction. (by the by, if you haven’t read last week’s post, you should!) As an editor of clean fiction, I can tell you that there are a lot of indie authors who need help in this arena—which is what I’m here for, this month!
We’re tackling some of the subjects that are annoying difficult to brooch in clean fiction, because clean fiction readers can be even harsher than the other ones (and sometimes we question why we set ourselves up for this in the first place).
This week?
Writing Cleanly: All aflutter
Yeah, yeah, I know. I said I wasn’t going to be talking about love—but you know what, love is a tricky subject, when it comes to clean writing. It can be a make or break, for a lot of readers, and it needs to be approached very delicately, from start to finish.
If you hate writing love stories… I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’ll need this information at some point anyway, so you may as well stick around, or at least bookmark this post for later.
Now, before we get any further, I want to have one little aside. If you did want to read a series on love, this month, then click over to the RADblog. I’ll be posting about different kinds of love and how to write them in fiction, all through February and March. It’ll be great fun.
In here, however, we’re talking romantic, guy-meets-girl love.
The trouble with this kind of love, at least in clean fiction, is that it can lead to a lot of red flags, for a lot of readers. Especially when it comes to writing romance novels. Yes, there are clean romance novels. Yes, they actually are quite popular. But ask any romance author how they write their love scenes, and they’ll all give you very different answers.
See, just like with battle scenes, you won’t be able to please everyone when you’re writing. You just won’t. I’m sorry to say it, but you won’t. Some people want erotica and other people don’t—and the lines always blur at some point. Again, I’ll be showing you a couple ways you can potentially write your love stories, that’ll take you right down the middle in terms of what clean fiction readers are looking for, but that’s the best I have to offer. A majority, but not all.
The way I see it, there are two main ways to tell love stories in clean fiction. You can either have the love scenes all be behind closed doors, or you can have your characters be chaste (in whatever definition you choose) throughout the story.
With option one, you write a normal romance novel, only you have all the actual "romance" take place behind closed doors. That means your readers won’t see what’s happening, but they’ll know what’s happening, because you’ve implied it. There’s a lot of innuendo, in this sort of writing. A lot of, you-know-what’s-going-on-but-I’m-not-going-to-show-you, and that can be great way to write a love story. In many ways, you get the best of both worlds: you get to show your characters falling in love, and show what most people consider to be a normal relationship between two consenting adults, but without getting too steamy on screen.
Option two takes a little bit more doing, because you’ll have to put more thought and detail into your characters as a whole. You’ll have to be more intentional with the things you do describe, and the ways your characters think, to “justify” why there’s no “behind closed doors” time between them. Why? Because a lot of readers are expecting that steaminess, and you don’t want them to notice that it isn’t there.
Personally, when I’m using option two, I like the “fade to black” method. I cut my scenes before it can get too deep, before the characters get too far into their time together, so readers can decide for themselves whether or not anything happened—but I’ll make it mildly clear in later text, that nothing steamy actually happened between my characters.
Lastly, when it comes to deciding how much is too much steam… that’s really up to you. I can’t tell you how much steam to include, because it’s hard to say, without having read your story. Every story is different, every story needs something different, and I’m reluctant to give you a scale to measure against.
I will say something very similar to what I said last week, which is that I’ll generally measure my stories by the “would I allow my thirteen-year-old cousin to read this?” scale, and it seems to do well for me.
As for you? Well, you’ll have to find your own scale, because I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you consider clean.
If you’d like specific advice, however, shoot me a message! I’d love to help point you in the right direction!
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Writing Cleanly: Into battle

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by, and I hope that you enjoyed last month’s series—it was a lot of fun for me to work on.
This month, because I wanted to be a little different, we’re not going to be talking about anything to do with Valentine’s day. I know, I know, I usually do a series on love in writing, or some such thing, but honestly… I’m doing that in the RADblog this month, and I didn’t want to do it here, too ;-)
So instead, let’s talk about clean writing. And by clean writing, I don’t mean writing without any errors. I mean, writing that adheres to the “clean” mantra/genre/category. Clean writing, as in, writing that’s suitable for submission to RAD Writing, you might say. ;-) (am I winking too much?)
It can be a great struggle, for a lot of writers, to write something amazing, something that’s still hard hitting and doesn’t compromise on story, all because we want to write clean fiction. I’ll be really honest with you guys. A lot of indie authors who write clean fiction, do so very poorly. I’m saying that because I’ve read a lot of indie authors who write clean fiction, and because I’m an editor, so I know good writing when I see it—and a lot of those books… they aren’t. I’m sorry for saying it, but they’re just not great.
I want to help, in that regard.
So I’ve designed this month’s series around four topics that I know many clean writers struggle with, and I hope to help you tackle writing these subjects, without compromise.
Writing Cleanly: Into Battle
Let’s get one thing perfectly straight, before we go any further: some readers won’t like your battle scenes, no matter how you write them. If you go too gory, some readers won’t like it. If you don’t go gory enough, other readers won’t like it. So I’m going to try to explain this, to the best of my ability, to aim you straight down the middle—where you’re more likely to please the greatest number of readers. That’s what we’re all after, really.
Now I’m going to put on my editor hat, and I’ll be telling it to you straight.
When you’re writing battle scenes in general, you want to give as much detail as possible, without going too overboard on where people/battalions/troupes are physically standing. It can get muddled and confused for readers, when you give too much information as far as standing locations. Make those locations briefly stated, very to-the-point, and move on.
When you’re writing battle scenes, make sure you have a clear image in your head, of what’s going down. If you’re a seat-of-your-pants writer, like me, try writing an abridged version of your scene, just so you know who’s where and what’s happening, and then go back in and fill out some detail. If it helps, get out a piece of paper and draw a diagram. Arrows are your friend! It doesn’t have to look good, and no one ever has to see it but you. Seriously. I won’t even ask to see it.
Once you have that in your head, and once you know what’s happening, go in and put some details. Tell me things like what you’re POV character is seeing, whether or not time is slowing (or speeding) for them. Tell me about the weather, and whether it’s affecting the way anyone fights. Tell me if someone close to your POV character looks tired, and what the POV character thinks of that.
Show me someone getting injured. Whether that’s a stab through the stomach (survivable, in many cases) or a bullet through the head (obviously not survivable), is up to you. I want to see your POV character react to that instant. I want them to see it, too feel it, and to have some sort of reaction. Why? Because that’s more moving for a reader than if the injury occurs to your POV character straight out of the gate.
Take your time here. Be thoughtful with the things you choose to describe, and make sure each description has a actual, required reason why it's there. More often than not, this will depend on your POV character and their state of mind before the battle began, or the place you need them to be when the battle is over.
Now that you’ve done all that, let’s really look into what it means to be clean.
Above, you’ll notice that I didn’t tell you not to be gory. I wanted detail. I wanted to see people injured. I wanted to see some carnage.
It’s in the edits that you’ll cut it down and decide whether things are clean or not. And if you’re not sure, then leave it for your editor! You can always discuss it with them, if you want a second opinion.
The thing to keep in mind is that in battle, there should be gore—but that most readers of clean fiction don’t actually want to see it. Some will, sure, but most want the allusion to pain and suffering in battle, rather than the blood and guts details. So in your editing, go through and cut anything visceral. If someone’s entrails are on the ground, maybe go zip them back inside.
Because you wrote the gruesome first, because you, the author, know what everything should look like, you’re the perfect person to cut it down to size. You know what details are important to your POV character, and therefore need to be left in. You know which injuries will be mentioned later on in the story, and therefore need to be left in. You know what’s going to be important later, and so you need to be the one to decide most of this.
My general rule of thumb, when it comes to writing battle scenes? If I wouldn’t want my thirteen-year-old cousin to read it because I think it’s too gruesome, I need to dial it back.
That right there is the best advice I can possibly give you.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Change it: “I want to connect with my readers”

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by, as we’ve reached the end of our January series on changing resolutions. It’s been a joy, sitting down each week and discussing how to better our resolutions, before we get any further into the new year. If you haven’t been around this month, I’d strongly encourage that you go check out my other posts from this month, before we get into February.
As you know, this month we’ve been talking resolutions, and how to word them and write them so they’re things we can achieve, things we can work toward, and things we’re more likely to succeed at doing.
And this week, for the last week of the series, I’m talking to all of my established authors.
Change it: “I want to connect with my readers”
I’m so glad that you do! I do, too. I really do. It’s something that I’ve been struggling to find a way to do, over the years. With social media always changing the ways things work, it can be very much a challenge to find a way to connect on a personal level with readers all over the interweb—but it’s something we have to do, in this day and age.
And yes, this is actually one of my resolutions, this year.
But right now, it’s not a very good one.
What does it mean, that you want to connect with your readers? How do you want to connect with them? What sort of relationship do you want to have with them? Is there another author who you’ve connected with, that you’re using as a benchmark?
That’ll all be extremely helpful for you to know.
But yet again, I want to know why. Sit down and really think about it, really ponder why you want to connect with your readers, what it is that draws you to them, that draws you to want to connect with them and learn more about them and understand them and be a bigger part of their lives. Why do you want that?
Once you know, I want you to make a plan. If there’s an author out there who you want to emulate, then I want you to look at their work. Look at what they’re doing, especially on social media, and see what you can do to emulate it.
That, that right there, should be your resolution. Quantify what it means to connect with your readers, and qualify what you want to have, in your relationship with them. That’s the only way you’ll be able to make this resolution a reality.
“I want to connect with my readers.” Don’t we all? So let’s change it to, “I will open up on social media, reach out to my readers, and make a community for them, centered around my books and myself.”
That’s a good resolution, a continual resolution, for all writers.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Change it: “I want to read more”

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. All month long, we’re talking resolutions, and how to make them better. How do we take those vague ideas of resolutions and make them into things that’ll actually be attainable, that’ll actually be useful and beneficial to us in our future? If you haven’t been around for the rest of the series, I strongly encourage that you go back and read my last two posts—they’ve been incredibly helpful, even for me!
This week, I’m taking a resolution that I’ve also made, time and time again, and very rarely manage to succeed in. I should know better than to make it into a huge goal every year, because I know how little time I have. And we’ll discuss that too, in just a minute. But I also know a lot of other people who make this resolution, and I know many of them won’t succeed. Mostly because they didn’t set a goal, or remotely decide on how much of this they wanted to do, in the year ahead.
Change it: “I want to read more”
Like I said, I love this resolution. I’ve made this resolution, time and time again. It’s a good one. I love when people decide that they want to read more books, that they want to spend some time in a book rather than focusing their eyes on the television screen. I love it. I’m so glad, if this is one of the resolutions you made for yourself, this year.
But there’s also a major problem with this resolution, and a very big reason why many people fail with it, when they make this resolution.

How much do you want to read? What do you want to read? What counts as reading?

Nobody ever thinks about those, when they start out with this resolution. They just think to themselves that it’ll be great if they can read more, in the coming year. They think to themselves that it’ll be amazing, if they’re getting a lot more out of life because they’ve got their noses in a book more often. But when they don’t qualify reading, when they don’t say what they mean by reading, it’ll eventually fall into “well I read a blog post today… I guess that counts?”
I know, because I’ve done it too. No judging from me.
So what I want you to do, if you’ve made this resolution and now realize that there’s something a bit off with it, is to qualify what you mean by reading. What do you want to read more of? Medical journals? Novels? Short stories? Historical books? Language studies? Whatever the answer, you need to take some time and qualify that. You need to know what it is that you want to read more of, in the new year. Once you know that, you can quantify it—which is the other part where a lot of people fall short. Now that you know what you want to read, you need to decide how much. And for a lot of us, this is based on just how much time we have, outside of all the other things we need to do on any given day. For some of us, that means we won’t be able to read every day, but that we can set aside a couple hours a week, to reading. And that’s okay. But you need to know that, before you really set your resolution.
Why? Because if you don’t, you’re setting yourself up to fail, and to not really read any more this year than you did last year. We can fix that, right now.
“I want to read more.” Good! I do, too. But let’s change that, to, “I will read two novels, every month, in 2020.”
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Change it: “I want to be more creative!”

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. It feels strange for me still, to only be writing one post for all of you in any given week, but I’ll tell you, it’s been a lot easier on my noggin—and I feel like I have more time to really delve into my subject, and really hash out the things I’m talking to you about.
This month, as you’ll know if you stopped by last week, we’re talking about resolutions, and how to make them better. We’re taking some good resolutions, and making them into resolutions that we can attain, ones we can quantify, ones that we’ll stick to because we now understand the meaning behind them and know why we’re putting more effort into these things.
Today?
Change it: “I want to be more creative!”
I love this one. I do. I’ve made this one, for I don’t even know how many years. I make this one probably every other year, and it ends up amounting to nothing. It suffers from a lack of identity, a lack of anything to latch onto or make sense of, and I know we can make it a whole lot better.
It's a good thing, wanting to be more creative. Creativity is something we all need, and something modern education tries to drill out of students (at least in the US). So we have to fight for our creativity, which I think is why so many adults make resolutions out of creativity, out of doing something to exercise our creative minds, to allow ourselves to think in a way we haven’t done in years, even a way to discover parts of ourselves that we didn’t know we had.
It’s a very good idea of a resolution. It’s just not a very good resolution—and for almost the exact same reasons as the resolution we discussed last week.
Okay, so you want to be more creative. What does that mean? What do you want to do, that’s creative? Do you want to start doing pottery? Do you want to draw? Paint? Write? Dance? What does creativity look like, to you? What do you envision, when you think of yourself being creative, this year?
Now tell me why. That thing you’re picturing, why is that what came to mind? Why do you see yourself dancing with sugar plum fairies? Why do you envision yourself with a palette of paint in your hand and a canvas the size of the wall before you? What is it that draws you to this particular creative endeavor, and why do you want to explore this version of creativity, this year?
I’m sure you’ve come up with a lot of different ideas, at this point. So now let’s quantify it.
How much do you want to do? If it’s dancing you’re thinking of doing, then how many hours a month do you want to spend in the studio? How many choreographies do you want to learn? If it’s painting, then what kind of art do you want to be able to create by the end of the year?
Make sure you set yourself a goal that’s attainable, one you know you’ll have time to achieve, or one that will stretch you a little bit. Don’t reach for the clouds, if you know you only have time to reach the branches in the middle of the tree. That tree will give you a boost to get to the clouds, next year.
“I want to be more creative.” I’m glad! I do, too. But let’s change that resolution to, “I will learn how to draw a portrait without a reference photo.”
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Change it: “I want to write more”

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad that you’re here, joining me in the new year! I’ve been writing in here for so long that I couldn’t even remember how many years I’d been blogging, and I had to go back and check. I started in ­­­­2014. Can you believe it?! But I wanted to say a very special thank you, to all of you who’ve stuck around from the very beginning. I’m so glad you’re around, and I’m extremely thankful if I’ve been able to give you even a tiny little bit of advice or help through the years.
I do have an announcement to make, which makes me a little bit sad. I’ve been thinking about making a change here, for a long time, and I believe that time has finally come. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be around, still be giving you weekly posts on topics I find useful or helpful to writers everywhere. But that’s just the thing: I’ll only be writing in Too Many Books to Count once a week. Why? Well, because for half of the year, I’m also writing in the RADblog, where I’m sharing very similar content. And because this year, I’m stretching myself to delve into many more creative avenues than I’ve had in the past, and something had to give. So, from today forward, you’ll only see blog posts from me, here in Too Many Books to Count, on Tuesday afternoons (if you’re in Mountain Standard Time).
Never fear, however! I’m always around, and you can still reach me via Facebook or email, or even by commenting on my blogs, if you ever have any questions or want to chat about writing.
And on that note, I have a really good series in mind, this month.
I know last month was all about new things that I’m going to be doing, in 2020, but this month, I want to talk about you. I want to talk about you, my writer friends, and the writerly resolutions I’m sure you made for yourself.
And I want to make those resolutions better.
Don’t worry; most people stick to their resolution through the month of January anyway, so you won’t be worse off by not knowing these before the year began.
Let’s change some resolutions!
Change it: “I want to write more”
I’ll be the first person in the world to tell you that this is not a bad resolution. Wanting to write more is a good thing, and a good stepping stone to get yourself where you want to be. The problem is, wanting to write moreisn’t enough information. It’s not quantifiable, and it’s easily forgotten about, because, let’s face it, there are a lot of things we want to do, that we don’t do. There are a lot of things we should do, that we don’t do. And we know it, but we don’t often do anything to alter the issue.
So, wanting to write more is good. I also want to write more. There are days, admittedly, where I wish I wasn’t an editor and that I could write day in and day out, like I used to do while I was in college. But I’m not in college anymore, I haven’t been for a long time, and I’m down to just wanting to write more. I’m sure some of you are in the same boat as me.
But how do we make the resolution better?
Start with asking yourself why. Why do you want to write more? What’s your vision for the future, based on your writing? Spend five minutes and really think about it, really ponder why it is that writing is so important to you, and why you want to do more of it this year.
Now that you have your why, let’s quantify it a bit:
What do you want to write? If you’re a short story writer, maybe you want to write at least one story a week. But maybe you don’t have that much time, and you’d rather commit to one story a month. If you’re a novice, maybe you want to actually sit down and finish the novel you’ve been working on, you know, the one that you keep shelving because things come up and it gets too hard. If you’re a novelist, maybe you want to beat your record, and write more books this year than you’ve ever written in a year.
Whatever the case, it’s important that your resolution be quantified, so it’s not limited by the word more. More could just be writing a couple words a day, which for a lot of us, will dwindle down to nothing by the end of a few months, because we didn’t quantify how many a couple is, or how much more should be.
Point is, I’m glad that you want to write more. I’m super glad. But for your resolution, maybe take some time this week and decide just how much more you want to write, so you’ve given yourself a goal you can attain.
“I want to write more.” Great! But let’s change it to something like, “I will write two novellas, in 2020.”
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!
I know, I know, I’m a day late. Again. But I didn’t want to change around my post schedule! You get it, right?
Point is, I didn’t want to let the opportunity go by, to wish you the happiest of New Year’s.
I thought about taking today to introduce a new series, to talk about all the fun things I have planned for this year, in this blog. I thought about talking to you about 2019, and all the things I’ll miss about last year. I thought about doing a lot of things, but I always came back to this:
I need to wish you a happy new year.
I need to.
It’s important, in a way that I’d never really thought about before, if I’m being completely honest. It’s really, really important to me, that I take this time to wish you a happy new year.
Because you matter to be, and I want you to understand that. I want you to know that you matter, to me, and that it matters to me, that I wish you a happy new year. Sure, that might sound a little strange, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You’re a part of my life, whether you realize it or not, just by reading these words. You’re a part of what I’m doing in this world, and for that, I want you to know that I really do wish the best, for you. I hope that this year is filled with all the things you love. I hope that this year is filled with good things, blessings, and joy in your life. I hope that this year brings you more laughter than you know what to do with. I hope that 2020 is exactly what you wish for, in your highest of dreams. I hope that you’ll have the greatest year, ever.
And I just couldn’t let the opportunity go by, to tell you that.
So, from me, from your friendly neighborhood writer-editor combo,
Happy New Year.
Here’s to many more!
[love]
{Rani Divine}