My writing process is mostly...full of cake.

Anonymous reader here! :) I love your blog.

I have...I guess a post-request? I have been having writer's block, and it always helps me to know about other writers' processes - like, where they write, what time of day they do it, if there are any habits that help them, etc.

If you ever have the spare time, I'd be really excited if you'd post about your writing process. Thanks :)

Hello anonymous!! You're a wonderful person. I know this because you use the :) smiley, and anybody who uses that is a 100% bonafide AWESOME PERSON in my book. But seriously, I like your question. I like it lots, and I'm gonna try my best to give you an equally likeable answer!

Obviously, every writer is completely different. Our styles are different, the genres we choose to tackle vary, and that's only the start! What works for me might not work for you, but gosh darn it I sure hope it does.


















In all seriousness, I'm the type of writer who likes to sit at the computer for three or four weeks and frenzy out a really, REALLY rough draft skeleton thing. I take one or two months to revise that skeleton. I've finished two books in this fashion, so it's worked out pretty well for me! If you're slower, that's awesome too!

If you wanna get in the mood to write, the most essential bit is MUSIC. Put on some jams you adore out the whazoo. Make a little playlist of songs you NEVER get tired of listening to, freshen it up with some new things you like, etc. Hit 'loop' and think about the scene you're writing as if it were a movie, with that music in the background. My favorite guilty pleasure (and loltastic nerdgasm habit) is to put some very epic trailer music, such as from 300 or Inception, and imagine my book, my characters, my plot being weaved through that music as though it were a movie. It gets me pumped to keep writing the book itself!




















Music helps the creative juices to flow. Picture various action-y or other important scenes in your book playing to music. You might find new inspiration!

Another method of breaking writer's block in half like a boss is to become extremely attached to your characters. I do this a lot, because my characters are lovely and very real to me. Sometimes I hold conversations with them. It takes a lot of work to have a one-sided conversation, but if you pose them normal questions, it challenges your brain to come up with a correct response that would fit their personality. This can help you love them more/want to spend more time with them and will give you vital clues as to how to write them better!



















Keep in mind, doing this in public might get you arrested! But, seriously, try it out right before you go to bed at night, when it is most quiet and easy to imagine things. It's almost meditative, and it's worked wonders for me.


The last resort I usually reserve for the VERY HARDEST of times is to bake. BAKE BAKE BAKE. For you this might be different - a mindless task that is completely NOT writing at all can help you gain perspective. Weeding, painting, going for a walk. All are totally legit and can really aid you when you need to step back from the work and see if you're being a nutcase about it.



Above all, what motivates me to write is the realization that I'm not getting any younger. Time is awastin'! I want to share those stories and help people like books helped me. Do all you can whenever you can, try your hardest every second. A lot of the time, that means forcing yourself to write when you don't want to. Do that. Don't let anything defeat you or slow you down, ever. YOU are making your own success or failure entirely. So fight hard and fight long!

PS. Caffiene and sugar are magic pick-me-ups!!

PPS. Stay in school

PPPS. When you get famous, don't forget me.

PPPPS.


















Love,

Michelle

Crying Buckets is Okay Except not

Long time no talk! I've been busy crying my eyes out while writing. I have no idea why, I'm usually a very unexpressive person, especially when it comes to tears, but this book has wormed its way into my heart and yanked it around.

I finished my 40k contemp today, it focuses on drugs and, well, drugs! I think the blurb I made up explains it better than I could in this emotional state.

HEARTSTOPPERS - 40k YA/Contemp

"After Cynthia's father dies in a car accident her little brother goes mute, her hotel maid mother is told by God to become a teacher, and Cynthia starts making and selling pills from the stall in her high school's bathroom.

Except the pills are fakes, and they get insanely popular lightning fast. Cynthia is tossed ass first into the whirlwind world that is big league drug dealing, scraping by with the help of a fallen drug lord out for revenge on the current king of the town, Eight Gold Eli. Throw in the fact Cynthia has no idea what to do with so much money, that her crush's dad is a DEA agent bent on busting her, and that Eli won't stop until she's dead or out of business, and you have the recipe for the perfect disaster - or the perfect emotional recovery from the addiction of misery."

I don't know why this book got me all emotional. It's very close to my heart in some ways, and I'm very excited to start querying it!

On another note, I've gotten into making vanilla wafers cookies, and they are the best things on the planet! I'll edit the recipe in here later. <3

Don't you ever delete, damn it.

The journey is the important bit, right? Not the destination.

That's what they say, anyway. It's 100% freaking true.

For writing, and becoming a writer, the road ends only with death. We might take breaks from it, we might rage at it a bit and have a spat, but we are writers because writing is our life - which means writing only ends when our life does. Our journey might have milestones - like getting an agent, getting published, winning awards etc - but the journey never ends. We can always get better. We improve with every word and every day.

What I like most about blogs, and writer blogs specfically, is I get to follow the journey. From the celebration of completing a first chapter, all the way up to announcing a publishing deal. It's exciting, endearing. It's watching history in motion.

I know a lot of authors have this change they go through once they get an agent - their blogs might diminish, or they might start a whole new one. They might delete the chronicles of their journey, and that's horrendous!

If nothing else, keep the chronicles up for those of us working our way up from the bottom - they inspire us more than you know. They give us hope, fire, drive, and determination. Sometimes they keep us hanging on longer than our own willpower allows. Even if the entries are a bit raw, or disorganized, that's okay. Improvement does not happen overnight - and that's what deleting your past tribulations makes it seem like.

There's a certain beauty in watching growth firsthand!

I love this journey. It hurts, but that's okay. We're all in it together, all being hurt and helped together. I wouldn't be able to do this if I was alone. I'm not.


Thank you.

The Importance of bein' Honest.

Courage Wolf has a point here, but no. Today it's all about honesty.


There has been hullabuloo.


This hullabuloo has centered around a certain string of points made by various peeps, all of which may or may not have upsetted your little stomachs.

I am here to clarify what this hullabuloo is all about. Get me a cape with a huge C in it. The Clarifier is here to save the motherfuuuuuing day. (And if I had my way, Brandon Routh would be my co-star. Ahem.)

The hullabuloo in a nutshell: SELF-CENSORING ON YOUR OWN BLOG IS BETTER THAN NOT SELF-CENSORING. ESPECIALLY, (ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY) IF YOU ARE A WRITER IN SEARCH OF PUBLICATION.

The clarification: Self-censoring actually sucks.

A blog is your personal domain. You can tweak the colors, the pictures, whatever you want. This applies to your posts, too. You, aspiring authors, may post whatever you damn well please. The one exception is as thus; It would probably not be wise to post rants that hurt/directly attack certain individuals or companies. This is true in real life, too. The old addage; If you have nothing nice to say, don't say it works wonders. If you HAVE to say something, say it to your clutch in the ladies room, or halfway between sips of mojitos. At least with the latter you can pass it off as tourettes. (I have passed many a snarky comment off as tourettes, I will admit. Other times, I blame it on stubbing my toe. See? You can be clever about this.)

Of course, we are creatures of opinion! I love opinions. I only really dislike opinions that say other opinions shouldn't exist. Opinions are the lifeblood of a human society. It is what we do best.

After this hullabuloo, I was also very tempted to go through my blog (some of which is very personal to me) and delete everything except the carefully looked over posts. Then I stopped. Why should I? They don't hurt anyone, and they are representations of me. If a blog is my personal space, what better to represent me than the entries in which I was myself? You can find a bunch of them on here, (to a bit of my shame) because I decided not to delete them. For now, they accurately represent me, my soul, and what I'm all about, yo.

The hullabuloo went on to say that posting any negative reviews of books is certainly not favorable. This had me making a face, mostly because I like reading reviews, especially if they are HONEST. Not negative, or right out sugarcoating, but HONEST. I wrote a review of a very popular book that may or may not have been glowing, but I'm not keen on taking it down. It is an honest review of a book I didn't like. Okay, good. I made up for that by doing a review of a book I DID like! It's all part of the balance.

The hullabuloo states that if you have any of these things on your blog, agents will probably reject you. I think what the hullabuloo meant was that you certainly have a lower chance of being offered rep by an agent who likes the book you bashed, and that is if they even do reasearch on you in the first place. Your blog represents you, sure, but it should not represent a santizied you. You do NOT want to lie to an agent or a fellow reader/writer/author/follower by presenting a facade. When they find out it's not who you really are, things could get quite ugly.

As you can tell, I'm the sort of person who's the 'you get what you see' type. Heheh.

Honesty is a great truth. Writers are oftentimes liars, sure. We have to be. We lie to make a story that doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean it isn't sincere, or genuine, or even based a little in truth. You can lie and build facades in your writing, but if you don't really mean it or it doesn't fit, it will show. The reader WILL pick up on it. Write your lies for the good of your writing, with heart behind it, and never lie about the person you are. There is no reason to lie. You are a wonderful, talented human being. Hiding and lying is like refusing that fact.

I want to meet real people, and real stories.

And if you really have to rant, there's always the draft section. ;)

Year of the Metal Rabbit and what it means for you kiddos.

I have no resolutions. I am a child of rebellion, REBELLION, I say! Also, the word 'resolute' is the first word in red ink on my rap sheet, with underlines. Right next to the 'loves muffins' bit.

As you may or may not know, I'm something of a Zodiac dork. The Chinese way of astrology is a particular weakness of mine. Don't want to go looking through dozens of articles on what the Chinese way predicts for us? Fear not! I make it my personal duty to scour countless articles released on New Year, and I've complied the gist of all of them here. ;)

This year is a Metal Rabbit year. Last year was a Metal Tiger year. Tiger years are generally filled with financial, spiritual, and political warfare. War is what defines a Tiger year. Rabbit, on the other hand, is a calm, reserved year known for its incredible luck, morseo than any other years of the Zodiac. We've waged the battle, and now it's time to split the spoils.

Expect good shit to unexpectedly happen for no earthly reason at all. Providence is warming up her guns and feeling random, and rest assured, she's aimin' at all of us.

It's a Metal year, so there'll be feelings of melancholy and regret. Metal years are notorious for producing great cultural and literary works of art ( :D We're looking at you, pub industry).

If you were born in the Year of the Rooster, things might be particularily frustrating. Rooster and Rabbit are polar opposites on the wheel, and contention runs aplenty between them. Dragon runs for second place on having a hard time. Most of the other signs look to have a decent year, with Goats, Pigs, Dogs, and Snakes having an AWESOME year.

Each sign has a differing element each year, so not only are you an animal, but you have a certain element attached to it. Those born in Water and other Metal years will find things smooth, while those born in a Fire year find things even smoother. Metal chops the element of Wood, and if you were born in a Wood year, it might seem like you find resistance wherever you go! Earth elements have nothing to worry about in any elemental year, they are the center of the elemental compass and remain relatively neutral.


In short, Metal Rabbit will be a lot better than last year! Metal+Rabbit=Robo-Rabbit?

Post-coitus....for writing?

In sexual terms we call it the afterglow. In less creepy terms, it's the calm after the storm, the recovery, the disarming lull that settles in once you've completed something that felt monumental.

Having written three (rather shoddy) books, I'll tell you this right now; when it's done I feel a distinct emptiness in my chest. I'm pretty lucky in the fact that I can put in two to four hours of writing a day, but it's not always the most productive - some days I get 6k words, others I get 500.

When I start typing out the very end, the epilogue or the last few words, it's always a teary time for me. The ending might not be particularily sad (but being me, it is always sad) but I am still real emotionally volatile. This being my third time going through the process, I'm able to pinpoint it now - I get touchy because I no longer know if what I did was right.

I begin questioning myself; did my material deserve more than what I gave it? Did I shape the clay accurately after the dream, so to speak.

(Writers aren't artists, but that is a discussion for another day.)

Inevitably, I make peace with myself but the nagging emptiness remains. I want to write again, and I make slipshod plots in the notes section of my phone while running errands or checking into work - I want to be writing again as soon as possible, please and thank you.

I think it's an addiction.

It's taking a bit of a tax on my social life. It's hard enough to have a social life on a cesspool island like this, but in all honesty I'd rather be writing than grabbing coffee with people I don't know well enough to like. This is how it's been since I was little - it was just disguised. I had notebooks filled with dragon gods and maps of worlds. (So did everyone else, it seems, but you understand.)

Writing is not the only path in my life, but it's the only one that matters to me.

Maybe my passion does not equal my output. Maybe what I produce doesn't reflect what I feel for it, and if it doesn't then that's the only true failing I'll admit to.

When I'm not writing, I want to be writing, and that's all there is to it. Maybe I'm mentally unwell?

This is not to say the real world holds no interest for me - it very much does. I have no illusion of being a creator of worlds, or an artist. When a story leaves me as a finished manuscript, I feel very empty and immediately scrabble to fill the hole with another endeavor. I feel like I'm wasting time if I'm not churning out words.


I don't know what it is, really. I'm just happy to be alive and writing.


Querying is terrifying and an exhausting process. I would rather write seven more books than query one. But it's one of those things you have to do!


who likes bourbon?
I don't.