Five for Friday

Next week is Thanksgiving! I love turkey day! I love having a reason to gather with family, cook and pig out until our bellies look like ticks. And I especially love that we get to do it all without the added pressure of shopping and gift giving. Of course, I love Christmas, too. It is my favorite holiday, but Thanksgiving is a very, very close second.

Since this is the last Friday before we gorge, here are 5 writing-relevant things I'm grateful for:

1. The blessings of the stories that have been given to me.
2. The talent to put those stories into words that people understand.
3. The health and physical ability to record those words into a format others can read.
4. The resources (like a computer!) to share those formats with those who want to read it.
5. The people I've met along the way, from my alphas, betas and critters to other writers to book bloggers to fans, you are all a true blessing. Thank you for being my friend!

Perfectionism or Procrastination?

So, the other day I was complaining about never being done, even when you think you are. Typos pop up out of nowhere. Words lose their italics or get italicized when they're not supposed to be. Someone bends over at the "waste"...um, yeah, that happened, even after several rounds of revisions.

Then a funny thing happened. Not "haha" but more like, "a-ha." After I made that post, I added excerpts to the Purpose website. And because Word adds in all kinds of bogus HTML (if anyone can tell me how to avoid that, I'd love you forever!!), I had to go through the excerpts line-by-line to remove the unnecessary and cluttery tags.

As I'm doing that, a couple phrases pop out at me. And I'm suddenly thinking of a better way to say them. Not able to control myself, I make the changes. Then go back into the Word and PDF docs to make the changes there, too. Now I have an itch to go through the whole book to make sure there aren't other phrases that could be even better. Because I know there are.

I also went into Promise's excerpts and reformatted that page. And it happened again. I didn't make the changes, though. I wanted to. So very badly. But the book is published and I just need to keep it the way it is. It bugs the crap out of me, though. And this was my a-ha moment.

Actually, I've had this conversation with other writers, published and not, so it wasn't really an "a-ha" moment as it was a reminder. As writers, we (hopefully) are continuously growing, learning and improving our craft. We will always go back and look at something we wrote and have ideas to make it even better. A different word. A more compelling way to phrase something. Perhaps even a whole scene or chapter that could be removed or improved.

No matter how good we thought it was then, at a later time, we see how it can be even better. This will always be true. So at some point, we do have to call the work done. We have to move on to the next step, whatever it is for each of us. Because if we keep trying to make this one perfect, we'll never get to the next one. And who wants to work on the same story their entire life? Not me. I have too many others I need to get out of my head.

Do you find yourself nit-picking? Is it because the story really isn't ready? Or is it because you're being a perfectionist? Or perhaps because you're procrastinating, afraid of the next step (i.e., querying or the next blank page 1)?

Just When You Think You're Done

As many of you are chugging away at NaNoWriMo, trying to get those 50,000 words out, I'm at the other end, wrapping up the very last round of proofing. I really don't think, if the timing would have been better, I would have had a problem with NaNoWriMo.

Rough drafts - or what I call brain-dump, word puke - come easy to me. The ideas and words come so fast, I can't keep up with them. The voices talk to me All. Day. Long. so by the time I get to write at night, I'm on a dead run, making every night a writing marathon.

The problem with my madness is that it requires seemingly endless revisions, editing, re-writing, more revisions, polishing, proofing... You get the idea. Although I do a little editing as I go along, the first draft is pretty much garbage. When I first started writing what is now Promise and Purpose, I actually became sad as I reached the end of a round of revisions. But then I would cheer myself up by remembering that I got to start all over. Yeah, I was kind of sick.

That was 34,613 revisions ago. I'm still sick. Sick of this damn book! Okay, just kidding. Sort of. I'm just ready to be done. Ready to move on to the next book. Ready to start real writing again. And I thought I was there. Purpose had been critted, reviewed, revised, edited, polished, proofed, formatted and sent to the printer for proofs and ARCs.

I knew it wasn't perfect, that it still needed a final proofing because those dang typos pop up when no one's looking, as if the letters play musical chairs while I sleep. I expected some fixes. By the time my proofers and I were done, I had this:

Yes, each of those pretty, colorful flags is a mistake. Seriously. And ARCs had already been sent out to reviewers. Ugh. How embarrassing! Thankfully, there's a disclaimer in the front stating that this book has not been proofed. But still...

So those fixes have been made, but there were so many, I needed the book proofed one more time. I'm waiting, holding my breath, for that final file to come back. Then hopefully I can really call this book done.

As you write your NaNoWriMo novel or whatever WIP you're working on, enjoy the journey. Because it's one that never ends. And if you want to trade places, give me a holler. I'm so ready to write again!