For those of you who've been waiting all week with bated breath for my next blog post, I do apologize. I had decided to submit this post on Friday the Thirteenth, keeping with my belief that, in the spirit of my home-girl Taylor Swift, Thirteen is my new lucky number.
But alas, Friday, May 13th, 2011 will go down in history as The Day of The Epic Blogger Fail.
I trust this does not happen often, though I'm tempted to abandon this blog for the fancy graphics and user-friendliness of Wordpress. But that would be throwing in the towel much too quickly. And as you know, throwing in the towel is not what novelists do.
I began my journey as a novelist more than two years ago. "That seems like an awfully long time to work on one book" you might say, and you'd be right. It is. We won't even discuss the fact that the damn thing still isnt done. Sometimes i wonder if it'll ever be polished enough to satisfy me.
I realize there are novelists out there who are churning out two or three books a year. Stephenie Meyer took Twilight from idea to finished product in around ninety days. Elizabeth Kostova, on the other hand, spent more than ten years writing her magnum opus, The Historian. Both these ladies were Newbie Novelists.
Both went on to sign multi-million dollar contracts with Little/Brown, an imprint of Hachette, one of the 'Big Six' publishing houses. Both became huge bestsellers. Which one did it the right way? As it turned out, both of them did.
Stephenie Meyer practically chained herself to her computer, eschewing sleep and housework and most everything else in order to churn out the now iconic story that was burning a hole in her brain. Granted, it ain't Jane Austen, and it probably could've benefitted from a couple more edits. (Sorry, Twi-hards. It's good, but it's far from perfect.)Meyer herself admits that if she had it to do over again, she would've held on to her ms a bit longer to make sure it was as good as she could possibly make it. But in her excitement, she typed the words "The End" and almost immediately began shopping it out to agents. If you're Stephenie Meyer, apparently this method works. if you're the rest of the world, please don't do this. I think Ms.Meyer would advise the same.
Elizabeth Kostova agonized over her manuscript for years and years. She worked on it in her spare time--nights, holidays, weekends--sound familiar? But she wasn't willing to let it go until she felt it was absolutely perfect. Was it? Well, in my opinion, no. It was a great book, don't get me wrong. It was simply too long by at least three hundred pages. It was a real struggle for me personally, to get through the first hundred. If you can make it past that, the story is riveting. But I'm not sure how it ever held an agent's interest that long. In today's market, I'm not sure it would. From what I've read, the publishers were banking on this story becoming "The next DaVinci Code." So perhaps for Ms. Kostova (and for Stephenie Meyer, for that matter) it was mainly a matter of timing. Truth be told, timing plays as much a part in an individual's success as anything else.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is this---just as no one knows how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, no one knows how many days it takes to get to the last page of your novel. It's different for each of us. Ninety days is way too much time for some people. Ten years isn't near enough for others. You can't compare your progress or your timeline with anyone else's. I'll leave you with a quote by William Faulkner which I think sums up the theme of this post perfectly:
"Always dream and aim higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Strive to be better than yourself."
A Writer's Ruminations from Green Thirteen
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5/7/11
To Blog or not to Blog, that is the Question
I've toyed with the idea of starting a blog for quite some time. Seems like everyone who's anyone has a blog these days. Having never been one of those jump-on-the-bandwagon kinda gals, I've always come up with valid excuses reasons to support my belief that a blog (in my case, anyway) might just be a more ridiculous idea than the Barack Obama Chia Pet Head.
Therefore, my very first blog post will be devoted to all those reasons why I feel blogging is probably a terrible idea, and why I'm determined to do it anyway.
1.) If you have time to blog, you have time to work on your novel/clean out the garage/organize your closet/catch up on the laundry/etc.etc. fill in the blank.
You have a valid point, housework-angel-on-my-shoulder. But aside from working on my novel, all those activities listed above are time-sucking chores that I LOATHE. Even without the added daily commitment of a blog, I'd still avoid them like the plague. And now that the first draft of my novel is FINISHED AT LAST (A Labor of Love, but a labor, nonetheless) my hope is that this blog might enable me to connect with other writers. What a blessing that would be since, besides myself, I have only one friend who has ever written anything.
2.) Why in the world would you waste your time on a blog? Who's gonna read the darn thing anyway?(NO, your mother DOES NOT COUNT!)
This one's tough to argue. Why would I waste my time on something that no one is ever likely to read? (Not even my mother, truth be told.) The answer is, I don't really know. I've asked myself this same question time and time again, as I pecked away on my novel at four in the morning for the tenth night in a row, or skipped out on a date night with my husband or lunch with my girlfriends or a rainy-Saturday-marathon-viewing of Napoleon Dynamite with my son. I guess its because I know in my heart I have something to say that might be useful to someone out there in Internet-Land. Maybe there's some struggling writer in Iceland or Madagascar or Timbuktu who'll read my words and think Hey, this chick's goin through the same crap as I am, but she's stickin it out and finishing what she started. If she can do it, I can do it, too.
So if my rambling helps one writer finish a project, well, that's good enough for me.
Just send me a cut of the royalties. And name your beautiful, brilliant, headstrong protagonist after me.
3. Do you really need something else in your life to commit to? I mean, you can't even update your Facebook status/Twitter page on a regular basis! What makes you think you can maintain a BLOG?
NO, I don't really need something else in my life to commit to. Most days I'm stretched too thin already, the same as most women I know (and even a man or two out there, I'm sure.) But commiting myself to writing something, at least on a semi-regular basis, has to be a good habit for me to get into.
Besides, I'm tryin my darndest to give up smoking. So I need a new habit, anyway.
And NO, I don't update my Facebook status/Twitter page as often as some people do. But really, does anyone want to read a tweet like "Thinkin bout makin spaghetti for supper tonight..." or a Facebook status update like "Just saved thirty cents on canned peaches at Kroger!" I confess that I have, on occasion, Facebooked or Tweeted some similar mundane nonsense. But I try not to make a habit of it. A good rule of thumb--if you're updating your facebook status or tweeting more than, say, twenty times a day, your friends and/or followers might appreciate your words more if you save those opportunities for when you really have something to say. "I like grape Kool-Aid" might be what's on your mind, but is that really worth sharing? Depends on your audience, I guess.
Therefore, my very first blog post will be devoted to all those reasons why I feel blogging is probably a terrible idea, and why I'm determined to do it anyway.
1.) If you have time to blog, you have time to work on your novel/clean out the garage/organize your closet/catch up on the laundry/etc.etc. fill in the blank.
You have a valid point, housework-angel-on-my-shoulder. But aside from working on my novel, all those activities listed above are time-sucking chores that I LOATHE. Even without the added daily commitment of a blog, I'd still avoid them like the plague. And now that the first draft of my novel is FINISHED AT LAST (A Labor of Love, but a labor, nonetheless) my hope is that this blog might enable me to connect with other writers. What a blessing that would be since, besides myself, I have only one friend who has ever written anything.
2.) Why in the world would you waste your time on a blog? Who's gonna read the darn thing anyway?(NO, your mother DOES NOT COUNT!)
This one's tough to argue. Why would I waste my time on something that no one is ever likely to read? (Not even my mother, truth be told.) The answer is, I don't really know. I've asked myself this same question time and time again, as I pecked away on my novel at four in the morning for the tenth night in a row, or skipped out on a date night with my husband or lunch with my girlfriends or a rainy-Saturday-marathon-viewing of Napoleon Dynamite with my son. I guess its because I know in my heart I have something to say that might be useful to someone out there in Internet-Land. Maybe there's some struggling writer in Iceland or Madagascar or Timbuktu who'll read my words and think Hey, this chick's goin through the same crap as I am, but she's stickin it out and finishing what she started. If she can do it, I can do it, too.
So if my rambling helps one writer finish a project, well, that's good enough for me.
Just send me a cut of the royalties. And name your beautiful, brilliant, headstrong protagonist after me.
3. Do you really need something else in your life to commit to? I mean, you can't even update your Facebook status/Twitter page on a regular basis! What makes you think you can maintain a BLOG?
NO, I don't really need something else in my life to commit to. Most days I'm stretched too thin already, the same as most women I know (and even a man or two out there, I'm sure.) But commiting myself to writing something, at least on a semi-regular basis, has to be a good habit for me to get into.
Besides, I'm tryin my darndest to give up smoking. So I need a new habit, anyway.
And NO, I don't update my Facebook status/Twitter page as often as some people do. But really, does anyone want to read a tweet like "Thinkin bout makin spaghetti for supper tonight..." or a Facebook status update like "Just saved thirty cents on canned peaches at Kroger!" I confess that I have, on occasion, Facebooked or Tweeted some similar mundane nonsense. But I try not to make a habit of it. A good rule of thumb--if you're updating your facebook status or tweeting more than, say, twenty times a day, your friends and/or followers might appreciate your words more if you save those opportunities for when you really have something to say. "I like grape Kool-Aid" might be what's on your mind, but is that really worth sharing? Depends on your audience, I guess.
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