Slight Moment of Panic and A Long Night of Insomnia

I had a slight girlie moment of panic last night that led to a night of insomnia in which I was composing haikus instead of sleeping. Totally normal, right?

My moment of panic stemmed from the ten day trip I'm going to be embarking upon on Thursday. Yes, this Thursday. This trip includes four cities, two weddings (one of which I am in), and me in a bathing suit in a week from now, oh my god. Yes, this is one intense trip! It's going to be ridiculously awesome, and I'm going to see most of my very best friends, including my middle sister, over the course of the next ten days. However, I've been avoiding planning for it, meaning making lists of things to make sure I take and leave. Like take my gps for driving around L.A. but leave my Swiss army knife here instead of getting to the airport, failing security checks, and having to mail it home to myself and go through security again. So today I make lists and plans as I embark upon another work day with less sleep than normal.

Because I'm going to be out of town for ten whole days meaning I'll get little to no work done, I'm trying to get my book finished before I leave...in FIVE days! This may seem like unnecessary pressure, but you know when you're running a marathon and you only have a mile left...you're not going to stop for anything. Nothing. At all. No matter what. Because you're almost finished. And you really want to just be finished. I really want to just be finished with my book. And I'm so freaking close; I can literally taste it at this point!

Plus, I've written a rockin' query letter that I want to start sending out to literary agents to get this process moving along, so I can sell my book, you know, yesterday! So, I push myself to pack for a ten day trip, to not forget anything, and finish my book. All in the next five days.

So here we are. Yesterday, I put every event, major and minor, and time reference on a piece of posterboard. I had divided the posterboard up by months because in my head, I thought I knew when everything happened. Well, now I have all these events on my time line. (Yes, the dreaded time line I've been avoiding for a year is complete.) Putting all of these events on my time line made me realize two things: 1)I actually didn't have any idea when anything happened. I won't give away specific details of events, but there's one major event in the story that happened in the Fall in my imagination, but according to my book, it happened in early Spring. 2)The event that happens on the first freaking page of the whole damn novel is the one that's going to fuck up the ENTIRE time line of my story! Every other event can be moved or shifted pretty easily, but this one event was causing some MAJOR problems!

So last night, while my roommates and I were making dinner and playing Wii, I start discussing this one MAJOR problem and trying to come up with a solution. But not just any solution. At this stage in the game, the solution needs to be like one or two sentences and thus, really easy to fix! Well, after explaining my situation, my roommates gave me a couple of potential solutions, but they were BIG fixes! I can't use a big fix at this point. I can't go back and rewrite lots of various parts of the story for one scene. It's just not realistic. So we kept chatting. It took a minute, but we finally came up with a really easy, one or two sentence fix that makes the first scene completely plausible. Hallelujah!!! Like I said, the first scene was the only really big problem with my time line. The rest of the stuff is little and just needs to be nailed down.

This morning I got lucky and found a blank piece of posterboard. So, I'm going transfer every event from one posterboard to another, making them all fit together in a precise puzzle as I go. And then, I have to go back in and make changes in the novel of all of these event time changes. Hopefully this process will be completed today because I have several other things to work on in the next four.

For now, I leave you with a haiku composed in a state of insomnia.

The NFL draft
Is like the smell of rain. You
Lust for the real thing.

Can I get a "Fuck Yeah!" and a High Five of Stoketude please?

It's been a freaking phenomenal day! I bought a case of paper this morning for $20. Woo hoo for cheap white paper on which I printed my novel! Also yay for new red pens! It's the simple things in life really.

When I edit/rewrite/revise/write, I print my novel out and write all over it in bright red pen! I know it's a waste of 100 sheets of paper every time I do this, but this is the only way editing works for me. I can't do nearly as good of a job on the computer screen as I can writing it in by hand. However, this makes double the work as I then have to go through the file and make all of the hand-written corrections. But it works, and that's all that matters. Oh, and I recycle!

Before I started my editing today, I read through my editors' comments and notes. I like to get a sense of the issues my editors are having, so I can easily and hopefully organically slip in solutions. I'm also flipping through a marked up copy while I edit my clean copy. There shouldn't be many more edits at all after this round, so I have to make sure I don't miss anything!

One of the comments one of my editors made was that readers needed to really get into the protagonist's head more. And I should describe her actions less. Particularly toward the end. So today I really tried to get into my protagonist's head. Which was difficult! Especially in the end of the book where the protagonist and the serial killer come face to face to duke it out. Having never been in this situation, it's hard to get into the mindset of thinking you're about to die at the hands of a serial killer who has brutally murdered a decent number of people over the last few months. Really getting into Leia's mind is crucial to my story's success.

So, I got fucked up, closed my eyes, and just wrote, trying to really concentrate and put myself in those feelings, her feelings. This might sound weird, and I'm certain I looked weird typing really fast with my eyes closed, but I think it helped. I hope her thoughts and emotions are coming to the surface more, so you can feel this intense level of fear and terror WITH her! So you will be afraid FOR her! So you will give a damn! So you will care about Leia Marie Sutherland, and you will cheer her on as she fights this psycho for her life. Cuz if you don't give a damn, I have failed in my mission as a writer. And if you don't care, you might not have even made it to the end chapters I worked on today. And you won't tell your friends to buy my book. Yes, you caring about Leia is this important and a crucial element to my success. So, I hone her voice and make her a stronger character.

Lots more editing to go for this round, but I'm off to a good start! I have to keep plowing through at a quick pace, so I can start querying agents ASAP now that I have my query letter finished.

Yesterday

I turned my whole novel into my adviser/editor yesterday. She will read it, do her thing with it, and return it as a...well...who knows what it will look like when she returns it, but I am greatly looking forward to hearing her expert, objective opinion.

In the interim, I will pour over my Writer's Market 2010 Guide to Literary Agents to figure out how I'm going to get a literary agent, pour over books as to the best publishing houses for murder mystery novels, and figure out what exactly my query letter is going to say so I can sell my book to someone, anyone, the highest bidder, but really...anyone. Let's get this baby in print! It's about that time.

Well, okay, so maybe we're not quite there yet. But the book is almost perfected. So, it's time to move forward to the publishing, making money, another hard part because it's a first for me, but oh-my-God-we're-really-excited part!

To my editing friends, be looking out for an email with aforementioned query letter in it along with a sweet, polite plea for you to use your amazing editing skills to make my query letter great.

To anyone and everyone who reads this, please keep your good vibes coming my way. Writing the book is only half the battle, and it may not even be the hard half.

And the editing process continues...

I call it editing. But it's editing, revising, rewriting, writing new sections, writing new chapters, all in lots of red ink on the all almost 200 pages of my novel. So, it's days and days of frantic, "in the zone" scrawling in red ink. Bright red ink, so I can see it and hopefully read it. Lots of arrows and boxes with text in them and instructions in the margins as to where this new bit of text is going to go and where that sentence should go and crossing out and rewriting and consolidating ideas, paragraphs, and sentences.

And lately it's been The Shins but before that it was everything country and sometimes it's Modest Mouse but not normally rap. Something inspirational with a good groove that will hopefully keep me moving forward. To the next paragraph, the next page, the next chapter...until I get to the end. And insanity. Lots of creative, beautiful, inspiring, wonderfully worded, and not-so-wonderfully worded insanity. It's intensive and tiring and lots and lots of hard work, but it makes me so freaking happy.

This is my novel. My first. My baby. And I love it. I love everything about it. All the rough, ugly, grotesque, beautiful, twisted, funny, scary parts. So I trudge forward through the mire of living, breathing, loving, terrifying words. Day after day. Only to be followed by days of making all of these corrections in the computer. Back to my novel I go...