This Writing Life: Springing a Leak, Author-Style

Happy one year in the house!

By Lisa Alber

A year ago, exactly, to this day, May 19th, 2015, I closed on my very first house, my own little sanctuary away from the world. Cheers! To one year!

Alas, this little house of mine, it had a dry rot problem, which is common in the Pacific Northwest, so I shelled out major moulah to get it fixed. Fine. Fixed. Yay!

A year later, my house sprang a leak. I hoped and prayed that the contractor's guy had fixed the problem last month, but, no, he had not <insert your expletive here>.

The funny thing is that I think my house channeled my inner writing demons, because I've been having the worst problem with the ending of my work-in-progress. I know the ending--I've always known whodunit and whydunit, so why can't I get to "The End"? I keep writing scenes that aren't getting me there.

Over the weekend, as the rain poured down, and as raindrops tap-tap-tap-ed into a bucket, I had an epiphany: My plot had sprung a leak somewhere. That's why I couldn't finish--

and, to continue this awkward leakage metaphor, I couldn't help but think of a garden hose, and how you don't get no water pressure out the end of the thing if it's leaking somewhere along the way to the end.

Despite my anxiety about finishing by deadline (at one point I started to whimper, which I sometimes do under extreme stress), I decided to slow down for a day or two. It was no use trying to force a bad end to the story. It just wasn't feeling right. Instead, I called the contractor, waited around for him (isn't that always the way?), and realized that I felt relief along with the anxiety.

When it comes to the writing, I've learned to trust my gut, and my gut said, Oh yeah, baby, now you're thinking about it the right way--which is to say, thinking outside my own box, the box I'd written myself into by the end that wouldn't end itself.

I was still freaking out--deadlines will do that--but as I watched my cute contractor walk up the stairs ahead of me and do his thing with plastic and hammer and nails and a long piece of wood (now, now, no double entendre meant by that!), I decided it was no use freaking out. My contractor wasn't. He was doing the next logical task. He didn't appear phased by the leak, and as he said, Yes, leaks happen, but they're fixable. Sometimes you just gotta dig a little deeper than the first obvious, easy fix.

So it goes with my novel. I talked myself off the ledge of total hysteria that my story required a complete tear down. No, no, no-ditty no no. Was the contractor going to have to tear down the house? Of course not.

And wouldn't you know it, as soon as I let it be okay to think about revisions before officially finishing the first draft, some new and interesting plot ideas came to me -- changes that I can already tell will allow me to get to the end.

How well do you trust your gut in life? Has it ever failed you?

Lisa Alber is the author of the County Clare mysteries. Her debut novel, Kilmoon, has been called "utterly poetic" and "a stirring debut." Her second in the County Clare mysteries, WHISPERS IN THE MIST will be available in August 2016 from Midnight Ink Books. Ever distractible, you may find her staring out windows, fooling around online, or drinking red wine with her friends. Ireland, books, animals, photography, and blogging round out her distractions. You can find Lisa on Facebook, Twitter, and her website.

How OCD Are You?

by Shannon Baker

In the famous words of W.C Fields, “Go away kid, you bother me.”

I’m closing in on a novel I started about a year ago. I haven’t been working on it all year, though. I wrote a couple of chapters and an outline, then turned my attention to another genre and cranked out two books. Those books are living in an undisclosed location under an assumed name.

In April I returned to this book. For a while I wrote like a sane person. I completed a draft, planned revisions, contracted an editor and we set a deadline. I can meet that deadline with certainty by working a challenging, yet rational schedule.

However, I lost my tenuous grip on reality four days ago. After a relaxing week of vacation with my guy, kayaking, hiking, cycling, camping in the Rocky Mountains, I headed down to Tucson. I have a ten-day stay planned in which I would inspect some work done on the house while we were gone, make some decisions on other house improvements and finish the revisions on my book. In the meantime, I wanted to trip up to Scottsdale to support fellow MI author, Maegan Beaumont with her release of Sacrificial Muse. All laid back and easy.

Somewhere in day two, I boarded the crazy train. Left to my own devices, with no one to expect company at meals or conversation over coffee, or to generally behave like a normal human, my engine heated up and I can’t seem to cool it down. I finished the revisions yesterday and now I’m filling holes and patching cracks. I can’t have a phone conversation because I’m distracted with my characters’ motivation and if I remembered to add that clue.

My neighbor, the sweetest woman in the world, is excited I’m here this week and has engaged me whenever I slip out front for any reason. I try to be friendly but I want to ignore her and run back to my computer. She invited me over for a cookout today and I am so irritated I have to interrupt my flow I feel like declining. But I didn’t. I even mixed up my killer Three-Bean Salad.

Then I had to stop a chapter spit and polish because my alert popped up that I have a blog post due tomorrow and as I’m writing, this happened:

I assume it was one of those desert thermals that landed on my house, because I had those pages anchored down. None-the-less, that’s the latest draft spread across the floor. And you know what? I’m not stopping to pick it up because I have two hours before the cookout and I have to finish this blog and get back to the edit.

 I should do yoga and I’ve got to pay some bills. And I have until the end of the month to finish this book and it’s very close to being done but I want to have time to read it out loud and I think I should send it to a beta reader or two and what if they think it doesn’t work and I wonder if I ought to change the part where the killer laughs and her motivation isn’t clear in the second part and, oh my god, I forgot she smashed her nose on the steering wheel in chapter 27 so people need to react to all that blood on her face in chapter 28….

This is why I shouldn’t do a private writer’s retreat. I need someone to speak slowly and maintain eye contact and tell me to step away from the manuscript.  

Tell me I’m not alone in this wacked-out behavior. Just how OCD are you?

Deadlines

Did I hear a collective groan?

I made the mistake today of cataloging all my upcoming deadlines:

Daily:
1. Projects at work, moveable at rush jobs appear
2. Get supper on the table
3. Continue writing book 2

2-3 Times per Week:
1. Laundry
2. Work out at the gym

Weekly
1. Grocery shopping

Within the next 4 Weeks:
1. Copyedits for book 1
2. Two birthdays

Within the next 16 Weeks:
1. Christmas
2. Author events (no idea, yet, how many there will be)

This looks way too much like part of my kid’s physics homework: If writer A has X minutes to complete task B, how soon will writer A’s head explode when tasks C, D, F, and G are added at a rate of Y per hour? This is my instinctive reaction to that formula:

Then again, this is where being an anal-retentive type comes in handy. I’m a pretty good hand at multitasking, and I’ve become more efficient at it over the years, when I learned how to take advantage of Found Time. Those are all the little bits of “hold time” while waiting in line, waiting for dinner to finish, waiting at the soccer field.

Like many of us who write and maintain a Day Job and (often) household, if I didn’t monitor my schedule daily, I’d drown. Hooray for phones with a calendar function. And Post-It Notes. Those little sticky pieces of paper have rescued many a plot point from oblivion.

Today’s tasks aren’t done, and there are tomorrow’s to prepare for. And the next chapter. And the laundry… I think I’ll lay down with a cool cloth on my forehead for five minutes. No; wait. That’s not on my schedule. Guess it’s time for this: