This is the number one thing that I keep learning and re-learning as a writer.
I'm the kind of person who gets so excited and enthusiastic that I create ridiculous writing goals. Of course, they don't feel ridiculous at the time, but after a few days of not reaching them, I start to get anxious or down. It's almost as if I feel like I failed instead of thinking at how much work I actually did. And sometimes, I become so overwhelmed that I end up not writing at all! The insanity of a writer! So I decided to make goals that I KNOW I can attain. Quotas that I can reach even if I'm having a busy day, or I'm exhausted from work. Because the one thing I've learned is that even though I know what I'm capable of writing a day, it just isn't realistic for long term. For example: on a good day I usually write about 2 -3 thousand words. This takes me anywhere between 3 to 4 hours, sometimes longer depending on whether or not I've worked out everything in my head. So in the past my goal would be that I would write 2,000 words a day. This seems fine, but it's just unrealistic for me. Sure, I can do it. Sure, I've done it, it's how I wrote Alexis Tappendorf in a month. But long term, it doesn't work for me. 1,000 words is doable. It's something I know I can do. And by reaching this goal every day, it makes me feel accomplished. It relieves my neurotic stress of feeling like I'm not doing enough. And the funny part is: I usually end up writing the 2,000 words a day anyway! So, make goals you can meet. Even if it's 200 words a day! It may not seem like a lot, but if you do it every day, you'll have a book in a year. A year is a long time, but think of how many people work on their book for years and never finish. 200 words a day and you're guaranteed to have a rough draft in a year. It seems simple, but it works!
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As most of you know, Comic-Con is just around the corner and for me that means it’s cosplay time! Now, to be honest, this is the first time I’ve ever cosplayed at Comic-Con. I’ve been going now for almost a decade and I always wanted to dress up as my favorite characters but I was way too shy! But life is too short to be shy! I don’t want to live in fear anymore. And Cons are the most welcoming, supportive events for people who love all things nerdy and dress accordingly. What helped me was to have a partner in crime. I’ve teamed up with one of my very best friends Faith (a.k.a. F.M. Sherrill the amazing author of Ivory!) and together we’re going to wear a different costume every day of the con. Which means…. A crap-ton of sewing! I swear, I’ve been sewing every day for the last three weeks. And it’s not just costumes I’ve been making, it’s themed bags to go with them! For our Captain Mal cosplay I made us both Serenity bags! I had to make up my own pattern and believe it or not it took a lot of math to figure it out! But I think they turned out pretty well! I even did a time-lapse of the entire process: I know it sounds like I’m complaining, but sewing actually relaxes me. I’ve been doing it since I was seven. Even then I made costumes for playing with my friends. My mom would give me old sheets, I’d bring out the RIT dye and make my friends and I clothes so we could pretend we were in Narnia or finding the Sword of Shannara. Technically, my first cosplay lol! Wonder-Con this year was my first time cosplaying in public. Faith and I made Tardis dresses and girl versions of the 9th and 10th doctor. I admit, I was scared at first, but after a few minutes of getting over my nerves, I actually had fun! A lot of fun! And I thought, why was I so scared to do this? I even did some original design work this year like making Shadowhunter outfits from The Mortal Instruments book series. I wasn’t sure if they would turn out, but they ended up looking cool! Here’s a sneak peak of one of the hoodie boleros I made! So now I’m hooked! Faith and I are even going to be starting our own web show on thestream.tv about the cosplay world. We go as 2NerdGirls and we’re so excited!
But in the mean time… I only have 2 more weeks to sew, so I have to get back to it!! Can’t wait to post the pics! And what I mean by stop punishing yourself, is I’m trying to stop punishing myself. Wait, what? If you’re a writer, you know what I mean. I constantly feel guilty about not making my quota, or not getting enough work done, or taking too many breaks, or… etc. etc. I try really hard not to let it squeeze my chest with anxiety and self-loathing, but some days are harder than others. I have two ways to pull yourself out of this self-induced-funk. They don’t always work, but nine times out of ten they do. And trust me, I’ll be utilizing them today! Reward System! This one is simple: write for an hour and reward yourself with whatever you want. For me it’s usually whatever TV show I’m currently binge watching. The only problem with this is I always talk about a reward system, but rarely practice it. And the funny part is, whenever I do it, it works perfectly for me. But my own psychosis tells me “I don’t deserve a reward,” “I haven’t done enough work to justify something as awesome as a reward.” (You get the idea!) This is all bull! If you find yourself saying anything of the sort, tell yourself to shut up! You DO deserve a reward! Everyone needs to relax and rejuvenate. Believe it or not, it will help your writing! So set up a system. I’m going to do three rounds today. Wish me luck! Get the Blood pumping. Whether it’s a walk, a jog, a run, jumping jacks, yoga… as long as your moving, it’ll help break you out of your negative headspace. You’d be amazed at how simply running in place for a few minutes can boost your mood. I try to do 20 jumping jacks every hour. It helps me keep track of the time I’m spending in front of the computer, and makes me feel psychologically and physically better. Bottom line is: you can’t stop your brain from being an a-hole, but you can try and re-route some of that negative thinking. It’s a daily struggle for me, but I’m trying to break out of my self-destructive patterns by reminding myself that self-punishment doesn’t get me anywhere. If anything, it holds me back.
So give yourself permission to reward yourself once in a while without feeling guilty about it! It will make a world of difference! Let’s face it: editing is the hardest, most grueling part of writing. Putting the words on a page is the fun part, making those words sound great is an entirely different beast. Here are 3 things that I’ve learned along the way to help tighten up my manuscripts and stay on target. 1. Word Search Is Your Best Friend. I don’t know about you, but when I’m cranking through my novel I tend to repeat certain words. A lot. As in, how many freaking times do I use the word ‘felt!’ She felt this, she felt that, she felt stronger, she felt as if she knew him etc. etc. etc.!! I don’t know why authors tend to cling to particular words, probably just to put words on the page and get through a scene. But it’s important that you don’t keep the 3,000 ‘felts’ or whatever your word of choice is in your novel, and word search helps immensely. First, I make a list of all the words I repeat during my initial read-through of my manuscript. Sometimes, it can be actual phrases. I seriously punch myself every time whenever I catch: “That was when…” in my writing! Once I have a list, I search the entire book for these words or phrases. You’d be amazed at how it forces you to re-arrange or re-create your sentences. It makes your work stronger and ends up helping you in your next novel because you learn not to use those words and phrases so much. Of course, they’re replaced by entirely new words, but the cycle must continue, right?! 2. Limiting the amount of sentences that start with a pronoun. Starting every sentence with ‘He’ or ‘She’ can become boring to read. Do a quick search as you read through your book and if you have two or three sentences in a row that start with a pronoun change the middle one up. An easy way to do that is to take the verb of the sentence and place it first. For example if the original sentence is: “She ran to the park and played on the jungle gym.” You could change it to: “Running to the park, Sarah played on the jungle gym.” Reminding the reader of the character’s name is never a bad idea either! 3. If a sentence feels too long and clunky, it probably is. This is an easy way to clean up your book. If you find yourself zoning out by the end of one of your sentences or paragraphs, then you can bet your reader will too. Even if it’s grammatically correct, longer sentences can be tedious to read. (With the exception of “Stream of Consciousness” books, then it’s their purpose!)
Here’s an example of a sentence I had to break up in my manuscript today: “The paranoid part of her couldn’t help but worry that if there was written proof that she knew every detail of a murder that the police would think she was the killer.” This was clunky and hard to follow. So I changed it to this: “Paranoia threatened to overwhelm her. Knowing every detail of a crime would make her look guilty. How would Mara be able to explain her journal to the police when they arrested her for murder?” The same meaning, but told through three shorter sentences instead of one long one. Hope this helps! Growing up I was one of the many kids that stood in line for Star Wars for five hours at the only theatre in Seattle playing it. I was five years old, so you can guess that I was complaining and moaning the whole time. Even when we were finally let into the theatre my family had to split up. My dad and I sat in the front row, while my sister and my mom sat in the back. But when the lights turned down and the gigantic Star Destroyer crawled across the screen, my mouth dropped, my eyes bugged out and I was officially a movie-nut for life. Yes, that's me as a little blonde Princess Leia. I think I was her character for Halloween 5 years in a row lol! From that moment on, all I ever talked about was when I was going to make movies myself, and of course, this spilled into the TV world as well. I was just as obsessed with Wesley Crusher as Luke Skywalker. My goals never waivered. The only other career I ever considered was writing books. For some reason my child-brain never made the connection of possibly writing for TV or the movies to combine both my dreams, it wasn’t until I was graduated from film school and in Los Angeles for the first time that my dad posed the question, “Well, why don’t you just write films? You’ve always been a writer, and you want to make films, do both!” Well, duh! Why didn’t I think of that? And that began my long and sometimes amazing/sometimes frustrating life of writing feature screenplays and TV pilots. Over the years, I won some contests, I met some amazing people, but let me tell you, trying to get a movie made or a pilot even looked at when you don’t have any money or contacts is statistically like winning the lottery. My accolades in screenwriting contests finally helped me get a break in television, which let’s face it in the last ten years has far outshined the movie industry. I’d watch an AMC show over most current films any day! I worked on the show Ghost Whisperer as the Creator and Executive Producer’s assistant. He was amazing! He let me write the Ghost Whisperer comic books for IDW Publishing. Then the writer’s strike happened and I was out of TV. So what to do? I was tired of writing screenplays and teleplays that would sit on my shelf. I had so many stories I wanted to tell, but only friends and family to share them with. That’s when I decided I was going to write a book. I had a pilot that I had written called Riser and I knew that I wanted to turn it into a book. I loved the world, I loved the characters, and if I couldn’t see it as a TV show then I would tell the story as a set of novels. I couldn’t believe how much I loved writing Riser. It was exhilarating and freeing! I could nestle inside the main character’s head and unlike movies and television instead of having to “show” everything, I could write what she was thinking. It was such a great experience, when I had completed the first book, I felt like I had really accomplished something fun. I just hoped people would like it as much as I liked writing it. I spent the first year trying to get an agent and starting that uphill battle of convincing people to take a chance on me. Well, I had finally had enough. When I read about CreateSpace, I knew: I was going to self-publish. My mother-in-law and I combined our resources and started a small publishing company called Red Frog Publishing. We bought our ISBN numbers and haven’t looked back.
In this day and age, independent publishing is the future. Let the world decide what they want to read! I had to learn the hard way of how to layout my books in InDesign. I watched a lot of tutorials and received a ton of advice from my graphic designer husband who has pretty much mastered the entire adobe suite. I am not as talented as my über brilliant hubby, but I’ve finally got to the point where I can layout my books (and many other author’s books) in a professional looking way.
But considering I only come out with books once, maybe twice a year, I found that I’d forget a step or two and have to re-learn everything just to remember how to do something simple. So, I decided to make a document with step-by-step instructions on how to layout a book from start to finish and all the little details in-between. Mainly for myself, but I realized that maybe others could benefit from it as well. Here’s a link if you’d like to download it yourselves, hopefully it’ll help! http://www.beccacsmith.com/indesign-steps.html I’ve been reading Terry Brooks since I was twelve. (Yes that's 13 year-old-me nerding out at Christmas 1985-style with perm and bangs included!) He was the first author I picked out on my own. Everything I had read up until then was either a recommendation or stolen from my sister’s bookshelf ☺. Once I got my hands on his books I’ve been reading them ever since. And I’m spoiled, he writes a lot of books! My favorite of all time is Elfstones of Shannara the second book in the Shannara series! And now they're making a TV show of it on MTV. So. Excited. I even painted some fan art years ago! I met him once when I was fifteen. My mom and dad drove me to the mall to get all my paperback books signed. When I stood in the long line waiting anxiously to meet my hero, I realized that everyone else (which happened to be all adults, I was the only kid) had hard cover books for him to sign. I immediately felt self-conscious (a symptom of teenager-hood) and I made my dad hold my large stack of paperbacks and I picked just one for him to sign. The beat up, falling apart, “Sword of Shannara.” (As you can see, I read these book A LOT! Lol) When my mom and I finally arrived in front of Mr. Brooks, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything but just stare at him. I was in fifteen-year-old awe at the fact that my genuine hero was sitting in front of me. He was so nice! At my lack of speaking ability he assumed my mom was there for the signing, but my mom quickly told him it was, in fact, the mute standing beside her. He tried everything to get me to talk. He just kept smiling and being the extremely kind person he is. Finally he held up a book from each of his series and asked me to point to which one I liked best. I pointed to the Shannara book and he said, “What if I told you I’m going to come out with a new Shannara book next year.” Inside I was bursting with excitement. I couldn’t believe it! He hadn’t written a Shannara book in years. (This was 1988 and Brooks hadn’t released a Shannara book since 1985 and in kid years 3 years is an eternity, remember waiting between Star Wars films, torture!!) So I finally uttered my first words to the man that was about to write another book in my favorite series. I said (and I’m not kidding), “No.” Yep. I meant, “Nooooooo, really???? Holy crap, that’s amazing!!” But all that came out was a very small, “No.” My mom laughed and said I was just nervous which thank goodness Mr. Brooks already figured out. He was just as kind as can be and signed my brand new “Wizard at Large” book and my falling apart “Sword of Shannara.” Such a great guy. This experience is probably why I always shy away from meeting anyone I admire for fear of becoming an embarrassing mute again! But, thank goodness Mr. Brooks was understanding and just plain cool about the whole ordeal. There’s just nothing like reading a good book. It’s the love of stepping into another place and feeling like you're there and you know these people intimately. That’s why I love writing so much. It’s such an amazing feeling creating your own world and the characters in it. I just hope people have as much fun reading my books as I did writing them! Every human being suffers from procrastinating! Some more than others, but I happen to be a black belt in the field! Of course, I disguise it as excuses, such as: · I have to clean my house! It’s disgusting! I can’t write in an environment like this! Cluttered space = cluttered brain! · I have so many errands I have to do! I need groceries! I can’t write without food! I have to go to the post office! Oh crap! I really need Q-tips! I better go out and get some. Just think how much easier it will be to write, if I don’t have to think about all the errands I have to run! · That Battlestar Gallactica poster I got as a present has been in a tube since Christmas. I really need to get a frame and hang it on my wall. You know, for inspiration! All lies! This is a masterful way of procrastinating, convincing yourself that certain things have to get done in order for you to do your work. What’s funny is that you end up doing way more work than you would have if you just would have sat down and did whatever it was you were trying to avoid! So what do I do? I admit, I give in to the Procrastination-Monster more often than I care to admit. But mostly, I’ve learned to defeat the beast. Mostly. Here are 3 ways I use to stop procrastination in its tracks: 1) Reward system. This works wonders for me! I think of something I really, really, really want to do, whether it’s a TV show I haven’t watched yet, or the next chapter of a book I’m currently reading. Then I set up a system for the day such as: For every 1,000 words of writing I can watch one show or read one chapter. Whatever the reward is though, it has be something so tempting that it forces you to get your work done! 2) Sprints.
Sprints are another great tool to break out of procrastination-mode. If you’re a writer, you simply pick a chunk of time, even 10 minutes can be extremely beneficial. Set your timer and ready, set, go! Write for the full 10 minutes. I usually do hour sprints because it’s enough time to crank out at least 500 words depending on how my creative juices are flowing. By doing sprints, it jolts your brain out of making excuses. Everyone has 10 minutes to spare. And even if you only work for those 10 minutes, you’ll still feel a million percent better for having done it. 3) Accountability Partner. This works for almost everything! Having someone who is going through the same avoidance-of-work issues you are helps immensely. From arranging sprints during the day, to meeting up to work together can break you out of the procrastination cycle. I’m lucky and have several people I can call on to help me through my writing droughts. Just by having another person cheer you on and help you focus can jump-start your brain to where it needs to be to accomplish your task! These 3 things work best for me! What do you do to tame the Procrastination-Beast? Sometimes, I sit down at my computer, ready to write, ready to immerse myself into the world I’ve created, ready to finish another book…
Then a thought haunts me, “does anyone even care?” Sure, my books sell pretty well, but the low self-esteem part of me always wonders if people buy my books because there’s nothing else to read, or because they really want to? It’s always a thrill to see a review from a complete stranger and have them gush over my book, but the thrill can turn to depression when someone else says how much they dislike it. I’m human, it effects me either way. I’ve definitely toughened up over the years, but a one-star still guts me a little, even if it’s only for a few minutes as opposed to when I first started out and it would effect me for days. It can be frustrating being an Indie author for the simple fact that you’re playing all the roles: writer, cover designer, layout designer, publisher, editor, marketer etc. Granted, I hire editors for the final version of my book, but the first few drafts I try to catch as many errors as I can. It just feels that no matter how many times I read it (aloud even, word for word) or have other people read it (including 2 professional editors) there are still mistakes. Normally, I wouldn’t worry about it considering I catch typos and grammatical errors in some of the biggest books on the market (Percy Jackson, Game of Thrones, to name a couple) But no one seems to care about errors in traditionally published books, they only want to be irate about them in the indie world. It’s a no-win situation. There’s only so much anyone can do to catch every little mistake, but reality is: things are going to get missed. I guess the plus side of indie publishing is that if someone points out a glaring error to you, you can fix it and upload the new draft immediately. Traditionally published books probably wouldn’t waste the time. But it can still be a disheartening process. No one wants to release a novel with mistakes in it. No one. It’s not like the author is aware of these typos and decides to release the book despite them. Trust me, I have at least twenty people read my novels for errors including professional editors before I publish. But things get missed. It happens. There’s also the uphill battle dealing with the snobs of the industry as well. I’ve run into a lot of people who feel that if you’re self-published it doesn’t count. They act as if you can only be a true author if you are traditionally published, as if you need to have an outside source approve of your book to validate you. It’s as if it doesn’t matter to them that an author makes a solid living publishing their own books. To them, if it wasn’t published by an outside source it’s not real, it’s somehow make-believe. This can be demeaning, frustrating, depressing and just plain annoying to an indie author. I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, I just want to tell stories that people enjoy. I’ve been writing since I was five and I never wanted to do anything else. But in the end, I’m an indie author and I’m proud of it. I make a good living writing books. I love it. I hope readers can pick up on all the passion I feel when they read my novels, but if they can’t, I have no control over that. I can only do so much and hope for the best. The important thing is to keep on writing… It's December 31st. The last day of 2014. I figured it was time to write about my experience with NaNoWrimo before the year was up. It was really an eye-opening experience for me. It solidified for me that my writing process works just fine without having to write thousands of words a day. Don't get me wrong: I LOVED NaNoWrimo and plan to do it every year from now on. But I now know HOW I want to use it. This was my first year so I figured I'd come up with an idea a week before it started, outline it and write the whole book in November. I did this. And it fried my brain, lol! I'm a fast writer, but dang! I had to write 3,000 words a day to finish my book. And what did I end up with? A total mess. But I took the advice of the many who had completed NaNo before me and left the manuscript alone until mid-December. After reading the first chapter, I knew it was too soon. Something was missing. Something important, vital to salvaging anything that I wrote the entire month of November.
But yesterday everything fell into place in my brain. All the missing pieces came together and I know now what I have to do to fix it. But it's going to be a huge re-write! I have to thread through an entire sub-plot and change my character's history to make it work, but I have faith now that it could end up being a novel I could be proud of. What I learned from this? My brain takes time percolate. I'm an outliner by nature, but I still deviate from the outline as ideas come to me. NaNoWrimo doesn't allow for percolating. It's a sports car driving down the freeway at a 100 miles an hour. Next year I'm going to use NaNo differently. I'm not going to write a novel from scratch. I'll use it as a motivator to write 50K of whatever I happen to be working on. I admit, I was a little overzealous writing a 70K novel. Next time, I'll stick to the 50K, not try and finish early and just enjoy the ride! Here's to next year :-) |
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December 2021
AuthorI'm a writer of YA fiction, fiction, comics, television and movies. I try to make all my stories full of jumbly goodness :-) |