I didn’t. I never, ever wanted to “be a writer.” I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to get these blasted characters out of my head and nailed down on paper so I wouldn’t have to keep thinking about them.

Being a writer is something that happened as a result of writing, almost by accident. It was never my goal. My goal was always to finish the current story, and then come up with something even cooler to write about next time. Publishing and making a living were afterthoughts.

At what point in your life did you think you could actually make a living from your writing?

About five and a half books in. That is, I had written and sold five novels, of which two (I think) were somewhere in the production process, and I was partway through the next book, which I was about to send off to my agent to sell. My first book had earned out by then, and I think the second had, too, so I had variable royalty income from those, plus the known amounts I was getting as the second- or third- partial advance payments on the two that were in the production process. This meant I had a pretty good idea what my writing income was likely to be over the next year or two.

At that point, I’d been thinking about quitting my day job for a few years, so I’d been building up a savings account in anticipation. The idea was that I’d have enough cash to get me through a dry period or two, and if it ever dropped below six months’ living expenses, I’d start looking for a new day job (figuring that six months would be long enough to find one). I’ve had to dip into that fund several times over the years, but it’s never gone below the six months line (knock wood).

So if you’re asking when I started thinking about quitting the day job (and planning and preparing to do so), the answer is some time around 1983, roughly two years before I actually quit and went full-time. It didn’t become a serious possibility until I had the income and the bank account in place, which took two years to get fully set up.

When you work with fantasy, how is it different from something like realistic fiction?

I wouldn’t know; I’ve never written anything that wasn’t fantasy. I did try once, but one of the characters turned out to be a wizard in Chapter Two, and I gave up.

Still, I think I can say a little more than that. The basics of writing are the same, regardless of genre: style, viewpoint, dialog, characterization, plot, etc. Sometimes there are genre conventions that are important and that can expand or limit the range of techniques that are available to the writer in that genre, but by and large, effective writing is effective regardless of content.

Worldbuilding and background tend, I think, to be a bit more important in speculative fiction in general than in so-called realistic fiction, simply because one can choose to set realistic fiction in places that the reader is likely to be familiar with already, and which therefore need much less development in the story. That’s about all I can think of, though — and it’s not a hard and fast rule. Lots of realistic-fiction authors set their novels in places that their likely readers will consider exotic (whether that means New Orleans or Tokyo, Los Angeles or Paris, Moscow or Sydney). Part of the point of doing so is to give the readers a chance to image places that are strange to them, which requires just the same sort of in-story background setting as any SF story.

What are some of the criteria you look at when first starting a piece?

Sometimes, there a business considerations that dictate what comes next; for instance, if I’ve signed a contract to write a trilogy, then when I finish the first book, the next piece is going to be Book #2. Or if my agent is trying to re-sell some of my out-of-print backlist, sometimes it is easier if I promise to write a new sequel. Or I need to write something to fulfill the option clause in a contract before I go on to what I really want to write next.

But apart from a couple of multi-book contracts, business considerations haven’t come up terribly often for me, so the main thing I think about when I’m deciding what to write next is, “Is this a story I’m interested in writing?” Since I usually have anywhere from three to twenty possible stories for which the answer to that question is “yes,” the next question is “Is this story insisting on being written now?” If one of them is, then that’s the one that comes next. Usually, there isn’t any one piece on the list that’s at critical mass and/or chomping at the bit to get going, so the next questions are “Which story(s) are almost ready to move forward and/or can be gotten to that point with the least amount of work? Or which one(s) will be the most fun to play with, even if they’re going to be a whole lot of work to get moving?” and “Of the stories that appeal to me and that I think I can get moving, which one(s) does my agent think she can sell most easily in the current market?”

That usually whittles the list down to one or two titles, at most, and if I still can’t decide, I flip a coin.

I hate questions like this because they make so many assumptions about “inspiration.” But since you ask… Probably a combination of my mother, my father, and the family I grew up in.

This tends not to be the answer people are looking for when they ask this question, so let me explain. Both of my parents told me and my siblings stories and read to us, practically from the time we were born. My earliest memories include my father making up bedtime stories that included references to whatever had happened during the day. One of my earliest memories of my mother is of her reading “Little Women” to the three oldest of us when I was about five, to amuse us during a long train trip from Chicago down to New Orleans. And the family – well, basically, the only rooms in the house that did not have fully loaded bookshelves somewhere in them were the porch and the dining room, and in both cases the only reason they had no bookshelves was that there was no wall space on which to put them; both porch and dining room were surrounded by windows and/or double-doors.

In other words, I grew up with stories, with people who told stories, and with people who read stories. I didn’t need “inspiration” to start telling stories, any more than I needed inspiration to eat dinner every night or breathe. I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember. Dad says, even earlier than that.

What inspires you the most in the process of writing?

Having bills to pay. No, really.

Writing fiction for a living is a job. If I worked at McDonald’s, nobody would ask how I got inspired to go in to work every day. It’s expected; it’s what you do when you have a job. Same thing if I worked in corporate advertising or copywriting, both of which demand that the job-holder “get ideas” for new ads or copy. And Visa is not going to accept “I’m sorry I can’t pay you this month; I didn’t have any income because I haven’t been inspired for a while” as an excuse.

And while it is true that some days are more productive than other days, the unproductive ones are generally due mainly to lack of energy (I stayed up too late reading/watching TV/knitting/partying; I didn’t eat right the day before; I haven’t been exercising; I’m stressed out about something), not to lack of inspiration. There are, of course, some writers who have slow days on account of lack of inspiration, but in my experience they tend to a) have a creative process that is very different from mine, and from many, if not most, of the other professional writers I know, and b) be the sort of writer for whom ideas really are the problem. Which is kind of a rare thing among professional, write-for-a-living type writers.

Career writers have been saying this and saying this and saying this, since long before I was born, even. I’m not sure why people are still asking.

Do you write morning pages?

The first three times somebody asked me this, I had no idea what they were talking about. Finally someone explained: “morning pages” are an exercise recommended by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way. Basically, you’re supposed to get up a bit earlier and write three full pages of…well, anything: thoughts, descriptions, reactions, “I hate morning pages” 280 times, whatever, as long as you keep your hand moving to “dump” all the stuff that’s on your mind. And you’re supposed to do this every single day.

I am not very big on “supposed to”s.

I did finally read the book. I’d describe it as a twelve-step program for would-be writers, and for me it was absolutely worthless. I’ve met a few writers who’ve told me that they loved the book, that it changed their lives, and that they do morning pages every day, and it vastly improves their creativity. Me…well, I tried the morning pages thing. I lasted a week, and got no writing other than the morning pages done any day during that time. And I was bored.

So the short answer to this question is “No, I don’t do morning pages.” The slightly longer answer is “No, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them if you want.” The medium-long answer is “No; but if you think they’ll help you, go ahead and try them. They might work brilliantly for you, and if they do, you have a useful tool to help your process along. Just don’t be afraid to stop if you’ve given them an honest try and they don’t seem to be working for you…and if they don’t work, remember that you can still be a writer even if you don’t do morning pages. Every tool works for some writers, but not for other writers; if this one works for you, use it; if it doesn’t work for you, nod pleasantly, let it go, and move on to something else.”

The three questions part is particularly obvious when the author of the letter really has only one question that they’re burning to ask. It’s usually something specific, like “What happens to…?” or “How did you ever think of an insubstantial floating blue donkey with wings?” And then they’re stuck, so the next two are the sort of general questions that a lot of people ask writers. “Where do you get your ideas?” is really popular; so is “Are your characters real?”

And then there are the questions that betray a more specific class assignment. Chief among them are “What are your influences?” and “What is the theme/meaning of this book?” I mean, really – is there an eleven-to-thirteen-year-old anywhere who cares about the writer’s influences unless there’s a grade riding on the answer?

Not that I blame the letter-writers. It’s the teachers who give them these assignments who enrage me … and I am not using hyperbole here. I am most particularly and especially infuriated by those teachers who tell children that they will get a better grade if the author to whom they write answers the letter. Invariably, those letters do not get forwarded by the publisher for two or three months, and when they do arrive, I’m out of town or working to deadline, and the mail waits another month before I get to it. So the poor kid, through no fault of his or her own, misses out on that grade-boost.

I’m also getting more and more e-mails pleading for an address to which someone can snail-mail an assignment letter directly, almost always in connection with that kind of “extra credit.” I don’t give my address out on the web or via e-mail, for an assortment of reasons, and I get a bit cross with teachers who expect me to set their students such a bad example.

We won’t even discuss the number of teachers who seem to think that all writers are independently wealthy (or perhaps who think that no other teacher in the history of the world has had the brilliant idea of making their students write to a favorite author), and therefore do not have their students enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope with their snail-mail letters. Postage adds up a lot more quickly than you might think.

I like hearing from my readers, really. I don’t always have the ability or time to respond right away (and there have been years when nobody at all got an answer, like the one right after my mother died, when I was trying to cope with being her executor and having a book deadline), but I do like hearing. I don’t like it when it’s forced. Although I confess that one of my favorite letters started “My teacher is making us write this because we read your book in class. I thought it was for younger kids. We are in the seventh grade!”

I know some people who feel quite strongly about keeping to the main character's POV except when it's absolutely necessary to go to someone else, but I've also seen that rule (like so many others!)broken successfully. It can be so useful to show someone else reacting to the MC.

Any guidelines on choosing? I keep having to write these scenes in more than one version to see which is the right way.

OK, first off, single-character-viewpoint tight-third-person is one kind of viewpoint. There are lots of others. It’s a stylistic choice: does the writer want the focus and intimacy that comes with sticking to a single character’s view for an entire novel, or does the writer want the flexibility that comes with using multiple viewpoints or omniscient third-person?

From the way the question is phrased, this particular writer is probably using a third-person multiple viewpoint structure. I call it a structure rather than a type of viewpoint because one can obviously do multiple first-person as well as multiple-third-person, or even do a mixed multiple viewpoint, with some of the viewpoint characters told in first person and others in third person. Or, I supposed, second person, though that would be very unusual…and is getting a little off-topic.

Back to multiple viewpoint. I group this into several loose categories: a) the ensemble cast, where the viewpoint characters all have their own storylines and importance; b) a plot-centered book with a wide-ranging plot that really needs to be seen from multiple angles; c) a character-centered story with a main character who needs to be seen from multiple angles; and d) the braided novel, where three or four plotlines interweave and overlap a bit, but may not come together until the end.

How the writer picks the viewpoint character for the next scene depends on what kind of story she/he is telling.

A straightforward braided novel that has, say, one viewpoint character for each of three plotlines, might go in strict rotation: a scene from A’s viewpoint, then B’s, then C’s, then back to A, repeat until they all come together at the end. If one plotline is more central than the others, it will likely have more scenes (perhaps A-B-A-C-A-B-A-C), or the A scenes may just be longer than the B or C scenes. Not all writers like to be tied down to a mechanical rotation like this, but if it’s right for the story, one can learn a lot from doing it…and it makes the question of whose viewpoint to use in the next scene really simple.

A plot-centered or character-centered book where there is a central thread that the writer wants to view from several directions is more complicated. A multiple-viewpoint, plot-centered story is a lot like a football game – the person who has the ball is the one who’s important, the one who’s moving the plot forward. So for each scene, the question is “who has the ball here?” Which character is moving the story forward? Who did the quarterback (your main character) hand the ball off to this time…or did he/she throw a pass to someone else, or run with it him/herself? Or has the other team intercepted?

A character-centered book is similar, except that instead of moving a plot-football forward, the idea is to get ever more interesting and deeper understanding of the central character, but from different angles. The first question here is therefore “whose opinion of the main character changes the most during this scene?” Which character does the scene make the biggest difference to, in terms of their relationship with or opinion of the main character?

An ensemble cast is, for me, the hardest kind of book to keep balanced, because you have all these people who are in the same place, who are supposed to be of equal (or nearly equal) importance. The one time I tried this, I found the balancing act very difficult – I had to look at it in all three ways – who’s doing the next plot-important thing? who do these events matter to the most? who’s had too many/not enough viewpoint scenes so far? – and then make a conscious decision each time as to which factor I was going to let have the most weight this time. (There is a reason why that story is lying mostly-abandoned on my hard drive…)

When all else fails – trust your backbrain. Go with what feels right. If nothing does, do the best you can; maybe later it will become clear what the right choice should have been. And yeah, rewriting a scene several times from different viewpoints is a pain … but I know more than one pro who does exactly that. So if it’s any comfort, you’re in good company.

I can write pretty much anywhere; I learned that trick when I was still working and had very limited time in which to write. (“A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.” – Gene Wolfe) Most of the time, I do my writing at my desk, on my computer. Fairly often, especially if I’m having trouble, I take my laptop to a coffee shop or restaurant and work there (I know exactly which tables are near outlets in all my favorite spots!). Doing this takes me away from all the distractions at home. People keep recommending that I go to the library; they don’t realize just how distracting I find all those books!

Do you carry a journal around with you?

Not exactly. I usually have a pen and paper in my purse; if I’m not carrying my handbag, I usually have my PDA or cell phone that I can take a few notes on. But I don’t keep a journal of any kind. I’ve tried a couple of times, and never been successful at it for more than three months (and the only time I managed it that long was because I was traveling through Europe, and knew I would never remember it all if I didn’t write everything down!). Lots of other writers do it and find their journals incredibly useful, though. I just never got the hang of it.

How often do you write?

Honestly? I try to follow my own advice and write at least a little every single day, but in actual practice, some days I don’t. When I don’t, I start feeling twitchy. If I skip more than a day or two, it gets harder and harder to get back into whatever story I am writing.

It’s kind of like brushing your teeth – we all know we should do it twice a day, every day, but does everybody do that every single day of their lives? Not anyone I know. Even the most obsessive people have days when they get home at 2 a.m. and it’s just too much bother, so they go to bed without brushing and wake up with furry teeth. It’s better to do it every day, but realistically, it doesn’t always happen. Still, I do try to write something every day, even if it’s only a sentence.

How long do you write each day?

I’m one of those writers who goes by word count, rather than time. This lets me get away with working for only half an hour some days, if I’m on a roll and the words are coming as fast as I can type. Of course, when I’m on a roll, sometimes I don’t want to stop and I get twice as much done as I normally would. Most days, a good writing session will take one to two hours before everything starts slowing down and I really need to take a break. When I have a deadline closing in (as I do currently), I do two or more sessions a day – whatever it takes to meet my day’s quota of words.

This only counts time spent at the computer, typing new words that are part of the story. Revising, reviewing old material, calling my agent about a subrights offer, research reading, making maps, diagramming plots, going over comments from my beta-readers, surfing the web in search of information on the Philadelphia train station in 1858, answering fan mail, blogging, etc. – none of that counts as writing time. That’s what I do with all the rest of my time.

What is your favorite time of day to write? Does the weather influence your writing?

Nobody’s ever asked about the weather before, and I don’t think I’ve thought about it much. Hmm. I tend to have more energy when it’s sunny, but nice days also tend to tempt me away from my computer. Rainy days are good, but just gloomy and overcast, not so much.

Favorite time of day…well, I like writing around lunch time and early afternoon; that’s when I do a lot of it. My absolute most productive time, though, is right after I get up in the morning. Especially if I get up early, which is really, really annoying. I thought that being a writer meant always being able to stay up late and sleep in, but not for me. (This is especially annoying because it does work for so many of my writer friends. I just happen to be the odd writer out.)

It depends on the story. Sometimes, it starts with characters; sometimes, with setting; sometimes, with plot; sometimes with a situation or an idea; sometimes with a theme… It really doesn’t matter where the story starts, as long as it has all the crucial bits in it when it’s finished. I’ve started stories from an idea for a character, from a mental image that I wanted to explain, from a situation that I wanted to explain, from a title I wanted a story for, from a plot description, from playing a game… Even for the same author (me), stories don’t all start in the same place, and different authors really don’t all work the same.

Do you hand write and then word process? Or just word process?

I’ve been touch-typing since I was sixteen; I type MUCH faster than I hand-write, and with about the same facility (by which I mean, I don’t think about what my fingers are doing when I type, any more than I think about how to shape the letters when I hand-write – I just think what I want to say and write/type it). So I prefer to type straight into the computer (or laptop) when I can. If I can’t for some reason, then I’ll hand-write.

Were you good in your English classes in high school?

I was pretty good – not top of the class, but I was still in Honors English, and I took a class in journalism for one quarter. I never took any English classes after high school, which I sometimes regret…although I really don’t know which college classes I would have chosen not to take, in order to replace them with English. I figured that college was my chance to find out all sorts of things that I’d never had a chance to learn before, so for my “English, history, and art” distribution requirement, I took things like “Art of the Far East” and “History of India” and “Medieval French Society.” I figured that I’d probably read plenty enough English on my own … and I did, though perhaps not quite as many “classics” as the college professors might have liked.

Do you always choose an audience before beginning to write?

Never. Unless you want to say that the audience is me. I write books I would like to read; fortunately, I have broad enough tastes that a lot of other people turn out to like the same sorts of things I like, so I can sell what I write and make a living at it. But the only time I ever worried about “the audience” at all was when I was writing the Star Wars middle-school novelizations, and that was only because I was a little worried about whether my editor would make me simplify the vocabulary because of the grade level (he didn’t).

If I wrote Easy Readers or chapter books, which are aimed at people who are just learning how to read, then I would have to think about the audience a bit before I sat down to write, because those types of books frequently have specific limitations in vocabulary and/or sentence structure. But for any other type of book – and here I’m including all genres and age-ranges, from middle-school on up to adult fiction – my philosophy is, write it first and then try to figure out who it’s going to sell to.  Because for me (and many, many of the other writers I know), worrying about “the audience” while writing is vastly counter-productive – not only does it slow down the writing process, it frequently ends up messing up the story because the writer starts second-guessing his/her ideas.

Well, mainly because I’m a novelist. Short stories are really hard for me; in thirty years as a writer, I’ve written roughly fifteen publishable short stories. Ten of them are in Book of Enchantments; three more were for the Liavek anthologies and probably wouldn’t make much sense on their own. To do an all-new anthology, I’d therefore have to write at least eight more stories (more if it has to be all Enchanted Forest stories). Which would take me years.

Most of the ideas I get are things that need to be novel-length or more. I get a short-story idea maybe once every two years; my list of novels-to-write is up to 25 and still growing. Writing is a hard enough job already. Trying to make myself write stuff that I’m not good at is a recipe for disaster. Also, short stories don’t pay all that well and anthologies don’t sell as well as novels, and I have a house and two cats to support.

So…no anthology any time soon. Maybe in another fifteen years…

Is Thirteenth Child the start of a new series? How many books will there be? When will the next one be coming out? Will they all be from Eff’s viewpoint?

Yes, Thirteenth Childis the first book of a trilogy, and all three of the books will be from Eff’s viewpoint if things go as planned. The next one will be coming out when I finally get it finished; I’m working on it, but it’s going slowly because of assorted ongoing real-life responsibilities. The publisher won’t put it on the schedule until I turn it in; when I do, and when I get the schedule, I’ll put the information up on the web site.

Once I finish the trilogy…it’s anyone’s guess whether I’ll write more in this world. Right now, I can think of dozens of stories that would be interesting to tell in this world, but I get tired of writing about the same places and people fairly easily, so I may want a break when this is done. And of course, whether the publisher wants to buy more stories will depend on how the sales of the trilogy go.

Which is a lot of the problem right there, in my opinon. Because “What happens next?” and “What do I do next?” are among the most useless questions most writers can ask themselves. They won’t help most people get unstuck, because getting the answer is getting unstuck, all at once.

It’s like having a car that’s well and truly stuck in a snowbank; if you rev the engine trying to go forward, the tires just sit there and spin. You have to try different things:  shovel out a little of the snow, sprinkle some sand in front of the tires, get one of those chain-link thingies to give some traction, rock the car forward and back until it gets up enough momentum to get over the hump and back out into the street, get some muscular friends to push…or, in extreme cases, call a tow truck.

But “what happens next?” is the most obvious question, so it’s the first one everybody seems to ask…just as the first thing you try when the car is stuck in the snow is to drive out and save yourself all the fiddling around with sand and shoveling and rocking and so on. The trick is to catch yourself doing it before you’ve spun the wheels long enough for the friction to turn the snow to glassy-smooth ice under and around them.

And there are a few writers who need the more general, as opposed to the more particular, questions. But it’s pretty easy to tell if you’re one of them, because if you are, you get stuck when the next question is particular, not when it’s general. Same principle, only done backwards.

So what do you ask instead? Well, I find that “why?” is nearly always useful. Why do they have to cross the river right here? Why hasn’t the villain done anything to stop them? Why can’t they just walk around it?

Also, Murphy’s Law is a writer’s best friend. (It’s a really frustrating best friend, because “Whatever can go wrong, will” applies as much to the writer’s plans as to the hero’s, but still…) “What can go wrong next?” is therefore almost always a really helpful question.

And if you really have no idea what happens next, it’s frequently useful to look at what all the off-stage characters are doing. The villain isn’t just going to be sitting around clipping Evil Coupons while he waits for the heroine to ride up and rescue the prince; he’s going to be trying to figure out how to stop her before she ever gets close. The sidekick who’s off delivering messages is going to run into other people and talk to them, which can result in anything from hearing useful rumors to having a beer with the villain’s minions while commiserating on their respective employers’ unreasonable demands to running into the heroine’s Aunt Margaret who insists that the sidekick deliver this hand-knit pink sweater to her niece right now. All of which can make for interesting conversation when the sidekick finally gets back and the heroine finds out about it. And so on.

One can also start at the Next Big Event and work backwards. If you know that the hero has to get hold of the magic sword before he can defeat the villain, what has to happen in order for him to get it? Defeat the dragon guardian? OK, what has to happen in order for him to do that? Fireproof armor? OK, where’s he going to get fireproof armor? And so on, until you get back to wherever he’s standing now.

And if one is desperate, there is always the old “have some pirates or ninjas or a guy with a revolver jump in through the window” trick, which works mainly because once this has happened, the writer has to come up with some sort of explanation for why these people have shown up and what they want. Between the action scene itself and the explanation, one can usually get at least a couple of chapters, and by then things are moving once more.

Of course, this stuff is only useful if the reason you’re stuck really is “I don’t know what happens next.” Sometimes, that’s not really the problem…but this post is too long already, so I’ll get to that later.

On another note, Mary asked for some reading recommendations for a nine-year-old. Assuming the nine-year-old is a sufficiently good reader that she is reading my books, which in this case she obviously is, here are some of my personal favorites, at least some of which haven’t gotten into the FAQ yet (we will assume, for purposes of this blog, that any of my books that you haven’t read are at the top of the list. <grin>)

Anything by Tamora Pierce. I’ve been following the Tortall books since In the Hand of the Goddess, and I love them to pieces.

Elle Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. A nice twist on the Cinderella fairy tale.

Wren to the Rescue and sequels; Crown Duel and sequel, by Sherwood Smith. I don’t know why Sherwood’s books aren’t better known; she does a great job with … well, pretty much everything I’m looking for in a fantasy.

The Princess Academy, by Sharon Hale. One of the girls from the village is going to be the bride of the prince, but no one knows who, so they all have to be trained to be proper ladies, just in case…

The Door in the Hedge and Beauty by Robin McKinley; also any of her other stuff, but these two were the first ones I read and I still love them dearly. Door is a collection of four fairy tales, two retellings of familiar ones and two original ones, and they’re all just wonderful. Beauty is her first retelling of  “Beauty and the Beast” (Rose Daughter is her second). Both are beautiful, magical books.

Howl’s Moving Castle and The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones; also all the rest of her stuff. Diana has a wonderfully twisted sense of humor. And the chapter heads in Howl’s Moving Castle  (“In which Howl expresses himself with green slime” “In which there is far too much washing”) gave me the courage to try the same thing in Dealing with Dragons.

The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye. Another “unusual princess” book, and one I found very charming.

All of Edward Eager’s books. I think Half Magic is my favorite (the one where the children find a token that will grant them each a wish…but only half of it), closely followed by The Seven-Day Book (in which they find a book that puts them into their favorite stories…but either before the story starts, or after it’s over).

Anyone else have suggestions?

From several people: “Will you be autographing/appearing in X area soon?”

Answer: If it’s not listed on the web site under “News and Appearances,” I don’t have any current plans for it. That means that unless you live in Minnesota, the current answer is “no.” Out-of-town appearances get scheduled a fairly long way in advance; in town (meaning the Twin Cities, Minneapolis-St. Paul), I occasionally get asked a few weeks (rather than a few months) in advance, but I’m not really anticipating anything new in the near term. My publisher usually sets up this sort of thing, and right now, they really want me to be working on the next book and not doing appearances! If and when something does come up, I’ll post it on the web site.

From a high school English/Creative Writing teacher: “…someday (a still somewhat very far away someday) I hope to maybe finish a few stories I write during my free time. Piggy-backing off of one of your blog posts, I ‘write to write,’ whether I ever share it with the world or not. ..”

Good for you!

One of the hardest things about writing is making time to do it, especially if you’re not published yet (or have chosen not to write for publication). After all, there are a lot more important things you should be doing, right? And an awful lot of people find themselves classifying everything as more important than writing, especially if it’s “just a hobby” (i.e., they aren’t making money at it).

But whether you want to be published or not, the only way to get things finished is to work on them. Preferably with some regularity—there is a momentum that builds up when you’ve been working on a project on a daily or weekly basis, even if you’re only writing one or two sentences at a time.—but regular or not, some writing is better than no writing, if you want to finish things.

For some folks, it helps to remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time through. You have plenty of chances to fix it later. On the other hand, if you loathe and despise the revision process, spending a few extra minutes to get things right in the first draft may be a better use of your time. It depends on the writer.