There are a lot of reasons for both the advice and the passion. Quite often, the advice-giver is one of those writers who found out the hard way that if they talk about anything they haven’t written yet (whether that’s a novel idea, a plot outline, an upcoming scene, a bit of dialog or character development), they lose all interest in writing it. If they force themselves to write anyway, what comes out is flat and lifeless, and eventually they have to abandon it.

Obviously, anyone who’s had this happen becomes quite rightly paranoid about never, ever letting that happen again. Where they go wrong is in the assumption that this is the way everyone’s creative process works, and that therefore it is a Very Good Thing to warn incoming writers most strictly against doing themselves.

I happen to be one of those writers over on the other side of things. Talking about my work energizes me and helps me work through sticky bits (though it is often extremely disconcerting to the friends who hear me babble through what looks to them like a novel outline, whole and complete, and then find me next day, babbling with equal enthusiasm about a new plot twist that will fix some problem I hadn’t even hinted at the day before). It took me a while to figure out that one of my best friends is a can’t-talk-about-it type, and that my cheerful inquiries about her plot problems ran a serious risk of giving her a bad case of writer’s block.

There are, however, other kinds of bad experiences that make some writers advise against talking about works-in-progress, or, in extreme cases, against revealing that one is a writer at all. If the person one is talking to has a negative reaction to one’s plot or characters, it can have a crushing effect on one’s desire to write. Sometimes even a reaction that’s merely unenthusiastic can be profoundly dampening, especially when an idea is in its very early stages.

Also, different people react negatively to different things. I tend to get very grumpy and dig in my heels when well-intentioned relatives and the occasional acquaintance try to be supportive of my writing as a job – that is, they ask questions about my production (and I don’t mean “Have you written your page today?”) and if they aren’t happy with my answers, they trot out all sorts of anti-writer’s-block exercises and techniques they think I may not have heard of over the past thirty years. I hate nearly all possible writing exercises, and I’m quite capable of managing my production and output myself, thanks much.

All this means, though, is that I am selective about who I talk about my writing with. I want listeners who’ll get me revved up about the fun parts – making stuff up and coming up with plot twists and so on – not folks who spend half an hour reminding me that I’m in the miserable middle and I just have to grind my way on through (I can figure that out just by sitting down and grinding for a bit). If it’s not fun, what’s the point?

In addition to the negatives, there’s a positive reason for not discussing ones WIP. For some people, keeping it a secret is like lighting the fuse on a rocket, or shaking up an unopened can of Coke – it creates an internal pressure that helps keep them writing. In other words, they react exactly the opposite of the way I do: what gets them revved up is wanting to talk, but having to wait until the story’s finished before they do.

I come down, once more, solidly in the “whatever works for you” corner, with a couple of caveats. If you know or suspect that talking about your work-in-process will end up with you not producing anything at all, don’t talk about it. If you know or suspect that keeping your WIP a deep, dark secret will get you to write more, or faster, don’t let your beta readers see it until you’re all the way through the first draft. If, however, you know that you are energized by telling stories in a way that makes you go home and write them down, find some trustworthy friends and talk yourself blue in the face. Just be sure you have objective evidence – that is, more pages getting produced. It’s not at all uncommon for someone to think they’re energized and encouraged to write by talking, when in fact they merely enjoy telling the story a whole lot and the talk does not lead to actual pages produced.

If you’re going to talk, however, there are two classes of people for whom I advise extreme caution in discussing one’s writing at all. First, there’s one’s boss, if one has a day job (as most would-be and new writers do). I’ve known several people who, for one reason or another, explained to a supervisor that they were doing this writing thing, and in roughly three out of four cases, the reaction was negative (ranging from not getting that raise or promotion to forbidding the would-be author from working on the manuscript at the office on breaks or lunch hours). In at least two cases, the author in question fully expected the supervisor to be supportive, and was totally blind-sided by the negative impact it had on their second career. I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m just saying that you should be aware there’s a down side, and think carefully before you do.

The second class of people not to talk about writing with are those who are … “unsupportive” doesn’t begin to describe it. I’ve known writers whose families or friends have done everything from burning the would-be writer’s notebooks in an attempt to discourage them, to guilt-tripping (“Is it really fair to your children to spend so much time on this hobby of yours? You’re already away at the office all day…”) to deadly and destructive criticism to outright mocking. The only way to deal with such people is not to tell them you’re a writer at all. At least in this instance, it’s generally pretty obvious in advance that these folks are going to be toxic to one’s writing.

By and large, these are not people who have any actual connection to the actual book-publishing industry; the closest any of the ones I’ve met came was having edited their PTA newsletter. They fall into three basic categories:

First, there are the ones who are in love with the sound of their own voice. They’ll claim to have contacts of some sort – they know editors or agents, or they do a lot of work “in the industry” for their job. They can sound really plausible, partly because they are so very, very sure of themselves.

Every once in a while, one of these has some sort of credential that makes him (all the ones I’ve met have been hims) sound even more plausible. He’s a professor of English Literature, for instance, or he met Mr. Famous Author at a party once. The thing that lets you know that you can safely ignore pretty much anything he says is this: he doesn’t actually want to hear about your book, much less read it to see what sorts of problems you might actually have. No, he wants to get straight to the giving-advice part. Fortunately, this sort usually doesn’t much care whether or not you follow all his advice, as long as you’re willing to spend hours listening to him give it.

The second variety is a sort of status-leech. These people are not capable of writing to a publishable standard, and they know it, but they desperately long to be associated with writers and writing. So they try to horn in on everyone else’s career, so that if somebody is, eventually, successful, they can say “I helped” or “I knew her when” or even “He couldn’t have made it without me.” They do listen when you describe the story, but their advice is either so basic or so obvious that it’s not much help. And if they do happen to know some editors or agents, it’s a safe bet that the editors/agents find them deeply annoying, and will not look kindly on any of their recommendations.

The third variety didn’t start showing up until I was five or six years into my published career, and they are much less obvious, at least initially. They don’t offer unwanted advice or try to horn in; they behave very politely for a while; and then, when I’m convinced that they’re nice, normal, socially-ept people, they ask in the most unexceptionable fashion if I will give them some advice about their writing. If I agree, they then spend three hours telling me all about their great ideas and fabulous plans, without ever allowing me to get a word in edgewise. What they want is a captive audience, and perhaps, once they have dazzled me with their unique ideas, an offer of collaboration (or at the very least, an introduction to my editor and agent).

The real trouble with folks like this is that they prey on the not-yet-published. The easy way to avoid them, at least at first, is simply not to tell anyone you don’t already know and trust that you are writing anyone, but this is a lot easier said than done, especially if one is looking for first-readers or a crit group, or if one just happens to be the sort of person who likes to talk about one’s writing. And there is always the (very slim) chance that whoever-it-is really does know what he/she is talking about – just because the unwanted-advice-givers I’ve met were all talking through their hats, it doesn’t mean everyone like that is.

This is the part that really sends beginners into a tailspin. Here is this person, sounding authoritative, maybe even with some credentials to back up her opinions…but she’s obnoxious and the advice she’s giving is not at all what you want to do with your story. But what if she’s right? She’s so sure of herself…

At this point, what you do is ask yourself 1) If you follow her advice, and it works, will you have the sort of success you want? If you’re working on a sweet children’s bedtime storybook, and she’s telling you to write a gritty R-rated screenplay about vampires and zombies, will you be happy if you switch and that gets bought? If he can guarantee that his editor friend will buy a niche mystery about fly-fishing, will you be happy publishing that instead of your far-future space opera? In other words, are you in this to tell your stories, or are you in this to get a publication credit for something, anything, doesn’t matter what?

Assuming that the answer to #1 is yes, you would have no regrets whatever about abandoning your current work forever, so long as it gets you published, the second question is 2) Can you stand knowing, for the rest of your life, that you are indebted to this obnoxious person for your instant success? If the answer to this is also yes, then there’s not much downside to taking the advice.

If, however, the answer to one or both questions is no, then you have determined that you don’t want to take this person’s advice. You then have three possible courses of action: 1) listen until they run down, thank them, and dismiss them from your mind as you walk away, 2) bluntly explain that you’re not interested in their advice, or 3) turn the situation around on them.

#1 is for people who are well-intentioned or whom you don’t want to alienate. #2 sometimes becomes necessary to get rid of repeat offenders (some folks simply will not quit pestering you until you say bluntly “I do not want your advice; I will not talk about my writing with you; I don’t want to hear any more of your stupid ideas. Bug off.”).

#3 works best on people who really do have some experience with real live authors, but who are clearly not giving you any useful advice, and who are not-giving it at tedious length. What you do is, you role-play a wannabe. When Mr. Know-It-All offers to show your work to an editor (after you’ve revised it to his specifications, of course), you wave your hands vaguely and say “Oh, the book really isn’t ready to show anyone yet. Actually, I only have an outline and the first scene written…or maybe it should be a Prologue, I haven’t decided. But I’d love to talk more when it’s a bit further along.” Then you never bring it up again. Should he ask how it’s coming, you say “Oh, I’ve been so busy lately…” and look guilty. If this doesn’t make him drop the question like the proverbial hot potato, I guarantee that he has zero experience in actual publishing, and you can safely ignore his advice ever after.

At the other end of the scale are things like painting, where one person can theoretically do the whole job themselves (though very few painters today stretch their own canvases or grind their own pigments).

And then there’s writing.

We’ll set aside the problems of production and distribution for now; the Internet is changing that part drastically. But I will point out that for the last century or two, even so-called self-publication didn’t mean you set your own type, printed your own galleys, and bound each copy of your book by hand.

Writing is in many ways a solitary activity; when push comes to shove, it’s just me at the keyboard typing. Even when one is collaborating, you can’t type four-hands the way you can play a piano duet side-by-side at the same piano keyboard. But writers have always talked to each other over tea, over coffee, over beer and wine, from afternoon to the wee hours of the morning, and in letters when they couldn’t get together in person. The Inklings and the Algonquin Club and the Bloomsbury Group were none of them the first of their kind.

Nevertheless, the myth that most non-writers (and far too many writers) believe is that books are an act of singular creativity; they spring from the head of their author in true and pristine condition, and whatever minor changes occur afterwards are mere refinements of the author’s vision. Yes, some people really believe this. A professor of literature at the local university once told a friend of mine rather condescendingly that editors never asked for substantive changes in a manuscript, and therefore they never needed to discuss what changes might have been requested for marketing reasons vs. which were made for artistic ones.

In fact, every editor I have ever had has asked for changes to the manuscript – nothing ever goes straight to copy-edit. Furthermore, most of those changes have not been for marketing reasons (or if they were, the editors were clever enough to come up with good, solid artistic reasons for asking for the changes). I don’t always do everything the editor asks, or do it the way he suggests, if he makes a suggestion. In the current work-in-production, for instance, the editor wanted the opening scenes rearranged in a certain order; unfortunately, this would have required me to change the timing on several key events that were pretty much nailed to the floor, either in previous books or by the weather (settlers did not pick up and move in the middle of winter in Minnesota).

So I did something else, which fixed the pacing-and-tension problems (I hope) without playing hob with timing-and-plausibility, and I got the email yesterday saying they liked it, and we’re good to go to copyedit. The point is, I think the changes were good ones.

And I wasn’t just working on the problems my editor pointed out. My new crit group had a few things to say, too, and while I couldn’t address everything (since, again, some things were nailed down in earlier books), there was still quite a bit to chew over. And that’s not even counting the comments made by a variety of first-readers, long before things ever got to this point, or the discussions with friends about plot points before anything at all was ever written down.

There are also plenty of people whose contributions are more indirect but no less necessary. These are the ones who answer questions about castle construction or the development of guns; who loan out obscure books on British slang in 1811 or the development of railroads; who drag one out to dinner or over to watch a movie just before one’s brain starts racing around and around the squirrel cage.

The books might still happen without all of this support, but they wouldn’t happen nearly as fast and they wouldn’t be nearly as good. It’s an odd sort of teamwork – I’m the one doing the writing and trying to make everything fit coherently, but it would be disingenuous to ignore just how much everyone else is a part of the process. Yet it’s not something you can break down into discrete parts – you can’t say George put the wheels on, Janet did the upholstery, and Gene and Jennifer painted the trim.

I can’t point at a paragraph and say, “Lois wrote that bit,” because she didn’t; I wrote it. Even if I say “Beth or David or Carol gave me that idea” or “I put that bit in for Rosemary or Pamela or Caroline,” it’s never as pure and simple as it sounds. Yes, Lois or Carol or David gave me that idea, sort of, but I worked out how to write it and fit it in, and it changed along the way. Yet it wouldn’t have gone that way if it hadn’t been for that talk we had.

It’s more than just support, but it’s not the kind of influence my English teachers talked about when I was in school. It’s both more collaborative and less; most of these people aren’t trying to write parts of my book, they’re just joining a conversation about it. But that stimulus from outside my head is sort of like binocular vision for ideas – it’s part of what lets me get a clear picture of what the story needs to be. It’s possible to get along without it, just as one can still see even if one is wearing a patch over one eye; but without two points of view, one loses depth perception.

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!”

Everybody gets overstressed at some point, and the result can be quite dramatic in terms of productivity (and if it isn’t, you frequently end up paying for it later). There are a bazillion books out there on how to manage stress, and they all say the same things and they’re all right: exercise, eat right, take care of yourself, take a break, take a walk, meditate, talk to people about it, find ways to reduce it if possible (move, change jobs, change the locks on the house or the phone number, etc.), see a professional if it gets to be too much. The trouble is that they’re all long-term solutions, and we’re a quick-fix society…and most people don’t even start trying to deal with stress until they’re already in over their heads and sinking fast.

But it’s like writing: nobody else is going to make you write…and nobody else is going to take all the stress out of your life for you. You have to work at it yourself. Some of it you can get rid of permanently; some, the only thing you can do is to change your attitude. And sometimes, it’s a matter of remembering your priorities. Much as we all love it, writing a book is not the most important thing in the world. Not compared to, say, getting your kid to the emergency room when she’s fallen out of a tree and broken her arm, or taking care of your elderly mother who has dementia, or calling the plumber about the flood that’s happening in the basement right now. Sometimes it’s OK not to write for a while.

It can be hard to admit that there’s just no time for writing right now, especially when your backbrain is nagging you to Get This Story Down Immediately. You have to be honest with yourself about whether writing is part of your coping mechanism (in which case it may be worth it to make the time, because it will help reduce the stress) or whether it isn’t (in which case you need to not-write, or you will just make the stress worse).

On the other hand, if your frontbrain is what’s telling you that It Is Your Job/Duty To Do Revisions Today, or that You Cannot Waste This Valuable Writing Time Just Because You’re Stressed … tell it to go take a hike. You don’t have to write when your Mom is in the hospital or your kid is running a temperature or you’re worried sick about layoffs or the roof just blew off in a tornado. You can if you want, but you don’t have to.

Be warned that which hand you’re using may well change with the circumstances. Most of the time, writing is part of my coping mechanism, but when my mother was dying and just after, I lost a good six months or more of writing time because even the thought of dealing with the plot was the very last straw that I couldn’t cope with on top of dealing with the estate and everything else. And it took a while to realize that trying to make myself write “in order to cope” (which had always worked before) was the exact wrong thing this time.

People aren’t machines…and even machines need down time for repairs and maintenance.

I’ve kept up with my goal-setting ever since those early years. Gradually, it evolved into an annual review, on or around New Year’s, in place of the New Year’s Resolutions that everyone else seemed to be doing. A little over nineteen years ago, I mentioned this to one of my dearest friends, and we’ve been meeting on January 1 every year since then (unless one of us was out of town, in which case we schedule it as soon in January as we can both make it) to talk over what we did in the previous year and set goals for the upcoming year (and on into the future). Our goal-setting get-together has evolved over the past nineteen years; we now do our major goal-planning on Jan 1, and then meet quarterly for a progress and reality check.

One of the big differences, for me, between goals and New Year’s Resolutions is that tesolutions tend to be about immediate life changes, like starting to exercise. People make up their minds to do it, head down to the gym every day in January, and then give up. They might as well be called “New Month Resolutions.” My goals are a lot more specific, and I always have at least a year to get them done, though I try to have ones that  cover a series of time-frames from immediate, one-year goals to ones that I don’t expect to accomplish for five or ten years, or even longer. (One that’s been on my list for about five years now is “Take a trip to Rome with friend before we are both 75.” I have another 17 years to accomplish that one.)

I also divvy things up to make sure I have short, medium, and long-term goals for different areas of my life, from work to friends and family to hobbies to householding. (The new water softener I need has been carried over from last year’s goals; as soon as the next advance payment comes in…) Sometimes, I subdivide areas I think are particularly important, to make sure I really have them covered properly. This year, for instance, I’ve decided to split my “work” goals into two parts – production (1. Finish the third book of “Frontier Magic” by the deadline. 2. Write up a submission proposal for something new, etc.) and administration (1. Go through backstock and figure out which books I’m running low on, then order more copies of everything that’s in print, 2. Go over backlist with my agent to see which titles need to be reverted this year, etc.). Those are the immediate, short-term work goals; the longer-term ones are things like “Figure out a three-year schedule to finally get the research done for that Arthurian book I’ve been putting off for so long” and “Find a way to organize the non-fiction so I can find all the pirate books when I want them, even though they have to be on three different shelves because they’re all different sizes.” and “Come up with the coolest new story idea in the world because I’m bored with all my old ones.”

I don’t go through exactly the same process or exactly the same categories every year. I keep changing things around, looking for better ways to plan out what I want (just as I’m always looking for a better/easier way to write than whatever I’m currently using). Some years I have “Career” goals and “Writing” goals (the former having to do with things like publicity, generating sales, and so on, while the latter has to do with improving my craft and finishing my current WIP); other years, like 2011, lump both of those under the category “Work.” It can make it a little difficult to see how I’m doing, year to year, but that’s part of the fun.

This year, I had a rather busy fall and wasn’t  quite as ready for our annual goal-setting meeting as I usually am, so the first goal on my list is to spend January firming up a more specific list and coming up with a few that aren’t as obvious as “Get my taxes done on time” and “Finish writing Book 3 by deadline.”

And I know I’ll do it, because in three months, I’ll be meeting Caroline again for our first quarter check in, and she’ll ask me about it. There’s nothing quite like having someone to keep you honest.

Happy New Year, and may all your New Years resolutions or goals be a wild success this year!

The statement means different things to different people, but the most common meaning is “There are a lot of other things in my life that are more important to me than writing, so those are what I spend my time on.”

For professional writers, writing time is too often eaten up by the things required to manage a writing career. By the time you’ve spent time on fan mail, emails to your agent and editor, studying up on the latest twist in the Google settlement, keeping track of which publisher is going out of business or being acquired or just having difficulties (and checking whether any of your backlist is affected), blogging, tweeting, twittering, checking Facebook and MySpace, reviewing writing-and-book-related chat lists and mailing lists, reading enough to at least pretend to keep up with the field … even if there’s time left in the day, it’s hard to muster the energy, let alone the inclination, to produce new words, even if one doesn’t have a family or a day job on top of all that (and many professional writers have both).

For the not-yet-professional writer, the list is a little different, but the basic idea is the same. Work, family, friends, hobbies, and general daily life can take up all the time there is – those things do, in fact, take up all the time there is for everybody who isn’t a writer, after all. Sometimes just getting the laundry done and meals on the table in addition to a job is about all there’s time or energy for.

But. Nobody gets more than 24 hours of time in a day, or more than 7 days in a week. That prolific professional who has six novels coming out next year (and four the year after that, and five more the year after that) has exactly the same amount of total time as the much-admired writer who produces one novel every eight to ten years, the newly sold author who’s trying to juggle editorial revisions and copyedit and galleys while producing his second book, the as-yet-unsold writer who’s struggling to persuade herself that her writing will sell one day in spite of the latest rejection letter, and the one-of-these-days-when-I-have-time “writer” who hasn’t produced two sentences in thirty years on account of having “no time to write.”

It’s not about having time. It’s about making choices.

There are some people whose choices are constrained by circumstances: they have responsibilities (toddlers to care for, elderly parents requiring assistance, family members or friends requiring help during a critical or chronic illness), or their own life has gone pear-shaped due to illness or financial problems or some other disaster. Their time is spoken for and scheduled to the max, and piling on guilt for not-writing is just adding to their stress. I lost months of writing time before and after my mother’s death, first due to helping Dad cope with her illness and later due to the time, energy, and stress of handling her estate … and I don’t feel one little bit guilty about it, even though I missed a major writing deadline three times as a result. Sometimes, you just can’t.

Most of us, most of the time, are not actually in a situation like that, however. Most of us have, during any given 24 hour period, some number of minutes that we can choose to use this way or that. Fifteen minutes relaxing with a cup of tea, or fifteen minutes cleaning out the junk drawer. An extra half-hour of sleep, or half-an-hour of exercise. An hour watching TV, or an hour mowing the lawn (one more day won’t hurt, really…). All that is necessary is to pick some of those minutes, and to choose to use them to write.

“All” I say, but it’s actually a hard choice for many people. Because all of everyone’s minutes are already full of something – hardly anyone I know can look at their last month and point to an hour where they just sat and did nothing at all. Choosing to write means giving up on doing something else – watching TV, socializing, surfing the Web, sleeping, reading … something has to go. And it has to not be replaced immediately by something else that isn’t writing – giving up an hour of TV in order to mow the lawn may be a Good Thing, but it doesn’t get the chapter written.

A popular choice for many writers is to select one end of the candle to burn a little extra on – either they get up half an hour or an hour early and write first, before anything else, or they stay up half an hour (or an hour, or several hours) late to write after everyone else has gone to bed. Each method has obvious disadvantages; either one can leave the writer short on sleep, and it can be hard to get up (or stay up) when you’re tired. If you have family or roommates, sooner or later they start asking you to do things for them “since you’re going to be up anyway,” and if you give in, your writing time quickly vanishes under the weight of all those daily more important things to do.

The temptation to put the writing off until tomorrow and mow the lawn (or whatever) today is strong and endless. Unless someone you care for, or you yourself, is going to die, be in pain, starve, or go to jail if the not-writing thing doesn’t get done, resist. Do the writing and put the whatever-it-is off until tomorrow. If you don’t defend your writing time – even from yourself – no one else is going to.

It didn’t arrive.

We didn’t realize this for a week, because I was being restrained and not asking “Where the $#%@& are the revisions requests you promised me on Monday?” and he was being restrained and giving me time to think about them because they were fairly substantial (we’ll get to that in a minute). By the time we got that sorted out, I was down to two and a half weeks of revision time instead of four.

This was important because those two and a half weeks included a) my turn making tea for the girls (six of us have been doing this every other month for…over twenty years, for sure. Between cooking and cleanup, it’s a big production and eats up at least three days, counting the day of the tea itself), and b) a drive down to Chicago and back to take care of Dad’s paperwork and bills for the month, which took about four days but only ate two because I took the laptop and worked while I was there.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much in the way of questions; David is an excellent editor, very clear in explaining what he wants and why, and he’s also usually on the same wavelength as I am (meaning, he doesn’t ask for totally off-the-wall things like “Why don’t you put in some explosions? I like explosions.” or “What this needs is a completely new plot twist that has nothing to do with anything else in the story…put it right here, where it will wreck the pacing and twist the main plot totally out of shape.”)

Unfortunately… Well, I did mention that these were substantial revisions, didn’t I? By my standards, anyway. Among other things, I ended up needing a whole new chapter (containing a whole new character, because it’s really hard to do very much dialog that’s only tagged “one of the men said.” I needed somebody for my characters to talk to).

And of course David put his finger right on every single place where I’d hoped I could avoid dealing with some bit or other, or where I knew it needed a bit more but I’d figured I could skate by with what I had. I couldn’t even really argue.

So after I’d read the letter and the comments through once, I sent him an email and we worked out the new title and discussed a few aspects of the story that hadn’t been clear. To him, anyway; I knew the answers, but they hadn’t gotten down on the page. (One of my besetting sins is that I either over- or under-explain; I can’t seem to get the hang of making things clear without actually saying them straight out, so they come out cryptic instead of…well, instead of that thing Megan Whelan Turner does, where the reader figures it all out for themselves and feels clever). While we were discussing, I mulled things over. And made tea.

Mulling is a necessary part of the process, and very important. It doesn’t look like writing; indeed, it usually happens when the writer is doing other things (baking scones and making chocolate silk pie, in this case). Anyway, once tea was over and cleared off, I got started on the actual writing part, with two weeks left and a trip to Chicago coming up.

How I do revisions is, I look at the big ones, and if any of them look easy, I start with those. None of the big ones looked easy, this time. So I did a first pass, knocking off the little changes to get rid of as many comment balloons as I could and feel like I’d made some progress. ”Little changes” are usually stuff like deleting unnecessary adjectives or changing a word choice. Every so often, I’d go back and write a few sentences or paragraphs of the new chapter. Then I hit the short scenes, again alternating with the new chapter. The nice thing about revising is that every time I get stuck, I can skip to some other part of the manuscript and work on that for a while. The unfortunate part of revising this way is that it leaves all the hardest bits for last.

On Thursday, I emailed my editor and asked whether Production was really going to be working on my book all weekend, or was the deadline actually Monday morning? David assured me that Monday would be fine, so Production was off the hook for the weekend, and I was on. Until 9:01 last night.

The manuscript is now 10,000 words longer than it was when it started. It has one entirely new chapter in the middle (I hope I didn’t miss anything when I renumbered all the rest of them), four or five completely new scenes, and a whole lot of new paragraphs scattered throughout. The last chapter got taken apart and totally rewritten; so did two of the mid-book chapters. This is all a lot harder than it sounds, because when you add a new chapter, you have to revise about half a chapter before and half a chapter after to make the transition into and out of it work properly. Same thing for new scenes, and even new paragraphs.

So it’s done (until the copy-edit comes, anyway), and I am going to take the day off and play computer games. And then get back to work on the next one.

People have to make time for the things they love, because otherwise they never have time to do them. This is as true for full-time writers as it is for everyone else.

Up until 1985, I had a traditional day job, as a Senior Financial Analyst at a major corporation. I wrote five novels during my last five years at that job, on lunch hour and coffee breaks and weekends (when I got coffee breaks and weekends – it was a more-than-40-hours-a-week job for quite a few months out of the year). Since then, I have had a non-traditional day job:  managing my writing career. As I have said over and over repeatedly more than once with considerable redundancy, writing professionally is a business…and running a business, even a very small one, takes time.

From answering fan mail to data entry for my tax records, I have to do dozens of writing-related things that are not actual writing. By far the biggest chunk of time goes to the cluster of activities I lump under “publicity,” which encompases everything from the aforementioned answering of fan mail to updating my web page (which people will note I haven’t done in far too long) to scheduling appearances like autographing. And I do relatively little in this regard, compared to a lot of more socially ept and publicity-aware writers, because I basically hate this part of my job. (Most of it; blogging comes in here, and I like that.)

The second big chunk of time goes to selling. Not to the public – to editors. Yes, I have an agent, and she takes care of most of it, but she still has to come to me with ideas and suggestions and expressions of interest and the very occasional actual offer. Movie deals that fall through (I’m not sure there is any other kind, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding) can eat months. And there is a sporadic low-level stream of little things – notifications of anthology openings, requests to write the introduction to this book, requests to do a blurb for that one (which is several hours gone right there, since I never blurb without reading the ms. first), requests for blog interviews or newsletter articles, requests to donate copies of my books to this or that charity auction - all of which take time to read and answer even if the answer is “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have time right now.”

And then there’s the financial stuff – mainly just tax records and royalty statements, in my case. I gave up on actually selling my own books years ago, because even just the paperwork for collecting and paying sales tax was too much, and on top of that there was tracking for cost of goods sold. It wasn’t worth the effort. But a lot of writers do sell copies of their own books at events or when they’re on the road or just out of the trunk of their cars to random people they meet.

Then we finally get to things that are more directly related to actual writing, like research (of which a lot more is necessary than many people believe). Research falls into two categories:  stuff that is related to current WIP (currently the journals of Lewis and Clark), and stuff that is not related to anything…yet (I just bought a book on the history of pirates that falls into this category, as did Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany. I mean, what fantasy writer could resist that title?).

The deceptive part of all this is that it rarely all shows up at once, which means it is easy to discount or overlook just how much time it all takes. If one doesn’t allow for it, though, one can end up with less time to write after quitting a traditional day job than one had beforehand.

I’m not actually complaining…well, no, OK, I am. I’m on my third deadline overrun, and I really need to make this one, or else, so yeah, I am complaining. But I still love my job, warts and all. I just don’t actually have all that much more time to do the production part of it than I had back when I had a day job.

Anyway, Rosemary is one of my best noodling buddies. Noodling is what I call the process of tossing ideas around with someone else. When I’m just starting off on a story, a lot of the noodling has to do with background, character backstory, and possible plot directions – the purpose being to flesh out the original idea seed-crystal until it hits critical mass and demands to be written. Once something is well underway, the noodling changes to things that enrich the story, even if they may never actually get into the story.

I tend to do plot-noodling with my friends whenever I get stuck on where the story is going next (and of course I do the same thing for them, when they ask). But it’s hard, sometimes, when the other person is also a writer. Many of us (me, unfortunately, often included) have all too much tendency to go “Ooooo, shiney!” when presented with someone else’s story notions, and proceed to take them off in a completely different direction from the one the author actually wants. One of my dearest friends can, in seconds, morph one of my minor characters into a protagonist and then construct a detailed plot outline for an entire novel featuring him. Which is great fun, except that once she’s done that, it’s really hard to get her to talk about the novel I actually want to write instead of the one she wants to see.

Rosemary hares off after alternate plots just as often, but that’s part of plot-noodling. What she’s brilliant at is letting go of them and coming up with something totally different. She’s also a good test-reader: if I can put one over on her, it’s a safe bet the plot twist won’t be obvious to most readers.

But I digress. Because the other thing Rosemary is brilliant at is the off-the-cuff remark that leads to a sudden waterfall of cool plot or background, whether it gets into the story or not.

Like today, at brunch. We were talking about tea, as we often do, and she commented that she’d always pictured the steam dragons from Thirteenth Child as whistling like a teakettle. Within moments, we had a whole new  bit of steam dragon development worked out. See, steam dragons are aerial predators, so whistling while flying or diving on their prey would be a Bad Thing. But the young ones need to stay safe in the nesting area until they’re old enough to hunt (and fend off other dangerous critters). So they are born with some kind of blowhole-like thing that lets their steam escape so they can’t fly; it gradually closes up as they age until they are old enough to be safely airborne. And of course, it whistles like a teakettle.

You can tell how old a young steam dragon is by how loud its whistle is. (Possibly also by the tone…or maybe the tone varies slightly so that the steam-dragon parents can tell their offspring from all the others.) And if a whistle suddenly cuts off, it will attract every adult steam dragon within range, looking for whatever is threatening their babies. Among other things, this means that whistling tea kettles are an extremely bad idea for settlers who live anywhere close to steam dragon hunting grounds.

None of this has anything to do with what’s going on in Book 2 right now. It is unlikely to get into Book 2 at all. I might have an opportunity to mention it in Book 3, but I’m not sure; it depends how closely things will parallel my original, now defunct, plot outline. But I had to tell somebody.

And I wouldn’t ever have thought of it, if it hadn’t been for Rosemary. Thanks!