aurorawatcherak "I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
I have a loose goal to publish a book every year. That said, I am my own publisher so I am not held to any dates. I don’t advertise release dates until the book is finished and I’m just doing last-minute cleanup, so I don’t have to sweat that goal.
So far, I’ve been really good at keeping it, and I usually publish two books a year. During covid, I published three books in a year. But it’s a loose standard, subject to revision as conditions allow.
When I published Worm Moon last summer, I turned my attention to the next book in What If…Wasn’t and immediately hit a writer’s block. I don’t get those very often because if I can’t write one story, I’ll turn to another which usually gets me going on both.
And it was understandable for this book because it’s the first full-length romance I want to write and, well, yeah, me and romance aren’t really close. I’m feeling my way through it. And it was also summer in Alaska, so wanting to be outside would have slowed me down a bit anyway.
In September, I realized I needed a break. To give myself some time to marinate the story I was struggling with, I decided to start work on the book that comes after Worm Moon (title tentatively “Inalienable Liberties”). Turns out, it wasn’t just romance that had me down. Writing the most-complicated book in the Transformation Project series turned out to be a struggle. Or maybe it’s writer’s block in general because I haven’t written much nonfiction either. Anyway, throughout October and November, it was like writing through molasses. I wrote a bunch of scenes in no particular order and felt like I was scattered and never going to finish. But then on Thanksgiving, I had a lovely conversation with some of my alpha readers and they gave me a bunch of ideas that provided the climax to the novel. Because everything is out of order, it still feels scattered, but I’m getting to a point where I can actually organize the story and then work on what is missing and what can be trimmed.
Whew! I still need about 40,000 words to make it a novel, but I know that’ll come once everything is organized.
So the point is, I will probably still keep my loose schedule of one book published per year, but it probably won’t be two books in 2023.
Beauty in Flexibility
I am still working my full-time job and trying to live life. I refuse to be a hermit-writer. So naturally, I can’t be too ambitious about writing goals. I strive to write somewhere between 350 and a thousand words a day about anything, but it’s not always my novels that get the attention. I try to finish a book every six months and publish yearly, but I’m not going to kill myself doing it. And sometimes, I go through dry periods when writing doesn’t flow like normal.
There’s beauty in flexibility because I don’t need to freak myself out if I’m not producing like normal. I did this once before a few years ago, where I watched TV instead of writing for about three months and then wrote the rough draft for the next book in six weeks. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a more productive period of writing. Sometimes we need to take breaks to recharge our battery/muse.
I still do have a couple of dates marked on a calender that tell me when to start pushing myself hard to complete my loose goals.
Bright Spots
The good news is that Cai Delaney may be talking to me again. The character had stopped talking to me a while ago and I put him in a position where he could die at the end of Worm Moon, but now I’m getting slivers of a future story, so I might need to resurrect him. I try never to kill off a good character unless they stop telling me their story. And I really love Cai. He’s such a nice guy and I put him through hell. I think this resurrection isn’t going to be a walk in the park. I’m not a capricious god-creator, but bad things definitely happen to good people in my books.
And then there’s what I’m working on over in What If…Wasn’t. I put Peter in prison, where I don’t really want to write his story. Even with my friend Bern giving me insight into the experience, I don’t want to write Peter in there. But the story of what happens later in his life is almost entirely written. I thought I’d concentrate on what happens to the people he affected, but that’s where I started struggling. I know Lily and Ben fall in love while Peter is away, but writing it as a traditional romance is s struggle. I know the other stories too and they will be easier, but I have to get past that hurdle first. Maybe finding a dead body is the answer. Or, er….
And then there’s Daermad Cycle. The fourth book is largely drafted and I just have to find time to write it. Fantasy takes time and a lot of immersion compared to writing real-world fiction. It also requires a reset in my own thinking because I’m entering a different world with people who think very differently from ordinary people.
The point is, I have lots to work on, so I shouldn’t have any difficulty with keeping up with my goal for a few years.
I tried to comply with this question and couldn’t come up with anything I never got and am, or could be, bitter about. I know that sounds weird, but it’s a basic principle I subscribed to in early adulthood and have practiced for 40 years. I try to leave the past in the past. I even named a book series after this philosophy – What If…Wasn’t. That alternative past I might have liked better didn’t happen, so I ignore it and move on with reality. Oddly, this makes my present more tolerable.
What if didn’t happen, so why dwell on it?
My disappointments are rarely tied to monetary items anyway, so I couldn’t buy them for myself. Last year, our daughter blew us off for her birthday (12.21) and Christmas. Why? Who knows? Itinerate musicians tend not to pay attention to the calendar. But I missed hearing from her and I could let myself get bitter about it. But if she calls this year, I’ll forgive her for past indiscretions and never bring it up. I wouldn’t be bringing it up now except I needed a disappointment to discuss. That’s the second part of my philosophy, which plays a big part in the Delaney family in Transformation Project. After someone asks for forgiveness, they never bring it up again. You hear it often from the family members — You can’t change the past. Move on. Do better. You’re going to walk off a cliff looking over your shoulder.
My mother would always bring up things from 30 years ago and revisit it over and over again and I didn’t like living that way. It made for a ready-made topic of irritation and I saw that as destructive. It wasn’t even directed at me and I knew it was a fruitless way to live your life. As a young adult, I read this Amish writer who explained that the Amish impart grace to those who have hurt them by forgiving and never bringing up the hurts of the past. That seemed like a great way to live and I resolved to do it. If I’m telling stories about a difficult time in the past, I try to tell the funny ultimately uplifting story. When I’m arguing with my husband of three decades, I don’t bring up that time he did that, though I do remind him that if he wants to bang on me about something I did 30 years ago, I have a lot more ammunition I could launch at him. He usually settles down because he absolutely knows I do and he acknowledges that I have never used it. Nowadays I can just give him a look that says I’m about to break my rule and he shuts up because he’d rather I didn’t. Mostly, after I’ve forgiven it (whatever it is), I’ve been blessed to forget it (I could access it, but I have to work to bring it to mind), and when I don’t, I resolve to never use it.
A tribal ancestor, the Sachem Tarhe, described it as
“burying the hatchet under a tree.”
The North American Indians had a long tradition of burying hatchets as part of making peace treaties with other tribes and the Euro-Americans. The peace would hold for a little while, but always fell apart eventually. Tarhe, being both a renowned war chief and a grand Sachem, said past parties left the handles sticking out of the ground so it was easy to unbury the hatchet. He wanted to plant a tree of peace (the white pine) on top of the hatchet. You could get to that hatchet again, but it would be more hard work than it was really worth. History records the Wyandot and Shawnee never picked up arms against the American government following that particular treaty.
I try to bury the hatchet and plant a tree on top of it. For the most part, I am successful at imparting grace to those around me. And when I’m not (usually because the other person dug up the hatchet and used it against me) I don’t beat up on myself for not being perfect, although I will continue to strive for that bar.
I think my life is happier this way. Intentional grace to hurtful situations and people means I don’t have to waste energy retrodding paths that will never be resolved. Yeah, there are things that aren’t always lovely, but they don’t have to be a central part of my life. This leaves me free to change the things that I can address in the present and that makes all the difference.
And, no, it’s not as easy as it sounds. At first, it was hard. As with most things, it got easier with practice.
They say this and that’s kind of true. I didn’t choose Alaska as the setting for Transformation Project or What If Wasn’t. I wanted to chance of strangers showing up in my town and I knew that wouldn’t happen in Alaska during the apocalypse. Alaska doesn’t have a lot of elitists and they mostly live in Anchorage, so I didn’t feel like Fairbanks would be a great setting for my coming-of-age drama. I chose the location of Transformation Project’s town because it was near the middle of the US contiguous states, had a website where I could investigate the town, and was able the same size of the community I was writing. I chose the community for What If Wasn’t because we visited it briefly during a trip and it was the right sort of community for the family I was writing.
But I’m not actually writing those towns, so a lot of the details are actually borrowed from my personal life.
The main street of Emmaus has several buildings that exist in Fairbanks, on our main street called 2nd Avenue. Alex Lufgren’s dairy barn is roughly based on a historic dairy here in Fairbanks. The dance studio in What If Wasn’t is essentially the Firehouse Theater where my daughter studied dance. There’s an ice cream shop in the fictional town of Port Mallory that actually existed here in Fairbanks, although it is now in a standalone building and I used the original location in a little stripmall because I just like it better.
In the series Transformation Project, I have one book Winter’s Reckoning that centers on a blizzard and has a scene set in the Fairbanks International Airport. The scene at the airport was written while I was waiting for my husband to come back from visiting a family member. The sensations and views Shane experienced are all real experiences I’ve lived through. The blizzard was somewhat modified to fit the geolographic location of Emmaus, but I know snow and cold, so what I describe is mostly what I’ve experienced.
There’s so much in life that writers can borrow to use in their writing. Our own experiences provide authenticity to our characters and its lovely when we can find locations in our real lives because we can make them seem so real in fiction.
aurorawatcherak 