Category Archives: Writing

Writing Truisms

Matociquala reminds everyone about one of the overlooked/unknown truths regarding professional writing:

(this pro writer thing isn’t just writing. There are page proofs, interviews, research, contracts, business nonsense, copy-edits. There is slush to read. There is Stuff. Stuff takes up a couple of hours a day. Every day. Some days it can take ALL DAY.)

and

continued creative output requires continuous creative input.

The Stuff can really mire you down. Particularly if, like me, you forget that it’s part and parcel of the whole career while you’re doing it, and think it doesn’t qualify as Real Work.

Swan Sister Update

Total word count, Swan Sister: 26,751
New words today: 1,736

It takes a while to get going, but once I’m in motion it goes well. I hate that I don’t have consecutive days in which to work, though; it takes me hours to get back into the flow of thought and theme. And there’s so many layers in this story that I need to be in the right headspace for it to happen correctly, otherwise I just flail around, which gets neither me nor the book anywhere.

Off to get the boy. Orchestra tonight. No idea what will happen in that dinner-shaped space in between.

Argh!

Oh, bloody hell —

There’s a fairy-tale Swan Sister book already. Not my story, thank goodness, but the title. Bah. (Also a non-fairy tale book, but this disturbs me less.)

Yes, yes, I know there are hundreds of books that share similar or identical titles with one another out there. But when one believes one has come up with a perfect title, and discovers that someone else already did, it somewhat takes the wind out of one’s sails. And I know perfectly well that a working title has nothing to do with the final title, more often than not. Still: argh.

Surreal – Private

The Way of the Green Witch is currently in the top 100 bestsellers in the Wicca category in Amazon.ca, occupying the 82th position. Oddly, it outranks the Ann Moura green witchcraft books. It’s also outselling most of the books by Buckland, Farrars, and Starhawk.

I find this really out of whack. Granted, this list of the top 100 Wicca-category books reflects recent sales on Amazon.ca alone, and it’s not like it’s one of the top 100 bestselling books from all categories — but still. Very surreal.

Accomplished

So far this morning I have:

– written half a dozen thank yous for mail and Christmas-associated stuff
– gone through winter/spring 2007 frontlists from three publishers to pinpoint potential review books, and made a schedule for reviews through July
– discussed the details of an article assignment for Wyntergreene, the local neopagan journal, due at the beginning of February
– talked through a potential second article for the same journal, also due at the beginning of February
– read news
– uninstalled and reinstalled and repaired Adobe so that it actually opens PDF files I download from the internet
– did some banking

And yet I feel as if I have accomplished pretty much nothing. I have got to re-examine my personal standards of productivity, because this is ridiculous.

Well, I did cross five things off my written to-do list. That’s something.