New Website, New Awesome

My site has moved!

Please head over to my official website, mtelschwilliams.weebly.com to see what's been happening, read my blog, or find out about my books. While I'll be leaving this website up for a few months during the transition, no new content will be uploaded here.

I can't wait to see you at the new digs!

Creative Floods, Depresso Bull$()!+, and Life Stuffs

Guys, these last two months have been a horrible, fantastic mess. On the bright side, I finished the first draft of WILD TYPE and couldn't be happier with how it turned out. I have loved this book for so long now and when I hit the end of this draft I was on cloud nine!


Then, I crashed into depression-ville and actually sat around completely bored, hollow, in a paralyzing funk with no sense of direction, and wanted and did cry about stupid things. As these things go, I told as few people as possible for as long as possible until it just felt damn obvious that Margie was struggling to fake the smiles. I'm a self-isolator. I know that. Let's not discuss it.


After that, as I started with my usual coping strategy (complete with obsessing about whether or not the black cloud will ever leave and if I'm permanently broken), fresh ideas sprung forward. The creative flood occurred. (This flood I occasionally get may be the ONLY upside to chemical imbalance. [See how I didn't say it was me, but a chemical imbalance? Now there's a coping strategy for you.])


As for this flood, I now have a list of no less than five other books I think have potential and another string of six or seven titles I think I could use as short stories which read independently but could be linked together. These are the things I love--when the flood is pulling me along rather than under. Granted, then comes the issues of being in too deep, thinking about stories and characters too much, but that's a topic for another day.


All in all, I've learned to ride out the depressive rip currents as well as the creative floods. They are a pair and I can't seem to have one without the other. On the bright side, however, I can see so much potential for wonderment and magic in these new story ideas that it fuels me to work harder. I know this blog can get stale if I only talk about writing, but in all honestly, that's basically what I do. The day to day stuff I can tweet, the meat and potatoes is saved for you. You're welcome?


Sometimes, I struggle in life. I wonder what I should share and what I should hide. I also struggle with what this blog is from time to time and how I want it to be, what I want it to be. Above all else, I believe it should be honest and I will always approach it with honesty. In no way do I want pity or even sympathy for talking about my depressions. I hate it when other people do it since there's really nothing to say in return, but by God, if I don't bring it up, no one would know and that's where that monster lives: in the space where no one else can see it.


My writing I can hide behind, show you a world so you'll look the other way, but I don't want anything, including depression, hiding within me. There's more room for creative floods when the light is bright and there are no dark corners.

Why Everyone Needs To Make Some Noise In Life

My neighbor is moving. The Fam and I live in a duplex, so really we only share a few walls with this one single, chain-smoking, cat-loving woman who's relatively quiet, as are we. Today there's a moving truck in the drive and a million adults and children working like a nest of ants to haul all the belongings of the last seven years into this truck, and let me tell you, it's loud. Through all the clanking and yelling, thumping and banging, there isn't much room for having a quiet day on our side of the unit.


Initially I was doing a lot of eye rolling. This was my writing day and they were altering what I had preplanned for. But then I shifted gears, calmed down, and thought that for her this is a huge day. She's starting over in another state and everything familiar about her routine and day to day life are ending. Of course, there's bound to be a ton of noise. She's branching out and growing like a freshly pruned plant and frankly, I'm surprised there's not more noise in this act of rebirth. Sure, she may not be thinking of it like that as she carried box after box to the truck in ninety degree heat, but I'm certain she's changing in this experience. Hell, she's even literally uprooted all of her plants and bundled them for transplant at her new home.


Then something occurred to me: I've just returned home from a few days with fantastic writer friends and I think the only time we shut up was to sleep. We gabbed and giggled for hours. There was nothing but noise from sun up to sun down, but I promise you, I've grown richer in terms of my experiences and writing because of all that wonderful noise. So while I'm still and always will be a relatively quiet person, I've learned the value now of making some noise and breaking the shells around us that we thought we permanent. You need noise in your life sometimes so you can enjoy the richness and growth of the silence afterward.

On Writing Gods and Summer Vacations

It's June. Kiddo is home for the summer and the Writing Gods seem to have a knack for cramming tight deadlines into the whims, wants, and needs of bored school children with a sudden expansive estate of open, unstructured time. That's right, my "writing" days of free time, alone, by myself, uninterrupted, are gone until the middle of August.


So let's talk about excuses. This is a PERFECT time for me to say, meh, guess I can't write today--gotta watch the child, got to clean the house, got to make babysitting plans for the days I work. All of those sound like the easy way out of writing. They are. These days/weeks/months (summer, for me, other times for you) turn into the best excuses. It just makes sense to "take a break" or "relax a little."


For me, however, the excuses (even mine) are heard for what they are: procrastination with a backstory.


While it seems very convenient to bow down to the Writing Gods' will and just give in, because, hey, the kid's got to eat/play/be taken to gymnastics, this scenario is totally the tunnel painted onto the brick wall. I will slam into that sucker at full speed if I'm not careful and by the time I come to, months will have past and no writing will have been done.


What I have discovered over the years is that the kryptonite of excuses is dedication and a plan. As I mentioned above, I'm working on some tight deadlines right now. If these dates aren't hit, I will crumble. I need to hit my mark each time in order to feel progress within myself. A sense of accomplishment cannot come without measured goals, after all.


What I didn't mention above is that these deadlines which are so tight and foreboding are my own. This is where dedication comes in. Yep, they are MY push on myself to produce X amount of work by Y date. If I miss them, no one but me notices. If I hit them, no one but me notices. The key is that I'm building and nurturing a discipline for myself which is productive. And each time I build up a new discipline, I find it easier to tack a little more on.


Initially (ten/twelve years ago?) my writing discipline was about just shitting or getting off the pot in terms of writing regularly. Then, I started to make it a daily goal. Then, because I had written, I began a routine of regular editing paired with daily writing. All of this is to say that there was, in fact, a summer season during each year of my discipline journey and each year I've grown better able to tackle the excuses and power through the temptation to "just take a break for a little while." I manage my time tighter to offer loads of interaction with kiddo followed by down time where we each do our own thing, mine being writing.


So, as the Writing Gods poke and prod at my deadlines, and glare at my late nights spend hunched over the keyboard, I know that I'm creating something here that I'll be proud of come fall. To me, that is more satisfying than any well said excuse.

Complete and Total Distractions

As a writer, my job is to sit still and dump out words onto the page to make a story you can read. My hope is always to give you the best ride I can with great characters and rich development of plot and said characters. This requires many, many, m a n y hours of solitude. As an introvert, I'm not complaining, but it is important to leave home every now and then and see the world around me.


Well, along comes "spring break" for kiddo. Suddenly there's this beautiful child in the house with me and she's not so keen on me sitting in the same chair all day. So, I went outside. We explored the NC Zoo (amazing) and she started taking a gymnastics class that she loves. Yes, I can still do a cartwheel and a round-off, thank you very much.


I also took this time to clean the entire house minimalist style and we donated boxes and boxes of items to our local Goodwill. It also got me thinking that I'd really like to replace our current sofa and loveseat since they don't match and are really old. I mean, one of them is, I swear, thirty years old. I made forts from those cushions when I was a kid. No lie. That means I started to shop online and out and about in town. There's a lot to consider when buying something like this and I'm terribly frugal, so this will not be a quick decision and I expect to shop for months to come.


But what does all of this activity mean? I've not gotten as much writing done as I planned. I aim to pull down 500 words every day no matter if I worked that day at my job or I was off. 1000 words is ideal; 500 is my minimum. It just didn't happen this week. I got totally distracted from my personal goals, and I became disappointed in myself for that.


In life we're often harder on ourselves than anyone else. It just happens. We make choices for one thing knowing full well we're turning our back on the other. However, as much as I dissed on myself for not getting my full writing goals met, I did get time to think, to ponder my characters. I have to say, sometimes that time away from the keyboard, when no words get out, can be some of the most productive story time ever.


So, while I don't have my new couch (yet), and while I still have closets full of things I don't need, and now I'm set to take kiddo to gymnastics class weekly, I did gain a lot in terms of plot which makes me happy. I guess the point is that sometimes our distractions can give us something in return we didn't expect. There's a beauty to losing yourself in another task and then returning to your "regularly scheduled program" renewed.

Going to make this quick

Hey guys, just checking in for the first time since I've decided NOT to attempt only big, life altering posts anymore. In all honesty, it's rather freeing since I'm not waiting for a spark of insight to happen before I post.


So, what's been happening? Queries are big talk in my world right now. The quest for an agent is one thing, but this is a quest for the "right" agent, so there's a lot more research and thought put into who I send my work to than I originally lied to myself about. That said, I did get a request for a full manuscript that made my day and since I've rewritten my query (for the umpteenth time), I've noticed I get a lot more personal rejections. (If you aren't in the writing world, just know that 'personal' rejections are actually a positive.)


Also, I'm past 20,000 words on Wild Type, and have been doing lots of really interesting research about explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of it is just interesting, but some elements have been really useful for me. Also, I've been looking at Lewis & Clark pretty carefully since their journey west is similar in some ways to my main character's journey west. (And I'm reading Manifest Destiny, the comic put out by Image, which makes Lewis and Clark into monster hunters and Sacagawea is pretty well badass. Not research, but fun.) Anyway, Wild Type will be out of first draft stage come the end of June. I'm on track for that.


Lastly, edits of The Unruly are going strong, I'm a week behind my regular schedule, but it's due to some necessary restructuring and I'll recover that ground over the next two weeks and be back on track (my preplanned track) to finishing all edits of that book before the end of the year.


Otherwise, I'm good. Been an Olympic watching addict and reading The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin. I just finished The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan and it was flipping amazing. Sometimes you realize when the bar has been raised and Kiernan certainly did it. It will be a long time before I find a book as good as that again.


Ha, and I said this would be quick. Okay, forget that. I apparently can't make it quick so you'll have to settle for this long "quick" post. Thanks for reading!

Sports, and Stuff, and Decisions

I've been thinking a lot about the blog lately. A LOT. Mostly, I've been entertaining the idea of maintaining balance while still managing to keep up with my contact with you. So here are my thoughts, right up front: I'm going to stop waiting for those big moments when I have "something major" to say or address. Too often I'm waiting for something pivotal to happen, so no post happens at all or they end up several weeks apart. Not that suddenly my blog, which I hope people enjoy, will turn to fluff, but that there will be some lighter elements too so it feels less daunting to me to write in it regularly. That's first.






Second, sports, I suppose. Feels like this should be a longer post already because I have a lot to say about sports as a whole but here's the simple meat of what I want to say about that. My firmed-up, writing discipline came from NaNoWriMo. I know how to write, I was taught great things about writing, but NaNo gave me that kick in the ass to sit down and have some damn self-discipline. How that relates to sports is this: When NaNo time comes in November, the NFL is in full swing. I get super excited for football because when I see football, I associate that with whole blocks of writing time I can squeeze in while in front of the TV. That said, the Superbowl just ended football season for me, so now we're on to the Olympics. That's right, if you're a wanna-be writer, don't just sit there and watch the "games," write through them. Squeeze out that writing time. I'm doing it right now to create this post.






Lastly, stuff. My stuff. What's been happening for me since the last post. I've put my query in a contest to get feedback and that's helped tremendously. I've written over 15K words on Wild Type, my current WIP, and I've edited up to chapter six in The Unruly, the sequel to The Flame Wars. Basically, that's it. I have another round of queries going out to agents coming, so that always takes a lot of work to research and prepare and reread and reread and reread again. Otherwise, I keep a steady pace of edits and new writing daily. SELF-discipline is the key there. And self-reliance. Never underestimate the power of "self."






Have thoughts on my thoughts? Share in the comments below.

Looking Backward, Looking Forward

The New Year is nearly here. 2014!! Everything is possible with enough elbow grease and wine. Right? Well, almost. 2013 was one of the best years I ever had. Seriously. One of the best for a gazillion reasons from family life to work life to personal writing life. 2013 was not without struggle, mind you, but it came with triumph on many sides. There is, however, a reason for this--a very specific, detailed, exacting reason for this. And here it is:

So We Press On

I've been both exhausted and revived by writing lately. Luckily, the stories that are coming from this work will hopefully, one day, be a source of total enjoyment for others. Not only am I in deep with edits on The Unruly (sequel to The Flame Wars), but also I'm plotting the third book in the trilogy and two other books entirely (shh, these are secret books you know nothing about). All of this creative energy gets very muddy sometimes since my eagerness is bigger than the amount of time I can spend on these things. I literally have four different notebooks going right now to catch any ideas I have for each of these tales as they come.

I think about my characters always. In the shower, in the car, at work (sorry, Terry), and even when I'm playing games with the kiddo. I can't not think about them. This mental work tires me, and yet, I can't have it any other way. If I back off to "get a break" it's as though a jar of marbles just smashed on the floor and I spend the next "writing day" trying to find all the loose pieces to recover ground.

I can't say I have a writing process as much as a writing lifestyle. Finding the magic, losing the magic, refinding the magic. It happens in cycles, but they are familiar cycles. (There is no angelic muse on my shoulder, mind you. Just me.)

And then there are times when I get discouraged.

Times when confidence flutters in the breeze because it's not anchored to anything. Times when I don't feel appreciated, or times when I do but I don't believe what people are telling me. And there are times when, for no good reason, I just don't know that anyone cares about my work--the hours spent writing that they don't see. (That is the biggest issue with the writing profession, I believe.) And times when depression creeps in and all my characters whom I spend every day with go silent.


" . . . "


In those days/weeks, there's this other thing I try to remember. My [good] warlocks' motto is, "We press on." I think that's key in anything you do whether it's writing, art, relationships, horrible-awful-no-good days, parenting, having a career, anything. We must press on. Always. Push yourself to be better than you are today in whatever measure of progress you need. The world will wait for you simply because that's what it was made for--you. Then you go and make it what you need it to be. Press on.

Pippa

(Sometimes I write these short pieces to clear my head, break up--dare I say it--writer's block, or to hang out with a character I can't get a handle on. Not sure what to call them, but here's another one.)

Pippa

When she pulled the magic, it was like drawing a thread from a spool: slow, steady, friction warming everything. Pippa gripped the spell’s silver coil and grazed her finger over the surface of her own power. Technically, the world could wait for the enchantment. But for how long?

A rustle sounded in a dark corner of the vacant motel room.

“Quiet, you,” she shouted to the nothingness behind her. Her hair bobbed in front of her face, red ringlets corkscrewing into her vision.

She sidestepped to the window and glanced across the parking lot. Rain tossed itself about in waves, falling into shallow cigarette-littered puddles like pennies in a fountain. The candlelight flickered. The storm’s heart wasn’t far off.

The shuffling came again. A deep whispered voice followed by a hush. “What’s she doing?” it said.

Pippa slid her feet along the baseboards, marking the parameters of the dark, empty room, feeling for the creature her eyes couldn’t see. “None of your damn business, that’s what.” Her fingers went to work, toying with the spell coil again. Once she released the fibers a sequence of events would begin. Sorcerers should calm. Warlocks still. Witches would reign supreme.

“Don’t toy with it,” a growl came from the darkness. “Don’t play with us.”

“Shut up.” Pippa tugged her leather jacket around her shoulders and zipped it tight. “I’ll do as I desire.” She inspected the silver shimmer in her palm. The magic called to be used like a dog holding a leash between his teeth. “It doesn’t control me.”

Grating giggles ripped from the corner before twisting into a gravely hiss. “Then do it.” Panting followed rapid footsteps. “Spellcast. Let us out.”

Only because I want to, she thought. Pippa threw the coil into the air and ran from the abandoned room into the downpour. She slammed the door behind her and snatched the knob to keep it closed.

Vibrations shook the entire structure. Flashes of light exploded outward from inside the tiny room. The knob heated.

“No,” she screamed. Her skin pricked with pain as the metal grew orange. “Stay back.”

High laughter stung her ears. A bang knocked her backward. Her fingers slipped. Nursing her hands, Pippa watched the knob turn. The door squealed open. They were free.

New Territory and a New Title

I've done it. The book I've been slaving over for the past two years is nearly out of my hands. In the next few days, I'll submit this precious, powerful, exciting, deep, complex, and magical story to total strangers (aka: agents). To be clear, the road to find an agent is not just bumpy, it's down right uncharted. I know that I'm in it for the long haul and it may take several hundred dozen attempts before the right person comes along for this book. That's fine with me. The point is that I believe in this story, my characters, and my dream to share it with others. Sounds cheesy, yes. But, true is true.

And then it occurred to me: I'm in a brand new territory I've never seen before. I've written many books, but never taken one of them this far before. This is the farthest I've ever been from the Shire. (*If you're a geek and got that reference, pat yourself on the back.)

I want to underline for you how great it feels to push yourself. Challenge yourself daily, weekly, monthly, whatever. But do not let your days bleed into one another. Instead, mark each day with an asterisk. Make them noteworthy in your life and for yourself and/or others around you. (Note the "and/or" there. It's okay to pick you as the only one enriched.) That's what I feel like I've been doing by quietly working on this book while the rest of the world slept. I'm proud of each day I put into it.

That said, I've also played around a lot with the title. Burning Spirit always felt like a placeholder for me, so now, the current working title is The Flame Wars. That's how I'll pitch it from now on and if further down the road it needs changed, then I'll change it again. So there you have it.

* The Flame Wars by Margaret Telsch-Williams *

I rather like it. What do you think?

Getting Shit Done

So I started to write this almost apology blog post about why it's been so long since I've updated the blog. But it's been discussed before. (I'd link to all the times I've mentioned it, but I'm too busy to find them.) When I focus on writing, the blogging goes to the back burner. Not you, of course, dear readers, but the blogging. Instead this will be a post about getting shit done.

While you've been missing me terribly and suffering through having to read other fantastic things, I've been editing. If writing a novel from beginning to end was a fifty step process, I'd say I'm somewhere near forty-four or forty-five steps in.

Today I'm prepping the novel Burning Spirit to be sent to beta readers. While I'm glad to be nearing the end, I'm terrified of how much these amazing readers may point out my flaws. That's writing in a nutshell, I suppose.

Self doubt + hard work = a better book than when you started.

Take away either of those elements and the story/characters/magic may fall flat. But this isn't a writing blog, you say, so what else has been going on?

We moved! Yep, through all of this novel writing journey, the fam and I picked up and moved across town. We've done a move like this before, but for whatever reason (perhaps because it feels like I lost about 40,000 square feet of space), this move has been a challenge. I don't know where anything goes, and I don't know where anything is. Don't ask me, okay? 'Cause I don't know where it is. I'm just thankful I know where my laptop is and I can find the printer. That's really all a girl needs anyway, right?

Also, I'm still getting the plot and first draft of Burning Spirit's sequel on paper. Everything I've written I cannot wait to share, and then--much like our move--I don't know where anything goes or where it is after that. Don't worry though. About eighty percent of the story is in first draft form, so it's just the last twenty percent that needs to be written and I'm working out the best place to stop and leave off for the third book in this series.

Lastly, when I haven't been pulling my hair out with edits, I started a few boards on Pinterest. There's one for each book, in fact, so check them out and see what interests you over there. Now that's a website I could get addicted to.

There you have it, so I better get back to edits, huh?

This Crazy Hectic Life

Believe it or not, I wrote an entire post for you about 2013. I spilled my guts, stated my goals in writing and life, and sounded really optimistic. And then that post sat there in the "draft" stage for nearly two weeks and I never posted it. Why? I don't know. I really don't. Maybe because I don't have any mountain moving things to say, or because my goals sound like those of other writers out there: query agents, edit, write. It's not that this aspect of my life is bland, it's just that the whole post started to read like my laundry list, and you really deserve better from me than reading my laundry list.

That list is for me to check things off from, not for you to go, "oh look who posted, and what drabby-shabby information she shared."

 

Basically, if I had to sum up in a word how my life is going right now, I'd say things are simple and straightforward. There's three words actually. Sure, I struggled with depression over the holidays and will continue to (I've blogged about depression before), but things aren't horrible and I know they'll improve.

 

But if I step back even a few feet from my mediation and my obsessive nature about being near my laptop, my life is more like this crazy juggling act that involves flaming knives and maybe a few cats.

 

As of right now I'm editing Burning Spirit (teaser on that here). So far Burning has been all the way through my critique and I'm planning to spend the next seven months cleaning it up real nice like. You read that right. The groundhog saw his shadow, seven more months of edits. 

 

I'm also two-thirds done with writing the first draft of Darkened Sky, the sequel to Burning Spirit. This is where my brain lives right now. When I'm sitting at work, I'm thinking of Elsbeth. When I'm cooking dinner, my mind is deep in a cave spending time with warlocks. When I'm in the shower, you guessed it, I went to work with conditioner in my hair because these characters took over my mind.

 

Add all of that work to my day job, which I enjoy, and being a wife and mother, which I also wouldn't trade for anything that isn't dark chocolate, and my schedule was definitely too full when our car broke down for two weeks. Stress, yes. How life goes, yes.

 

I guess the real point of this post then is to say, yeah, it's a crazy, hectic life--we should enjoy it while we have it. If I quit writing, my heart would feel like something's missing, so I'd rather have the crazy any day than sit on the sidelines and watch it all go by.

 

 

How are you holding up in 2013? Leave comments below.

Becoming

There's a phrase that often repeats itself inside my head. It says, "I am becoming."

You see there's a gap between the person I was and the person I am going to be, so within this gap I am becoming the person I want.

Anytime you've had a goal or a vision but aren't there yet, it's okay, because you are becoming.

You are reaching down, digging up the courage/ability/willpower/gusto to do this thing you want to do, and once you've done it, you will "be." "Be" is a good place too, don't get me wrong. "Be" is like a beach resort destination, but "becoming" is where you live the other 360 days of the year.

I've been away from the blog for a few months, but it's because I've been busy becoming. In the last two months, during this year's NaNoWriMo, I wrote the sequel to Burning Spirit, which is currently titled Darkened Sky. I've never written a sequel before. I had to adapt--to learn how to be a new kind of writer. Again, "becoming."

So, I am still becoming. And I don't mind if I wear this title for years because "becoming" is a state of constant change. Always striving for the better element.

I'm certain if you think about it, there are elements of your life you want to improve on, and so I wish you a safe travel through your "becoming" no matter how long it takes. I'd love, however, to hear where you're going, so feel free to leave a comment on your journey.

Wiping the Slate Clean

Life has a way of becoming terribly busy on you even when it seems like nothing is happening, and when it appears you're moving painfully slow.

That's been my experience lately. I turn around and it's been two months since I've posted on the blog and really gotten a chance to touch base.

Well, first and most important in my heart: I've been writing. Without question, anytime I disappear from the blog it means I'm writing harder, working toward a self-inflicted deadline, or overwhelmed with the quantity of work I want to do but can't get my body to run without sleep.

I've also been doing critiques for my writing group, which takes its own amount of time to do well and helpfully. If writing is my baby, the critique group is my stepchild; these are the people that will pull me out of a burning building with their words and I would do the same for them--they cannot be neglected.

In the process of incorporating their notes about my chapters into my chapters, I had an epiphany and this is the nugget of wisdom I wanted to share that started this post in the first place.

...Makes You Stronger

Last Friday, when the summer sun had set and we had just returned home from a day out, a windstorm of twisting momentum crashed into our neighborhood. The Derecho was widespread over multiple states with little rain and maximum fury. Like a lot of others, we lost power.

Being the farm girl I am, I diligently lit candles and waited for the lights to come back on. That's what you do where I'm from. You play board games, fill tubs with water (just in case), and read by candlelight for two to three days. Since moving to the city, power normally is restored in a few hours.

The first few days passed without even a flicker of light, and the temperatures predicted to be near or over one hundred degrees kept their promises. With no air conditioning and no breezes, you can imagine the house heated effortlessly during the days to ninety degrees inside, and barely cooled off to eighty during the nights. The Hubs, our daughter Z, and I sweat along with the best of them. I washed clothes in the bathtub and hung them to dry each day, and we cooked food and made coffee over an open flame.

Day five brought with it an overheated car and then an abrupt complication which left us not only hot and sticky, stinky and hungry, but motionless. The idea of running out for a cool drink or going somewhere with working A/C was gone. With no power to recharge my computer and now no way to plug in somewhere else, what's a girl to do?

Life and Busyness

I've always been pretty clear about times when I drop away and times when I post on the blog with regularity. I'm here to say, that life has gotten pretty busy and that's when the blog posts slow to a trickle.

I'm of the belief that people need to know how to prioritize. That's how you tackle challenges and follow dreams: prioritize.

So when I'm overwhelmed with things that need to be done, I drop back on the lesser items to keep my focus on the most important items. For example, this blog is my connection to you. I love this blog; it's not a burden, but a fun retreat to peek in and see the world.

That said, when I'm choosing between blog posts and revisions on my novel, I'd be a fool not to chose the novel. Burning Spirit has to come just a notch ahead of the blog. If I addressed the blog first, and the novel later, I'd be sinking my own ship. It's just not good for business, for myself, or my soul.

A lot of new things have happened which have been great, and fun events have occurred, I just don't have the time now to share them weekly. I need to sleep sometime, right? What I'm not doing is quiting posting on the blog or quiting adding to The Trusting. What I am doing is refocusing, prioritizing, and refinding my balance in a new schedule. That is how you build a nest to comfort and protect yourself. And it is from within this nest that you can work, define yourself and your core, and create your most priceless eggs.

Putting Yourself Out There

Yesterday I shared with everyone part one of my six-part fiction series The Trusting. I've written, edited, and revised this story for weeks now, and after the countless hours spent working on it, there wasn't anything left to change. Well, onto the blog it went, as promised, and I made announcements across the Internet so the world would know I checked into work at Writerville for the day.

Then I promptly closed my email, blogger, social media websites, and I left the house. I couldn't take the waiting while I knew others were reading my work. I wanted to know what people thought, but couldn't handle staring at the screen in silence. The waiting period is an aspect author C. Hope Clark just recently blogged about, and I couldn't agree with her more.

Yes, it can be terrifying to share something so close to your heart, whether it's the project you've been working on, a piece of artwork, a fashion design, a novel, even a new recipe. Yet, you can't let that fearful moment between, "here, I made this," and "what do you think?" stop you from creating or sharing.

That's why it's so important to be brave enough to put yourself out there.

Item of Importance: The Key

A few weeks ago I wrote about Items of Importance in books and movies, and how much I love them. I also mentioned that I'll be sharing my own Items with you as I write and edit my novel, Burning Spirit. My hope is they are intriguing enough that you get a feel for the book through these items before you have the chance to read the story. Well, today I'm happy to share with you the first Item of Importance from Burning Spirit, and that item is a key.

Elsbeth, the main character, first receives this key when she goes to an inn. While it seems simple enough--insert in lock, turn--the key represents something more, something Elsbeth herself isn't aware of.

Elsbeth lives a life of secrets as she searches for other witches, but the person who gives her this key knows all too well who, and what, she is. What other doors could this key open beyond Room 9?

Knowing Your Voice

There's an expression in writing which says "know your voice."

But what does that even mean?

Knowing your voice is knowing truly who you are, how you express yourself that sets you apart from others, and finding the part of you that consistently delivers what you want to give to others without becoming generic or routine.

Knowing your voice takes time. You must grow into yourself, dig your roots down (not out to others), and find out who you are. For some this happens at 20, others need to hit their 70s for it to click, but whether you know your voice or not, know that it is already within you.

Rita Dove has a poem titled Ars Poetica, which speaks of a man who "entered each day with an ax." That's my way of knowing your voice. To enter each day with the same powerful tool, whether it be an ax, an ear, a shoulder, a pen, ambition, vibrancy, etc. But knowing your "voice" isn't something exclusive to writers. Everyone should, at some point in their lives, come to know their voice and hear how it sounds unlike any other.