Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary, Highland lass!

Reaping and singing by herself,

Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain;

O listen! For the vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.

(You can read the rest of the poem here.)

Afterwards, a woman I’ve gotten to know through the Poetry Saloon turned to me and said to me, half-kiddingly I think, that I irritated her.  How did I irritate her? I asked, surprised.  Then she smiled and said I irritated her because I always seemed so “happy.”

Her comment took me by surprise.  I honestly don’t think I’m any happier than the next guy.  And I doubt she would have made that comment if, say, she saw me dragging myself out of bed on a Monday morning.  But if she’d said nothing to me on Friday night, I might not have noticed that, in fact, I was extremely happy at that moment.  After all, the weekend was beginning, I was sitting in a living room with other writers, and I’d just read a favorite poem.  I’m embarrassed to think I would’ve missed the moment had she said nothing.

So as you start you week, I wish you this:  please take a moment in your busy life to notice what makes you happy.  Don’t rely on friends to point it out to you.  And if you have a favorite poem you’d like to share with me—a poem that means something to you, that makes you happy—I’d love to hear it.  I need something to keep me going while I wait for my manuscript to come back from the copy editor.

So what did I learn by writing a 102,000-word novel draft in 90 days?

4:50 In The Morning Was Easy .. Because I Couldn’t Sleep:  I suppose the worry of actually donating money to an anti-gay marriage charity would have been enough to keep me up a night.  But as the weeks went by, and I got more confident I could complete the project, what kept me awake was not so much the bet but the story itself.  What would happen next?  What would the characters say and do?  And yet I never wrote fewer than 1,000 words a day.  As a friend told me a long time ago, “The opposite of fear is faith.”  Unfortunately, my body couldn’t quite seem to absorb that lesson at three in the morning.

Weekends Are Harder Than Weekdays:  As difficult as it was to get up at 4:50 a.m. every weekday, at least I had a schedule.  I’d be finished by a quarter to seven and then breeze through the rest of the day with the confidence that I had the important work behind me.  With so much more free time on the weekends I thought it would be easier, but no:  I had errands, I had yoga, I had stupid computer games to distract me.  (I officially removed Words With Friends from my Facebook profile this week.)  On the plus side, by writing in the late afternoons most weekends, I had the advantage of being tolerably awake as I wrote.

Winter Is Better Than Summer:  Or at least this is what I suspect.  The weather’s lousy; you’re stuck in the house anyway.  If nothing else, pounding out two or three pages a day gave me something to do.

Take A Hike, Internal Critic:  In writing my first two novels, I could feel my internal critic hovering over me, telling me the sentence I just wrote wasn’t good enough.  I could spend an hour working and re-working a single page, or even a single paragraph.  But for this draft I didn’t have that luxury.  I stopped worrying about whether or not I was writing Literature, or whether the grammar hung together, or even if what I wrote made sense.  Heck, I chastised myself even if I backed up my cursor to fix a typo.  All I did was write.  For the first two books my single one-day writing records was probably between 800 and 1,000 words; for this project, I averaged between 1,500 and 2,000 words, topping out one day at 2,500.   Why didn’t I learn this discipline sooner?

I Shouldn’t Have Had To Make The Bet:  In February I went to the San Francisco Writers Conference, where I had the pleasure of listening to author Lisa See.  In her keynote speech she told us that if there was one piece of advice she wanted us to take home with us, it was that writers should write a thousand words a day.  Editor Alan Rinzler put it more bluntly in his own speech:  If you don’t write, he told us, then you’re not a writer.  In other words, I shouldn’t have had to play chicken with the anti-gay marriage crowd to write the first draft of my latest novel.  I should’ve been able to make the commitment no matter what.  And so this is the promise I make to my readers today — no more bets, no more gimmicks, just writing.  I’m going to work on this project every day until the damned thing is done.  My hope — my dream — is to have a final draft ready to go through the editorial process by the end of 2014, for a summer 2015 publication.  And by then, maybe, the anti-gay marriage crowd will be out of business.

In The Meantime, What’s Next?:  I have temporarily invited my internal critic back into the house to go over what I’ve written and decide what I want to keep for Draft Number Two.  (The critic has already weighed in on one point:  “Dude, your handwriting sucks.”)  In the meantime, the manuscript for my 2012 book, “You Are Here,” is undergoing some spit and polish with the very nice, very knowledgeable, and very thorough editors at iUniverse; the process should be over by end of May or early June.   I’ll let you know when I have a firm publication date.

One Last Thing:  I had earlier promised that if I succeeded in writing a novel draft in 100 days, I would donate the $100 that would have gone to the anti-gay marriage crowd to Planned Parenthood.  I am now happy to report that I did not renege on that promise.

Thanks, everybody!  You are all so fabulous!

Of the 90 days of this novel-writing challenge, today was the hardest.  I knew I couldn’t say it was “done” until I got through this day, but still I put it off until after I’d done my Sunday chores and finished the Sunday crossword puzzle.  And yet I put it off.  And put it off.  I think it’s because I didn’t want the story to end, to say goodbye to the characters.  I know I’ll be getting to know them better in the rewrite, but still, I feel like they’ve moved on.

I actually have a lot more I want to share with you about this whole process, but I want to get my thoughts in order.  In the meantime, I just wanted to thank everyone for seeing me through this challenge; it really was a big help to know I had people out there watching for me, making sure I wouldn’t miss the deadline.

In the meantime my completed novel, “You Are Here,” is undergoing a professional editorial makeover.  That process has only just begun and will likely not be finished until the end of May, meaning that if all goes well, I should have a finished product to share with you by this July or August at the latest (I hope).  I’ll keep you posted, and maybe even throw out an excerpt or two, as the book nears completion.  I’ll likely get a first edited draft back from the editor by mid-April, around the time I finish my novel draft.  I hope it works out that way:  I’m going to need a break from the new story once I’m done with it.

Things changed after I started cooking for two people.  My partner hates endless trips to the supermarket — doesn’t everyone hate going to the supermarket — and he quickly taught me the beauty of writing a list of groceries to buy for the week.  I write the list, we go to the supermarket, and then we’re done for the week.

For the first few weeks of novel-writing I was applying this very principle to writing the first draft.  On a sheet of paper I’d write a list of the scenes I wanted to write for that week, and then, every morning, I’d consult that list and write.  And for a time that worked.  Before I started writing the actual draft I’d written enough notes to figure out how I wanted the novel to start, how to construct the initial situation; and so those scenes came easily.

But now I’ve launched into the novel’s much longer second act, and here the list is failing me.  I still set a marker for where I want my hero to wind up by the end of the week, but writing out daily assignments is now more elusive.  Like a good chess game, where the number of different outcomes multiplies exponentially with each move, I’ve been finding that the further I wade into my new story, the paths I can take are branching out and then branching out some more.  Where should I go?  Which path should I take?

And yet I spewed out more words last week than any other week of this experiment.  Instead of trying to figure out scenes ahead of time, I just started putting the characters together and bouncing them off each other.  The results are a mess, but I can still sense glimmers of what I want the final product to feel like:  the characters are saying things I didn’t expect them to say, doing things I didn’t expect them to do.  I have no idea if what I’m doing will make sense.  But with the deadline now just a few weeks away, I just keep writing.  I’m groping in the dark toward a conclusion I simply don’t know yet.

And you know what?  I don’t care.  I want to explore all the possibilities these new characters are presenting me, and I’m curious to know where they’ll take me –with as little interference from myself as possible.  Writing a novel isn’t like going to the supermarket, thank God.  And what reader wants to read a shopping list?

I now have over 40,000 words written.  But by April 25 it won’t matter if I’ve written 400,000 words.  Unless the draft has a beginning, a middle, and an end, the draft will not be finished.  And that’s what I need to keep in mind in order to win this bet.

I’ve been reading Gail Collins for years now , and every time I see that the column is about Romney, I look for it, wait for it, can’t concentrate until I finally get to the paragraph when she informs us that Mitt Romney once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.   Thanks to Gail Collins, I can articulate this dog story better than I can articulate Romney’s positions on Iran, same-sex marriage, or the 2009 auto bailout.  (Although I know enough about them to disagree with him on all three positions.)  I know I’d be disappointed if Gail somehow forgot to mention poor Seamus the dog, but as far as I remember, she hasn’t disappointed me.  If anything, yesterday’s column was more of a disappointment than most, since she devoted the article entirely to Seamus, introducing her article with Seamus, instead of tucking the tidbit, Where’s Waldo-style, in an unexpected corner of her column.

As a writer I’m often scolded for repeating the same word or phrase; but this, I think, is repetition done right. (I suppose it also helps that I can’t stand Romney.)  But can someone help explain the craving I feel to read about Seamus whenever I pick up a Gail Collins article?  Is it some sort of Pavlovian reflex — the writer holding up the verbal treat over which the reader should salivate?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This past Monday was Day 49 of Alan Watt’s 90-Day Novel book, in which Watt had these subtle words for writers who surf before getting to work:  “The Internet will suck the life out of every writer.  It will turn the most disciplined among us into bug-eyed addicts.”  Of course I knew that before I read it this week, but since I was still averaging between 1,000 and 1,500 words a day even with the Internet, was the Internet all that bad?

I nevertheless took his advice this week.  Instead of turning on the computer I’ve been doing a small, meditative exercise (more on that in another post) and then proceeded to write.  The preliminary results are in.  My worst day this week was still over 1,500 words.  Today’s total, if you include this blog post, is around 2,300.  For those of you counting, I just finished Day 52.

So if you’re out there wanting to finish that novel or short story, for God’s sake — stop reading this blog post!  And turn off your computer, and do some writing in a plain old-fashioned notebook!  But with all that said, thanks for tuning in.

Cheers!

1. First of all, how does someone become a Top 500 Reviewer?  How many books did you have to review?  And how long did it take you?

I had been reviewing for Amazon for many years, just as a way to share with the world the books I enjoyed. Then they opened the Vine program, which gave a list of books each month to particular reviewers. That was a dream come true!

I can’t guess how many books I read before hitting the top 500, but it took about three or four years. Reaching the top 200 took a year of dedicating myself to the task of reviewing more frequently.

2.  What are your favorite types of books to read?  And are there any books outside your normal comfort zone that surprised you anyway?  (If so, I’d love to hear why.)

I love to read women’s fiction (not chick lit, but domestic, family dramas and dysfunction), anything based on mythology, a good love story, a thriller, books set in a school and quite a few surprising non-fiction titles. I am fascinated by indigenous people and their loss of land/culture to new invaders.

I am not very scientifically oriented, but some of my favorite non-fiction books have been related to science: The Wave by Susan Casey; Ghost Wave by Chris Dixon; and Invincible Microbe by Jim Murphy and Alison Blank (the story of tuberculosis). Each of these books taught me something about the physical world I didn’t know previously in a way that presented science without all kinds of pretension.

I don’t like a lot of popular fiction, including the Harry Potter series (just cannot enjoy fantasy). Stieg Larsson’s books also were too violent for me. I am not likely to read or finish a book full of gratuitous violence or erotica.

3.  What are your pet peeves in fiction?

My number one pet peeve is bad editing. Some books come out of major houses with errors in the text. I know they have cut back on staff, but it seems that if they are going to publish for astronomical prices, they should deliver a quality product. In the Indie world, a few typos may get by, but if the book is filled with them, I am an unhappy reader. I also dislike books that read like film scripts, meaning “time to blow something up,” “time to throw in a sex scene,” formulaic writing.

4.  Are there any authors out there you’ve reviewed and haven’t been discovered, but should? 

I could not stop talking about Say Her Name, by Francisco Goldman, although this book got some press. Michelle Richmond and Mona Simpson are incredibly gifted authors who deserve a bigger following.

5.  How do your favorite books ‘hook’ you?

Almost any month of the year, I have a new favorite book. The narrative voice in Room and Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue made those books that I could not tear myself away from. The love story in Carolyn Parkhurst’s The Dogs of Babel – “I remember my wife in white” — broke my heart, and besides, that book has a dog.  I read a lot of books about people with mental issues or drug addictions (Cost by Roxana Robinson, the best), books that show how one family member’s problem affects all family members.

6.  You’re not just a reviewer, but an author in your own right.  Can you describe how your experience as a book reviewer affects the way you write your own books?

I have learned not to do what annoys me in other people’s work. Creative Writing 101, quit describing the sunset. Make sure your characters are real, not cardboard cut outs. Create conflict and tie things together, but not perfectly, at the end. There are no perfect or perfectly happy endings in modern literature. I have also invested in two editors so that my new book, a prequel to A Tale of Two Cities, will live up to the standards I have mentioned above for copy editing. Look for Sydney’s Story this summer!

7.  I would love to hear any stories of you “discovering” a book before the rest of the world did.

I was lucky enough to choose to read The Help way back in 2009. I loved it immediately and called it a new, modern classic. That review is ranked as one of my best for Amazon with 1300+ yes votes).

I have recently read Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, another book that should be an amazing success. It is beautiful to read stylistically, and the story of the heroes of the Trojan War never gets old. Looking into the growing love between Patroclus and Achilles made my heart thump.

8.  Any final words?

One more comment for people who do read a lot of reviews: Take a moment to say yes, you like a review or no, you don’t, leaving a comment about why you don’t.  These comments can help reviewers in their status and also help reviewers know what works and what doesn’t.

Thanks, Eileen!

How to recognize the inherent slowness of the craft with the breakneck pace of writing a first draft?  How not to look back at the sentence I’ve written and hit the delete key and start all over again, wasting precious seconds?  Using a blank screen every morning, which I talked about last week, is one solution.  Another is something I call Fontmania.  Instead of typing out the draft in boring old Times New Roman I’ve taken with experimenting with all the crazy fonts Microsoft Word has given me.  In three weeks of hardcore writing I’ve used fonts as varied as Sybil Green, Ligurino, Blue Highway, Mufferaw, Baveuse, Amienne, Vijaya, and my favorite-sounding font, Boopee.  These fonts have two advantages; not only do they look snappy, but they are virtually unreadable.  (Trust me, you wouldn’t want to read a novel, or even the page of a novel, written in any of these fonts.)  But for my purposes, the less readable, the better.  After all, if I can’t read what I’ve written down, then how can I correct it?  But even then it’s hard not to hit the delete key to correct a misspelled word or throw in a comma.  The book advises not to stop to correct even the smallest errors; alas, some bad habits die hard.

Once I’m done I’ll convert everything to Times New Roman.  I’m looking forward to taking the time to read what I’ve written.  At the pace I’m going, I can barely remember what I wrote three days ago.

Over 20,000 words written as of this morning.  Thanks for tuning in!

When I wrote my first two novels, I found myself wasting lots of time looking over what I’d written before writing new material.  (I started “The Love Thing” in 2000 and didn’t publish it until 2009.)  Now I’m beginning to suspect that’s not only procrastination, but procrastination of the worst kind:  the kind that makes you think like you’re actually achieving something.  If I play Angry Birds, I know I’m wasting my time; but if I constantly re-edit the last paragraph I wrote, not so much.  So for this draft I’ve been writing all my material on one file, then cutting it and pasting it to a second file.  Every morning I face nothing but a blank screen.

Yet the screen isn’t blank for me.  Instead, I see the faces of the anti-gay marriage crowd, who will collect $100 of my hard-earned money if I don’t finish this draft by April 25.  When I picture their faces, trust me:  the words flow as if from a fire hose.

And how am I doing?  As of this morning, over 11,000 words written.  And with time to spare to write a blog post!  Thanks much for tuning in.