Interview with Noelle Veldhouse

When and why did you begin writing? What genre/style do you generally write (fiction, poetry, non-fiction, mystery, literary, etc)?

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. Recently, I decided to follow a dream and started writing & illustrating children's literature.

Do you ever write in multiple genres?

Yes, no, maybe so.
Where might we be able to find your work?I started doing my own blog on my website, but have been so busy with work, kids, house stuff, and being pregnant that I have really haven't blogged in a while. I need to get back to it! However, I do have a poem published with Boise Novel Orchard's first publication Bites From the Orchard. It is called Piggtoot the Forgotten.

What is success for a writer? What do you do to get yourself there?
Success is defined differently for everyone. To me, as long as you are still having fun, writing and enjoying it, you are a success! Also, deep breathing helps.

Do you have a writing schedule? What works for you? How do you keep up the discipline to stick to that schedule?

I LOVE to write first thing in the morning, before anyone else is up and it is just me and the computer. But, I really also enjoy writing during nap time when I get to sit and relax in peace. My goal is to work on my book several times a week and do something every day, even if it is a sketch or a rewrite on a certain line.


You're walking on a straight line. There's trees and grass and bunny rabbits. The road turns a bit, and reveals a fork. Do you go right or left?

I'm sorry, what? I got distracted. I was supposed to be following a line? I was over on the hill chasing a butterfly.


What do you like to read?

Stuff that makes me think, smile and/or laugh.


Who's your favorite author?

I enjoy children's authors, Ted Arnold, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss. I do read books written for my own age. My favorite book tends to be the one that I'm currently reading.

Has this writer influenced you and your work?

They all have. Love them all & their creativity!

What about a writer you despise?

I think every writer does the best they can with the knowledge they have at the time. I'm not a fan of certain authors, but I don't despise them. I can say that I have no desire to ever read anything that else that John Steinbeck has written after I read Grapes of Wrath.
Has this person affected your writing at all? no

Where would you take your favorite author to dinner?

I would love to have dinner with Dr. Seuss but since that is not possible, Ted Arnold.

What's on your reading list right now?

I just finished reading Born To Run (LOVED IT!) and up next is The Princess Bride.

Do you have any projects on your table right now? What are they?

Yes.
Pants on Head and
Princess Piper Pillowey


At what stage are they?
I am sketching my 1st dummy for Pants on Head & am working with an editor on it. PPP is on hold for a bit.

Are you satisfied with it?

It is fun & I love it! It is an ongoing process but yeah, I'm more than satisfied with it.

Have you learned anything from writing that applies to other parts of life?

I know that writing has HELPED my other parts of life.

Do you have any personal advice that you would like to share?

Yes, but one valuable lesson that my husband has taught me is that sometimes it is better just to be quiet and listen. I love listening to what others have to say about writing.

Look out! It's the Zombie Apocalypse, and the only inhabitable place on earth is an island. What do you do? Do what Bill Murray did in Zombieland. But if that doesn't work, I'm off to the island.
What do you take with you?My family, my dog, the Swiss family Robinson boat & all their supplies, and LOTS of guns (to kill the zombies, of course.)

Your computer just died, does this ruin your writing day, or can you cope?

I see it as a sign, I need to get outside and breath fresh air, go play or go to bed... depending on what time of day it happens.

Why isn't the sky red?
One sky,Two sky. Red sky, Blue sky.

Noelle Veldhouse is a children’s author and illustrator who is exploding into the children’s writing/illustrating market with passion. She teaches elementary school in Meridian She is the mother of 2 ½ children, a dog, a cat and a fish named Buster. Her poem "Pigtoot the Forgotten" can be found in Bites from the Orchard: Bridges.

Chad Smith: Flow

I recently just finished up a rough draft of a long poem I had been working on with the title “Bébé qui lutte avec des diables”. I would have actually had this post done sooner if I hadn’t been so obsessed with making the poem work right (oh and the LOST series finale also took the wind out of my writing sails). I’m not sure if it’s perfect yet but I’m setting it down for a few days and will pick it up later and hopefully have a fresh perspective.

According to my computer’s translator, Bébé qui lutte avec des diables is French for “Baby who battles with devils”. I don’t know French so I guess that’s right. I don’t know how to pronounce it either. I just know it by seeing it and haven’t tried to say the poem’s title out loud very often yet.

Another name I don’t know how to pronounce and mostly just see in writing is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I don’t have to spell much of it either now that search engines fill in what you’re looking for once you start typing Mihaly. I first heard of Csikszentmihalyi’s work in a great class I took in college called the Psychology of Creativity. It was a class on how to beef up one’s creativity. I bought his book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” a few years ago and hope to finish reading it some day.

Csikszentmihalyi is a psychology professor who coined the phrase “flow” to label that moment of being in the zone, bliss, or ecstasy when one is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. That state where you are concentrating entirely on what you are doing and time seems to fly by. Inspiration hits and you are feeling totally on fire and creative. Csikszentmihalyi believes that experiencing this optimal experience brings people true happiness and enhances quality of life.

I am a flow junkie. If I can get to that state while doing something creative then I am totally in heaven. It keeps me coming back to the creative process again and again. After that class on creativity and learning that getting lost in creating ones art was called flow, I started to notice when my own moments occurred.

The first time I really said, “Hey I was just experiencing flow” was when I was doing some digital video editing using the program Final Cut Pro on the computer for an editing class I was taking. I was so engrossed with putting my video project together that I didn’t notice 10 hours had just vanished and the school’s computer lab was closing for the night. Flow has hit me quite a bit while working on video projects. So much so that I had thought that I was going to change my major to video production (I didn’t).

I have experienced flow while drawing and working on art projects. I often get lost in my work when doing illustration or graphics on the computer as well. I hate to admit this of course but even during my day job I have experienced moments of total focus and creative bliss.

Gosh, this is starting to sound a tad naughty.

Until about a month ago I hadn’t really had a flow experience while writing. I was working on a poem, everything was coming together, I was in the zone, focused and it hit me, “Oh my gosh! People experience flow while writing poetry?” I am even more hooked now on writing poetry!

The question then is how in the world do we get into the flow and how do we stay there?

Unfortunately it seems like with what I have read (haven’t finished the book like I said) and studied so far, Csikszentmihalyi takes a Yoda sort of Zen stance when asked how one achieves flow. You won’t know how to get there but you’ll know when you have arrived. I guess that keeps the magic of a muse intact. He suggests paying attention and take note of your surroundings when you discover you have been in the flow. What were you doing to get there? Csikszentmihalyi says that the task that you are taking on has to be challenging, but not too challenging and you have to have the proper amount of skill to complete the task.

It goes back to the old standbys: What time of day do you do your best writing? Do you have a quiet place where you can go and be free from distractions? Are you well rested? Many writers have all kinds of rituals that they perform or things the put in place to get the writing flowing.

I have noticed a lot of creative ideas come to me while washing the dishes or mowing the lawn. I think Csikszentmihalyi was talking about this being a form of flow but I can’t find the exact passage for it now that I want to write about it (of course). Something about the repetition of mundane tasks, getting the brain and body into a rhythm that it can do automatically and not think about while your mind is freed up to wander to and think about creative things. My wife sometimes gets annoyed with how long washing the dishes takes me. Lots of ideas come to me and I have to stop and write them down. Once again my day job’s repetition is great for getting out of my head and thinking of more important things.

Music also helps me get my flow on. I listen to head phones all day at work and I find instrumental music, jazz and lately electronic dance music has been getting me into a trance like creative state. I think there is something to the repetition and the beats.

So had you heard of flow? Maybe you have experienced it but hadn’t heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? I was hoping to give you a bit of an introduction and give you a springboard to do your own investigating. What methods do you use to get into the flow and bring the muse forth?

While looking up info on the nets to help with writing this post, I found quite a few blog posts that covered this subject much better than I. There is a ton of stuff out there if you are interested in investigating flow and creativity further. Here are a few good links that I looked at:

There are lots of videos of Csikszentmihalyi speaking. This TED talk was pretty good:
http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html

An article by Csikszentmihalyi in Psychology Today on finding flow:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199707/finding-flow

An article on the benefits of boredom:
http://www.naturallifemagazine.com/lifelearning/boredom.htm

Especially interesting to me are these links on poetry and flow:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5907

http://magmapoetry.com/archive/magma-34/articles/poetry-in-practice-creative-flow/

These last two links are on creativity:
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/being-creative-the-right-brainleft-brain-myth-and-flow.html

http://blog.iso50.com/2010/02/10/overcoming-creative-block/

Why Blog?

The first blog from May's guest blogger, Chad Smith. Chad won the Bridges contest. His poem, "No Rocks on This End," can be found in Bites from the Orchard: Bridges. Happy reading!
Megan

First off let me say thanks to Megan and everyone in the writer's group for letting me hang out in the Novel Orchard. I am truly honored to have my poem in your book. Sorry I couldn't make it to the book's opening night, but alas I am in Portland and my private jet has been in the shop all week.

When Megan asked me to be a guest blogger here on Writing Through the Year I was frightened at first. Sure I would do it I guessed, but what in the world did I know about writing? Then I thought about some subjects to write about and calmed down a bit:

I was asked to write a blog post. I can totally do that.

I will have been writing blog posts for 9 years this August. My first post is dated August 18th 2001. Before that I had been keeping a creative journal in a spiral notebook for several years. I don't think everyone was calling it blogging yet back in 2001 (I'm definitely not the first person to have started a blog). I think of myself as a journal keeper. No, not a diary. A journal.

I started keeping a creative journal right after I graduated from high school when an instructor at Portland Community College suggested that everyone should keep one. A place to store all of your creative thoughts. Story ideas, plot lines, dialog. Ideas for drawings and graphics. Notes for your Great American Novel. As I started to get into it and get some words down on paper I found that my creative journal, along with the notes and ideas was turning into a diary. Keeping track of my daily activities was keeping more entertained than scribbling notes for graphic designs or movie scripts.

Around 1996 I came up with the name Jack Noodle. I was subscribed to AOL back then and I wanted a name for my AOL email that didn't have to have a number in it. Chad Smith was already taken (believe it or not). Jack Noodle was born. I was going to use the name Jack Noodle everywhere I went in cyberspace and all of my artworks and writings would be signed by Jack Noodle. Now days I don't try to push the pseudonym as much. Everyone knows that Jack Noodle is really Chad Smith. No mystery.

That takes us to right around 1999 - 2000. I had been reading and enjoying the musician Moby's daily journal that he had up on his website and was also reading a journal by a multimedia artist named Mumbleboy. I was constructing my jacknoodle.com website and graphic design portfolio around that time and thought it would be cool to have my creative journal, a daily posting area on the site as well. I didn't have Wordpress back then so my posts were entered using raw html. I switched over to Wordpress around 2003 - 2004 and slowly reloaded all of my old posts into the Wordpress database then.

So where is this rambling history taking us you ask?

Well for my guest blog post I am going to agree with your previous guest blogger, Margaret Ellsworth's post last month on Practice and maybe expand a bit on the idea that blogging and keeping a journal is a very important activity for writers to take part in these days.

I think that anyone who is an aspiring writer should get a blog going. It's a great tool in helping build your writing muscles. I liked what Margaret said about getting the sensations of writing imprinted into your muscle memory. Maintaining a blog helps you practice the writing you will do on other projects.

Writing the Jack Noodle Journal is something I do for myself. There are other bloggers out there in the blogosphere that really worry about their numbers and try to get as many page hits as possible using all kinds of tricks. It's really easy to get caught up in the schemes and wizardry of page hits and reader numbers. For me it's about the act of writing and I'm not so concerned about who is reading it. Sure it would be fun to be popular and have a million readers but I like to think that have an audience of twelve.

Well if I'm not concerned with generating an audience with my blog then why put it up on the internet at all? Why not just keep my writing in my spiral notebook?

Despite saying I'm not concerned with how many people read my posts there is a certain level of attention set to the writing style knowing even subconsciously that someone might read what one is writing. That is good to cultivate and is really is a better writing than something one would hide away in a closet and never show anyone. If you are going to be a professional writer you are going to have to show your wares to the public eventually right? Why not start now with your blog?

Another benefit of having a blog is that I have a nice history and artifact of the history of the last 9 years of my life. Oh yeah, and with a search function even! It has been fun going back and refreshing my memory concerning the big events that have taken place. Along with family stuff I have interesting (to me) posts on how I felt on 9-11, a couple of presidential elections and other World events. Oh yes and I do still have some notes on creative thoughts and the start of some ideas I wanted to do for a television show until I saw that LOST was covering all of the topics I had thought of.

I have been surprised a time or two by who has been reading my blog when I get comments or emails. The most resent surprise was when a reporter from the Oregonian contacted me and said she had been reading about the details of my wife's pregnancy and the birth of our son on my blog and wanted to interview me for a story on paternity leave. That was pretty fun. You never know who's tuning in and what kind of opportunities could arise from someone enjoying your writing.

So that's my advice to you fellow writers. If you don't have a blog now then add more time to your already hard to find time for writing schedule and write a blog!

Also Facebook and Twitter are pretty cool too. Probably stay away from Facebook though, as it is a massive, distracting time suck. My Twitter feed is filled with people who continually give excellent links to interesting items. I've found a lot of writers and poets on Twitter as well....

But Facebook and Twitter belong in a different post.

May Guest Blogger: Chad Smith

May's Guest Blogger is Chad Smith, winner of the Bridges contest. His poem, "No Rocks on this End," can be found in Bites from the Orchard: Bridges.

[Edit: Never post things half-asleep, especially when copy pasting. The formatting will always get funky]

When and why did you begin writing? What genre/style do you generally write (fiction, poetry, non- fiction, mystery, literary, etc)? Do you ever write in multiple genres?
I started writing and illustrating stories way back in grade school. I took a creative writing class or two while in college. I enjoy being creative and making art stuffs. Most of what I've done in the past has been in the visual arts realm. I'm a graphic design multimedia guy. This year as a New Year's resolution I decided I was going to become a poet and I am starting to get serious about writing.

Where might we be able to find your work?
My poem "No Rocks on this End" in the Bites From the Orchard book was the first landing spot (of hopefully many) out of the gate. I have been posting my poems on my blog at JackNoodle.com

Do you have a writing schedule? What works for you? How do you keep up the discipline to stick to that schedule?
Oh! I really should stick to a schedule. I find that my best writing and ideas come to me first thing in the orning. I'm a firm believer in documenting anything that comes to you in your dreams right when you wake up. If you say you'll be able to write it down later in the day you won't and the freshness will have worn off. I had a whole poem figured out in a dream, still had it when I woke up and then totally forgot it later in the day. Many writing and artistic solutions have come to me while sleeping. That's quite handy when one can catch it.
If I could get more nuts and bolts, nose to the grind stone writing done in the night before sleeping that would be awesome. I'm usually too sleepy then.

You're walking on a straight line. There's trees and grass and bunnyrabbits. The road turns a bit, and reveals a fork. Do you go right or left?
Left of course.

What do you like to read? Who's your favorite author? Has this writer influenced you and your work? that about a writer you despise? Has this person affected your writing at all? Where would you take your favorite author to dinner?
I'm an excellent starter of books but a horrible finisher. I wish I was more of a reader. I'm in love with the idea of being an avid reader and consumer of books. I think one of my problems is I read too slow and then my mind wanders off when an interesting idea pops up in the book. I'm an excellent retainer of the words that do make it into my noggin though.

What's on your reading list right now?
Right now I am reading all poetry. I've been checking out lots of how to write poetry books from the library and reading as many poets as I can. I'm digging Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. I discovered Kim Addonizio a couple of days ago and can't wait to check out more of her stuff. I'm going to investigate Gertrude Stein in the near future. Oh yes, and Arthur Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell" is magnificent. I'm still a toddler in the poetry world and I've been quite excited with where my self educating journey has taken me so far. I'm still figuring this stuff out.

Do you have any projects on your table right now? What are they? At what stage are they? Are you satisfied with it?
Right now I am working on a one hundred line poem about a baby who fights demons. I'm also trying to finish up some poems that I'm not posting to the website in hopes of submitting them to some poetry magazines. There's that whole, "Is posting your poem to your blog count as previously published?" question that I haven't got a solid answer on yet. I'm trying to write one hundred poems in 2010. I'm not sure if I'll make it. I have a thing for the number one hundred and I'm trying to slip it in every chance I get. Not sure why.

Look out! It's the Zombie Apocalypse, and the only inhabitable place on earth is an island. What do you do? What do you take with you?
I don't care for the zombie genre so much. I think somebody should totally write a zombie teen romance series in the vein of Twilight though.
My favorite horror movie is "Devil's Rejects" by Rob Zombie. Devil's Rejects is the sequel to "House of a Thousand Corpses" and they should both be viewed in the same sitting. House of a Thousand Corpses isn't as good as Rejects but you must see it to appreciate how horrible and terrifying the characters in Devil's Rejects are. Despicably not for anyone the slightest bit squeamish. Very scary.
Wow look at that tangent.

Your computer just died, does this ruin your writing day, or can you cope?
I'm a computer guy. I have to sit in front of a computer everyday for my day job and I enjoy it. I am getting to the point in my old age though that I probably wouldn't mind if my computers died. Pen and paper is nice for writing. I would miss the spell checker!
That is an excellent reminder to save and backup your files.

Wood for the Table

Sorry for the delay, here is the second blog from this month's guest blogger, Margaret Ellsworth. - S.




“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry… Both are very hard work. Writing is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez



As writers, we work with the material we have at hand—which is reality, and the words we use to describe that reality. Now, I’m a nonfiction writer, so reality is a bit more of an issue for me, since the reader expects my pieces to be fact-checkably “real.” But fiction and poetry have an equal responsibility to reality. Because unless the writer can create a world in her story that’s as detailed and rich as the world we inhabit, the reader’s not going to stick with it. We’re using reality, but we’re also competing with reality, which is already a sensory overload experience.



Which is why good writing draws from reality. The best dialogue has the same rhythms as conversations we’ve heard before. The best characters, while unique in their own ways, often share characteristics with people we recognize from our own lives. Even sci-fi and fantasy worlds may not correspond to “reality” as we know it, but a good writer can fill these worlds with so much realistic detail that we hardly notice.



It’s these details that can make or break a story. So where do we get these details from? The details that allow people to enter the worlds we create, and be able to see and smell and touch the world around them, clearly? How do we gather the wood for our table? Here are a few suggestions:



Get out in the world, and take notes. This is crucial for nonfiction writers—to get out there and experience the reality we’re trying to convey. We can actually go to the settings of our stories, and get details there. But this can be a useful tool for fiction writers too. If your characters happen to be musicians or doctors, see if you can find some musicians or doctors in the real world to shadow. If you’re writing a bustling town scene for your historical/fantasy book, head down to the farmer’s market and watch how people interact with each other there.



Take a notebook and a camera (or a cell phone camera if you’d rather be more inconspicuous) and watch what’s going on. Write down the little things: colors, sounds, smells. Notice the way people move and talk to each other. You could even try to scribble down snippets of conversation, to get a feel for the rhythms of dialogue. Try not to particularly think about your story at this point: if you focus on what you’re writing, you might miss something that’s happening around you. Afterwards, when you read your notes over, you can work the details into your story.



Follow your obsessions. Tamora Pierce (author of the popular Tortall teen fantasy series) said that she watched “The Three Musketeers” movie 17 times during her years at college. Did it have anything to do with her work at that point? Probably not. But it gave her material later on. This is one of the most fun parts about being a writer—the license to be obsessed with anything and everything. Read books, blogs, websites. Watch and re-watch movies. As Pierce says, “All creative people--not just writers!--expose themselves to as much information, in as many forms, as possible, in the hopes that it will be useful down the road, or even right now. You never know what will spark something new!”



Write what you know. I know, it’s an old cliché, something writing professors like to say… and then they end up with a stack of dorm-drama stories on their desk. You may think that “what you know” is too boring to ever interest anyone else. But I’m willing to bet you know some pretty odd things. Just through 20-odd years of life experience, I’ve become (perhaps too) familiar with church politics, long-distance relationships, and wasp-proofing my house. Just to name a few! Go ahead. Take ten minutes, and write down everything in the world you know about, everything you’re an expert on. Maybe one of your characters will love the same band you do. Maybe your summer job waiting tables at a resort will give you the idea for a story.



How about you? How do you come up with the details that bring your stories to life?

Practice

I started taking organ lessons in college, for basically one reason: I wanted to play an instrument that was larger than my dorm room. At organ concerts, I’d admired the beautiful pipes and felt the sound rumble and echo through the concert hall. I couldn’t wait to climb up to the organ loft and pull out all the stops, to feel my whole body shake as I made music.

But after signing up, I realized I only got a few hours a week to play the “big organ.” Most of the time, I was relegated to a tiny practice room. This instrument is tiny; you could probably stack ten or twelve of this little organ in the big organ loft. There are only two stops, or varieties of sound (as opposed to the big organ’s 53) and the highest one is tinny and whiny, slightly off-key. But this actually makes the practice room a better place to practice.

When I talk about practice, I mean the slow, painstaking process of learning the notes. Figuring out how to move smoothly from one note to the next. Playing slowly, one note at a time, until it hardly sounds like music anymore. When I practice, I’m teaching my fingers the path between notes, locking down the fingerings into muscle memory, so when the lights are up and the concert hall is full of people, my fingers will know where to go. And I’m also memorizing how the music sounds. Soon I can hear the next note before it’s even played. I’ll know what it sounds like when it sounds right.

So what does this have to do with writing?

Many of us write in search of those “concert hall” moments—flashes of inspiration. Maybe a word or phrase gets stuck in your head, or a character comes to life suddenly in your imagination. Soon the words are pouring effortlessly out onto the page. But what happens when those flashes don’t happen?

What sustains me as a writer, day to day, is not those fickle flashes, but rather approaching writing as practice. Then it becomes less about the sheer power of your words, but about the little things instead. The feel of the keys as they click under your fingers, letter by letter. The smell of the ink from your ballpoint pen. The more you sit down to write, the more these sensations get imprinted into your muscle memory, into your unconscious.

The sounds of sentences are making their way into your memory too, when you practice. You might try a short punchy sentence one day, or a long rhythmic list the next. You’ll experiment with colons and semicolons and commas. And you’ll start to hear your own voice coming out.

That’s why I consider journaling, blog posts, forum posts, to be writing practice as well. You’re still sitting down to the computer, still working on finding the right words to express your ideas. You are teaching your fingers their way. So when you do get a sudden inspiration, and you grab for your notebook or computer, your body knows how it feels to sit down at the desk. Your writer’s “ear” knows the variety of sentences available to you, and can choose the right one. And the writing that comes out of this “performance” is stronger than it would have been without those hours of practice.

Malcolm Gladwell (an amazing nonfiction writer who you should check out, if you haven’t already) recently wrote a book called Outliers about what it takes to be successful. In this book he tells the story of the Beatles (way back before they were, you know, The Beatles) and a series of concerts that they played at Hamburg, Germany. This was a brutal gig—they played at noisy clubs to rowdy patrons, 8 ours nonstop per night, 7 nights a week. By the time they became a US rock and roll sensation, they had performed 1200 times. Twelve hundred. Most bands don’t perform 1200 time in their whole careers! That, according to Gladwell, was one of the things that set them apart from other bands. They had performing in their blood, in their muscle memory. They had put in their practice time.

Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become truly great at what you do. 10,000 hours! If I stuck to the college concert hall schedule, it would take me 39 years to be a great organist. Truth be told, I don’t care about the organ that much…but I do care about telling stories. And so, each morning, I sit down with my notebook, grab my ballpoint pen. I’ve got a lot of practicing to do.

Finding My Voice

And here's Phil, March's guest blogger. He can be found over at Tin Can Goat. Rumor has it he might be at the critique group meeting next week.

Here it is Saint Patty’s Day, the day before the day that fills me with angst; March the 18th.

You see, on the 18th I’ll officially age another year. I’ll tick another mark on the wall of my heart and plod on, chalk in hand, to the next year, ready to mark again.

Now, I’m not trying to bring anyone down. Lord knows I’m not one of those negative people who worry that I look older than I should. Or that my hair is turning gray (it is); that my skin doesn’t pull tight against my body anymore (only in a couple of places, most notably my chin); that I have hair growing where it shouldn’t, or longer than intended (ah, eyebrows, I curse at thee); or that I’m getting crow’s feet near my eyes (though the Carrion Crow are circling). Nope, I don’t worry about any of that, but I do wonder where all my time goes.

It seems the older I get, the more I slow down, but the quicker things need done. I need to finish the patio before it rains, or the days grow too hot. I need to play with the kids before they reach the age in which I embarrass them. I need to…blah, blah, blah. It’s all a foot race to my grave and I feel like I’m losing. Where is the time I need to keep up on my writing?

I’ve researched the writing habits of a few authors in attempt to sharpen my own writing. Most of these authors claim they write in the early morning, taking advantage of a time in which their minds are fresh, active, and alive. That during the early morning the imagination is fostered and the mind expounds creativity. Good for them, seriously, but I find it difficult to roll out of bed before 10 a.m. and stare aimlessly at the boob tube, let alone attempt to write.

The authors go on to suggest I carry a tiny notebook everywhere I go and jot down the surprising or interesting things I experience. Yeah, great in theory, but I’ve noticed as I age, so does my handwriting. I tried the notebook technique and jotted things for a couple of weeks, but I didn’t review the notes until months later and by then my writing looked Cantonese. Then again it’s probably just the floaters in my aging eyes.

I tend to write more effectively at the end of the day; a time when the wife and kids are asleep and their voices aren’t blasting through the vent system like a dusty, screen-covered megaphone. This is the time I find most peaceful and I can focus on the impactful things that happened during the day and I am compelled to write about.

I hold steadfast in my belief that all writers learn from other writers, good and bad. I tend to mimic the style of those writers I respect, as I think we all do. I think mimicking is helpful, as established authors help mold the style we eventually come to embrace as our own.

What I don’t believe is taking suggestions verbatim. Don’t get up at the crack of dawn just because someone else does. Don’t take entire pages out of a story just because one person doesn’t like it, re-write it and try again. Don’t paint a large pig black and white and call it a Holstein.

By the way, don’t worry about getting older, I don’t. Everyone grows old; it’s simply a matter of how we react to change, but change is good. Change helps us experience those things we normally wouldn’t, which helps us find our voice. Then once we have that voice we write and we write and then we write more; much, much more.

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The Death of Fini

Our guest blogger this month is Phil. He's joined The 500 challenge, and regularly posts his pursuit of the challenge over at Tin Can Goat. Keeping himself honest to the task, he always posts his word count at the end of his blogs (and, it's always at least 500 words).

It amazes me what memories or specific instances stay with a person throughout their life; for me it was receiving a failing grade on a ninth-grade creative writing project.

I don’t believe my English teacher should have written me a failing grade and I’ve spent a whole lot of time these past years crushing on it. It was over one hundred pages long. It was my pride and joy. It was a creative writing project. Yeah, that’s right, a creative writing project. For crap’s sake, how does one fail a fourteen year-old kid on a creative writing project and still sleep at night?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know I spent a lot of time imagining and typing that story. Yep, typing. I typed it all; cover, content, and credits. Although the word processor existed in some form or another at the time, I didn’t own one due to a lack of parental sponsorship and financing. My mother insisted that I craft my story the way God and Hemingway intended; on that mechanical claptrap the typewriter. What a disservice to writers everywhere that machine was. If you’ve never written anything on a typewriter you’re missing out. It’s an experience like no other.

The whole process of typewriting is contrived. It starts with inspiration and ends in pain—bruised finger pads, sore knuckles, and bloody nicks and cuts. Typing with the keys is tough, like pressing your fingers into sun-baked Play-Doh. The type bars often stick to each other, or against the type guide and ribbon vibrator, and the feed roller is a vile piece of engineering with the sole purpose of catching long sleeves and fingertips.

The machine never had a delete key, only a backspace, which, when pressed, slowly reversed the carriage across the body of the typewriter. Another classic and overused feature of the backspace key allowed the ability to repeatedly darken letters or words—the vintage method of accentuating text in bold. Overall, my favorite function of the backspace key was its support in corrections and rewrites.

Corrections and rewrites followed the exact process of the bold function, but expanded the process by requiring that I hold a—shiny on one side, rough on the other—white tape against the incorrect word or phrase on the paper and with my other hand, hunt-and-peck the same sequence of incorrect letters across the keytop. The corrective process was never pretty when complete; the paper dotted with flakey white letters, marking the pages in dirty, white cirrus clouds against a darkening sky.

In the ninth grade I started thinking I was classically cool. I was classically cool and I wanted to share my classic cool with the world. So after I typed the final sentence of my manuscript, I pulled the carriage return lever twice more across my chest, tapped the space bar twenty-four times to center the type guide on the platen and typed “++ FINI ++”. Oh yeah, classically cool; just like they do it in those fancy Penguin paperbacks.

I ripped the paper from the machine and like Stephen J. Cannell, tossed the page in the air so that it would rock itself—as a floating feather—onto the manuscript pile; unfortunately I missed.

I straightened the pages, stapled it three times along the spine, and sealed it with a kiss.

I couldn’t wait to turn this masterpiece in. I was going to be the teacher’s hero, her Hercules sent to save the literary world. She’d fall in love with my manuscript and I’d be published within months.

I was wrong.

I read her note more than a few times, still shaking my head at the red letters across the page, and wondering how she failed to see my genius. “You can’t write a story in which the main character is the narrator and have that character die at the end,” her note on the paper read.

I’ve beaten myself up a lot over the years thinking of how I am right and she is wrong. I have driven myself to tears over it.

I’ve fabricated paths to fame and how I’d push it right back in her face. I’ve thought about how I’d take my fame and write a story in which the main narrator did indeed die at the end of the story and the book would sell millions. There is no way she was going to have the last word on that. I might even make the narrator die twice so she’d really get the point.

So far it hasn’t happened.

I think every writer experience instances such as this and I believe we all react in the same loathing attitude when it happens—some of us more than others. We may blame the person we feel wronged us, we may hate them for mauling our baby, but it’s not worth it.

We need to step back from our writing and view it objectively like others do. Sure it’s precious infant and needs protected, but often we’re overprotective and blinded by our internal visions of glory and grandeur.

When it comes to my own writing, it lightens my heart to say that those who criticize don’t know what they’re talking about, but I know I’m just being overprotective. I’ve found that if I keep and re-read critiques weeks, months, or years later, that I do gain insight from the reviewer’s comments. More often than I want to admit, even the harshest critics have helped me grow as a writer.

I’d like to end with words of advice that will reverberate in the reader’s minds; such as, the teacher was vehemently wrong—and she is—but nothing is coming to mind. Instead I will leave you with a phrase my mom was quite fond of and has contributed to the person I am today: “I didn’t gain weight until you were born.”

Yeah, I don’t get it either.

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What Do You Do When You Fail?

Here she is again, our guest blogger Miriam S. Forster.

I have a confession to make. We're now almost two months into the 500 challenge and my average... is not so good. About 50 percent follow-through, in fact.

I'm still making it a goal, but it's a goal I don't always reach and that got me thinking.

What do you do when you fail?

I'm not talking about rejections from agents or editors or bad reviews/critiques. Those are things you don't have much control over. But what do you do when you set a goal for yourself and don't make it?

It happens all the time with me. Exercise and diet are the two biggest offenders, but writing is up there. I make a goal, I set out to do it....

And I mess up. Forget. Get distracted. Get stressed. Get too tired. Watch TV.

So what do you do?

I think the biggest key is to focus on the present.

If you aren't making your goals, don't dwell on your past failures. That leads to making excuses, or if you're a self-flagellating type, getting discouraged.

And don't worry about the future. "How will I ever learn to do this?" "What if I suck for the rest of the year?" "What if I NEVER make my goals?" These are not profitable questions, and won't help you.

Focus on the present. It's about you, today, doing today's work. It doesn't matter if you didn't do it yesterday, or the day before, or for the last six months. You can do today's work today.

Maria Killilea in her book "With Love from Karen" says: "Now is all that can be presently profitable."

So that's what I do when I fail. I start over, every day, and do it again. And I try to be patient with myself. I missed many blog posts when I first started trying to blog on a regular basis. I fell down a lot when I learned to ride a bike.

Failure is part of the learning process, and as of this minute, all your failures are in the past.

Focus on the now.

And go write 500 words, too. :)

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Three Things No One Ever Told Me About Success

Here it is, a guest blog, brought to you by author, blogger, and 500-er (is that a word? it is now!) Miriam S. Forster.

Like a lot of you, when I decided to get serious about writing, I started dreaming. Publication, awards, recognition, success.

But success is a tricky beast, as difficult to catch and hold as vapor. And there are three things about it that I didn’t know.

1. Success takes time

Writing is such a personal thing. Especially when you’re first starting out, everything you write feels so true and deep and precious. You want to argue when people point out weak points, want to believe that this thing you’ve poured your soul into is wonderful.

But the fact is, writing, like any other art, requires practice. You probably won’t play a concerto your first month of piano lessons, and most people can’t draw a portrait the first time they pick up a pen. It takes time. In fact, studies show that you have to put 10,000 hours of work into an art or discipline before you achieve mastery.

But patience and time are not the only things that success requires.

2. Success requires a day-by-day commitment

By time and practice I don’t mean rewriting your first book over and over and over. You have to write something new. New words on a regular basis are the best way of improving as a writer. You can always take what you learn and apply it to your older work.

One thing I learned when I started blogging was the importance of consistency. You can’t build a good blog without posting regularly. Exercise is the same way; a long exercise session once a week is not as effective as smaller ones throughout the week.

Perhaps you work better in long stretches. That’s okay, everyone is different. But whatever you do, keep it consistent.

It’s hard to be persistent though, when you feel you aren’t getting anywhere. And that’s where my biggest lesson came in.

3. Success is something only you can define

Here’s the thing about success. It’s always the place you want to get to next, always the step right past where you are. The unpublished writer wants to be published. The small-press author wants to be published by a bigger house. The unagented writer wants an agent, the agented writer wants a book deal. Most writers would love to write full-time and still be able to pay bills. There’s always something more to want.

What does that mean? It means that if you measure your success as a writer by those things, you will always fall short. Goals are good, don’t get me wrong. But you have to be able to appreciate your achievements for what they are without getting discouraged.

This is the most important thing I’ve learned about success. To quote the immortal John Candy in Cool Runnings, “A gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it.”

Have you learned anything lately about writing and success?

Febuary Guest: Miriam S. Forster

We're starting off the guest blogging with an interview with an Idaho author, Miriam S. Forster. Her book, The Flute and the Dagger, is due out this year. Keep reading for insights from a budding new author. Then, head over to her blog for some more reading, and updates on her book. Miriam can also be found on Facebook and Twitter. We'll hear more from Miriam later this week, and again later in the month.

1. When and why did you begin writing?
According to my mother, the first book I wrote, I wrote at the age of seven as a birthday present for my younger sister. And writing poems and stories in English class was always my favorite. But I didn’t start to love writing for its own sake until high school. I’d made up a this world on a computer game I had and I wanted to tell the story of it

2. What sort of genre do you write?
Mostly young adult, and mostly fantasy. I like how tight the writing is for that age. And I love the possibilities and wonder of fantasy lit.

3. Have you been published? If so, what titles? Where can we find your book?
I am in the process of being published. Unfortunately the small press I’m publishing with had a huge name change last year that pushed everything waay back. I have heard from my publisher though, and things should get rolling this spring.
The best way to keep informed about when the book comes out is to follow my blog, or join my Facebook Page.

4. How do you define being a successful writer? What do you do to get there?
I think success is a hard thing to define, because no one ever feels like they’ve reached it. Success is always just one more achievement away. And in publishing, a LOT of things are out of your control. So I try to focus on what I can do. Am I writing consistently? Am I improving my knowledge of how publishing works? Am I connecting with readers and networking to the best of my ability? If I can say yes to those things, then I consider myself a success.

5. What is your writing schedule?
500 words a day, of course! I usually try to write after work, before I go home and other things get in the way. If I don’t do that, then later at night generally works best.

6. You come to a fork in the road. Which way do you go? Why?
Probably the road less traveled, or the one that looks like it might go somewhere interesting.

7. What books have most influenced your life?
I can’t think of any specific ones that had a huge impact. I think the thing that really influenced me was that I was allowed to read widely when I was a kid. My dad shares my love of books, and most of his library was open to me. That really encouraged my love of books and storytelling and gave me an open mind.

8. What book are you currently reading?
I got The War of Art by Steven Pressfield for Christmas, and I’ve already read it three times. It’s a simple book, but it shoots straight about a lot of things, including the fight against Resistance and the way we self-sabotage.

9. What are your current projects?
I’m currently rewriting the book I finished in November, a novel about a high-school girl who dies and ends up into the body of a kitten. I’m also doing a lot of research about the Nome Alaskan gold rush for my next book, a middle-grade historical fantasy.

10. Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?
Oh, that’s a HARD question. I love Mercedes’ Lackey’s worldbuilding and Donna Andrews’ sense of fun. Tamora Pierce does awesome female characters like no one else, and Dean Koontz can almost always be counted on for good escapist plots.
It all depends on what I’m in the mood for.

11. Have you learned anything from writing that applies to other parts of life?
I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is to focus on the things I can control. Also, humility and patience.
In writing, you can get too wrapped up in the words on the page, too invested in the work. Writing is a deeply personal thing, but it’s also a skill like any other and needs practice. If you take critiques, rejections, etc, too personally, it can really hurt your ability to improve.

12. Do you have any advice that you would like to share?
Practice, practice, practice. You wouldn’t expect to become a concert pianist the first time you played chopsticks, don’t expect to be an amazing writer the first time you pick up a pen.
Along with that, the best way to be a better writer is to write another book, (or poem or song, or whatever). I spent years trying to rewrite my first book, and it wasn’t until I had another two manuscripts under my belt that I had the experience to make that first book what it needed to be

13. You're trapped on an island, what five things do you have with you?
A book on edible plants and a fishing net, to start. :) Also, a box of pens, a giant box of paper, and a really good, long book.

14. Quick, it's a Zombie Apocalypse! What do you do?
Run and find someone with a really big gun, then hole up in a bunker somewhere.

15. Your computer just died, does this ruin your writing day, or can you cope?
I think I could cope. There’s always planning to be done, outlining, or research. And if I have a scene that HAS to be written, I can always write longhand.

16. Where would you take your favorite author to dinner?
Flying Pie! Or somewhere like it, somewhere you can settle in, eat breadsticks and relax.

17. Why isn't the sky red?
Um, it is, isn’t it? Next you’ll be telling me stop signs aren’t blue! :)

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