Here's my blog: distraction99.com. And here's my author website: novaren.com.
If you have questions, I might answer them. Depends what you ask.
Another song from the 17 & GONE playlist that carried me through writing the novel…
“Now that I adjust my eyes as you turn to leave,
I have come to realize that I was 17.
Only 17.”
—”Seventeen,” Meredith Bragg and the Terminals
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Another peek at my music playlist from 17 & GONE. I must have listened to this song on repeat for a whole month while writing a certain section of the novel.
“Don’t I know you better than the rest? All deception, all deception from you.”
—”Zebra,” Beach House
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A song from the 17 & GONE music playlist I used while writing the book…
“Run, run, run away. Lost, lost, lost my mind. Like you to stay. Want you to be my prize.”
—”Runaway,” Yeah Yeah Yeahs
(17 & GONE comes out THIS WEEK! On March 21!)
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2012 Was the Year…
2012 was the year I didn’t technically reach my goals, for life or for writing, but I’m not worried—I can carry a few of them over to 2013.
2012 was the year I finished my second YA novel, 17 & Gone, which comes out in 2013.
2012 was the year I went away to write at two colonies: one in the mountains of northern California and one in upstate New York. It’s the year I went to Wyoming to learn about outer space. It’s the year I fell in love, even more, with my home here in lower Manhattan, especially in those dark days after the hurricane when it was E and me on our own, facing it together.
2012 was the year I was really sinfully awful about answering emails. Ugh, I’m sorry about that.
In 2012, I wrote more pages that I threw away than pages that I kept. So it goes, some years.
I must say, I had full intentions to write a beautifully crafted, long, and lush post of all of what happened in 2012, to me and around me. What inspired and distracted me. What blew me up and broke me down. Lists! I love lists. But, truth is, I have a lot of freelance work to do right now, plus reading for the class I’m teaching, so I will leave you with only a few small bits.
By the end of this year—2012—I found my heart again, in writing. I finished a draft of my new book proposal last night.
This year—2012—was the year many different voices found their way to this blog. Thank you to every author who wrote a piece for me to share here. I am honored.
In 2013, I will let you into 17 & Gone, which comes out March 21. I will continue on with the Beyond the (Latest) Buzz book series on my blog, with more posts from librarians and bloggers coming in January, and because I love to read debut novels I will get to share the Anticipated YA Debuts of 2013—my first two picks of January 2013 will be announced on my blog soon. Things will happen. My blog will continue.
In the meantime, for 2013, I was gifted with one word to carry forward into the new year:
“true”
For me, it’s an answer to a question I’d been asking. I think it means I should be true to myself, as a writer. But maybe it means even more than that. I look forward to finding out.
Happy New Year, everyone.
(Originally posted on distraction no. 99.)
Source: distraction99.com
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Oh, Just a Little Creative Breakthrough
(Originally posted on my blog)
On the outside, this happened:
I revealed the cover and plot summary for my new novel 17 & Gone—and I have a pub date: March 21, 2013!
If you are a librarian or a blogger or reviewer,you can request an ARC here, for when ARCs are available, which thankfully isn’t today.
And I need to update my websites once I get a moment.
But on the inside, I’m a strange jumble of nerves and yes excitement but more nerves, come from having something kept private for so long now being pulled up into the light. Do any other authors get this, too, or am I a complete weirdo?
I am also in the midst of a creative breakthrough that I can’t talk about yet. Partly it came from failing utterly at this writing experiment (which deserves a whole separate blog that I will get to) and also from needing to follow my heart right now. Needing to write what I want to write, and—no offense—not care what it is I think YA readers and the market and critics and anyone else might expect or want from me. 17 & Gone is very much me, it’s kind of ridiculous, and I love this book all the more for that, so I might as well fling myself off the deep end and keep going instead of wishing I could be more commercial, which is a flaw I have, like wishing I could be a flamingo when I’m actually an ostrich. I’m an ostrich, damn it!
I didn’t build this semblance of a life to try to be anyone other than who I am.
And thus ends the cryptic talk about my behind-the-scenes creative breakthrough! How many of these does a writer have to go through before it sticks?
Source: distraction99.com
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On Chasing Ambition and Being a Girl and a Woman
(Originally posted on my blog)
I sometimes look around and realize I’m living a strange life—well, “strange” by the standards of what a woman in her thirties (I refuse to say the number out loud or write it down) might be living. I haven’t given my mom grandchildren. Every time I see her and I think of her with her friends who all have grandchildren, I feel a pang of guilt—even though she assures me she wants me just the way I am and that I’ve given her two “grandchildren” so far: Dani Noir and Imaginary Girls, with a third on the way this coming winter.
I don’t feel the need or desire to have children. It’s just not in me to be someone’s mother; there’s no biological clock in there, and I’ve tried to listen for it. No ticking. I say I don’t want children every single time I go to doctor visits, because they keep asking. But I also know they’ll stop asking me soon. My window is soon closing, and I’m fine with that.
I’m not such a successful grown-up either. I haven’t bought a house or an apartment—and I will never be able to do that. In fact, I own nothing of value at all. I’m married, but I don’t fit the standard definition of “wife” —I don’t cook; I barely clean; I don’t even do my own laundry. In fact, sit down because you might find this too romantic—I got married to give my boyfriend health insurance after he finished grad school. I took a personal day from work, we went to City Hall, and the next day I went to work and signed him up for my insurance with HR. We’d never intended to marry before, even though we love each other and have been together since we were eighteen. But I insisted. For health insurance, I told myself. Ironically, I no longer have that job. So it goes.
I don’t have a work career anymore, beyond freelancing. I don’t have many friends—I lost touch with so many of them over the years—and the only ones I do still have are writers too. I don’t like holidays. I don’t understand why people stay close with family just because you share blood. I keep close with certain members of my family, a tiny circle who I love, and I don’t need anyone else. I don’t have a social life. I don’t have hobbies. I don’t have savings. I enjoy spending time alone, with only myself. Very much. I look around lately—with so many people I know having children, and moving out of Manhattan, if they ever lived here to begin with, and doing things with family and going to weddings and going on vacations—and I see how odd I am. I am writing this alone at a café table on a beautiful weekend morning when most people seem to be outdoors, and I’m perfectly content staying right here.
I have and want one thing, and I’ve been single-minded about it since high school: I write. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, to the detriment of everything else.
When the writing is going well, I’m happy, I’m alive, I’m more pleasant to be with—and when the writing isn’t going well, I’m destruction on short legs. I’m a nightmare. I’m all or nothing. I’m that self-centered, temperamental artist no one wants to live with. When I want to go away for a month at a time for an artist colony, I jet off and go. When I want to stay home for days at a time revising and not cleaning or doing dishes or picking up things I drop on the floor, I do it.
I’m everything I always wanted to be—because I only ever wanted this one thing. And I’m also a bit of a monster, because when you have only one thing, you have quite a lot to lose.
I’m thinking of all this now because of this beautiful post I came across last night,“What I Did the Summer After I Graduated” by the Rejectionist. It’s this quote that resonates with me, this one I shared here on Tumblr last night:
“When you are a woman or a girl or female no one says to you Look, artists who are great take without asking and take and take and do not apologize because when you are a woman or a girl or female the only thing you are supposed to take is a lot of other people’s shit. No one says to you Be sure you are strong enough to take and not apologize and keep going when the taking leaves you nothing to go back to. Be sure you are strong enough to steal and live alone with what you’ve chosen to make yours.” —The Rejectionist
You see, that post speaks to me. It speaks to me about ambition. About having this kind of larger-than-life ambition as a girl and now a woman. I know so many of us have it, but I also know it’s all I have. It’s all I want. My life is made up of this and nothing else.
Which is dangerous.
That beautiful post makes me think of all I let go and thought I didn’t want and so lost, over the years. About being this strange kind of creature who’s filled with only this WANTING to become something she may never get to be because it’s never good enough, where I am, it’s never the best I can do. What will be left of me if I never reach the heights I see in my dreams? And does it even matter if I know I’ll never stop reaching?
Recently, on Twitter, I asked, cryptically, if it ever ends. If, for authors, you ever stop and think what you’ve done is good enough. Authors said no, so I must not be alone in this.
I know in my heart it won’t ever be enough. I will never have written enough. Having aspiration this enormous means it can never be fed.
I have a memory of being eighteen, the summer before I left for college and met the boy I dragged to City Hall. It was night. We were in the woods, some boys, some girls, and of the friends I was with that night, I was the only one headed off to college in a week or two. Three of them would go on to become heroin addicts and one would be murdered over a drug dispute before she turned thirty. But at that moment, the summer nights smoking innocent bowls and running naked into the reservoir and hanging our arms out the open windows of speeding cars down long, dark roads seemed to be the only thing worth having in the world. A friend was talking of all I’d miss. All we had here. How much he wanted to stay and how he couldn’t fathom how anyone would want to leave. And it was a beautiful town, yes, where people still go on vacations. But it was so not enough for me.
We were on the edge of a cliff, looking off into the dark night and there was no way to know how far we’d fall if we jumped. I remember looking into the darkness of my hometown and feeling it in my bones, this thought: I have to get the fuck out of here. I couldn’t stay. I had so much more to do. I’d barely written anything beyond amateur poems and stories at that point, and I didn’t even know what being a “Writer” even entailed, but I knew I had to be one. I was going to be a writer. Somehow I felt sure I had to give up everything and anything to do that. I looked into the darkness and swore to myself I would.
It’s a promise I kept. I did go off to college. And I never did look back, though I mourned my friend who died, who was so talented, she should have gotten out, and away from drugs, herself. She would have become an artist whose name you would have known.
I’d miss my chances at trying heroin with my friends—I thank the universe for this every day—and I’d move to the city, where I always wanted to live, and I’d stay far away from drugs and I guess I’d become this thing I wanted to become. An artist. A writer. A cold-hearted person who cares for nothing else. Somehow I got it in my head that this is how I had to be and I whittled down my life to only this.
This is a strange life, the kind of life—decades ago—only men were supposed to live.
Ambition. Why did I let go of so much while chasing after it to get here? And if I hadn’t, would I have made it anyway?
Is this where I thought I’d end up when I looked off the cliff into the darkness?
Complicated questions I ask myself. Complicated answers I can’t ever hope to know.
Source: distraction99.com
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The Writing Productivity Experiment of Doom (or Great Success, Depending)
All around me, wherever I look, it seems like there’s another writer who is faster, more productive, more focused, and, because of all that, more successful in this full-time author life than I am. Drafts finished in record time, book deals, two-book deals, three-book deals, anthology stories, novellas on top of book deals, blogs of genius, plus all the promotional energy that goes into this author thing, and I’m left in the dust carving out my little sentences and making sure I don’t repeat the same adjective too many times in a span of 350 pages. And you know what? There are writers like those other writers—they are not unicorns; they exist; they work hard and they are fast and all the myths are true. Also true: THEY ARE NOT ME.
So knowing I struggle with this, you may think that joining a writing productivity experiment inspired by Rachel Aaron, a mythical creature who has found a way to write 10,000 words a day, would be exceedingly unhealthy and worthy of an intervention. (The article is long, but if you want her detailed method, here it is.) But when Holly Black first tweeted the link and I took a peek at the method, I was intrigued. So then Project: Write Faster happened. And I was involved in it. And I don’t even know anymore.
I don’t think any of us are trying for 10,000 words. I know I’d simply like more words, and more focused words I’ll end up keeping instead of cutting later, and if that turns out to be an average of 1,000 words a day, I’d be thrilled.
Since shouting from the rooftops that I’d be taking part in this craziness, of course, I had a revision to finish—FINISHED! Let’s pretend you saw a blog about it; I was feeling too spent and pleased and private to write one—and the experiment got pushed aside for some days. I was supposed to start on Friday, in fact, and I haven’t had the energy to do so yet.
But I do still mean to come up with some personalized, adapted version pinging off what Rachel Aaron found works for her. I’m especially curious to see how and when and where I write the best—and I love color-coded charts, and have made them for every single day job I had since working at RAW Books & Graphics years ago. Why not let myself make a chart!
But aside from the pleasures of color-coding, there’s something more behind all of this: I do want to write faster. I want to find my best pace—knowing it won’t match the pace of the superstar commercial writers, because how could it?—and I want to make a true and honest effort to work toward it every day. I am known to despise word counts, and have said so publicly, but if keeping track of my word counts for a short while helps me know what works best for me, then I’ll do so.
It’s all about pushing ourselves in the reality we live in. I’m not wishing I were another writer. I’m wanting to know what works for me and wishing I could be my best writing self.
(And I’d really like a new book contract this year. That’s not crazy talk. That’s being at the end of a two-book deal and looking ahead to what’s next so I can build this career.)
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Blogged: Finding Your Writing Confidantes
Who do you show your writing to? On my blog today I’m revealing the few—very, very few—people who see my writing in-progress and why, for me, it’s so important to be careful who reads and to hold it close as long as you may need to.
Visit my blog for more, and tell me: Who are your writing confidantes?
Source: distraction99.com
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The Writer never arrived. I did. I stopped waiting for the moment when I would know what to say. I realized later that I’m not supposed to know what to say. I’m writing to find out what needs to be written. And not only in my fiction. This post, my tweets, marginalia, revision notes, who knows what any of them are supposed to do or be, but they get done, and not by some writer. It’s just me. Me, with the holes in my socks and the laundry in the washer and a pile of Legos between my feet.
Source: distraction99.com
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There is the obvious karmic, good-energy stuff of not giving in to the dark side. It feels so much better to go to the gratitude place. And just as there is always something to feel bitter about, there is always something to feel grateful for. But there is also a practical side for writers, for all creative people, for all people, really. It can be oddly satisfying to wallow in bitterness. For about two seconds. And then you get pulled under and have to expend all this energy just swimming, keeping your head above water. Energy that would otherwise be spent creating.
Source: distraction99.com
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