Southern Writing

Eat, Pray, Love review

I finished Eat, Pray, Love last night. Apparently, a sensation that swept the land revolved around this book.

Okay, I knew that already. That's one of the reasons I avoided it up until now. There's also the fact that I thought it was a Christian memoir of a book, about how someone ate, prayed, and loved themselves into a devout state of being.

Instead, it is one woman's odyssey through three countries, a divorce, meditation, a relationship with God, three or four languages, and a few tons of pasta. I was surprised to find myself loving it.

The writing style opens a window into Elizabeth Gilbert's mind. We follow her through her divorce and into the realization that she needs to do something drastic to keep going. She's having a hard time coming to grips with her post-divorce relationships and love life. What better way to get over heartache is there than to eat your way through Italy and delve into a love affair with the Italian language, then head to India and Bali for more serious pursuits?

She makes friends, gabs up a storm, and ignores the historical sites and museums the tourists flock to in Italy. Instead of intellectual stimulation, she's looking for the crispiest calamari and the plumpest gnocci in town.

After gaining a few pounds (or a few dozen) she heads off to India to live in an ashram run by her guru. She makes friends, gabs up a storm, and muddles her way through spiritual enlightenment. Vicariously watching her work towards a still mind and compassionate heart makes it all seem like good fun, not the hard work I'm sure was actually involved in her transformation.

After losing a few pounds and gaining a world of inner happiness, she heads off to Bali, where she has sketchy, by-the-seat-of-her-pants instructions about possibly working for a local healer. In Bali, she makes friends, gabs up a storm, and finally finds love again.

By the end, I was rooting for her, but I was also unsure how long her new enlightenment would last when she was faced with the real world she'd left a year earlier- the world of New York publishing and business, where it's easy to get stressed and burnt out in a short matter of time.

All in all, Eat, Pray, Love made me want to go out and see the world. It's too bad I'm not a well-to-do writer from New York with a healthy savings account. It's looking like I'm going to have to push back traveling anywhere, especially outside the country, back for another year. It made reading the book extremely bitter sweet.

Links as currency

On the web, linking is important. It's almost like money- if  you like someone's blog, you link to it. If you have something to add to a conversation, you link to the original posts. If you find a news article you like, you link to it. Links are flying everywhere!

That's why it is unacceptable that up to now my blogs have been lacking in the links department. I'm building my blog roll right now, so if you're a friend, and I read your blog, or you just think I read your blog, remind me that I should include you. Right now, I've got a few of my friends up, but this is just a start. I need more!

Coming soon: complete blog roll for friends and my list of must-read blogs!

Creating motivation

I joined a writing group, She Writes, a week or two back. One of the preoccupations of many of its members is motivation, and what to do when it's lacking.

Lately, I've been lacking in motivation myself. A number of factors have been contributing to it. It's summer, and I battle a hot weather depression every year. (I like snow, not beach weather.) I'm poor and stress out way too much about money. Plus, it seems like no one is willing to pay me a living wage to do anything I'm qualified to do. ($8 an hour just isn't cutting it, even if I were to move back to full time.)

I'm not writing this to be a downer, or to whine about how my life isn't exactly how I planned it would be while still in school. This is just to illustrate the hows and whys of my current motivation problems.

There are a few ways I've been able to combat ennui. I figured I'd share them for everyone who isn't on She Writes and hasn't been reading my responses there.

• Clearing out clutter. I'm naturally a packrat. Or, as some would call it, a hoarder. Except, when I'm at my worst, I can barely function. Right now, I'm working on clearing out all my old junk and cleaning out my apartment, which has been increasing my productivity 10-fold. Plus, cleaning is a good task to work on when I get tired of writing. After about 10 minutes of scrubbing floors, I'm ready to get down to business.
• Working out. This can be a double edged sword. Sometimes, after I work out, I crash. Sometimes, I'm so hyper I run around my apartment like a crazy person and can't concentrate on anything. But, I've noticed a correlation between working out and my energy levels. More energy = more writing. Feeling strong = more confidence. More energy + more confidence = writing my debut novel in a little more than a month's time.
• Reading. This makes a lot of sense. Reading is the foundation of writing. But, when writer's fatigue sets in, I find it helpful to read for a while. I pick a time limit or a page length and read until I reach my stopping point or replenish the will to write.
• Writing in small snippets. I usually do this a lot when I first start writing every day. Sometimes it's not even writing. Sometimes it's just putting a title on a page or opening notes I have to work by. But, the little things add up over time. After a few quick spurts of work, I usually end up writing up a storm without noticing I've gotten into the groove until I look up and realized I've written a few hundred words.
• Ignoring the end goal. In writing, keeping your eyes on the prize can be a fatal mistake. I'm not saying you shouldn't think about your ending. You should. In fact, I usually write the end to a project long before I finish it. What will be fatal to your project is keeping track of your progress in relation to your word count. If you do that, you will probably either get overwhelmed with your inability to reach the count or freak out when you realize you're almost finished. That's just the excuse your inner censor needs to start in on you. This brings us to my last bit of advice.
• Shitty First Draft. I read about this philosophy years ago. In fact, I can't even remember where. (If you know where, please let me know in the comments, so I can attribute properly.) Understand that a first draft isn't supposed to be perfect. It's a first draft. It's supposed to suck. As silly as this concept might seem, it really is freeing to know that a first draft is a ROUGH draft, and no one needs to see it if you aren't happy with it. Just keep writing and worry about grammar, spelling, and rewrites when you're done. Kill that inner censor. You don't need it, especially when you first sit down to write.

Tinkering around

I'm playing around with my blog design today. I've already cleaned up some categories and added an "About Me" page.

On the writing front, I've submitted some queries to agents. I'm stressing about my synopsis.

I've put my sequel to the side for now, and I'm writing a novel of a different genre. It's giving me a well needed fantasy break, and if my first novel doesn't sell by the time I finish it, I'll be able to query two markets at the same time. It's a little bit harder to write the new novel, though, because it's based in reality. I don't have as much room to play.

If anyone out there has recommendations for urban fantasy agents (I just read the genre is dying in an industry blog- fun!) let me know. I need all the help I can get.

Revisions and queries and life, oh my!

I find it strange how fast the writing process has gone for this book. Previously, I tried to write a novel during NaNoWriMo and failed. I've been working on the same epic novel for ten years. In school, I was always starting a novel, writing a few pages, then giving up. I've won a couple of awards for short stories and even had one published, but novel writing has always been just out of my grasp.

Now, all of the sudden, I've managed to write an entire 60,000 word novel and rewrite it in a little less than two months. It kind of makes my head spin. I guess that's what the threat of poverty does- it makes you take a chance on your dreams and do the work. While at the time I was writing in just about every spare moment and pushing most other things off to the side, now it seems like a dream.

I'm thinking I'm going to send a query a day to agents; I have four ready to go and one I just sent out tonight. This whole process is fascinating to me. If I have nothing but rejections after 30 or 40, I'll start sending queries off to publishers.

In other news, I'm going to be in Howl O Scream again. At least I can always have scare acting to fall back on if the economy keeps going South. Now that's the kind of marketable skill everyone should have.

Cue fanfare

I finished my novel. Now, I'm working on preparing the manuscript for submission to agents and going through the whole thing to tweak it here and there with suggestions from my beta readers.

This is new to me, so the people who read this blog now have the chance to follow an aspiring author as she goes through the process of finding an agent and publishing a novel. I'm thinking that next week or the week after I'm going to submit the novel to five agents and see what happens. I'm thinking the worst case scenario is no one wants it and eventually I take it to a writing group or workshop for critiques.

I've already started on the second novel in the series, and I'm working on a submission to an anthology. More about that later. Right now, I'm going to celebrate with my coffee.

Almost there...

Last night, I got to both the 100 page and 40,000 word mark in my novel.

The first three chapters are almost ready to be sent out, and I have about six chapters edited and formatted. 11 chapters are already past the first draft phase.

I'm at the point where I'm actually wrapping up the novel and weaving some plot threads together. I've got a few pages of comments and feedback to go through, and I'm guessing I'll be sending queries out some time in August.

This is the first time I've gotten so far in the process of writing a novel, and I'm going all the way this time, Baby!!

It's so exciting.