Yeah.

For a few minutes Anne, drifting slowly down, enjoyed the romance of her situation to the full.

Maybe it’s my natural impatience (a character defect that continually smacks me in the face), but I seriously underestimated the time every publishing activity ever would take.

Publishing is one of those weird industries that simultaneously moves at the speed of light and the speed of a snail. The “hurry up and wait” phenomenon is in full force here. DEADLINE FRENZY is followed by the lull of the dead. And August?! Forget about it. Nothing happens in publishing in August! Nothing!

Things I’ve waited for in the world of publishing:

• Answers to my queries
• Reaction to my proposal (which got lost in the mail the first time ’round – God help me)
• The first book idea to sell (it didn’t)
• The second book idea to sell (okay, that happened relatively quickly, but a lifetime LIFETIME longer than I imagined)
• Edits and initial reviews
• Royalty statements
• A sense of unstoppable confidence
• A new book idea
• Critiques from every human whose opinion I admire (and those I most fear)
• My ship to come in
• Etc.

Waiting is a mixed bag, I suppose. In its masochistic way, it has taught me to trust myself and to just sit with my ideas, my hopes, and dreams that threaten to engulf me and others and the whole world. And one of my biggest pieces of publishing advice is still “prepare to wait.” What about you?

BIG DISCLAIMER:  This isn’t directed at anyone personally, so don’t worry.

During the course of her short life (she died at 39), she was a teacher, governess, and author. She was a not-so-patient daughter, a discontented lover, and a rebellious sister. Though surrounded by Gothic myths and legends since the publication of Jane Eyre, she was surprisingly fun-loving, wry, and witty.

A moment of silence for Charlotte, who has saved, changed, challenged so many of our lives. This year, for the first time, her date of death will serve as Hyperemesis Gravidarum Awareness Day.

Last weekend, I had the honor of giving a book talk and participating in an author panel hosted by Pikes Peak Writers, and the question came up over and over again as we shared the difficulties of things like getting noticed, figuring out royalty statements, dealing with change in the industry, and all that waiting. It was one of the more honest discussions on the pitfalls of the business I’ve heard in a while, and probably raised the hair of the aspiring authors in the audience (sorry, guys).

This is not how I look while writing.

After the event, I headed back to my hotel, a splurge intended to give me the chance to write uninterrupted and in relative luxury for a weekend in a desperate attempt to Get The Damned Book Proposal Turned In. I opened up my document only to find that it sucked. Everything was wrong. The chronology was off, it was boring and pompous, and I was reminded how much of a longshot it is that anyone will ever want to buy a piece of anyone’s writing, let alone mine. I was reminded of my fellow panelists and all of the stress and hardship of the industry and the fact that Writing is Hard. So hard.

I indulged this feeling for a little bit, contemplating the certain destruction of my career and my lonely, withered and unloved death. Then I did the only thing I really know how to do—I leaned into it. I shuffled my notes around. I acquired snacks, and ate them. I audibly groaned at times. I chewed on my pen. I listened to the same music on repeat. Soon I was rearranging the chronology, slashing words and putting others in their places, feeling out how to stitch that little piece of narrative together.

I finished the proposal and hit send.

This incident reminded me of why I love writing and why it’s so worth it. To me, writing is more than a contract or my name on the front of a book, though I will not lessen the significance or excitement of either of those things. It’s the annoying exhilaration of figuring it out so that I can talk to all of you. I finished the weekend kind of exhausted and bleary-eyed, but closer to triumphant than I’ve been for a while. Getting that draft done was the personal equivalent of hitting a personal record on a run or scoring some kind of work victory. Best of all? I get to do that again, and again, and again.

So…yeah, it’s worth it.

To wit: Eleanor Brown, the most fun lunch companion, well, ever, just hit the New York Times and IndieNext paperback bestseller lists with the paperback of The Weird Sisters, a book that amazed me and is likely to delight the many book clubs who have been chomping at the bit for a paperback edition. 

And Stephanie Burgis! Stephanie is a real dear, and not just because she turned me on to Georgette Heyer. She writes the best kinds of books: middle-grade fantasies with a strong dash of Regency, and her debut novel, Kat Incorrigible, was just included on VOYA’s Top Shelf List for Favorite Middle-Grade Fiction of 2011.

And the very wonderful Sandra Hume is deep in preparations for Laurapalooza 2012 in Mankato (won’t you join us?).

And Ellen F. Brown, whose Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind made my must-read list for 2011, just published an amazing article in Bloomberg on why book publishing will survive the digital age.

And Liz Michalski is hard at work on her next novel, and Daniel Hernandez keeps blowing my mind with his reporting from Mexico City (check out his Down & Delirious in Mexico City, you won’t regret it), and Kyla Calvert is working on an exceptional series on homeless youth in San Diego County, and Kj Swanson just was accepted to St. Andrews in Scotland, where she will dissertate about the Brontës.

What about you? What are your latest accomplishments?

Work it!

Even though I’m regularly asked to speak on my perspectives on writing and literature, I never really feel qualified to do so. As is evidenced by ten blogs in a row about my writing process, it’s a tenuous and delicate and scary thing, so how could I ever master it? Luckily, I doubt I really need to. I just need to keep getting back to work, back to myself.

Rather than depressing me, a workmanlike (workwomanlike?) attitude toward writing keeps me going. It reminds me that I can improve with practice, that I need to plug away. Treating writing like work is not the most glamorous choice in the world (pro tip: neither is any aspect of writing, at least for me), but it results in writing that gets done with the minimum of fuss and emotional trauma. This is not to say that there is not emotional trauma galore in the process…how can you really get to readers if you don’t strip naked and wander around every once in a while? But for me, it always comes back to the work.

Luckily, I am a person who loves to work. I am a hard worker. This could be due to insecurity or incompetence or some other word that starts with “I”. I’m sure it’s safer for me to keep my identity as a worker instead of as an artist, but it works for now.

Might this change as I mature? I guess we’ll see. For now, there’s a big pile of work awaiting me—the work of finding myself and others on pages I create and the work of showing up for my work. That sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? And yet I relish the rolling up of the sleeves. Who’s with me?

You know the big, huge, terrifying amount of time, energy and love you pour into your writing? You know the dreams you wrap up in every word? It will all be for naught if you don’t show up to protect it.

I don’t mean go out and buy a gun, or go out and get all obsessed with the remote possibility of someone stealing your precious ideas, unless that’s your thing. I mean that letting your desire for publication trump your common sense and your sense of self-protection is somewhat ludicrous. So is allowing people to divert you from your higher purpose or giving away your self-respect to someone who seems to offer “something for your career” in exchange for your firstborn child, or something. Find the right people to bitch to and trust. Find a sense of unwavering something that lets you shut the door a few moments a week to write those words, or stand up on behalf of the draft you can’t get out of your head, or murder the character you love too much for your own good.

I won’t go into specifics, but I have had to learn all this the hard way. Ultimately, I must show up on my own behalf and on behalf of my work.

That's what I like about you.

Look, the publishing industry is changing fast. Things are buzzy and kind of terrifying. There’s always something to compare yourself to—a stellar success that is just enough like you to make you really jealous, or a flameout that is just close enough to home to make you wince.

It might sound cliche, but the only way I know to combat this weirdness is to look for the book only I can write.

When I got close to my first book deal (spoiler alert: it didn’t happen), I really didn’t get this. I didn’t get that an editorial committee, or an editor, or a reviewer, or a librarian, or a reader would take a look at the cover of a book with my name on it and say something to the effect of “So? Why should I care?” And that’s okay. It really is. Because when I’m doing my job right, I’m writing the book only I can write, the book I was born to bring to all of you. This doesn’t mean that the book will change the world, but in order to succeed I have to bring my uniqueness and my voice and courage to the work.  It might be scary, or confusing, or really hard to get down to that essence, but I kind of feel like that’s my calling as a writer.

It’s also the hardest thing in the world to go for, because in order to pursue the book that only you can write, you have to figure out what “you” means at any given moment. That’s the really tricky part.

Mmm. Layers.

There are two types of revisers: the reluctant and the thrilled. Maybe it’s the former-school-newspaper-copyeditor in me, or the short drafter in me, but I love revision. At last! Drafting is done (ha) and I can make the damn thing a bit better, or at least I hope.

But revision isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. It’s a layered process, one with lots of nuance and fluidity. The layers I can think of are:

• Flow
• Story
• Voice
• Time
• Tense
• Facts
• Focus
• Pace
• Look
• Ease of Reading
• Grammar/Spelling
• Fun

I’m sure there are hundreds of other layers, if you look for them. But these are the common threads I look for in revision. I try to consider the piece from a reader’s standpoint. What comes before/after? Is the voice accessible or (woe!) dry and academic? Has the piece caved in to the wall o’text mentality or is it sparse and flimsy? Does it clog my throat when I read it out loud? Am I falling asleep with boredom?

As I get into revision, I always start with an assessment of what I’ve written. Usually this consists of me scratching my head and feeling mystified at my word choices and decisions, but then I get down to business and do a paragraph-by-paragraph summary, just a few words to describe each paragraph. Just going through that exercise usually immediately reveals big holes, things begging to be rearranged, things that can go now. It also, strangely, reassures me a bit. Okay, I have a slight idea of what I’m doing, or at least what I’m doing wrong.

I am pretty brutal about cutting, but every once in a while there’s a turn of phrase I find particularly brilliant and can’t bear to let go. This tends to be a warning sign of tunnel vision. Rather than forsake it completely, I force myself to experiment: What if I cut it out and put it in another document of dead darlings? Would it improve things or detract from them? Nine times out of ten it languishes in that file forever as I find I can live without it.

My last gasp is always what I call “the fun pass.” My insecurity tends to show up in wordy academic tendencies that make every sentence into a parenthetical disaster, so I go through one last time and get honest with myself. Is this fun to read? Really?

Since the revision process is a multi-layered one, there’s no right or wrong way. This is maddening and heartening at once.

How about you? Are you a reviser? What’s your favorite revision trick?

My drafts are tangled and confused!

So, you’ve given yourself permission. You’ve made the space. Now it’s time to draft.

I will be frank: this is my least favorite part of writing. I feel like that makes me a freak (do you sense a theme here?) since writers are, you know, supposed to enjoy writing? And I do enjoy writing, but much more the fixing part than the vomiting out raw material part. Because that’s what drafting is for me.

I will be frank once more: though the thought of an outline gives me the chills, I really work better with one. Usually I try to draft too early and the first draft turns into a truncated, Frankenstein-like thing with lots of brackets and indicators of things to add. When I was writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf I would outline each chapter in five lines or less. It helped me know where to go when I got lost (and wow, did I get lost).

Drafting is terrifying to a control freak like me. It all looks so disgusting! It’s weird and doesn’t get anywhere near where I’d like it to go! But beneath all that grossness is a big leap, a sense of “here goes nothing, I am just going to show up and go through this crazy process” that always leads to serendipitous and good things. Drafting is where I really get in touch with my gnarly, confused subconscious, and my best drafts are totally unfamiliar to me once they’ve been written. It’s like creating a ball of tangled yarn. It’s disgusting and weird. I promise. And then it’s over and I can do what I do way better…editing.

How about you? Do you enjoy drafting?

And then there was me, a person who wrote my book in stolen moments at the mall, for chrissakes,, who went to an arts high school but has never considered myself to be an artist. I was at a total loss. I may even have gone into the bathroom and texted a friend something along the lines of “omg these people are all artists omg they will all discover that I’m here by mistake omg can I please leave now?” I’ll leave it to the phone records to tell.

What role does permission play in your writing?

It struck me that my problem might be one of permission. See, I’ve always been insecure about taking up too much space, physically and emotionally. Writing a book is a pretty dramatic statement on space, isn’t it? And pressing for its publication is a very public way of saying “Move over. I have some ideas to share, people.” I spent many years writing to escape my life. I did it surreptitiously and in secret. So coming clean with my identity as a writer meant I needed to find a sense of permission for both the act of writing and the even bigger act of going public with my words.

We’ve all seen examples of great writing that occurs without permission. Passed notes in high school. Secret diaries of people undergoing the most horrific experiences. Without permission, my writing remains trivial and small.

The word “permission” sounds weird, now that I’m using it. It means someone needs to grant it. Over the years, I have learned that only I can grant myself permission to enjoy my work (or not to enjoy it), to struggle, to experiment, to step out into the world as a writer. When I get caught up in envy, comparison, and other fear-based habits, I’m telling myself I don’t have permission to try it anyway, to struggle and to learn. In those (frequent) moments of weakness, I have to wrest permission from my own petty, clenched fists. I have to give myself permission to write as myself, sloppy, undisciplined at times, fear-driven, ridiculous. I’m the only person who can grant that to myself.

What can I say—every writer I know struggles with a sense of their worth as a person. And every great writer I know gives themselves permission to be themselves, to sit at the table and to do it anyway.

A few weeks after the reading, my book won the Colorado Book Award for the Nonfiction-General category. And I stood up on stage, bewildered and still feeling like a mistake had been made, but marveling that space was being made for me. The presenters moved aside, gave me the mic. The room quieted and people leaned forward to hear my words on my book and my experiences. And I gave myself permission to stand there and speak.

What about you? What role does permission play in your writing?