Yesterday, as my family gathered around the Thanksgiving table to count our blessings, each of us took a moment to express what we were most grateful for: Good health, employment, the overcoming of difficult trials and the recognition of accomplishments large and small.

My husband and I had something new to add to our lists this year. He offered his thanks to all the wonderful people who have helped usher my novel into the world, and I gave my thanks to every person who has bought the book.

Whether you loved it, hated it or simply shrugged and said, "meh!" after reading Ice Song, I am deeply grateful and honored that you chose my book. Every sale is valuable and meaningful to me. It is a recognition of my years of struggle, striving and survival. I am honored that you, dear reader, have taken the time to sit with me and invest your precious hours to hear my tale, and for that I thank you.

Blessings to you and yours as we move into the season of short days and long nights. I hope that your winter is chock-full of good stories, loving friends and family, and pie, glorious pie.

Recently received the editorial letter for "Tattoo." Six pages of insightful comments and suggestions for sharpening, shaping and clarifying my story.

Since speaking with my editor last week, I've been thinking a lot about Tattoo and how to strengthen it.

I used Vogler's "Writer's Journey" to create a 4 page plotting/character worksheet. Filling it out helped me identify the main plotlines and crises, pinpoint which elements are wrong or misplaced, and create an internal structure for the story. It seems that the novel was supported by scaffolding before. Now I must dismantle and rebuild it from the inside out, starting with the skeleton and fleshing it out with characters, details and subplots.

After completing the worksheet, I diagrammed the story for the third time and now have a clear idea of what needs to be done. No sorrow about deleting superfluous scenes, or surgically restructuring the novel, rather I'm excited to have created a workable method for envisioning my story in a new way.

The cut file (orphaned sections of excised text) grows.

If I may ask (and you can decline from answering if it steals too much from the storyline), why did you decide to create the characters Sorykah and Soryk with no consciousness of each other’s actions?  

Each of us has a shadow side, and we embrace or recoil from it in varying degrees. Life is a journey to wholeness, understanding and integrating all the disparate aspects of self into a strong, unified being. It's this pursuit that is best characterized by "the perilous curse," Sorykah's disease of forgetting. If she retained all her memories through the changes, she would be someone else entirely. She'd be some sort of new century superhero, which is its own compelling story, just not hers, sadly!

Read the rest...

Lit agent Nathan Bransford posited an interesting question on his blog: "When is writing unhealthy?

If writing makes you miserable, it's time to take a break from it, whether a short sabbatical or permanently abandoning the pen. However, asking writers to evaluate their own mental health is like asking the emperor to show you his new duds. Here are two takes on compulsory writing:

Listen to an NPR podcast about hypergraphia by the author of "The Midnight Disease."

From the Electronic Book Review:
"Kundera has the perfect term for this sort of writing - Graphomania. As Kundera describes it, graphomania is not "the mania to create a form," that is, not a mania to create challenging new aesthetic forms and media, but rather a mania "to impose one's self on others" through already established modes of "received ideas" and pervasive non-thought [ idées reçues  ]. Graphomania reflects a singular neurosis common to modernity: namely, the need to have an audience, "a public audience of unknown readers." Graphomaniacs aspire to make stories out of their lives and thus presume to do a lot of people good. Writing four love letters a day is not graphomania; xeroxing your love letters so that they may be published one day is."
Read the complete article

Un-freaking-believable. Somehow, last night, I accidentally deleted my home page. Bloody typical. Thank god I don't do freelance web design anymore. Talk about wiping the slate clean come January 1.