Insecure Writer's Support Group - Too Much of a Good Thing?

It's the bane of unpublished writers attending holiday cocktail parties. Not what to wear or if you should take your life into your own hands and try the egg nog - I wouldn't if I were you - no, it's the innocent sounding question, "So, what do you do?"

Lots of blog posts deal with the topic of whether or not to cop to the W label, and there was an interesting take on the subject on Nathan Bransford's forums a while back. My own take is that I don't use the 'w' word when I'm in non-writer company. It takes too long to explain properly, and causes misunderstandings (wait, so I can't go to Barnes & Nobel and pick up your book?)

It's even taken me a long time to say 'writer' to my own friends and family. But the hardest part isn't that they are not supportive or don't take me seriously. The hardest part is how completely and utterly they believe I will succeed.

It's irrational. They have NO REASON to believe that I'll do more than futz around with manuscript after manuscript until I either give up or am dropped off at the nearest Center for Delusional Old Ladies. Their unconditional support can feel - at times - like an albatross. Another cart load of people to disappoint if I fail.

I know this is a purposefully negative view of what should be a source of comfort, but does anyone else ever feel like unconditional support can seem like insincere support? Or am I being a total freak?

When I give crits or talk to other writers about their work I get really specific about why what they are doing is worthwhile. I don't want them to feel warm and fuzzy, I want them to believe.

That's what I want from my (sometimes) blindly supportive friends and family (Mom, talking to you here.) I want to believe.

What about you? Is unconditional support what you want? Or are you a freaky bag of contradictory needs like moi?

This is a (totally awesome) blog hop started by the incomparable Alex J. Cavanaugh. You can find the list of participants after the jump.

Back in the Land of the Writing

Happy December. I'm back and (mostly) recovered. Have still not finished my revisions.

Before I got serious about writing I used to wish for a broken leg. I thought it would be the perfect way to write a book. I figured it was the kind of incident that, while painful, would usually not be fatal or even crippling. It would require one to be still and bored. A captive to the muse. I envisioned myself kind of like the Sigourney Weaver character in Working Girl, but not a total see you next tuesday.

In short, I thought it would force me to write a book. I do know, honestly, how stupid this sounds. And I managed to start writing without so much as an ingrown toenail, but I couldn't quite shake the idea that convalescing will lead to getting things done.

This is a fallacy. Duh, when you are recovering you are on crack, or some other medicine. I was on percocet for a week (third hernia operation in three years. I make big babies, what can I say?). When I wasn't slipping in and out of weird dreams I was cranky. Not in unbearable pain, just uncomfy and itchy and annoyed and tired. None of these things is what you want in your writing. I couldn't get my wits together enough to even try to revise until the second week. I even tried to hit one of the two beta reader projects I'm doing but finally gave up thinking that I might accidentally say something enormously stupid or hurtful.

So, here's the short list of things I wanted to do during my recuperation time but didn't:
1) Finish revising BookEnd

Here's a longer list of things I did do:
1) Re-read the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix. So awesome.
2) Watched Let's Make a Deal - think that was the percocet talking.
3) Watched Room With a View (Julian Sands *sigh*) and Sense and Sensibility
4) Watched new version of Jane Eyre
5) Started to read and then abandoned 5 different books
6) Did not wear makeup.
7) Trawled the internet A LOT.

Which brings us to three links to things I found and liked. They're kinda related, but not really at all. I can't blame that on the percocet. So happy to be back in the land of the writing.

Watching Julian Sands in Room With a View made me look him up on IMBD. Doing so lead to finding that he'd done a movie in 2006 with Robert Pattinson based on a book by one of my husband's favorite author, Dennis Wheatley. We got this movie out of the library and watched it during my recovery. It is so gob-smackingly bad that both husband and I were at a loss for words. Luckily we found a review of it on this neat UK site, The Medium is Not Enough TV Blog, that says it all. I especially like the bit about a jar of stunt spiders.

Review: The Haunted Airman

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, as always, has a great take on young adult fantasy and what makes it compelling. It may not be what you think. Read The Dragon's Egg.

Finally, I've been playing Aragorn's Quest. A LOT. Slashing orcs is just soothing when you're laid up. That got me in a Viggo Mortensen frame of mind (it doesn't take much) and I love this article in the New York Times T Magazine about him.

Photo: Cass Bird

Hiatus OR The First Cut Won't Hurt At All

Three things are happening in the next week that are cause for hiatus.

All three are painful and involve knives.

1) I'm having surgery
2) Thanksgiving
3) I'm (still) revising like crazy. (What, you don't use a cleaver to revise? Hmm, Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong.)

Guess which one is going to hurt the most?

Yes, Thanksgiving.
For some families, turkey day is a huge orgy of football, eating and running around in the leaves. I know this because I've seen many Hallmark commercials and Lifetime movies. For me, Thanksgiving is just the first salvo in the family vs. family war that gets staged every year. It's not pretty and no one really wins, we just survive.

Makes the minor surgery I have to have a cake walk in comparison.

The revisions however, will likely be a close second to Thanksgiving in the painful-olympics. I'm still struggling, struggling. I haven't given up, which is the only positive thing I can say about it.

So what I want to know, as I take some time off to play with knives, is what do the holidays do for your writing? Inspire it? Derail it? Slow it down, speed it up?

See you in December and Happy Thanksgiving.

A Lovely Award and a Shed Load of Revisions

I know I said I was doing NaNo but somehow it hasn't really happened. Two things have waylaid me.
Most important is my revision schedule. I've said before that I am killing myself to complete these revisions. These will be the LAST revisions I make on this ms until (if) someone with a shiny agent badge asks me for more. It's root canal with a cup of tea for anesthetic, but I'm muddling through. I'm a third of a way through guts and garters revisions and my self-imposed deadline is November 18th.

The second thing that's put me off NaNo is this post from Maggie Stiefvater. At first, I discounted it. I've heard criticism against NaNo before (like this from Salon's Laura Miller last year) and it never rang true to me. But Maggie's 'dear john' letter to NaNo did. BookEnd is a NaNo baby, and though it would most likely not exist if not for NaNo, it would also probably not need such extensive revisions if I'd taken more time with the writing of it.

So, while I'm happy with the new story I've started this year in NaNo, I'm not going to worry about word count (like, not at all.) In fact, I'm using November as a springboard not to write a new book, but just to think about one.

What about you? Are you a NaNo fan forever, or do you have your doubts?

On another note, thanks to Jenna at Finding the Write Way for the "One Lovely Blog" award.

I hereby bestow the "One Lovely Blog" award on the following three blogs which are both lovely and smart:

Yvie Gonya at Wandering on the Edge of Paradise
Sharon Bayliss at The Blue Word
Jennifer Burke at Jen's Bookshelf

Bad Days - Insecure Writer's Support Group

I'm pretty sure I'm doing Alex Cavanaugh's blogfest, Insecure Writer's Support Group all wrong. Instead of writing inspirational stories of how I overcame some issue, I spend my post time moaning and whining and generally being miserable.

If you were hoping I'd say 'But not this time!' then you are going to be disappointed. Because I got no sleep last night and sleep makes me seriously half-empty.

My three year old came in to sleep with us, probably due to some post-halloween sugary imbalance. For about an hour I withstood her elbows and sticky hands on my face. Then I carried her to her bed and tucked her in. She was dead asleep. Then I tossed and turned for three hours, unable to get up, unable to play bookworm and unable to go back to sleep because I was busy worrying. I worried about finishing my revisions. I worried about how long it's been since I got a full request from my agent girl-crush that I still haven't sent because I'm not done revising (it's been six months. I suck). I mentally composed the email I'm going to eventually send to said agent when I'm ready, then discarded it as seriously stupid. I also managed to squeeze in some worry about the new wip I started for NaNo. It just goes to show how effective I can be as a multi-tasker when the task is worrying myself into an early grave.

Due to this lack of sleep, I'm completely useless today. I can barely keep my kids from playing in traffic. And my NaNo word count is hovering under 300. Today is a wash.

I know it will be better tomorrow after Tylenol PM has sorted out my insomnia, but I hate days like today. They seem like such an unnecessary waste. Do I need to have this total breakdown to get to some other 'better' place? Or, as aforementioned, do I just suck?

What about you insecure lot? What are your bad days like?