How to Say Goodbye to your MS

You've hit send. You're done with the book (unless someone - your agent, a publisher, an editor, your mom comes to you with edits/revisions.) How do you move on to your next project? How do you stop obsessively thinking about the people and world you created - spent months or years shaping - to move on to the next project?

Every writer gets to this point, regardless of whether you are published or not. For whatever reason, more tinkering cannot be done on your baby. You need to let her go (SNIFF!)

Here are my tips for saying goodbye to your ms and moving on to your next Work In Progress.

1) Bask in the Glory That is You (I know this is grammatically awkward, but cut me some slack.)
You wrote a book. Regardless of what happens now, nothing and nobody can take that away from you. My excellent writer pal, Jenny Herrera sent me a care package, just because I finished a book. (Obviously, she is awesome and I will have to work hard to reach that level of awesome.) She sent me homemade cookies (choc chip w/ popcorn!!! go harass her for the recipe, it's amazing.) an inspiring writing book, oranges, a funny pin, book plates - just things that let me know she was proud of me. But she wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't told people that I'd finished FIND ME. So brag a little. Post your accomplishment on Facebook. Tweet about it. Call your friends. Let them throw some love on you. Then throw some love on yourself, too. Take this moment, before anything else can color your perception of yourself or your book to realize that YES. YOU WROTE A BOOK. That is something most people have never done, and will never do.

2) Take a Break (part 1)
The state of my housekeeping during the last weeks of revising was, shall we say, less than stellar. My hedges were overgrown, I forgot to send snacks in for my pre-schooler's school (the shame burns) and the lady at the Burger King was starting to call me by name. Everything took a backseat to the book. Now I can cook. I can plant my seedlings. I can work on my other (non-writing) projects. I can have clean underpants. The Villasante household is humming along again and I've even completed my taxes (4 days to spare, WOO HOO!) Take a few days to take care of non writing business. This will make you feel less frantic when you jump back into writing.

3) Take a Break (part 2)
You've been in your writing cave, working and re-working your ideas. If you are smart, you've also been reading the whole time -feeding the hopper of your mind with how other writers craft. All good. But now that you're not actively crafting, you need to step up your exposure to culture. Art. Writing. Music. History. News. Your kids art show in the gym. NATURE (especially now that the world is exploding in floral gorgeousness.) Nourish your writing soul with things that are not necessarily writing. I'm not saying don't read. But I am saying PLAY. All these things will feed your future writing.

4) Start Again - And Don't Panic
The first time I said goodbye to a book, I took the advice of starting a new project to heart. How do you stand the waiting (which is indeed, Tom Petty, the hardest part)? You start your next project, says everyone, ever. All well and good. But what they don't tell you is that you'll feel like you're two-timing your last ms. You'll feel the pull of the world you left on your new, fledgeling work. It's kind of unfair. You're last manuscript is gorgeous, polished and refined. You're new WIP is messy, kind of short and shallow. OF COURSE if you compare the two, you're going to prefer your last ms. You might not feel the same passion for your new project as you did for the one you just left. This is normal. I remember feeling quite depressed, when I started FIND ME almost a year ago, that it wasn't as good as my last book. I felt like it wasn't taking off, it didn't POP. It took me two solid months of writing FIND ME to feel like I'd found the story's groove. So: Don't give up on the new project too quickly. Don't compare it to the last project. Don't feel badly if you don't fall in love with it right away. Writing love will grow.

A Confluence of Random Things

Confluence of the rivers Negro and Uruguayo, Uruguay, SA

After a long break from my WIP, I was ready to get back to the world of FIND ME. But I was a little trepidatious, too. I mean, I left our heroine and a girl she just met in the girl's bathroom. One girl was putting on elaborate make up, the other was watching her, feeling out of her element. I needed to get back inside my character's heads to pick up the thread that brought me to the bathroom in the first place.

I went back a couple of paras and found out that I'd missed an opportunity to fill out the story and the characters. I do this often, 'under-write' particularly in a first draft. I like to sketch and then fill in richer details later. Anyway, while I was diving into this section to expand it, I opened up a page on my browser.

Now, a note on distractions. My husband can stay up late into the wee hours googling all manner of nonsense, like, "What was the name of that chick that used to be on MTV News? Tabitha something?*" and so on. I'm not like that. I'm not saying I don't waste time on the internet, I do. But I have a limit to how much web surfing I can do before I get bored. For me, I can open up a page on salon or slate or WWD and read a random bit of news that interests me and, before more than 15 min has passed, be back at my WIP.

Like the difference between people who must work with music and those who can't (I fall into the former category, which makes sense) I need a modicum of distraction to spark ideas. I can't work in a vacuum. I don't recommend this for everyone, but distraction in small doses can be an engine of ideas. And if it's not a web page, it might be a spot of gardening, a walk around the block, laundry folding or watching your neighbor's kid try to parallel park. As long as it doesn't keep you away from your work, distraction is good.

Back to my confluence of random things. In my WIP, I have a girl who we have just been introduced to. I know what she's got to do, but I don't know how she'd present herself to my MC. Mulling this over, I click open a page on Safari and head over to an article about a Balenciaga fragrance that's launching soon. It catches my eye because my grandmother was a seamstress at Balenciaga before the Spanish Civil war. I also worked in the beauty industry and visited many fragrance houses. I wondered who created the new Balenciaga fragrance. I wondered if I would know the Nose. I thought about how a girl I used to work with became a Nose and was sent to France for two years, and how she earned an associate chemistry degree - all in her quest to become a perfumer (or a Nose, as it's called.) Then I realized that my secondary character already had a deep interest in chemistry - mostly because later she will need to blow things up. Wouldn't it be awesome if she wanted to be a Nose?

Yes, yes it would.  That's the direction I'm haring off to. I like it and it dovetails neatly with what I'm already writing (by the seat of my pants.)

I believe in the confluence of random things. I believe in 'medicinal' distractions. But that's just what works for me. What distractions actually help you write better?

*Tabitha Soren was indeed part of MTV News in the 1990's

The Dark Side of Querying

I know, ominous title, right? But I've been thinking about this a lot and I wish I could hire someone (and maybe pay them with homemade chocolate chip scones) to manage the querying process for me. It's not that I don't like the logistics of it, it's that I like it too much. I like logging in to Query Tracker, checking out agents on Literary Rambles. I like going to my online pals, my writing group or the QT forums for answers to my query questions. There's no lack of resources out there. There's also no lack of advice, contests, speed-agent dating and conferences to research. It's fun and it feels like I'm accomplishing something.

I'm good at this business side of being an author. I thrive on it, really. It's similar to the job I get paid for and I like it because it's not subjective and its quantifiable. I can make pie charts to represent my agent outreach. Safe, fun, busywork.

I don't mean to belittle the importance of this author eduction, not at all. But I'm worried that it's taking me away from what I should be doing - writing. I've started a project and it's exciting and hard and intriguing and maddening. So much easier to create a color coded pie chart.

While I'm not giving up on querying BookEnd - I've worked too hard on it to let it moulder in a digital drawer - I need to cut back on the 'education' stuff. It's nearly as bad a distraction as youtube, blogging and baking.

How do you manage querying your last project while concentrating on your current WIP? OR - How do you get your creative mind (rather than your jobsworth mind) back on track?