Ex-journalist / novelist / paperback writer / etc.
November may be all about National Novel Writing Month, but since I’m going to be doing more editing than world creating, I thought I’d participate in this challenge recently posted on The Writer’s Circle Facebook page. Stay tuned – this challenge starts on November 1!
My fellow Sister in Crime, Sheyna Galyan, tagged me on Facebook the other day to talk about “seven things about my writing habits.” It was a fun exercise and since I don’t have any of my craptacular pictures to share with you, I thought I’d repost this here:
Seven things about my writing habits:
1) I have to play music while I’m writing. In fact, I tend to build playlists for my books as I go along. Music is essential to my character building process, it also helps me set the scene.
2) I like to edit my stories by printing off my draft and using a pen to mark the hell out of it. I don’t have a problem creating a story on my computer, but when it comes to edits – I think better when I’m dealing with hard copy.
3) I have a terrible habit of abandoning projects in favor of “greener” pastures. So, right now, I have three fairly fleshed out stories that I’ve been working on over the past ten years or so. As you can imagine, this causes lots of problems when I come back to the projects that I’ve shelved. So, anymore I work on one thing at a time.
4) The current story that I’m working on (I call it “After Life” or “AL” for short) is the first book that I started writing in my adult life and I will be so happy to get it done. Every time I’ve set it up on a shelf, it’s the story that keeps bugging me to be written.
5) When I first think up a story, I just the story go where it will take me. But the older that I get (and the less time I have), I’ve found that I creating an outline of my story helps immensely. It helps to keep me on track and it helps when I have to switch my focus from working on fiction to other tasks.
6) Although I feel like I’ve been writing stories my entire life, I’m really awkward about admitting that I’m a writer. Which is weird, because it’s what I do in my professional life, but I’ve always worried that folks would think I’m delusional if I told them that I write novels in my spare time. Then I realized that they probably already think that, so that’s a hurdle I no longer worry about. 🙂
7) I’ve been writing since I was a kid, I’ve been a professional writer for over 15 years, but I’ve only been treating the novel as a “career” for the past three years and I’m constantly amazed at how much I learn every year that I write. I just sincerely hope that my next book won’t take so effing long to finish.
I took a tentative step towards becoming “legit” in the social media world today and created an author page on Facebook. Then I promptly “unpublished” it. Because while I have plans, dreams, and schemes – one of those being the creation of a relevant and robust author’s platform – I have to be honest … creating that page created two feelings for me. The first – a little bit of glee. I can’t wait until I can turn this page on and be like “look at me! I’m an author!” And then the other part of me wants to duck in a corner because … well. I’m not a published author yet. (Notice, I said “published.” I do believe that there is a distinction.)
Anyway – I’ll share more later about some of the research I’m doing in regards to social media. And when I’m not such a chicken shit, I’ll share the link to my Facebook page. For now, I assure you that I’m not taking myself too seriously. After all – how could I do that when this is my profile picture?
michellekubitz 