The Cone of Silence

Here it is. The forty-minute cone of silence in my life.
The morning routine is my significant other hauls two of the four kids off to school, while taking along the baby in his car seat so he gets to view the world outside his car window. Forty minutes round trip, give or take (my significant sweetie usually combines the trip with going to the bank or stopping for gas). As for me? Silence.
I resist the urge to do a carthweel to my computer.
Actually, that's because I CAN'T (and that is something on my 100 Things I Want to Do Before I Die list).
I usally light five candles. Say my prayers. I sometimes turn on classical music softly--but sometimes not because, after all, this is my forty-minutes of pure unadulterated silence. And I write. I also get ready to write--meaning, I clear my brain so when I DO get a few minutes here and there when a child isn't hanging on my pant leg, I actually can have a coherent thought.
When you are young--say, your twenties, and you want to write, you take the silence for granted.
Not anymore.
Must run . . . the bliss will be ending soon!
Happy Writing!

Nice Job If You Can Get It

I used to have a real job. This was maybe 10 years ago. A job of the nine-to-five variety. Only I rarely got there before 9:30. But then I worked through lunch. Somehow, I was always the woman putting her makeup on in traffic. I missed being able to take a nap if I wanted. I hated having to work nine-to-five when I am often most productive at 6:00 a.m. and then again around 9:00 at night.
So today, I sat down to work on one of my two ongoing books. I sit in a big comfy chair, and I listen to music. Today it was Django Reinhart. I had my monster mug of coffee. The mug was a gift from writer Trish Cook.
So I opened one file. Wrote a bit of my third Billie Quinn book, due out early next year. Then I realized my heart, today, was for a thriller I am working on, so I opened that file. Was in some kind of zone and nailed a scene thanks to feedback from my writers' group (without which my writing would perish). When baby #4 woke up, I took the afternoon off. I spent some of the time surfing the 'net for information on hermit crabs, due to child #2 and #3 getting a pair for Christmas. That's its own story. I may even have to blog about it. These are NOT easy pets. They may look like simple crabs in shells, but suffice it to say, they would have been better off with pet tarantulas. Anyway, this novelist thing meant I COULD spend time finding out about hermit crabs and listening to Django.
And so though there are times, when I am under deadline and getting no sleep, OD-ing on coffee, not showering (it really does get ugly), when this gig as a novelist feels . . . unsteady, intense, and crazy. But this is absolutely the best job in the world. It's still unsteady, crazy, and intense . . . but it's also utterly cool. Who gets to sit around and make stuff up for a living?
It's the best job in the world.
And I don't ever have to leave my comfy chair to do it.

It's All in the Details

I'm turning in a new book to my editor tomorrow. I had finished it but then went back to the beginning to proofread it. I was amazed at how many little details I added on this last read-through and how much they added.
If I counted words, maybe I added 5,000. I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention. But it was a word here, a paragraph there, a page here. It wasn't the page count or the word count that really mattered though. It was the mood. The nuance. I changed one character's quoting of a Greek myth to the character of Achlys, which is SO much better than Sisyphus, which was my original example. Thematically, it fits the theme of grief.
In another spot, my character talks about when her world of science collides with the emotional impact of crime . . . In short, it was the layering of a hundred tiny details that hopefully make a book seem very real.
I wrote on my blog one time about "quirk overload"--when writers give their characters quirks as a shorthand for character development. Instead, to me, it's the subtle process, the little things. The details that hopefully give a character life.