Winter is the inside season
We went to Quebec, Canada last week, and it was cold. We brought the dogs and when we took them out for their morning walk, our hair and eyelashes froze and it turned me into an ice witch. I always wondered how you become an ice witch, and the answer is you take the dogs for a walk at 6 in the morning in Quebec in February.
Winter tends to be a productive time for me, writer-wise. It's the inside season. A time when it makes sense to sit at my desk with a cup of tea (and scarf, and arm warmers) and write.Â
But I also know that it's important to leave the house sometimes. Most ideas live outside (even in winter). I learned that my breath can freeze on my hairs, for instance. And in general, as much as I like staying in my house, a change of perspective can fire me up to keep going, creatively. (I have been doing #authorlifemonth on Instagram, and it is making me realize that I need to get out of the house, or at least look up from my desk every once in a while, particularly when I realized I had no non-bookish hobbies anymore.)
(I will also note, although it's not really related, that if you go on vacation in Quebec, when you come home to the not-very-warm state of Maine, the 21 degree Fahrenheit day will seem downright tropical, and then it's like you live in the vacation place.)
HOWEVER, I am also on a deadline, and being away from my desk made me exceedingly itchy.
I am working on a revision of Two Dogs in a Trench Coat Book 4, which I can't tell you anything about, because I'm working on a revision of it, and so maybe everything will change. So far this has been my process with these books:
1. Have a phone call with my editor, Matt Ringler, where we figure out what the book will be about.
2. Decide, during that phone call, what the driving force for the book should be. What drives the dogs to keep going?Â
3. I write the book. I think I'll be able to bang it out, but then get majorly interrupted by something (this time, I got interrupted by rotator cuff surgery). Finish it, and realize the first and second halves of the book don't really match, so fix that as best I can, and then send it to Matt.
4. Matt calls me and says "well, it needs a plot." I don't know why this always happens to me. I think I have written a book with a plot! Really I do! But it's never enough of a plot. During this phone call, Matt and I talk for two hours, trying to figure out what this book is trying to be, and about an hour and 45 minutes in, we suddenly realize, and it's honestly magical and we never know how we're going to get to that point of magic, but we always do.
5. Matt sends me the marked-up manuscript, which inevitably involves the middle of the book being completely deleted.
Last month we went sledding with our friend Chris and his big dog Eamon. This is Eamon chasing after a sled, and it is also an excellent representation of me working on a revision. I'm going, I'm sliding, I'm doing it, I'm falling, I'm probably doing it wrong, but hey, I'm in it this far, I might as well keep going.
I do love revising for the chance to make my book better. Sometimes it gets overwhelming to be deep in it, and the best way to move through is to break it into chapter-sized chunks and attack it piece by piece. Each one is me chasing a sled down a hill, ungraceful, slippery, but also fun.
Lastly, when we went on vacation last week, we brought all our fruit to eat, including this lemon. We didn't eat the lemon, and brought it back home. I think a rule of life might be when you bring something with you on vacation, and bring it back, it becomes a member of your family. At any rate, I feel sorry for this lemon. We can never eat it.
(No, don't tell me to make this into a book; Pat Zietlow Miller already did it perfectly in Sophie's Squash.)
Come hear Jarrett Lerner, Diane Magras, and me talk about the process of writing a sequel. Second books: the stakes are higher, the deadlines are tighter, and how do you even continue a story from Book One? We'll be doing a panel at Print Bookstore in Portland, Maine on March 12 at 5 pm. More info here!