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As I near the end of the first draft of my novel in progress, tentatively called

THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD, I’ve been looking back at this diary for a reality check on where I was a year ago. I came across an entry in which I wrote about a talk I was preparing for the Greater San Diego Council of Teachers of English.  I titled the talk “Writing Scared,” a feeling any serious writer should understand perfectly. “Writing IS scary, unless there’s no chance for growth in it,” I wrote, “and in that case, why bother?”

“In the years I taught college composition, I used to tell my students that it was easy to think of a writing assignment, or indeed any challenge, in a way that would overwhelm them. The trick is to whittle down big problems in smaller ones that aren’t overwhelming and that can be handled one at a time. Is a ten-page paper on the Russian Revolution too scary? Well, how about one paragraph on the lives of serfs? And then how about a paragraph on how the revolution was supposed to improve their lot? Can do! And then, how about…well, you get the picture. Lo and behold, eventually you hit page ten.”

The fact that writing never stops being scary is tied to the fact that it never gets easy, and to keep the fear under control requires figuring out the baby steps every single time, whether it’s for a short paper or a full-length book.

At the time I  wrote the diary entry I quoted from above, I was percolating an idea for a new novel.  Everything about the project terrified me–the subject matter, the lack of a really clear idea of the plot and characters, the setting, the historical period, the work.

The work. Oh, yes. Writing a novel is a huge and utterly draining undertaking. I was apprehensive about going there again, and then, as always happens, the project took hold of me and wouldn’t let me go.

A year later, the book that had me talking to English teachers about writing scared is now nearly finished. It’s not so scary any more, but the next one…?   As I said a year ago, “Some things never change…. It’s pretty big, pretty scary. Can I whittle it down into do-able pieces? Awfully glad I think so.” Do I know for sure?  Not until it’s done.

This morning I was going through old diary entries seeing if there was anything in them I might be able to adapt for the “blog tour” that will be starting in a few weeks for PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER.  These days, most authors don’t tour when they have a new release, because, quite frankly,  there’s not much bang for the buck in spending several weeks in hotels and running up bills in restaurants just to go from bookstore to bookstore or other small venues doing talks and signings. Unless you are in that small group of authors who can fill auditoriums wherever you go, you’re better off  trying to make a success of online promotion.

Anyway, I found one diary entry from a little less than a year ago (September 3, 2009) that really gave me pause.  It’s called “Instructions from My Imagination”:

Some people may picture the Muse as a creature with a toga and a crown of laurel (which I like to think of as a Laurel Corona). She sits on a writer’s shoulder and sings inspirational songs while accompanying herself on the lyre. My muse isn’t like that at all. She’s more like a drill sergeant barking orders. Get up! Get to work! Stay put! You have a novel to write! With all my novels, it was like getting instructions from my imagination, instructions I had no choice but to accept.

I’m not saying I don’t love my Muse. She has never let me down (although, as for all authors, the Muse’s relationship to our unwritten books is yet to be seen). But writing is a real taskmaster, and writing a book feels like going to a very, very long boot camp.

Long indeed. I realized the other day that I have written four full-length books–three novels (THE FOUR SEASONS, PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER, and my in-progress work, THE LAWS OF MOTION) and one narrative non-fiction work (UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH) in six years. I have never not been writing a book since the beginning of 2004, and in some cases, most notably with UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH, rewriting and heavy editing overlapped with creating the first draft of THE FOUR SEASONS.

Those are some pretty serious marching orders! So I’ve been appreciating the fact that, with the first draft of THE LAWS OF MOTION done (and with no editor yet to take the place of the Muse), I have no orders at all. I’m back to having only one full-time job, teaching humanities at San Diego City College, and it is really a treat to be able to give it my full attention. Who knows? I might actually do some reading for pleasure this fall. Play a little more tennis. Get back regularly to the gym. Read more than the headlines in the paper. This could be fun!

Okay, so here is the reality.  I did stop writing for most of that semester.  I  did do a little reading for pleasure (including more than the headlines), played tennis and went to the gym at least sometimes. It was great to give my classes pretty much undivided attention, and except for some unexpected health problems, I had a strong semester.

Then the drill sergeant showed up again.  I made it to early December without letting myself go back to the world of being an author.  By then the idea for THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD, my work-in-progress was taking over my waking thoughts, and I was once again, as Diane Ackerman calls it, “coming down with a book.”

So let’s update one of the above paragraphs: I have written five full-length books–four novels (THE FOUR SEASONS, PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER, THE LAWS OF MOTION, and the nearly finished THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD) and one narrative non-fiction work (UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH) in seven years. I have never not been writing a book since the beginning of 2004 (except for a few months last fall),and in the last few months, dealing with revisions of PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER and THE LAWS OF MOTION  have overlapped with creating the first draft of THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD.

Marching orders, indeed!  Though it’s still like bootcamp year round,  I’m managing my time better.  This time around my year-long forced march comes complete with stops for coffee and lunch with friends. It comes with lots more time for exercise and R&R.  The Muse is still a drill sergeant, but sometimes she’s having a little trouble finding me to boss around.

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve been writing since 6AM. It’s a beautiful day, and perhaps I can convince the Muse to put on some sunscreen and spend the day with me.  Tennis, anyone?

My second novel, Penelope’s Daughter is coming out in a few weeks (the launch is September 24, and official pub date is October 5).  Those who read it will note that the dedication is “to all the children left behind when mothers and fathers go off to war.”

That dedication came from my heart after spending so much time with Xanthe, the heroine of the novel.  She is the daughter left behind when Odysseus went off to Troy, the daughter he does not even know exists, because Penelope was too early in her pregnancy to be able to share the news.

I thought a lot about what it means to dedicate a book in this fashion. I do not want it to be an empty gesture, an easy thing to say and no more.  I am still pondering how to use the platform the novel could provide, as a means of advocating for the dedicatees (is that a word?) So far the best idea I have come up with is to create a website for readers of the book (and others), focusing on resources and information that will help increase awareness of the difficulties faced by children of our own service personnel deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

It’s very much a work in progress, but I launched it today.  Take a look at Xanthe’s World, and if you have ideas, please let me know.  I disable comments here because of problems with spam, but I’d love to hear from you! If you don’t have my email address, there’s a link on the “Contact” page of this site.

I’ve recently taking up running again after a twenty-five year break. I can’t remember exactly why I stopped–something having to do with small children, a full-time job, and a nasty bout of viral pneumonia that sidelined me for months.

I suppose the biggest psychological factor was that I never really enjoyed running all that much. It was more about wanting to be on the other side of it, to spend the rest of my day having done it, rather than actually wanting to go out and have the experience. I ran so slowly I called it “going out for a trudge” because I didn’t think that even the rather laconic term “jogging” applied to what I did. Running itself was always about no more than getting to the end.

It’s been interesting to see how different it is now. Twenty-five years is enough time to watch a lot of things happen to one’s body, plenty of time to realize that there are nothing but bad reasons at my age to wait one more day, week, or month to get started on something good for me. And so I did. I got out a pair of trail shoes I’d bought a few years ago because they looked cute with jeans, and went down to my local YMCA for a course entitled “Running 101.”

My partner wondered aloud why anyone would need a class to learn to run. but having been a sturdy, athletic boy growing up in rural America, he figured it out for himself, like most kids do. I was an overweight pre-teen in the 1950s and no one cared if I could complete a fifty-yard dash, or do ten sit-ups, for that matter. After all, someone has to come in last. And yes, those are both things I remember not being able to do, although admittedly I didn’t get the point of bothering to try. Is PE over yet? That was the only question I had.

With my cute shoes on, I and my classmates headed out for a twenty-minute run on the first day of class. I was left in the dust by a group of people most of whom are about half my age, and by the time the twenty-minute run/walk was over, I was the last to finish of those who ran (some started out walking). The operative word, however, is “finish,” not “last.” Four weeks later, I’m just behind the fast group and running more than 5K in every class.
I don’t know what to attribute being better at it now than then. Maybe it’s that this time I feel more investment in taking control of the quality of my life rather than putting it off until later. I don’t really have a goal other than living in the best body I can. Ironically, the one goal it never would have occurred to me to set–to enjoy the sport–might actually be realized too.

One thing my previous experience with running taught me (other than the fact that I could indeed do it, if not happily or well) was to make analogies from running to the other tasks I face. The 10K (6.2 miles) organized run was just gathering steam in the 1980s, and I ran quite a few of those. Even today, more than two decades after my last one, I still find myself thinking, “this is like the mile 2 mark,” or 4, or 6. Each marker went with a state of mind and body that correlates to getting any kind of big project done.

Like writing a novel. I often ask myself, “so where am I in this process?” and think I am at 3K or 5K, or blissfully, at 6.15, with only the last few steps to go. But I’ve noticed this time around there’s another analogy as well between writing and running.

Every run has its own pattern. For me the first few minutes are the hardest. Every time I wonder whether I have it in me that day. By ten minutes, I’m feeling tired, and I’m still wondering the same thing. Then everything starts to click, and I can go for quite a while at a pretty good clip without feeling as if I need to stop. Now and again, I reach a point where I think “this is hard,” but most of the time I can power through it. If not, I stop, but usually not for more than a few seconds. Take that pattern, stretch it out over a year or more and–well, what do you know?–sounds just like writing a novel.

I’ve been in the huffing and puffing stage for a while with my novel-in-progress. I just could not hit stride and I’ve been dallying by the wayside trying to regroup. Now, however, I have my second wind and I’m off again. I’ll finish later in the fall than I had first thought, but the road ahead looks clear.

If this were a 10K, where would I be? Probably about mile 4, with 2.2 to go. A time to be both discouraged at how much lies ahead, and excited that I really am, once again, on the route and making it to the finish.

“To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”   Although philosopher Hannah Arendt wasn’t speaking of novelists in particular, her words seem quite apt, because writers’ imaginations go visiting every time we pull up a chair in front of our computer.

Like the other visits in life, sometimes we wish we could put it off for another day, and sometimes we anticipate it eagerly.  In the yearlong visit that constitutes the writing of my fourth novel, I know something about both attitudes.  For the last week or so, I’ve been putting off paying a call on my main character, who has just arrived in Granada and is going to have to create a new life for herself there.  However, this morning I woke up, ready to knock on her door.

A burst of energy and ideas drove me through the five pages I needed to set the scene and introduce the new characters she will have to contend with. Nevertheless, I’m still a long way from blazing through the next chapter.  It takes a while for scenes and people to come to life for me, but I am starting to get to the point–and this is a very good sign–where I so completely can’t wait to see what happens next that I have to force myself to stay in bed until the clock says 6AM. Not until then, not even 5:59, can I get up and rush to the computer and see what pours out onto the screen.

Having reach page 400 with this latest push this morning, I’m facing what is both a predicament and a blessing.  On the one hand, I don’t think it’s possible to get everything that needs to happen into the next 100 pages, at which point I will reach my arbitrarily imposed maximum length of 500 pages.  I’m worried that a manuscript longer than that may be more difficult for my agent to market, although I know both from personal experience as a reader and from what others have told me, that lovers of historical fiction are more likely to think greater length is a good thing than are fans of many other genres.

On the other hand, much as I love to write, it’s wonderful to have 400 polished pages behind me, and to know that the end is, if not exactly in sight, close enough to catch the scent when the wind is right.  It is interesting how this particular point in a novel has always brought a bit of a stall to my momentum, as if something about being able to acknowledge the end will come makes it harder to cope with how far away it is.  Years ago, I used to run 10Ks, and this is like being around the 7K mark. I think I can make it, but it’s awfully hard right now, which is the only time that counts, and I don’t want to think of how much lies ahead.  But just like with a footrace, it can only be done one step at a time, or in this case, one sentence at a time.

Gotta go now–visiting hours will be over soon and I have a young woman in Granada who’s expecting me.

Check it out–start to finish!  I’ve been working for the last month with Patricia Maas and Gabriel Porras of Blue Jay Technologies to revamp this website to make it more interactive, informative, useful, and fun.  Many pages are new, and most of those I’ve retained have changed a little or a lot. Hope you enjoy the visit, and let me know what you think at lacauthor@gmail.com.

I’m procrastinating.  I’ve come to a big turning point in my novel in progress and I’m doing everything else I can think of today except write–which accounts for the sudden urge to post something in this diary.

Everything about writing a novel is demanding, but some things are harder than others.  Hands down, the most difficult part for me is the opening chapter, because I don’t know the characters all that well, and I don’t yet feel as if I live in their house, in their town, in their era.

As a novel progresses there are other places that present a similar challenge. I’ve written and revised into marketable quality more than 350 pages of the book, but I have now reached the point where my main character has just arrived in a new city with an entirely new set of characters, and furthermore, by the end of this chapter, I’ll be jumping forward in time 5 years and she’ll go to another new town with another new set of characters.  It’s almost like starting from scratch except that I know my protagonist now, and all I have to do is supply the people and the situation, and she’ll take over and tell my fingers what to type.

All I have to do?  Sounds like a lot to me. Even minor characters need names, personalities and motivations, and places need to be thoroughly imagined–although fortunately, I learned recently, readers don’t necessarily want detailed physical descriptions of every last person and place because they prefer to imagine for themselves.

Luckily for me, before I left off writing, I made notes for this new section, including the main elements of the plot and the characters I would need to carry the plan out.  I took a look at these notes–less than a page total–and started thinking, “this is going to be good!”  Still, I’ve got the blank page heebie jeebies today, and I’m just going to let them stick around for a while until they get bored and check out of my brain.

it won’t take long for that. It’s an exciting world I’m writing about, with a main character I care deeply for.  I can’t wait to see what’s really going to happen.  It’s usually far different and better than the notes, and the only way to find out is to start writing.

Some famous writers cultivate an image of reckless disregard for their bodies.  Some are just plain weird, maladjusted, or out of touch with life in the real world.  And some, of course, are best described by all of the above.

I know a lot of writers, and I can attest to how basically normal most of us are. We have to be.  We function in an environment that has myriad ways to sap our energy and undermine our egos, and we have to be able to float on top of it all, at least most of the time.

I have been writing for publication for 11 years now (17 YA and 4 adult trade titles).  I pulled out a calculator to figure out how many pages of conventionally published writing they all add up to, and I’m astonished that it comes out to somewhere around 4000-4300 pages in books alone, not to mention book reviews, this diary, and other things I’ve written.  Interestingly, that comes out, using the low figure, to roughly 365 pages a year, or 1 published page a day for 11 years.

I’m not crowing here. I have been more fortunate in getting published than many of the

talented and committed writers I know.  I’m just thinking that this puts me in a pretty good position to comment on how to stay in writing for the long haul, without sacrificing health or sanity (at least I hope most people would agree I haven’t lost the latter).

I’m 300 pages into my novel in progress, and I am trying to learn from how wiggy I’ve gotten in the past, so I can avoid it this time. I’m a professor with summers off, a mixed blessing because the structure of going to work and interacting with a variety of people is good for me. People with different commitments and obligations might have to adjust the details, but I think the principle I’m sharing here is sound for everyone.

In brief, the problem with many writers, especially those who do it for a living, is that we think everything else we do is taking us away from our writing.  We don’t like that, so we devalue other things and try to do as little of them as possible when we’re hot in the middle of a project.  This is a mistake.

This summer I am telling myself that writing is only one of several good uses of my time, and it is inappropriate to be writing when I should be doing something else. I have a sign near my computer that has a list of 5 things:

Writing

Book Promotion

Exercise

Life Maintenance

R&R

Every one of those things is a valid and necessary part of my day.  I plan every day around ensuring that I put in at least an hour on each. Then I fill up the rest of my time with a mix of all of them, in whatever way works that day.

I’m not talking about the 8-hour standard workday, but the whole 12 hours from the time I get up (around 6AM) to the time I call a halt to everything but an evening with my sweetheart (around 6PM). On most days the majority of my time overall is taken up with writing, but as I get more invested in the other things on the list,  I often spend more than the minimum on them, and I still have a lot of time to write.

I ask myself a couple of times each day whether I’m doing a good mix of the 5 types of things, and if I’m not, I tell myself “it’s not writing time now.”

Haven’t exercised?  Do it!  Haven’t taken a shower or gone to the store? Do it. Haven’t stopped just to do something fun? Do it!

I’m having a great summer, and interestingly, I don’t think my writing productivity has dropped overall.  I’m still on track to finish novel #4 this fall, and I think I could have finished it only a few weeks earlier at most if I had done nothing else. And I feel great–not at all like that stringy-haired, unwashed, antisocial creature with a backache I vaguely remember from summers past.

Writing a novel is such a huge undertaking that writers run the gamut of emotions many times over during the process.  I’m sure as the remaining months go by in which I finish up my work in progress, THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD, I will have times when I have doubts not just about what I have written but about whether I am capable of making the book as good as I want it to be.  I’ll be amazed by surprises the characters have in store, and saddened and angered by some of the things that must happen to them. (I’d like to keep them all safe and happy, but that’s not the nature of either real or fictional lives.)

I’ve talked in the past in this diary about how writing can be so intimidating that I get scared to open the manuscript file on my computer.  It’s hard to “go there” sometimes because the work is so intense and it takes so much out of me. Once I am into it again, I become so compulsive that my life patterns get more out of whack than I want them to.  I can’t seem to stop writing, and when I make myself leave the computer, I can’t stop thinking about my book.

I took three weeks off in June to go to Spain and Portugal to research my novel in

progress, and when I returned, family obligations kept me away from my desk for another week.  But now I’ve been back on the job for a few days, and to my surprise, I wasn’t hesitant to dive back in.  In fact, I couldn’t wait.  I already have the first seventy-five pages revised to include material from my travels and other improvements that come from knowing the characters better and seeing more clearly where the story is going.

I already sense the first signals I’m getting weird and compulsive about my novel in progress, but I don’t care.  Writing is what I most love to do.  And as I said, writers run the gamut of emotions.  Right now, I am relishing the fact that I LOVE THIS BOOK!  I love the characters, I love the setting, I love the history, I love the message, I love the story.

Hang in there, I tell myself. Charge forward!  This can be the best work you’ve ever done.  Everything is there.  All it takes is me.  The computer is glowing.  I have a book to write.

I’ve written in this diary in the past about how important travel is to getting the details right in historical fiction. It’s exciting to see how accurately I have portrayed some locations just from researching photographs and descriptions of places, and there is also blessed relief in realizing how much embarrassment I may have avoided by being able to correct what was blatantly wrong.

I’ve also been reminded daily on this trip through Spain and Portugal researching THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD (my novel in progress) that a lot of the value in travel isn’t to confirm or correct details but to discover what simply wasn’t knowable without direct experiences of places or chances to talk with local people.  About Sagres, for example, I would probably never have known how much of a factor the wind is in everyday life on the southwest tip of Portugal.  The hotel clerk told me, “people who live here think something’s wrong when the wind stops blowing.”  Just the three days I spent in the area convinced me that the wind needs to be a dominant part of my description of the place.

Yesterday in Arevalo, north of Madrid, where Isabella (of “Ferdinand and Isabella” fame) spent her childhood, I understood for the first time what Isabella’s mother was up against when she was declared mad and sent away to live in seclusion with her small children in a town so small it isn’t even mentioned in the Michelin Guide and can barely be found on their map.

It was the equivalent of being sent to live in a palace on Alcatraz, a place whose very remoteness and inaccessibility made it a prison even though she lived in luxury.  If she wasn’t mad when she went to live there, it’s hard to see how she could have avoided madness afterwards– or perhaps even why she would have wanted to, since there must be some solace in detaching from such a reality.  I didn’t have a detailed plot for this part of the story until I understood what life would be like in Arevalo. Now I see so clearly how my protagonist Aya fits into the place that she seems like part of its true history.

And then there are places like Sevilla and Granada, which are wonderful places to visit, but the reality is that with few exceptions, like Granada’s Alhambra Palace, there not much in the urban landscape that hasn’t been rebuilt since the fifteenth century, when my novel is set. The synagogues and mosques are gone and even the churches have gone from medieval to baroque and beyond in their styles.  Aya may have sat in the Seville cathedral but none of the decorations that dominate the experience today would have been there.  Likewise, taking a boat ride along the Guadalquivir River, I saw a number of amazing modern bridges with stunning archtecture, but had nothing resembling Aya’s experience coming up the same river.

I’m not complaining—I am lucky to be here and having a rich experience—but it’s turned out to be hard to find my story in many of the places I have visited, unlike in Venice, Greece, or France, where I traveled for the first three novels. This is due in large part to the fact that the Reconquista so thoroughly and deliberately reshaped Spain. I was told that if I wanted to know what Granada was like under the Muslim Caliphate I should go to Marrakesh. Sounds good to me—next time!