Listening for the Quiet Voice of Creativity

AMID THE WINTER SNOW, an anthology of fantasy romance holiday novellas is now available for pre-order! It releases December 12, 2017 and contains four all-new, meaty novellas in each of our fantasy worlds. Early reviews have called it “gorgeous,” which I just love.

As the snows fall and hearths burn, four stories of Midwinter beginnings prove that love can fight its way through the chillest night…

THE DARKEST MIDNIGHT, by Grace Draven
The mark Jahna Ulfrida was born with has made her a target of the cruel and idle all her life. During the long, crowded festivities of Deyalda, there’s nowhere to escape. Until a handsome stranger promises to teach her to save herself…

THE CHOSEN, by Thea Harrison
In her visions, Lily sees two men fighting for her tiny country’s allegiance: the wolf and the tiger, each deadly, each cunning. One will bring Ys chaos and death, one a gentler path—but she’s destined to love whichever she chooses. The midwinter Masque is upon them, and the wolf is at her door…

THE STORM, by Elizabeth Hunter
When her soul mate died in a massacre of the half-angelic Irin people, Renata thought she’d never feel happiness again. She’s retreated to the snowy Dolomites to remember her hurts—until determined, irrepressible Maxim arrives to insist on joy, too. And before she can throw him out, they discover a secret the Irin have to know…

THE SNOWS OF WINDROVEN, by Jeffe Kennedy
As a blizzard threatens their mountain keep, the new Queen Amelia of the Twelve Kingdoms and her unofficial consort Ash face their own storm. Ash knows a scarred, jumpy ex-convict isn’t the companion his queen needs. But when a surprise attack confines them together in their isolated sanctuary, the feast of midwinter might tempt even Ash into childlike hope…

Amazon

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We’ve been getting an amazing response, so thanks to everyone who’s already pre-ordered!

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is writing in a vacuum—which is better for you, writing in a closed space or writing where people can interact with you? Come on over for my answer. 

Boosting Creativity by Ditching the Video Poison

10_29_15I’m back from a lovely Thanksgiving holiday and buckling down to seriously crank on THE EDGE OF THE BLADE. Since I’ve been writing full-time, I haven’t consistently hit the hit word count goals I’d like to. In fact, I’ve felt like I’ve been writing more slowly since summer and I haven’t been sure why.

(Though I told writing buddy Anne Calhoun that I felt like I spent all of July sitting in the grape arbor, doing nothing, and she said, “Amen, sister,” so it might not be just me.)

Still, I’ve got a January 1 deadline for this book, so I’m out of arbor-dawdling time. Plus it’s too cold out for that. So, on the drive home yesterday, I constructed a new daily schedule and looked hard at where I could improve productivity. And I realized a Huge Thing. In midsummer, I stopped listening to music while I ran on the treadmill in the mornings, and started watching videos on my iPad mini instead.

There were good reasons for this at the time. I was doing very particular research and watching the videos killed two birds with one stone – entertained me while I ran and provided time to watch the stuff I needed to. After that, I kept going, watching various musicals, as I could find and stream them.

No harm done, right?

WELL.

A lot of you know I gave up watching TV a long time ago. Wow, like almost twenty years ago, we ditched the cable, happy to save that money. The cost savings was a side-benefit, however. My main reason was because of something I read in Stephen King’s ON WRITING. I was trying to work out how to be a writer and consumed all sorts of craft books like that one. I’m paraphrasing here because I can’t find my copy (did YOU borrow it??), but he said that it’s no accident he grew up without TV and became such a vivid creative writer. He called TV poisonous to creativity and urged all writers to give it up.

So, I did. It was a pretty easy choice for me, as the sound of the TV going in the background always irritated me. I was born to a mother who claimed the way to meet the ideal man would be in the Tattered Cover Bookstore during a Broncos game. Fortunately the man I had found (though not in Tattered Cover) fully supported the idea. My teenage stepdaughter not so much, but she was gracious about it.

And it worked!

At least, I felt like it did. Enhancing creativity in oneself is not a clear-cut enterprise that can be measured quantitatively. However, over the years, we never regretted the move, and often counted our blessings not to be subjected to the sensationalized news and pharmaceutical advertising so many complained of. As time passed, we were able to access Netflix and Internet streaming. We watch a lot of movies and sometimes TV series. No more than one movie or two episodes of a show each evening, after my writing day was over.

Until I started on my video-watching while running kick. Could that have impacted my creativity and productivity? Surely not! And yet… the timing worked out.

So, today I went back to running to music. And my productivity zoomed up. Maybe that’s a coincidence. Maybe it won’t be reproducible. Still, I believe that watching those videos before my morning writing put my creative mind in the wrong mode. Music it is, from now on.

Something to consider, if you’re struggling with ways to clear your writing mind!

Writing to Deadline – Keeping the Quality AND the Speed

RT Top Pick GOLDThe Tears of the RoseSo, this happened today.

And, yes, I’m totally over the moon about it. This Top Pick Gold is an even higher rating than RT Magazine gave The Mark of the Tala, the first book in The Twelve Kingdoms. Beyond the obvious thrill of having this sort of amazing compliment is the incredible validation of having the second book exceed the first. It’s hugely important to me to continue to grow and learn as a writer. This tells me I’m on the right track.

The review says this:

Although The Tears of the Rose picks up immediately after book one, new readers will have no trouble following along as the events surrounding Prince Hugh’s death – at the hands of Amelia’s sister – are quickly described. Amelia’s journey from pampered princess to empowered woman begins with sorrow and pain, until she begins to see her purpose and embraces her newfound strength and power. She is a surprising female character, as is the scarred and mysterious Ash. He shows Ami what passion and love truly mean in the sexiest way possible – loving her unconditionally even when it seems impossible for them to be together. One of the highlights of the Twelve Kingdom series so far is that the women are charged with saving themselves and creating their own happily-ever-after, with the men surrounding them just one part of the process.

It means even more that they love about this book exactly what I do. I couldn’t be happier!

Another reason to feel good about this love for book 2 is that I wrote it on deadline. See, I wrote book 1, The Mark of the Tala, before my agent sold it. I had plenty of time to write it (though I did hold myself accountable to my self-imposed schedule, which I strongly advise pre-pubbed writers to do). On The Tears of the Rose, however, all I had was a few paragraphs of concept and a looming deadline.

I had a conversation with a younger author about this the other day, where she lamented the difficulty of trying to stay on track with the book she’d sold on spec (like I did with The Tears of the Rose). She was having a lot more trouble getting the book to gel and feeling a lot more stressed, even though she’d written the first book in the series in the same amount of time. I commented that I think it has to do with trying to wedge a part of ourselves essentially without timelines – our creativity – into a schedule.

A few years back I read a book called My Stroke of Insight. It’s not a book one would typically pick up to learn about creativity, but it’s an amazing story that way. The book is an autobiographical recounting of a brain scientist who experienced a devastating stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her training and knowledge, she was able to observe her own symptoms and the effects of the injury on her thought processes with detailed insight. We often talk about the left brain being in charge of math, logic and other linear concepts while the right brain is our creative, language and imagination-based side. What this very left-brained scientist discovered was that the loss of function on that logical, linear side freed her creative brain in a new way. She also found that she lost most sense of schedule, timelines and organization. As her left brain recovered, she improved. In the interim, however, she was terrible at being on time.

This is what we’re dealing with by writing to deadline. The left brain knows all about that schedule, but the creative side – our storyteller – is oblivious. It moves on its own time, which is in some ways no time at all.

I ended up telling this writer that for me it’s a lot like making pie crust. Good bakers can make a pie crust come out perfectly a lot of the time. I’m a better baker than I used to be, but I’m no pro. I am, however, getting to be more of a professional writer. A lot of that is building skill. Experience and knowledge make the professional. Another piece is having a good recipe. Choosing the recipe that works also comes from experience and taste. You have to know what works for you. The final component, as every cook knows, is a dollop of hope and black magic. Sometimes you do everything right and the pie crust turns out tough. Or falls apart. A good baker plans around this and can recover.

She also gives the blessings of the kitchen gods their due.

At What Point Do You Dig In to Protect Your Writing Process?

025A shot from Los Angeles last week and lunch with the delightful Lynda Ryba (@fishwithsticks). She’s going to be helping out with my Facebook Author Page, so we should see VAST improvements in that! (Really, it couldn’t get worse…)

What with it being NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, if you live under a rock – basically you commit to writing 50,000 new words during November), I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing process. Quite a few people wanted me to participate in NaNoWriMo. I could, because I’m seriously drafting book 3 in Covenant of Thorns right now. (I think it will be called Rogue’s Paradise.) I’m almost 20K into it and will almost certainly write at least 50K during this month. And I’d like to be supportive – I really would. Some of the newbie writers in my local chapter are doing it and I can see it would be helpful of me to join in. I like being supportive that way.

Except I said no.

Why? Because I *have* to turn in this book – complete and polished – by December 31, according to my contract. Worse, my editor is going on this long trip to New Zealand (yes, we hate her) and really wants the manuscript by December 25, so she can take it with her. Really a week doesn’t make that much difference, but it makes the deadline ever so slightly tighter. I cannot miss this deadline.

But Jeffe, you say – isn’t that all the more reason to do NaNo, to crank on getting those words down?

See, it’s really not.

Over the past several years, I’ve put a lot of effort and concentration into learning and refining my writing process. I say “learning” because I really believe we all have an organic process that we have to discover and love. It’s rough to go against that. I’ve now written six novels and novellas according to the method I’m using now. I know how much I can do each day (right now, about 2,250 words in 2-3 hours) and how long it will take me to complete the draft and then to revise. Being able to reliably create on a schedule is crucial for being a professional writer. This process is delivering for me. That makes it precious.

Which means I’m not going to mess with it.

No way.

Call me superstitious, but I’m not changing a thing.

I’m feeling much the same about workshops and classes. Now, I’m a huge believer in continuing education, lifelong learning – all that stuff. I was the girl in college who took 21 credits every semester, just because there were so many interesting classes to take. That said, I don’t have a writing degree of any sort – no English major, no MFA. I’ve taken tons of writing workshops, etc., over the years, but for the time being, I’m feeling like I want to stay away from them.

This isn’t the hip thing to say these days. Particularly not in the romance-writing community. (In fact, I don’t recall seeing this perspective much at all in the literary community. Those writers are much more apt to be protective of their process and to be vocal about it.) People love to point out when established writers come to workshops. They say things like “I’m never done learning!” and “not taking workshops can lead to stagnation.”

In fact, someone said that last to me just the other day. I threw the question out to Twitter (of course). I framed the question carefully, asking if any of the writers – especially well-established ones – found themselves staying away from classes and workshops, to protect their method. I tried to phrase it to weed out the happy “I love to take classes!” answers. Even so, I still received those responses.

 

 

and

 Another author, who preferred to remain anonymous, told me about an experience early in her writing career about “you can’t do that” that stopped her flat. She didn’t write for almost a year.

I think if I cast my net wider, I’d hear more of this kind of feedback. Because it sounds better to be enthusiastic about learning and growing, those writers who feel protective of their process might be less likely to speak up. But, I think it’s an important point – and speaks to the gal who said that not learning could lead to stagnation, a very common view – to remember that growing isn’t necessarily derived from taking workshops. There are thousands of ways to learn and grow as a writer, not the least of which is reading!

It’s certainly a fine line to walk. And it’s not that I think my process or my art is perfect. I do feel, however, that it’s working for me. I’m continuing to improve as a writer and that’s important to me.

More, I’m protective of it.