Epic writing week

Well, I found my mojo.

How, you ask? I merely rolled up my sleeves and started writing. And I didn't quit until my eyes glazed over.

Each day this week. Without fail. I didn't blog. I didn't read blogs. I stayed off Facebook and Twitter. I even managed to (mostly) avoid my baseball PS3 game. Oh, and even real baseball, except for night games.

Yesterday, for instance, I sat down to write a particularly big scene in Empty Spaces, one I had been looking forward to writing for quite some time. I had no idea how long it would be, I only knew I wanted to finish it in one sitting.

I did.

And it was 3,500 words long. I know that's a piece of cake for some writers to knock off in a day, but I tend to agonize over each and ever sentence -- even going back and rewriting after only a couple of paragraphs. So, it was a pretty big deal for me.

All told, I wrote a bit less than 10k words this week, bringing the manuscript up to 26k. Still a ways to go, sure, but I'm back into the story and it's starting to well up inside of me, like The Devil You Don't Know did when I was writing it every day.

I'm still a bit down, since I've heard nothing from any agents except one since the Writer's Digest conference in late January. That means I still have two partials and a full out, not to mention more than 20 queries. Some of the queries are several months old now, so I'm assuming a no on them. But many are less than a couple months old, so there's still hope.

And no, I haven't pulled the trigger on self-publishing yet. I'm not sure I ever will, to be honest. But I think it's wise to keep it as a fall-back right now for TDYDK.

I'm really sorry I've been absent on the Internets recently. I promise to post more here and hit all of your awesome blogs. Honestly. It just seemed important to me that I somehow climb back into the writing saddle and start riding again.

And, thank God, I did.

How was your writing week?

Back in the saddle

Here's a picture of some of us in Tres Reyes, Mexico, during our recent mission trip. I'm the doofus in the white tee-shirt and Cubs hat.

Sorry I've been absent for so long. When I returned last week from Mexico, I was beat. Turns out, the youngster was off school all week and the wife took some time off, too. So we kind of had a family vacation week.

It was good.

I won't bore you with the details of the mission trip, other than to say it was the best yet. We had an awesome time, got some really hard work done and spent one day at the Mexican Riviera, sitting alongside the ocean puffing on a Cuban cigar and sipping a latte.

It was good.

I did suffer a weird injury this time, one that caused a few moments of alarm. I was lifting buckets of rocks over my head and pouring them into a cement mixer (don't ask) when I felt something pop in my forearm. It didn't hurt at all, so I kept working. Truth be told, the buckets were far too heavy to be lifting over my head, and my knees were starting to buckle.

At that point, one of my friends took me by the arm and asked, "What happened to your arm?"

I looked down and gasped. The inside of my right forearm, literally from my wrist to my elbow, was hugely swollen. I had a lump the size of a tennis ball right in the middle and it was growing before my eyes. Now keep in mind we were in the jungle, an hour or two from the nearest clinic.

Luckily, one of the women with us is a registered nurse, so she came over and took a look at it.

"Oh my," she said, leading me over and making me sit down.

"What is it?" I asked, feeling the slightest twinge of alarm. I don't like it when nurses say "oh my."

"You're bleeding out," she said, feeling the arm. It now hurt like hell from the pressure. It turns out that the strain of lifting the five-gallon buckets of gravel somehow caused a blood vessel or artery to burst in my arm.

"Am I going to be OK?" I asked, only half serious and already feeling guilty about sitting down in the shade. It was only a little after 9 a.m. and we had a ton of work to do yet.

She looked at me. "I don't know."

That wasn't the answer I was looking for, of course. She wrapped it tightly and made me sit there for a while. Eventually, it stopped swelling and I went back to work.

Later, before I showered, I removed the heavy bandage. My arm was purple and green and swollen to twice its usual diameter. To make a long story short, it eventually turned into the biggest, nastiest bruise I have ever had, although it never did hurt.

To this day, nearly two weeks later, I can still see a huge yellow bruise on my arm.

Other than that, the trip was great. I'm hoping I can convince my wife to go with us next year. She's considering it, probably just so she can shut me up.

Now, I'm struggling mightily to get back into the grind of my new novel. I spent today re-reading it, since I had pretty much forgotten what the damned thing was about.

I really hope the passion comes back. I've been a bit depressed lately, mainly because I still have two partials and a full out -- not to mention a dozen queries -- and have heard nothing in the past month and a half. Grrrrrr. I really hate waiting.

Anyway, I'm back and plan on blogging more often. I'll probably keep the posts a bit shorter so I can blog more and still have valuable writing time left over.

How's it with you guys?

Project update

Sorry, but I only have time for a short update today. I'm about 4,000 words into my new book (working title Empty Spaces) and I'm feeling pretty good about it so far.

It's a psychological thriller that follows two survivors of a horrific school shooting (with a couple of nasty plot twists!). The main characters are a 34-year-old teacher and an 18-year-old female student, the aforementioned survivors.

Of course, one of them isn't who you might think he/she is. ;)

The biggest hurdle for me so far is getting back into the writing-everyday routine. I wrote a ton yesterday, almost to the point of burnout. Today, I wrote far less. Sigh. I know from past experience that the routine will eventually come if I just stay with it.

So, I'm curious. What are you guys writing? I'd love to hear the "elevator pitch" for your WIP.

Searching for the right project

As most of you know, I finished my first novel a few months ago and have been mired in query hell ever since. I've started three new projects since then and shelved them all -- including my political thriller that now sits at 20k words.

The first thing I started after finishing The Devil You Don't Know was what I thought was going to be the sequel. Then it occurred to me that it might be a bit, um, presumptuous of me to begin a sequel to a book that may or may not get published. Frankly, it seemed like a waste of time.

But the opening scene, a school shooting, was by many accounts one of the best things I've written since taking up fiction writing three years ago.

What to do?

Well, the weeks off this summer seem to have proven fruitful. I had the most wonderful idea for a new book that can use the opening shooting scene (which I posted on this blog a few months ago) in its entirety.

I suspect I was putting so much pressure on myself to succeed at the next book that I was being overly cautious about what to tackle next. I've decided to keep the other two and finish them later. But I'm pursuing the new book, which has a working title of Empty Spaces.

Sometimes I think my problem is that I have too many ideas. Each one seems new and fresh and exciting, but after a few weeks of writing it, I think of something better. Sigh. I know I need to pick one and focus on it (while continuing to query TDYDK).

So. That's what I'm doing. How about you guys. Do you have trouble deciding what to write next? Do you only work on one project at a time? Or do you have several cooking at any given moment?

Back from the ledge

Thank you for the virtual pats on the back after my latest whine. You guys are the best. I only hope I can be there for you, should you need it, like you were for me.

So what did I do to pull myself back from the ledge? Well, I sat on the deck and read Donald Maass all morning and then, literally in a flash, I had an idea to make the new book even better. It's a plot twist that even I didn't see coming, and it was somehow spurred by reading a chapter in Maass' superb Writing the Breakout Novel.

He was writing about premise and how it's important to layer your book with several nuanced sub-plots and then twist them in just the right way to bring it all home at the end.

And it clicked. So I dropped the book, grabbed my Moleskine notebook and jotted it down before I could forget it. I'll flesh it out in a couple of hours while sitting at my son's Little League game.

And again, thanks for the encouragement. I really needed it.

Such is the life of a writer ...