writing process | Jamie Fessenden's Blog

So let’s say you’ve decided to make a go of writing full-time. You might imagine that your work day would consist of sitting at your computer for long stretches of time, busily writing. After all, you’re a writer! Isn’t that what writers do?

Well, I’ve had a busy day doing pretty much all writing-related stuff and it occurred to me that it might be of interest to someone contemplating the life of non-stop excitement and adventure that I’ve embarked upon. Keep in mind that I still work full-time in the tech support industry, so this is all in my “free” time, at the moment. This was how I spent my Saturday. Not that I’m complaining. I love it. The temptation to play computer games is always hovering at the edge of my consciousness, taunting me (and occasionally seducing me), but the writing and editing is in fact fun.

But it’s also a lot of work.

Last night, I finished going over the final galley proof of my YA novel and emailed that off to my editor. That doesn’t count for what I did today, of course, but this morning I remembered a couple things I’d forgotten, so I sent a couple emails to straighten that out. That novel will come out March 1st!
I also received an email from a reviewer who’d been nice enough to host a giveaway of another one of my YA novels. She’d picked a winner and was forwarding the email address to me, so I could send the eBook to that person. I sent the email, of course. And I was charming as all get-out.
Murderous Requiem has gone into the editing phase. Yay! I received the first wave of edits from Dreamspinner and now I have to go through the manuscript and accept or reject the changes… and explain why I rejected them, if I do that. I have a lot of respect for my editors and I think they’ve really improved my writing over time, by pointing out passive sentences and suggesting ways to make them more dynamic, as well as forcing me to review awkward phrasings and strange word choices. But sometimes we disagree. I may prefer the way I wrote the sentence originally, or I might have a reason for using a particular phrasing. One of the big battles in By That Sin Fell the Angels was over capitalization of pronouns referencing God and Jesus. The Chicago Manual of Style says they shouldn’t be capitalized. After all, the King James Bible doesn’t capitalize them. However, I based the church in that book on the Assembly of God churches I attended as a teenager in New Mexico and Texas. They capitalize. A lot. Just listen to an Assembly of God pastor talking about Jesus and you can hear the capitalization. Their website is covered with capital letters. So I fought for that one. But I digress…. Anyway, the edits have to be done by this coming Wednesday.
I was contacted by a fellow author who had read The Dogs of Cyberwar and wanted to let me know that she’d reviewed it, and also wanted to chew me out for the cliff-hanger ending. I assured her that I would get back to Dogs as soon as this current novel I’m writing was done. She’ll have to get in line behind all the other people who want to strangle me for the ending on Dogs. Does this count as work? It was a pleasant email chat with a friend. But still, writing-related. And yay! A review! (Thanks, Angel!)
Speaking of my current novel—or as we sophisticated writer-types like to call it, WIP (Work In Progress)—it’s lagging behind. I’d promised my publisher I’d have it done by the beginning of March. Now I’m certain that isn’t going to happen, so I had to hang my head in shame and ask for an extension, until the end of March. Fortunately, she was gracious.
Then I wrote a scene and realized I was going in the wrong direction. It wasn’t bad, but it meant I had to change the direction I’d wanted to go in for that character, which really didn’t make sense. So I spent some time brainstorming with my husband to see how I might get things back on track. Fortunately, it didn’t involve throwing out what I’d written, but I now have to go back and write some stuff leading up to it and change what’s coming after it.
~~Then I played Morrowind.~~ (Scratch that! It never happened!)
I updated the list I’m keeping of things that need to be done. It includes interviews I’m doing, bloghops, submitting published novels for consideration in various awards, miscellaneous promotional stuff, etc. I currently have about fifteen open items to keep track of.
I did some brainstorming about my next YA novel, a somewhat surreal sci-fi adventure.
I submitted two novels to the Rainbow Awards. (Last year, one of my YA novels got two honorable mentions.)
So how much writing did I actually get done today? It actually wasn’t a banner day for writing. Let’s say about 1,000 words. A good day for me is about 2,000 words. But if I can manage 1,000 a day for the next few weeks, I’ll make my deadline, at least.

So that was my day. I’m sure other writers are much busier than I am. I certainly know writers who have more output, but I’m not too unhappy with the amount of actual writing I do. I have slow days and fast days, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, I managed about 150,000 words of new material last year, not counting editing. If I calculate that out for 52 five-day weeks, then that means I wrote about 600 words a day. I can easily increase that, if I were doing this full-time. We’ll just see how things go.

I finally finished the contemporary psychological drama I’ve been calling Billy’s Bones (awful, awful title!) and several friends are reading it to tell me if it’s any good. I’m really not sure. I like the first half, but it gets very grim in the second half. Ever read the beginning of Alice Sebold‘s The Lovely Bones? That’s about the level of grim I’m talking about. To a lesser extent it resembles the revelation of Tom’s repressed memories of “Callanwolde” in The Prince of Tides (considerably toned down in the film version). Not exactly what most people expect in a romance novel.

I should have seen it coming, of course. I came up with this plot centered around repressed memories of sexual abuse and murder, and then when I came to the part where the repressed memories begin to surface, I thought, “I could have the character tell the story to his therapist or his lover (who is actually the viewpoint character), but it would be far more dramatic to show it in a flashback!”

Yeah, great idea.

Except that I soon realized that what I was writing was too horrific to describe in any kind of detail. There’s a reason that I tend to use crimes against children to represent evil in my novels: I find them absolutely horrifying. I don’t think I’m alone in this. So there’s a fine line between being boring by not dramatizing it and showing too much by dramatizing it. It wasn’t my intention to write a horror novel.

So I wrote the scene out, but didn’t go into graphic detail. We’ll see what my friends say, when they read it.

The other potential problem is that my viewpoint character (Tom) almost disappeared in the last quarter of the novel, as Kevin works with the police to piece things together. I had to go back and make sure he said something now and then to remind readers that he was still there. I don’t know if that worked. We’ll see.

What all of this demonstrates is that I can’t write in a vacuum — at least, not all of the time. While I’m working on the first draft, I don’t let anyone look at it. I generally have a sense of whether it’s good or not and I like to think I’m a fairly good storyteller. At that stage, I don’t want people injecting their opinions. But as soon as that first draft is done, I lose the confidence I had while writing. Sometimes my ego is too fragile for criticism for a week or so, as my husband has learned, but fairly soon after the first draft is done, I need feedback to tell me if the story came out any good or if it should be scrapped.