I’ve been thinking about this blog for more than a week. Usually, I have it written by now and just have to post it when the sun moves into the next sign. Not this time. It’s not that I can’t think of anything to write about—I always have a dozen ideas bouncing around in my head. It’s not that I don’t have time. I’m self-employed. I can work any eight or nine days of the week I want to. I can work any 28 or 29 hours of the day. Well, actually, I don’t work quite that much. By mid-afternoon most days, I get up from this chair, pick up a novel from my stack of books, and read with my eyes closed. I live like a cat for an hour to give my biological clock time to refresh.
I’m not complaining about being busy! What if all I had to do was watch daytime TV? The thought makes me shudder. This month, I am editing for my authors, writing for three Llewellyn annuals, and proofreading the pdf file of my new novel, Secret Lives, which I hope will be a Real Book by the end of July. (I watched Pinocchio last night. I'm wishing on a star for big sales.) If I can just quit writing it. Which leads me to my topic: my writing process.
Let’s start with my editing process, which I’m using on myself as I write. I’ve just finished a “documentary memoir.” This author and I met in the spring of 2010 at a meeting of a writers club. His book had been published in 2008 by a well-known POD. They didn’t serve him well. There are errors of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage on nearly every page—and they said they’d edited it for him. Shame on them. He’s 91 years old, so it’s a very long book. Along with my usual picky line edit, as we worked together I suggested some reorganization of chapters and the addition of front and back matter. In the 2008 version, there were long breaks in chapters, as many as fourteen pages of illustrations (the documentation—wonderful old photos, newspaper clippings, letters to and from the author). We moved nearly all of the documentation into chapter appendixes so the narrative is now uninterrupted. Reorganization can make all the difference in the world in the readability of a book. The author sent his book to the POD publisher earlier this month. Fingers crossed!
In addition to editing for six or seven authors, I’ve spent the last two weeks writing for three of the annuals published by Llewellyn Worldwide, which published my book, Goddess Meditations, in 1999. I’ve been writing for the Witches’ Calendar since 2004, but this year they decided to reformat the calendar, and they also decided to use three or four authors instead of a dozen. On the same day I was informed that I wasn’t writing for the Calendar anymore, I received notes from two other annuals editors. Would I write for them? But of course! So I wrote a piece for the 2013 Witches’ Companion on how to celebrate a sabbat if you’re alone but not accustomed to being alone. I was also asked to write for the 2013 Spell-a-Day Almanac. Twenty-five spells. They assign the dates. One of my spells will appear approximately every two weeks. My spells are probably different from most of the others. Example—hold a pagan jewelry race. That is, have everyone put on all their jewelry, and the first person to crawl across the finish line wins. Example—the magic Parking Space Word. Example—set gratitude as your intention for the year. I’m still working up to writing my piece for the 2013 Datebook.
Being a fussbudget editor, of course, I have to edit everything I write. Several times. I hired my son (who holds an M.A. in English) to proofread the manuscript of Secret Lives. I went through it myself. You’d think it would be error-free. Hah! I’m finding funny little things, not only typos (mine), but the occasional misspelled word and sentences that don’t make as much sense as I thought they did. My typesetter and book designer, Sherry Wachter, and I have worked together before, though, so we both know how the process goes—
Oh. Yeah. My writing process. I don’t quite remember what it was 20 years ago when I first wrote Secret Lives, but my guess is that it was pretty much what it is today. I start thinking about my topic. I walk around talking to myself. Ideas start sprouting like crocuses in February. I fertilize them by doing a bit of research, both in real books and online. When I go to bed at night, I plant more flowers in my metaphorical garden. I rearrange the plants (topics, ideas, sentences, good phrases) and start composing paragraphs in my head. Sometimes I wake up at 3 a.m. with more writing going on. I do not get up, though; over the years I’ve trained myself to remember what’s worth remembering and to forget what’s not. This is how it goes, at least, when I’m writing nonfiction. When I’m writing fiction, I’m watching the characters and listening to them and writing down what I see and hear. I'm also specifying that I’m the one in charge of gooder English. When I take a break from editing my authors’ books, I go back into my mental metaphorical garden and start weeding and pruning. I used to start the actual writing in a notebook, but I don’t do that anymore. (My handwriting turns into scribbles by the end of the first paragraph.) Eventually, like today, I sit down, open a new document, and start typing. If I want to stretch that garden metaphor, I guess what I’m doing is transplanting all my flowers from my head to my computer. Computers are nice. I can sit here and write and edit and rewrite and edit some more all day long. But I won’t. I gotta get to work.