Writer asks: 4, 13, 26, 44 pretty please
Heyyyyy girly. Thank you for sending this! I want to see your answers for these too...
4. Do you have writing habits or rituals?
In a perfect world, where I get more than the 20 minutes the baby gives me to write during her daily “nap” (*singular*), this is what I love to do... Pop open a can of Diet Coke (my third of the day), whip out an eos lip balm, and then read everything I wrote in my last writing session (sometimes I start from the beginning of the story). I get a feel for the voice I’ve been using, the flow of the passage, and then I just start writing from there. It starts out with a crawl, then a limp. If I’m lucky and I keep at it for a few hours, I might eventually hit a run. It’s almost meditative. I can’t write under pressure. And I need a fan as white noise in the background- otherwise dead-ass silence. Oh, and I put every single gadget I own on do not disturb. That’s essential. A nuclear bomb could drop outside my house, and I need to be totally tuned out to it. 13. How do you deal with writers block?
I let it pulverize every last ounce of my self-esteem? lol. Just kidding. I’ve been blocked for a couple years, basically. The only thing you can do is just keep at it. And be kind to yourself. When you’re blocked, any time spent working on the project, whether it’s forward progress or not, is time well spent and worth celebrating. I know it’s easy to fixate on metrics like word count, but if you can get to the place where you celebrate spending time in your own creative world, regardless of output, then you’ve kind of thrown off the destructive construct of “writer’s block.” At least that’s what allows me to keep grinding away at it, even if the output isn’t there. I just keep daydreaming. 26. Standalone or series, and why?
I tend to prefer standalones, at least in the romance world. Series usually come off a bit cheap to me. That’s not to say I don’t have some ideas up my sleeves for series, but I prefer reading and writing standalones. One of the reasons for this is that I hate epilogues, and in series you always get the obligatory cameos of characters who are epilogued to death. It’s formulaic, and the characters essentially continue to exist in order to sell copy. 44. Best piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten.
This is a really hard one because I’ve worked with some amazing betas who are incredibly talented not only as editors, but as authors. But ultimately I have to go with my girl @myusernamehere. She’s not only the person who encouraged me to write in the first place, but she was my first beta and the person who busted my ass way back when to make sure every chapter of everything I wrote had its own arc. It’s not enough to push out a half-baked chapter just to make forward progress on a WIP or to drum up visibility for a story. A chapter is its own entity, and it has to be able to stand on its own in some way. She also really pushed me on writing smut- on keeping the characters’ feelings central as opposed to the choreography.
