When you find your voice.

Every writer's journey is different but along the way we all experience the same things to some degree or another: The first love of a new project, the daunting revisions, the rejections...

The newest thing for me is feeling like I've really found my voice. I've written more than one full length novel and I love them all, even the shorts, but the newest one I've been working on is really me. It's still pretty new, so maybe that will fade when I'm on revision #500, but it's such a GREAT feeling! It's refreshing.

Have you found that one perfect story that just fits you? If not, think about your favorite book or the book/author that most inspired you to write. Don't try to imitate that voice but look to them for inspiration. Sometime along the way writing can feel like a mega shot in the dark. You've got a million story ideas floating around up there and it's hit or miss trying to find the right one for you to write right now.

Sometimes you've just got to clear your mind and go back to the beginning. Back to that moment when you said, I want to be a writer and taking with you all the things you've learned along the way. Go back to that initial inspiration with the know-how to make it happen!

Update + In My Mailbox

Popping in here for a quick update (excuse). I have been super busy this month--lots of family stuff that would bore you to tears--and my blog is being neglected. Just want you all to know that I haven't disappeared.

Book Expo is next week!! *Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!* If you're going, feel free to say hi if you bump into me! I'm not one of those people who actually plans what they'll wear, so I can't tell you what to look for, but I will be with one of my fabulous critique partners, Valerie, and Valerie is so fabulous I'm sure you can spot her in a crowd. We'll be in line for quite a few YA book signings and afterward we'll be at the Houndstooth for dinner and then for Kid Lit drinks, so if you're attending either of those, we'll see you there!

This week's IMM:

This week I received an audio book of ABRAHAM LINCOLN VAMPIRE HUNTER! I won this one from I Heart Monster. Thanks, gals!

Screenwriters!!!

My crit partner Valerie is offering up a screenplay critique! Not only is she an incredible YA writer, she's also an Indie film maker! Go bid! All proceeds go to Nashville flood relief.

http://dothewritethingfornashville.blogspot.com/2010/05/day-5-item-5.html

Valerie's blog:http://valeriekwrites.blogspot.com/

Valerie's films:http://blackbird-films.com/

Do the Write Thing for Nashville

In case you haven't heard, Tennessee was hit with major flooding. Nashville is under water. More than half of Tennessee's 95 counties has been marked as disaster area.

Taylor Swift has donated $500,000 to flood relief! As if we needed more reasons to adore her. Do your part if you can and bid on some amazing prizes over at http://dothewritethingfornashville.blogspot.com/

Beautiful Creatures Winner!!

This really surprised me! First I want to thank everyone who entered, whether you had 1 entry or 10. We had 72 people enter with a total of 292 entries! And now, on to the results!

NICKIE T!!!!

BuzzMyBlog Contest Winner Picker

Random Entry Selected:	33
Odds of Winning:	1 in 292
Entry Data:	1, Nickie

Thanks again! Nickie, I'll drop you an email for your shipping info. If I do not hear back within 48 hours, I will be picking a new winner.

I'll be doing more contests in the future, so keep a look out! In the meantime hop over to my critique group blog for a chance to win a signed RADIANT SHADOWS by Melissa Marr!

Where do I start?

I am currently revising the ms I wrote during NanoWriMo 2009 and the most difficult task I've faced with it is where to start.

Before you start writing, you'll need to know your world inside and out. Even if you're basing your setting on the place you live you need to know it and know it well. And you need to know your characters better than you know yourself. Those things are important for writing a salable book, but how do you know where to begin telling your story once you've planned it out?

You can start with a bang, right in the middle of intense action, but then the rest of the story might fall flat and loose suspension (see Valerie's post). Personally I don't like to read a book or watch a movie where something awesome happens right away, and then I have to read/watch the events that lead up to it. It can be done well, but it's not for me. Like Valerie mentioned, SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson does this well, but the big bad thing that happened to the MC didn't happen at the start of the book. It happened in the past and we read about the after.

You can start with pages of back story, but if the first page doesn't grab your teen audience, chances are they won't read much farther. If you're looking for an agent, Jim McCarthy of Dystel Goderich Literary Agency once said that you have about 6.2 seconds to impress him and then he moves on. With the very first novel length work I wrote I ended up cutting about twenty pages from the beginning. It wasn't necessarily back story but it was too much description and too little action. My lovely Sisters clued me in on that. :-)

GOING BOVINE is an example of a good book that starts a little slow. Cameron tells us the best day of his life was when he almost died at Disneyland. Attention grabber! But then we read all about how that happened and then we move into the story where not much is going on right away. The voice and the characters are what moves that story in the beginning. If we didn't know Cameron the way we do, when the change comes in to his life we might not feel sympathetic enough to really care.

So how do you decide where to start your story?

Each story is different. Some of them need to start with more action, some with less. I think the main thing is that you start with a change. If your character is happy with her life, something needs to happen right away to change that and throw her off-kilter. Weave back story in later and only if it's important. If you have anything to add, this newbie would love to know!

I've got to get back on my revisions, so I will leave you with John Dufresne's 10 commandments for writers:

1. Sit your ass in the chair.
2. Thou shalt not bore the reader.
3. Remember to keep holy your writing time.
4. Honor the lives of your characters.
5. Thou shalt not be obscure.
6. Thou shalt show and not tell.
7. Thou shalt steal.
8. Thou shalt rewrite and rewrite again. And again.
9. Thou shalt confront the human condition.
10. Be sure that every death in a story means something.

What to write?

My weekly post at Sisters in Scribe.

I'm working on a new YA novel and I'm doing a few firsts with it. Fun, refreshing, but also a challenge. I'm not big on outlines, but I plan out the basic plot points in a notebook. Right now, I'm struggling to find a good way to get my characters from one point to another and I'm wondering, how do you decide?

**pausing this blog post to make a "red heart-shaped cookie" on a piece of paper for my tiny human**

Do you let your characters choose the path, or do you lay it out for them before they "come to life" on the page? Have you ever found that they just don't want to do what you've laid out?

That's a big part of the adventure of novel writing. You can plan it all out, but your characters are people too, for all intensive purposes, and they have thoughts of their own. You can't force someone to do something that doesn't make sense to them.

Yes, I realize that makes me sound crazy. But we're all a little bit crazy, aren't we? We are, right?

I believe Valerie had a post on characters and the choices they make. So at least I know she's crazy too.

Anywho, this WIP has a bit of a mystery in it and mystery is HARD! Making my characters solve the mystery in a progressive way is a pain in the asterisk right now. The Edgars are tonight and I am cheering for Saundra Mitchell, author of SHADOWED SUMMER! Visit Saundra on twitter @saundramitchelle and cheer for her too!