Apparently the universe has decreed that I am spending an extra day in Toronto, because when I tried to board the train yesterday I found that my ticket mysteriously read MONDAY, February 23. And the earliest they could arrange to get me home at that point was 3:00 today anyway.

So I am perforce taking my remaining vacation day for the year and spending it chilling with my frighteningly brilliant sister, eating a whole lot of pakoras, and, of course, writing like a madwoman.

My dismay and heartbreak, internets. IMAGINE THEM.

My sister draws for a living. She is also in school full-time for graphic design. And on top of this she has her own epic projects percolating on the back burner. We were talking yesterday about how you manage to wedge your own stuff in around the cracks; she was bitterly discouraged at how difficult and anxiety-making her own stuff had become when for clients she could confidently hash out concepts and refine them without any trouble.

It's so easy to get sucked into #4 with your own stuff, because you care so much about it - if it's not coming easily, you must be a total fraud, a hack, a sell-out who will spend forever chained to a desk churning out mediocre nonsense for other people.

Here's the thing: your own work? It's still work.

It's just that the client is you.

Kameron Hurley has an excellent post about the virtues of her day job writing corporate copy. The environment in which I write for pay is much less cutthroat - probably downright cushy by comparison, actually - but there are still deadlines and clients with expectations and stakeholders to negotiate with. And there are always going to be those people whose input you just have to roll your eyes and run with, because, to quote the post mentioned above, "you're a professional."

You get used to finding a foothold in an abstract idea, drafting text around it, noodling around with it until it works, having it come back for a shift in emphasis, and then again to be cut down by half because it turns out there won't be space for the French version otherwise. It makes taking three or four tries to sort out a scene in a novel and then finally axing it or moving it and having to readapt it all over again look reassuringly normal.

This from Kameron Hurley is also spot on:

Writing is a job, for me. When you get to work at 8am at your day job and your day job is writing, well...you come to work and you write. Having a day job in marketing and advertising actually trained me really well on how to hit deadlines and write to spec. No one ever comes to work where their job is stocking vending machines and says, "Well, I really need to warm up my stocking-vending-machine brain." They just get to work.

(Almost more reassuring, coming from her, was this: 

We're in good company!)

I discovered this brilliant initiative hosted by Amy Trueblood and Michelle Hauk while surfing through the Twittersphere. The notion is that you post your novel pitch and first 250 words on your blog, add it to their list of links, and then critique the five entries before you and the five entries after you.

So here is mine! If anybody cruising through here is interested in exchanging full manuscripts, please email me (click on the little envelope button in the top corner). 

*** Taking this down for now, but am totally up for swapping queries, pitches, whatever - drop me a line! ***

Fellow Canuck Kate McIntyre, whose debut novel comes out this summer, is launching her writing blog with a great series of posts on disentangling oneself from a prolonged dry spell. I read the following and was all ZOMG MY PEOPLE.

"I kind of stopped writing for a while. I did this because writing got hard. We get to a certain age, or a certain level of education, or a certain something, and it doesn’t come quite as easily as it used to. And there are so many reasons. We have things to do. We think every word we put down sucks. We get caught up in the little things. We compare our work endlessly to that of our favourite authors. We come across something in our outline that doesn’t work anymore and it seems daunting and impossible to fix it, so we quit. I wrote almost twenty novels between 1992 and 2000, and then for eleven years, nothing. A lot of false starts, a lot of fanfiction, a lot of outlines, and not a single manuscript. The stories I wanted to tell didn’t go away. They just piled up. Some got repurposed into fanfiction ideas. Some turned into roleplays with my friends. But it’s not the same as writing down and really creating something, and when I tried to do that, it was like I was lost in an impossible labyrinth. The walls were all the reasons writing had stopped being the easiest thing in the world and started being one of the most frustrating, and it was like I couldn’t get out."

I have also recently fought my way free of this particular labyrinth, and the worst thing about it is that you're sure you must be the only one trapped there. Because a REAL writer would have a map, or a vorpal sword, or a helpful talking animal so as to breeze through this whole ordeal, but you're left trudging around in circles and taking inventory of your pockets and wondering how a lipstick or a ball of string is going to help you get out of this mess. You must not be a real writer, clearly.

Laurie Halse Anderson, in that post I mentioned in the last entry, attributes writer's block to one of two sources: fear or exhaustion. Exhaustion is easy to fix. Fear less so. That's the one that landed me in the labyrinth both times. Better to sit quietly and look stupid than to pick up a pen and remove all doubt. And with two kids and a full-time job (the most recent bout) or school, a wedding coming up, and a full-time job (the previous bout) or pretty much any roster of, you know, adult obligations and preoccupations, you've got plenty of excuses to not make it a priority.

So yes, I'm definitely looking forward to reading about Kate's experience, and thought I would post my own strategies for solving the labyrinth:

* Make up your mind to do it. Do or do not, there is no try. My parents used to tell me (about any number of things) that "you don't have to like it, you just have to do it." As a kid I found that profoundly unhelpful, but as a grownup it's oddly liberating. You don't have to do it well, or graciously, or quickly, or without drinking and whining and eating a lot of chocolate; you just have to do it. 

Draw a line in the sand - something nice and immutable and impossible to argue with, like a date, preferably an imminent one - and tell yourself that beyond this line there will be no more not writing. I have a marvelous quote on my office wall, where I will see it every day: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

* Don't bash your head against anxiety for too long at a stretch. I once read a strategy for overcoming phobias that boiled down to "stand closer, stay longer" - this is sort of the same principle. I wrote my MA thesis in two-page chunks because that was about as much as I could take without feeling physically ill. But two pages a day still piles up eventually. And slowly the productivity made me feel a little better, and I could sit with it a little longer and get a little more done. Again, set the bar for volume and enthusiasm low. You don't have to like it; you just have to do it. Small increments are, helpfully, also easy to stuff into the cracks in the rest of your life (like the 2h between the kids' bedtime and mine).

* Bribe yourself with treats. Pour yourself a glass of wine, buy yourself a fluffy coffee concoction, sit yourself in your very favourite and most comfortable spot with a pastry. Even better, save your treats for writing time; then you have something to look forward to, even when writing is about as appealing as a poke in the eye. Don't save the treats as a reward that you can only have after being productive; that just makes it more depressing if you screw up.

* Find allies in productivity. They don't even have to be writing. If you know somebody who's in school, who's coming up on a work deadline, who's knitting something, who has to do their taxes - get together and sit quietly together while you all get shit done, whether at somebody's house, at a pub, or over Skype. It's like having a gym buddy; they keep you accountable. (Although you have to be a little careful with this one, because god knows it's easy to get derailed into just hanging out and drinking wine. Not that this has happened to me. Ahem.)

The labyrinth has no power over you. Give it hell.