Spring in the Garden

It should come as no surprise that my approach to gardening is haphazard. Spring arrives, and I dutifully clean beds. I buy stones and bricks to rein in areas that have encroached on lawn. I see what survived the winter. I buy plants. I nurture them for a while. Then (usually) the exhaustive heat of summer arrives and my garden gets somewhat pathetic looking. Then autumn comes and I tidy again. Winter comes and it all decays again.

This year, spring is going to mean some pretty significant ripping of plants away. A big bush died this year, and it needs to be pulled up and something new planted. A tree was struck by lightning, I think. It too needs a chain saw taken to it. The fence needs repair from said tree. My vegetable gardening IS happening this year, if only because it will make my mom happy. She is planning on rose bushes, too.

All this garden talk, though, isn't so different from my writing. I generally start off with tidy little manuscripts and elegant first chapters, only to find myself at SOME point, usually in the drought of the middle, taking a chainsaw to it.

All this garden talk, actually, isn't so different from life. My life started neatly, I guess, but here I am surveying an awful lot of stuff that needs a chainsaw. This past year saw much of what I had counted on blooming for years to come instead uprooted and destroyed. I have two choices: leave the ugly detritus, or get rid of it--whether by burning it away or composting, or hauling it to the dump.

And all this garden talk, as it pertains to both writing and my life, is really about self-acceptance. Because I have friends with neat and tidy gardens. They have little nameplates for each plant dangling elegantly from copper spikes. Their rows are well-tended and weeded. Their beds have nary a stray leaf in them. I love gardens like that, much like I admire writers who can outline in neat little books or fancy software programs or storyboards, and think, "Now that is certainly a lovely way to write a book." It's a lovely way to have a garden. And their lives are certainly tidier than mine. My guess is their laundry piles never spill out from the laundry room into the upstairs hallway either. Their children are likely better behaved (at least as far as Pirate Boy goes).

But my garden and my life and my writing have always been messier. It's less about clutter, I now realize, than about energy. It's when I am full of the joy of a manuscript or my garden or my children, or life in general, I don't seem to notice how my world is swirling in a tornado until AFTER, surveying the mess. And when I am grieving, or in pain, or frightened and stressed, I don't notice either. It all just spills out of my head, my closets, and my tidy beds.

There's nothing right . . . or wrong . . . in either approach. And so, like everthing, from Ecclesiastes:

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war; and a time of peace.

And sometimes, some of us, have all of those things at once.

So how is spring shaping up for you?

Lies

I recently discovered someone in a position of authority lied. Not a little lie. Not a white lie. He told me something very specific, then walked into a a meeting with five other people and denied he'd said it. There was no miscommunication. There was no alternate way to interpret what happened. I wasn't drunk or suffering from a concussion when he told me this. I hadn't been struck on the head with a hammer. I didn't have amnesia. None of the above. He lied. End of story.

At this stage in my life, I don't think, for example, cops, firefighters, principals, teachers, CEOs, presidents, or even priests and ministers, are immune from being unscrupulous. They're human. Robes or collars or badges don't have magic powers. But for ME, abuse of power invokes a whole set of fictional scenarios. Because with all due respect for the terrifying serial killer books out there, what strikes fear in ME when I read are those books where someone is on trial for their life . . . and they are being set-up. People are lying on the witness stand, being bought off. Or a prosecutor refuses to look at a different scenario. You need only watch Law & Order--or read the paper--to see innocent people railroaded. Or to see the guilty go free. But to me, it would be absolutely TERRIFYING if (knock wood) one of my kids was set-up, if I was set up . . . if a friend was . . . it's a morass that has got to be a nightmare you wish you could wake up from--but can't.

Sometimes, terror and nightmares aren't the kinds of sick torture scenarios with serial killers eating brains--I mean, heck yeah . . . scary. But to me, it is sometimes it's the things that humans do--that then snowball. The woman who says she was raped, or that her kids were kidnapped--and innocent men get questioned or even imprisoned. The little white lie that then becomes an alibi for a guilty man. Those are the kinds of things that REALLY scare me.

Along with clowns.

But that's a discussion for another day.

Thoughts?

The Compass

Thank the Writing Gods for him. Okay, first of all, read his post today. Amen. But that's not why I'm thanking the Writing Gods for him today. You see yesterday I was in what he terms the "death spiral of ideas." I have a MASSIVE book, a dystopic novel, set in 2020 . . . and it's essentially, at its heart, a love story set at the end of the world (or is it the end of the world?), and about an Angel of Death who has become fascinated by the two people. I've altered the main female character ever so slightly. She takes pictures of dead people now. And yesterday I was toying with excising a character who is part of the famous nun study in favor of a more linear storytelling narrative.

And that guy asked a very simple question.

Does the end contain the beginning?

And indeed it does. Because the nun's brain (in the actual study, they all agreed to donate their bodies to science) . . . winds up at the end. Literally. Her brain.

It's easy to, particularly in big books, get tangled in the morass of intersecting plot lines. Because my novel spans centuries . . . there are touchpoints where characters meet or just miss each other. Moments when the thread of one weaves through the scene of another--much like life. It is random--and yet not. What one person calls a coincidence, another calls an act of God. But in the end, we all, as writers, should tape a few questions to our computer that ground us.

Does the end contain the beginning is one of mine.

What are your questions? What's your compass?

Back Away from the Manuscript and No One Gets Hurt

Have you ever known someone who seems to delight in destroying or manipulating lives? This would be the type of person who "accidentally" lets slip some piece of ugly gossip . . . a neighbor's spouse's affair . . . whatever it is. Or they will "innocently" create a conflict because they just "didn't imagine" the destruction that is the end result.

Now, me? I get to write drama. Conflict. Chaos! All of it happens in my head. No real lives are ruined. It's like the move Stranger than Fiction.

Just when I thought that I was pretty clear in my work-in-progress, I am toying with adding a character. Frankly, what the hell am I thinking? I'm a novelist on the edge today and no character is safe.

I feel like there should be a voice over for how I feel today.

Back away from that novel and no one will get hurt.

Or, instead of the standard disclaimer, this one from the Simpsons:

NO DOGS WERE HARMED DURING THE FILMING OF THIS EPISODE. THE CAT GOT SICK AND SOMEBODY SHOT A DUCK BUT THAT'S ABOUT IT.

Ever feel like some demi-god?

Have you ever looked at your work-in-progress and thought . . . I think I just might . . .

Run! No character is safe today!

Oh, what tangled fictional webs we weave.

Thoughts? Ever just feel a little mischievous? A little wild?

Happy Monday, Writers! Readers!

No characters were harmed in the rewriting of this manuscript!

Turning Point

I am in the midst of finding a family lawyer who will draw up guardianship papers for me. If anything happens to my housekeeper and her husband (i.e., deportation), I will become the legal guardian of their four children. Bringing me to a total of eight kids. Do I have room in my house for 8 kids? No. Add to this that the likelihood of invoking guardianship is somewhat high (most times, it's invoked by death . . . in this case, it would be invoked by that--unlikely--or deportation--much more likely). And so . . . I have passed a turning point.

What do I mean? My housekeeper says she doesn't care if she is shipped back to the slums of Mexico as long as she knows her children are with their other mom. I meet women all the time, in the ESL circles I travel, whose children live with grandparents in a home country and these women work back-breaking jobs to send enough money home that their babies are fed, clothed, and don't need to live in the slums or, in one case, one of the garbage cities. I went from knowing one woman like this . . . to several . . . each one breaking my heart a little. And pulling me into another world just a bit.

And I realized this morning (I have a long day ahead of me interpreting for a situation) . . . that many, many books and characters arc like that. The hero doesn't start OUT hunting for the bad guy who has murdered a hundred people . . . the hero is pulled into the abyss, into this other world, little by little, or suddenly--WHAM!--by some catastrophic event that leaves the hero no choice. Usually, there is a turning point. Some moment when the hero shrugs and thinks, there's no going back. I'm in it.

I am thinking of my wip. My critique group knows I am at a point in which my characters are about to get swept into another world. Little by little, I have planted this story. Little by little, Aleks has been pulled into searching for a cure for the virus. And WHAM! A turning point is about to occur that changes the landscape of the entire book--both figuratively and literally.

I thought Child-44 did a brilliant job of pulling the detective/hero into the morass of the hunt for a killer. It was gradual . . . until the turning point, and then all hell seemed to break loose. I thought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also pulled Blomkvist in little by little, like reeling in a fish, until a turning point where he was going to find out the truth no matter the consequences.

Thoughts? Does your plot have a turning point?

Game-Changers

Last week, someone did something so astoundingly vicious to me, that it was a game-changer. The meanness of how this person spoke to me is now is the new standard of what viciousness means to me. So much so that now I almost chuckle at what I USED to think were unkind remarks. In THAT sense, it was a gift. Now, I know that sounds impossibly Pollyanna-ish, but that is truly where I am now, a few days after this incident. Unkind words are a LOT more likely to roll off my back now.

Which got me THINKING about characters. Think of things that would make your stomach turn, things that would wrack you with nightmares for weeks. Now think of an FBI agent or a detective and what they might see in any given day or week. Their standards of what disturbs them are different. Sometimes when I read the news, I pause when I see a quote from, say, a 20-year police veteran who says something like, "It was the worst crime scene I've ever walked into." IMAGINE, given his standards of crime scenes, what that means.

It seems to me that much of literature is about about game-changers. Detective fiction is about THE case that almost puts a detective over the edge. In some fantasies set in contemporary worlds, it's about the game-changing moment when the person discovers an alternate universe, say. I've even played around with that with my two vampire books, because I chose to set them in such a way that for the hero/heroine in each, the book became about when they discovered vampires existed (versus a world/fantasy that opens with everyone in the book aware of their existence, such as the Sookie books). Great love affairs are about THE love. The game-changer.

So I wonder . . . your work-in-progress . . . is it about a game-changer?

P.S. I added the latest board when Parrish sent it to me today. Do you think he is calling me a brat?

Believability

Much of what writers do is create fake worlds that people believe in. That's most obvious in fantasy and sci-fi. But it's any world--cop novels, detective novels, legal thrillers, romances, blow-up-the-world thrillers, cozies (I know a couple of cozy writers who have readers write them wanting to move to the fake towns they've created). And we all have different thresholds of what we believe. We've all watched movies where we've thought, "Oh, give me a BREAK. Like she's going to go in that house with the lights off and not even turn them on . . . when there's a killer on the loose." And yet, do a good enough job of creating a world, and pal, I am along for the ride.

As a writer, I have been amused sometimes by the occasional review or email from a reader that questions something in one of my books--and it's usually not a big plot point. It's something small. In Spanish Disco, I remember one woman not believing the main character could have gone to a certain NYC club because my character was "too young." The reader could not have been a New Yorker, and definitely didn't know the term "club kid" (which I used in the novel), because my sister went way underage to that same club. In other words, what she didn't believe . . . was real.

So this got me thinking about what goes into believability. As they say, it's all in the execution, but I tend to think the following:

Odd character traits are supported by back story. I think of this in recalling an old acquaintance of mine writing a detective novel set in a very gritty city. The woman was a devout Christian, and she refused to have the detective curse. Rather, he would say things like "Gosh darn!" I pointed out time and time again that real detectives in real cities don't speak like Boy Scouts. But when I was critiquing her, I was in my 20s and hadn't honed my critiquing skills. What I really MEANT was if she was going to insist (which she did) on having an Aw Shucks detective in that setting, she was going to have to do an exceptional job of building his back story so I believed it. For example, she could have made him a Mormon or a devout Christian who once promised his grandma never to let the job turn him into a cursing, drinking pessimist, and so he works at that, much to the amusement of his partner. It doesn't have to require more than a few lines here or there, some mocking by his partner, whatever . . . for us to "buy" this character.

Details are authentic. I am worldbuilding in 2020 right now, at the fall of civilization. I spend a lot of time thinking about what life will be like then. I decided as workers and food supplies dwindle, finding a real bakery in NYC will be darn close to impossible. So when Aleks brings home real NYC rye for the soup they are going to have, it's a big deal that he went out of his way to the ONE bakery still open part time on their side of Manhattan. It's a small detail, but I think it's authentic.

Which brings me to details. There are the macro and the micro. You can have your high concept, but the LITTLE things are what will work to support it.

Accept that fiction must make sense. I can think of numerous healthy debates with writer friends over certain plot points. While they were able to make a plausible case for the REALITY of plot point A or B (similar to my example of the Spanish Disco detail), in the fictional world, it all has to be supported.

And finally . . . don't ask us to suspend TOO much disbelief. You can't pile it on . . . if a character just witnessed three murders and the killer is still on the loose and the cop says, "You're a target, I'm going to post a cop car outside your house," the average person will gratefully accept said protection, not protest it. The average person won't then (thank you, Psycho) take a shower or blast music or whatever, so they can't hear the killer. The average person is going to ask the cops to search the house. The average cops are going to DO so. ONE implausibility for the sake of plot . . . okay. A PYRE of ridiculous stuff and the manuscript goes up in flames.

Thoughts? What makes a book utterly belieavable for you?

Anarchy

So yesterday was my Come to Jesus Meeting with Oldest Daughter. No, SHE was not the recipient of the Come to Jesus Talk. I was.

In about two weeks, I need to turn in my rewrite of Star-Crossed, my Penguin 2011 release. I have been meandering all over this book all summer. I had oldest read it because she is the same age as my heroine. She loved parts but it was meh-ish for her. My rewrite letter had a few specifics, but there were some things that my editor wrote that didn't have an obvious fix. My own feelings about the book were vague. Each SCENE worked, but stringing them together wasn't working.

All summer, my daughter would say, "When are we having our meeting about the book?" And all summer, my brain hurt and I would say, "I'm not yet sure what I'm doing so . . . soon." I felt like I was swimming in murky water.

Oldest leaves for college again on Friday night. So this week it's now or never. Come to Jesus. So, we had our meeting. And in the end, she said the book had some plot issues but she didn't KNOW my characters. And if you know what my ususal reviews are, that is always where I tend to get a thumbs up. Character.

I ended up crawling on the floor to sit next to my daughter near a sunny window. And we brainstormed. She had solutions, but she kept saying, "What's THAT look for?" [INSERT my face all pensive and panicked.]

And then POP. Out of the blue I said, "What if this was set in London?"

And then POP, "And what if her uncle is her mother's brother, not her father's?"

And then one, two, three, four, certain problems fell away. And then I said, "What if she is a violinist?" [totally new character element].

"And what if August's father is not agoraphobic but physically disabled?" And then pop, pop, pop . . . problem after problem fell away. And then, it was like bursting up through the murky water into the air up top. I "saw" the book. In its entirety. Saw it. Knew it. Knew the characters. Knew it all. But all this summer? Hell.

My general feeling after yesterday was . . . three things tend to happen with mehs:

1. You abandon the book (had I not been under contract, I don't know what I would have done)
2. You continue as is because it's "good enough." (Not what I recommend.)
3. You are willing to COMMIT to anarchy for a while in the name of the greater good.

I did #3. I was willing, I have to say, to start at the first word and change EVERYTHING even if the process has not been fun.

My problem had been a somewhat stubborn acceptance that some of the main elements, even setting, were "fixed." When I let go of that, and was willing to wander through in a state of disorder, the result was not only freeing, it was exciting. I KNOW what I'm doing now, and I can't wait to work on it today.

Thoughts? Ever give in to anarchy for the greater good?

Whispers

Yesterday in the comments, Jude brought up Child-44. I loved the book, though it was exceedingly bleak. I thought the details of Stalinist Russia were incredibly accurate and well-told. I can still remember my grandmother showing me a picture of a cousin and his wife who were sent to Siberia. "What happened to them?" I asked. Her reaction told me all I needed to know, as did this book.

But really, Child-44, to me, is a textbook example of organic plotting. In chapter one, a fascinating and gruesome scene unfolds of starvation. And then chapter 1 opens many years later. It is not until the reader arrives at the last third of the book that the full and total ramifications of the prologue come to bear. To say more would be a huge spoiler. But suffice it to say, the whispers on the prologue ARE the book. The seeds of everything you might need to know about the book are there.

Organic plotting involves a lot of whispering. Whispering is that thing you can't quite . . . hear. Some rustling underneath the plot. Something not quite right. I have the privilege of reading Lurker Monkey's new fantasy and from the first breaths of this book, whispers are everywhere. Perhaps it's not unlike "chatter" in signals intelligence.

I feel like I have blogged a hundred times on organic writing. But it's one of those more esoteric writing subjects. Without organic writing/plotting, the results are forced. They are the work of a puppeteer and not a writer. Things happen TO characters instead of arising obviously and gracefully from the plot.

Here's another point. We are FICTION writers. In real life, bad things happen to good people for not earthly reason at all. And that can still be a fine point to open up a book. J.A. Konrath was here on his AFRAID blog tour. That chapter one he posted at his sight is indeed a seemingly random horrific event. But then the whole book, in essence, shows why it wasn't so terribly random at all. This is fiction. In the end, you choose, as the writer, what characteristics your characters have, what details to reveal, you create the foreshadowing, you hone the theme. So, no, I don't believe you can have random events in a book. The whispers have to follow from page one to the end.

Finally, I suppose some genres demand whispers more than others. Thrillers and mysteries . . . fantasy. They, to me, definitely demand you start the underlying chatter early on and let it build to a cacophony.

Thoughts? Do you have whispers in your book?

The Plot Spiral

Anyone who knows me in real life knows I am a tangent kind of gal. Get me starting about topic A, and I will likely meander quite far afield before finally arriving back at . . . voila! Topic A. There'll be a thread there . . . and I follow it as I spiral along before arriving back where I started. A discussion of the American educational system will get me talking about how I went to a British school, which will get me talking about the queen of England, her corgis NOT needing a diet, my "chubby" (that's putting it politely) corgi NEEDING a diet, which will get me talking about how he bayed at the full moon last night, which will bring up the constellations visible from my backyard, which will bring up my last trip to the planetarium, which will bring me to the big bang theory and quantum physics, which will bring me to how science really isn't taught hands-on enough . . . which will bring me . . . WOW! Back to the American educational system.

Infuriating to those trying to follow my train of thought perhaps. But it's a spiral. A protein fold made from what might appear to be a linear tangent, but it folds unto itself.

Which brings me to writing. I think when you write your first novel, you start at the first word and outline a path, and end at the last word with lots of banging your head against the desk in between. It seems like a line. Point A to point B to point C. You might even map it as such. By the time you start a second, third, or twenty-fifth book . . . you maybe start playing with your narrative structure. And then you may have these moments of clarity where you realize the whole damn thing is a beautiful circle. Or a spiral. Or a coil.

Somehow, on page 1, the main character is in one place. And by the end, they are back where they started--but different, changed, restored, wiser . . . whatever their path, they come "full circle."

The first time I did that was in The Roofer. The father's lines--imaginarily uttered from his casket--frame the first chapter--and again return for the last lines of the entire book. When that happened, I had one of those moments as a writer when I realized that of course my books were never linear. They were instead like protein folding. [If you want to know more about protein folding, you can read a simple discussion of it here.] Somehow, the linear threads coiled. Get proficient enough at coiling, and you can end up with a spiral . . . proficient enough at that as a writer and you can somehow make it turn into itself and come full circle or back to the point of origin.

In Magickeepers, Kolya's arc of multiple books will be that of a boy longing for magic to seeing magic for the danger it can be to embracing magic as his destiny . . . and the coil will loop him several times as he sorts through his feelings on family--longing for one, embracing them, rejecting them as too intrusive, pulling toward them again, round and round on the same spiral, until he emerges at the other end, changed and yet with a heart of longing again (though for different reasons).

Thoughts? Do your plots spiral? Are they linear? Circles? Do YOU have a corgi needing a diet? Oh . . . I digress.

You Don't Move Me Anymore

Way back when, while I had friends who mooned over Mick Jagger, I had a thing for the cadaver next to him. When Keith Richards released a solo album, I was first in line to buy it. As expected, there's some great guitar on it. And as expected, his voice sounds like someone who has boozed, drugged, and smoked his way through all his years on earth. I'm sure I'm not the only person who mentally pictures Keith Richards at age 2 with a Marlboro hanging from his lips. His is not a a polished voice, but a blues voice--and he's no great lyricist, but I like his music.

In particularly, he has a song called You Don't Move Me. And of course, it makes me think of writing. Because I recently read a manuscript that . . . well, didn't move me.

I tried to think of why. Each sentence was perfectly crafted. No extra words. Spare. Lean. Writing that I admire.

There were no errors of grammar. Nothing to stop this editor in her tracks.

The voice . . . solid.

The problem at hand? Yes, the hero faced a pretty Herculean crisis.

But I was not moved.

And it was only later that I realized this newer writer had grasped the mechanics of writing, but not the emotion. And later still that I realized PLOT DOESN'T EQUAL CHANGE.

That was it. Because really, when I arrive at a "meh," that is sometimes the problem. Plot advances story. It has a beginning, a middle, an end. But how does the main character CHANGE? Is there an emotional core to the book? It doesn't have to be this massive "message" book. But really . . . there's a story arc, and there's a character arc. If I am, say, going along with a cop on a case, and he solves the case, but isn't forever changed by the case, then it's just a procedural.

That Keith Richards was right. You need to MOVE me.

So how are you going to move your readers?

The Flea Market

When I was a little girl, my dad used to take me to the flea market. He LOVES places like that. He has easily 10,000 records. You read that number correctly. LPs. All jazz. And we would go hunting. (He is visiting me, and said he recently got airchecks of my favorite--Django Reinhardt--which he is going to give me.) The best thing about flea markets is the hunt.

Once in a blue moon, I still go to the flea market. I think because it reminds my of him and how much I love him. I like going ALONE (a flea market with Demon Baby is a nightmare I don't want to imagine). I wander the aisles in some kind of meditative trance. It relaxes me. I don't collect LPs, but I do buy useless crap sometimes--a pretty plate, or a teacup, or an old book. I sometimes spend an hour just looking through old family photographs there--you know, the old black and whites of families from the 1930s or what have you. I don't know the people, of course, but I wonder who they were. I also wonder why no one wants their pictures anymore. I think of family, and even death. After I am gone, and my kids are gone, and my grandkids are gone, who the hell is going to want my pictures? My crap! Will my junk end up in a flea market?

Anyway, what I love about the hunt is you find something cool, but there, 'round the bend is a table--and maybe there's something even COOLER, some hidden treasure that is just meant to go home with you.

So it was with my work-in-progress yesterday. You see, I have a perfectly servicable plot point. It works. It has a "cool" factor (this is for MAGICKEEPERS, my middle-grade fantasy). But then, out of the blue, I thought of something SO MUCH BETTER. I wavered for a minute. It will mean rewriting a couple of scenes. BUT . . . with this new addition, I know exactly where the book will end. Exactly. My young hero is going to say, "Why didn't I think of this before?"--and he will have an epiphany--just as I did yesterday.

And I guess my point is I can't help myself. There's always the promise of something hidden 'round the next bend. And that hunt, I suppose, is one of the neatest things about being a writer.

Thoughts?

Forest, Meet Trees

Day three of black eye is even more hideous. I look like a strange creature, indeed. But I am somewhat less loopy and feeling more intelligent than my last addled days, so that's good. And now for a discussion of forest and trees.

My new editor was as terrific in person as I could have possibly hoped. He's a thinker--and I like that. He asks probing questions. I like that, too. And at one point, he said to me, "Since this is a trilogy, where does book #1 end in terms of the hero's journey?" And I gave my answer . . . which is that he has a small triumph in this book, but now sees the world is far, far darker than he ever thought, that he is in more danger than he ever thought . . . and that he has to accept the tremendous new responsibilities thrust onto him by his birthright. My editor liked my answer--in fact, he firmly believes that trilogies should end book one with small triumphs but a sense of danger. And therein I had a forest meet trees moment.

You see, sometimes on this blog we talk about themes, and story arcs, and symbolism. Some of us write on a level where we don't think of those things until we're done, or they emerge bit by bit. But for me, I like to, once in a while, climb the mountain, get out of the forest of writing and denseness and plot and action, and get WAY up high and survey where the hell I am. At what point in the journey am I? Where did my character come from, and where is he going?

When I think about writers getting lost in the middle, finding the middle point soggy, or feeling like they have lost their passion for the story, I sometimes wonder whether it's that we have lost the ability to see above plot, to see this clear journey. Like Hansel and Gretel, lost in the dark woods, dropping breadcrumbs, we're moving forward without being sure of what is behind us and what is in front of us.

Sometimes, for me, the very heaviness of a deadline pressing down can make me lose my breadcrumbs, too. I have a pace to keep, pages to write, and I don't feel like I have "time" to sit down with a cup of coffee and just "be" with the hero and look at the journey. I'm too busy writing the journey.

But as John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." Sometimes, I think it's good to just pause. Climb the mountain. Survey the landscape. Answer some basic questions. Think on it.

Thoughts? Do you sometimes get so caught up in the writing itself that you lose your way? And what breadcrumbs do you drop to find your way back?