Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

1. Practically all of my books have acronyms, because that makes it a little easier for me to put book-related tasks in my planner. Most of them are easy to decode, like "R&R" for Rosemary and Rue, or "DA" for Discount Armageddon. The only book I've written so far that has no acronym is Feed (although it had one during the writing process, before the title change—the acronym for Newsflesh was, naturally, "NF.") The only book whose acronym makes no sense at all is Blackout, which I still refer to as "TME" (for The Mourning Edition) when writing notes to myself. This is because I refuse to have tasks related to "BO."

2. I tend to work out tricky bits of dialog by talking to myself. Maybe this wouldn't be so silly if I only did it at the privacy of my own keyboard, but I also like to take very long walks. The whole "hold your cellphone up to your ear and pretend that you're on a call" doesn't really work when you're actively keeping up both sides of a violent argument. I'm reasonably sure all my neighbors think I'm dangerously insane. That's actually just dandy by me, since it keeps them out of my yard.

3. Sometimes, what looks like me goofing off is actually the hardest part of the writing process. If I get really, really stuck on something, I'll generally respond by either a) stomping into the back room of my house and putting on the dumbest horror flick I can find, or b) leaving the house entirely and going to the movies. This allows me to disconnect approximately half of my brain—the half that gets in the way of seeing the story clearly—and really focus on what needs to happen next. At the end of Hellboy II, I literally responded to "What did you think of the movie?" by bursting into tears and wailing about a character's hair being the wrong color. I work very hard when I don't seem to be working at all.

4. Part of why I tend to be working on several projects at once is my tendency to get really depressed when I finish something. It's like I was on a wonderful adventure, and now it's over, and all I can do is look at the pictures I took while I was there, and maybe plan to take another trip someday (but you know it'll never be the same, because it never is). Editing and revisions are exciting in their own way, but they're really the equivalent of scrapbooking that first amazing trip. The best way to avoid the depression is to make sure I'm never left with the time to just sit on my hands and mope.

5. I draw lots and lots and lots of little scribbly maps on Post-It notes and stick them up around my computer, so as to make sure I don't lose track of where things are. In the case of large combat or action scenes, I'll frequently sweep everything off my bed and start blocking out the scene, using My Little Ponies to represent normal-sized people, and scaling up (or down) from there. Being represented by a sparkly purple unicorn does nothing to improve Toby's overall mood. Just in case you were wondering.

6. I inevitably wind up re-typing the entire book between drafts one and two. I guess it's a holdover from the days when I worked entirely via typewriter and didn't have a choice. I just find that I get a better feel for the sentences and the way they all sort of slot together on the page if I'm remaining as tightly engaged with the text as possible. Fortunately, I also type at a hundred and twenty words a minute when I'm really focused, so the continual re-typing doesn't slow me down as much as you might expect.

7. I have an irritating tendency to hide big plot twists from everyone, including myself, to prevent accidental spoilers. Seriously! I'll spend two hundred pages setting something up, and then consciously realize it's about to happen roughly two sentences before it actually does. Reviewing the text makes it clear that whatever it was, it was totally inevitable and the gun's been on the wall since page six. I still won't see it coming until it gets there, even though my notes will read like I was totally playing with everybody's heads on purpose. This is sort of awesome, since it means the stories stay surprising even to me. This is sort of crazy-making, for the same reason.

8. Years ago, I named my muse. My muse's name is Jane. Jane is a flaky alcoholic who doesn't believe in deadlines. I'm a Type-A neurotic who doesn't believe in being late. We're like the Odd Couple, only she doesn't exist and I'm always the one cleaning up after her. Sometimes I think that if I got three wishes, one of them would be the delicious opportunity to punch my own muse in the face.

9. When books start to lag or I start to lose interest in them, I often motivate myself to keep going by starting to get excited about the next book in the series. In fact, that's usually the sign that I'm really ready to engage with the text and just power on through. When I start wanting to talk about the awesome thing that happens in the third chapter of the sixth Toby book, that's when you know I'm about to find that final burst of creative wind and slam through the remainder of book five.

10. I really do write constantly. Even when I don't have a piece of paper in front of me, the odds are good that I'm thinking about what I'm going to write the next time that paper is available. Weekends, holidays, sick days, birthdays, trips to Disneyworld, it doesn't matter; I'm thinking about writing. This used to get me into trouble with a few of my boyfriends, who had a nasty habit of asking me what I was thinking about, and then getting annoyed when I gave them honest answers.

Recently, dawn_metcalf decided it was time to introduce people to her muse. Never a bad idea, as far as I'm concerned, because you can tell a lot about a person by their muse. Only then I realized that I'd never actually stopped to introduce the people here to my muse -- I complain about her enough that I tend to assume folks just know who she is. Since I like people to understand why I occasionally stop what I'm doing to shriek "Dammit, Jane!" and threaten empty air, well...

...introductions seem to be in order.

( I've said this before, and people forget; sometimes I forget, and so I'm saying it again, because there's a girl, and her name is Jane, and she's the world... )