Today is release day for the Strangers on a Train series—taglined “romancing the rails.” In my story, Ticket Home, the heroine’s workaholic ex stalks her train commute, hell-bent on winning her back. If he doesn’t get himself arrested, he’ll do his best to remind her of exactly what she’s been missing!

I’m lucky to have worked on this project with four other amazing authors: Donna Cummings, Samantha Hunter, Ruthie Knox, and Meg Maguire, each of whom has a separate story in the collection.

The series has a really fun genesis—Ruthie and Sam were chatting on Twitter about the Tumblr “Hot Guys on a Train,” in which unsuspecting beautiful males are photographed as they ride, and the conversation turned to how much fun it would be to write a series of romances that take place on trains. The rest of us got drawn into/recruited to the project, and these five very different stories grew out of one prompt: Write about strangers on a train.

You can see/buy all the stories here:

Please also join us on our blog tour—all the stops are listed here. There are many chances to win each of the stories individually and/or complete sets of all five stories. Today, we’ll be at four different locations, giving away full sets of the book. Serena Bell will be at Romance@Random, Ruthie Knox will be at FictionVixen and Meg Maguire will be at Smexybooks. All five authors will visit HEA USA Today.

Here’s a short excerpt from Ticket Home:

Ticket Home is now out!! along with stories by some of my very favorite authors—Donna Cummings, Samantha Hunter, Ruthie Knox, and Meg Maguire—as part of Strangers on a Train, a series of romances about railroad encounters of the very hot kind. Five couples, five trains, five steamy romances!

Please visit me and the other authors of the Strangers on a Train stories on our blog tour, March 25-April 22. Find out how we came up with the concept that became Strangers on a Train, read about our own train experiences, and enter to win copies of Ticket Home, Back on Track, Tight Quarters, Big Boy, and Thank You for Riding.

Below I’ve listed our stops and which book/author is posting—which also tells you which story you can enter to win by commenting on that post. “All the authors” means you can enter to win a complete set!

March 25, Bookaholic Anon, all the authors

March 26, The Raunch Dilettante, Thank You for Riding by Meg Maguire

March 27, Blogging by Liza, Big Boy by Ruthie Knox

March 28, Love to Read for Fun, Ticket Home by Serena Bell

March 29, Intrepid Reader, Back on Track by Donna Cummings

April 1, Kindles and Wine, Big Boy

April 2, RELEASE DAY! We’ll be at four different locations, giving away full sets of the book. Serena Bell will be at Romance@Random, Ruthie Knox will be at FictionVixen and Meg Maguire will be at Smexybooks. All five authors will visit HEA USA Today.

April 3, Brunette Librarian, Tight Quarters by Samantha Hunter

April 4, Delighted Reader, Ticket Home

April 5, Ex Libris, all the authors

April 8, Confessions of an Opinionated Book Geek, Big Boy

April 9, Feeling Fictional, Ticket Home

April 10, Romance Around the Corner, Thank You for Riding

April 11, Book Crack, all the authors

April 12, Romantic Book Affairs, all the authors

April 15, Harlequin Junkie, Tight Quarters

April 16, Shh Mom’s Reading, Back on Track

April 17, Dee’s Book Blog, Ticket Home

April 18, Totally Booked, Tight Quarters

April 19, Romance Reader at Heart, Back on Track

April 22, Talk Supe, Back on Track

Please join us and enter to win! And if you’re interested, below are some links for buying the series or adding it on Goodreads.

I have some squee-worthy news. My novel, tentatively titled Are You With Me? will release as a Harlequin Blaze at the beginning of 2014. Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

A few writer friends have told me that it isn’t always easy to identify the moment when you get “the call,” that long-awaited telephone conversation in which you cross the line from writer to author. And I’d have to agree. But I do think that at some point, you know you’ve fully made the transition. You know that however surreal and lurching and slow the process might have been, you are now on the “other side.”

And it’s a great feeling.

I sold my novella, Ticket Home, to Samhain in May 2012 for publication in April 2013. Ticket Home is part of a collection, one of five stories in the Strangers on a Train series, whose tagline is “Romancing the Rails.” On February 4, 2014, it will be released as a paperback anthology. I love this project. I’ve loved it from the very beginning. I love the wacky way it started, as a brainstorming session on Twitter. I love the women I work with. I love my story, and I love all four of the other stories. Hard.

 And yet, the way I sold Ticket Home, it never quite felt like my sale. My big moment. Partly because it is a collaborative project. And partly because of the way I found out I’d sold. I had flown across the country for the inspection on my brand new house. I was completely focused on the inspection—whether I’d like the house, which we now owned but which I’d never seen, whether the house would pass inspection, whether the negotiations that would follow the inspection would be as awful as the ones that had preceded it. My heart pounded as I waited to leave my mother-in-law’s house for the inspection, and I refreshed my email a million times, just for something to do.

In dropped an email from my wonderful editor at Samhain, Anne Scott. She wanted to buy my story, along with the other four, for Samhain. But she wanted some revisions first.

Oh, God!

There was no time to absorb the news. I had to race to the inspection—and for the next several weeks, the inspection and the other realities of the move consumed me. I finished the revision Anne had requested and she acquired the manuscript. But there was no moment. The day we celebrated on Twitter was a great day, but by then, my own sense of thrill had passed.

The next several months whisked by. My husband and I had two enormous financial transactions to deal with, and some nasty complications. Finally we moved into the new house, but our kids couldn’t sleep, summer visitors descended on us, and we worried about our new responsibilities. Just when I was starting to feel a “new normal,” school started, and my kids’ anxiety levels—and my own—ratcheted back up. We spent the early fall in a frenzy of friend-making activities.

Finally, I settled into a working groove and forced myself to revise Are You With Me? and send it out. I’d forgotten how hard it was to psych myself up for querying, and I knew that querying agents with a category-length novel wouldn’t make things any easier—many won’t read or rep category.

But then my first miracle happened. Emily Sylvan Kim of Prospect Agency loved the novel and offered me representation. Emily had been on my radar screen for years—before I knew she would turn out to rep my critique partner (who is also one of my favorite romance authors). I was thrilled by this turn of events, but because it all happened only a couple days before our cross-country Thanksgiving trip, I didn’t find time to celebrate it properly.

My mother disapproved. “You have to celebrate everything,” she said. “Every little victory. Because it’s a very uncertain career.” She’s a literary writer who has seen a book rejected by acquisitions despite love from an enthusiastic editor and a three-book contract vanish after the series was orphaned by an editor’s departure to another house. “You have to make sure you celebrate whenever you can. Everything.” She opened a surprise bottle of champagne for me the day after Thanksgiving.

That bottle of champagne helped me process how far I’d come. Two years before, I’d decided that since I loved reading romance so much, and loved writing literary fiction, especially the love scenes, I should try romance. I’d written a single-title-length novel and sent it to—I don’t know, eighty agents? Some of them had loved it but none of them had offered representation. Since then, I’d written one more single-title novel, a novella, several short stories, many abortive chapters, and Are You With Me? I’d lost my fear of querying, my fear of networking with other authors, my fear of conferences, and my fear of Twitter. I’d met amazing writer friends at RWA chapter meetings and online. I’d done it all one step at a time, without completely registering how much I’d accomplished, how much I’d risked of my ego, or how far I’d come.

I sipped my champagne and felt where I was. On the edge. On the brink of something. Emily was sure she could make it happen, and her enthusiasm, her certainty, was infectious.

She was also right. Just a few weeks after the champagne toast celebrating her offer of representation, Emily called to say that one of the editors who had Are You With Me? was on the brink of making an offer. Not quite sure whether it was time to celebrate yet or not, I went out to lunch with a friend but didn’t toast my almost-news. We finished up lunch, and I stepped outside to find a message from Emily. A little earlier, she’d told me that that she’d gotten a promising email from a second editor, and she thought it might be an offer.

I live in the Pacific Northwest now, and the weather here in January is gray. It’s one of the things that makes me sad about my cross-country move—that, and leaving behind family and close friends. The morning had started out bleak, but as I sat in lunch, the sun came out. Brilliantly, strongly, which it rarely does here in January. The temperature had warmed, too, and I found myself standing on the street in my little town—charming, sweet, bustling, exactly like a village in a romance novel—and talking on the phone with Emily while the unexpected sun shone on me.

The second editor had offered! And in response, the first editor had sped the book through acquisitions and made an offer as well. There were two offers on my book.

There had been twenty phone calls between me and Emily over the last few months—new hope and wait-some-more and no-really!-soon! and it had started to feel like there might be no one call. And there wasn’t, really, even that day. I walked around town and stopped in shops and waited for Emily to call back with updates, and I can’t keep straight which call contained which revelation.

Ultimately—I started with a spoiler, so you know how it turns out—I took the offer from Harlequin Blaze, and I’m thrilled to be working with veteran editor Brenda Chin to bring Are You With Me? (if it keeps that name) to readers early next year. I have recently learned that this makes me a “Blaze babe,” a distinction I’ll wear with pride.

I have celebrated—dinner out with my husband with a “Raspberry Truffle,” two scoops of vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and Chambord. I will celebrate again when my girlfriends take me out next week. I think my mother is right—it’s important to celebrate early and often and as many times as you think necessary. But the truth is, that moment, standing there in the sun, in the town I’ve come to love, listening to Emily lay out the terms of the two offers, marveling at the capacity of life to be miraculous? That was my call and my truest celebration.

My critique partner, Ruthie Knox, and I struggled for a long time to find a solution to the following problem: How do you read someone else’s manuscript on an e-reader, then export your highlights and notes in a way that’s easy for your critique partner to read? Previously, both Ruthie and I read on our Kindles, then transcribed notes and highlights by hand into Word, because Amazon has made it nearly impossible to export highlights and notes from personal documents on the Kindle.

Ruthie’s husband came up with this elegant solution. It doesn’t fix the problem for Kindles, but it does make it possible to do what we wanted on the iPad.

1) Purchase PDF Expert for iPad from the App Store for $9.99.

2) Open the manuscript in Word and format it to fit an iPad screen.

• 6.5″ x 8.5″ page size
• .75 margins all around
• No unprintable area
• Justified
• Helvetica neue (other fonts work, too)
• 12 pt

3) Print, save, or export the document as a PDF.

4) Email it to yourself. Receive the document on your iPad and long press the attachment–you’ll be given the option to open the document in PDF Expert.

5) Read and mark up in PDF Expert. You can highlight, make notes, strikethrough, underline, etc.

6) Using the emailer built into PDF Expert (in the upper right-hand corner of iPad screen, tap the little box with the arrow jumping out of it), email the marked up document to your critique partner. Once you select “Send by E-mail” from the drop down list, you have options that include send the document, send a read-only copy, and send the document with a summary of annotations (very helpful!).

If you try this, please let me know how it goes for you! And if you have other solutions for exporting marked up documents from any e-reader, please share!

Angela is the winner of the advance copy giveaway, and fourseasonsny has won the newsletter drawing. Thank you all so much for visiting and commenting on the blog train, and special thanks to those who also signed up for the newsletter. We’re happy to have you on board!

Welcome to the Strangers on a Train cover reveal blog train! I’m so thrilled to be part of this great series of railroad encounters of the very hot kind, with awesome authors Donna Cummings, Samantha Hunter, Ruthie Knox, and Meg Maguire.

This is the dining car—stop and feast your eyes. Make sure to leave a comment, because we’re giving away FIVE complete sets of ALL FIVE ARCS—one to a random commenter on each site in the train. Commenting on all five sites will give you the best chance of winning.

If you sign up for my newsletter (on my home page) this week, I’ll also enter you in a random drawing to win a $10 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift certificate.

The comment period ends Friday, December 7th and we’ll pick and announce winners Saturday, December 8th.

Once you’ve squeeeeeed with me over my cover and commented, head on down to the next car for another tasty treat, the cover reveal for Donna Cummings’ story, Back on Track.

Now—cue squeeeeing—here’s the cover for Ticket Home, my debut book:

Is that a cell phone in his pocket…or is he just happy to see her?

When Amy Moreland left Seattle, she never expected to see her workaholic ex-boyfriend again. Encountering him on her Connecticut-to-New-York-City commute is the surprise of her life. He seems hell-bent on winning her back, but every time his cell phone rings, it’s a painful reminder how he failed to put her first.

Jeff Havers can’t help that his phone keeps interrupting his carefully composed apology speech, but having Amy sic the Metro North security team on him is a bit much. Once he talks his way out of handcuffs, he focuses on coaxing Amy to talk about the fears that drove her away.

As the train ride takes them through the landscape of their lost life together, sparks fly and remembered heat reignites. But if they’re not brave enough to overcome the still-fresh pain of old wounds, it could be too late to pursue what really matters—their ticket home.

Warning: This book contains steamy train-car action, sex on the stairs, and a hero determined to give his velvet-and-heels-clad woman exactly what she’s looking for.

You can pre-order Ticket Home now!

Rochelle Melander

Although I’ve yet to participate in NaNoWriMo, I’m fascinated by it (it’s on my bucket list). So I was psyched when Rochelle Melander of WriteNowCoach.com asked if she could write a guest post on revising NaNoWriMo work. I’m a big fan of writing sprints—I depend on daily and weekly goals to keep me on track—but the downside of sprinting is the aftermath. Below are Rochelle’s tips for living through what comes after November. Please comment and tell us how you feel about what you’ve written and the work ahead of you.

 

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn’t advance the story.                 —Frank Yerby

Can you feel it? You are almost done with National Novel Writing Month. Yes! And I’m here to talk about what comes after NaNoWriMo: revision. Bringing up revising before NaNoWriMo has ended is a little like asking a runner to analyze mile three of a marathon while she’s running mile twenty-three. Not helpful! If you need to bookmark this article and come back to it after the big NaNo post-game party—go ahead. If you’re brave and willing to consider revision—read on!

I’ve read that agents and editors hate December because National Novel Writing Month participants deluge them with hastily drafted manuscripts. Don’t do it, people! Don’t even think about showing anyone your NaNoWriMo book until you’ve revised it. Here’s how:

Step One: Let it rest. You’ve been hammering away at this book for a month. You’ve taken your characters through an amazing adventure and ignored everything else in your life. Give yourself and your characters a break. Take a month off to recover. Celebrate. Catch up on sleep. Cook. When you feel a bit more like yourself, recall what you’d hoped to accomplish with your NaNoWriMo book. Read a stack of the best books in your genre. Remembering and reading will help you envision your revised novel.

Step Two: Read through. Set aside a day to read your book from beginning to end, preferably in hard copy. Keep a notebook next to you to jot down the revision issues you see in the book. Focus on the big picture, reading for story instead of spelling. Making technical corrections at this point is like filling in nail holes on a wall you might demolish. After you’ve read once through for story, take a second look and note what needs to be revised in the following areas:

• Character (Clear goal, Development, Transformation)
• Story (Conflict, Plot, Action, Pacing)
• Storytelling (Narrative, Dialogue, Voice)
• Setting

Step Three: Plan your revision. You’ve done your homework and you know what you want this novel to do. You’ve also read through your rough draft at least once and made a “to revise” list. Create an action plan for revising the book, starting with the broadest issues (e.g., fixing the structural issues in the story) and finishing with the details (e.g., checking for consistency).

Step Four: Revise. Work through the issues you raised in steps two and three. Don’t worry about time—revising can take longer than drafting, but at least you have words to work with! Once you work through all of the issues you raised in the first reading, repeat steps one through four. (No, I’m not trying to torture you!) In the second stage of revisions, you will deepen the characters and tighten the pacing of the story even more. After you’ve put the book through a second round of revisions, it’s time to bring in outside help.

Step Five: Choose beta readers. At some point, you need to test market your book on real people. Invite your critique group and other avid fans of your genre to read through your book and offer feedback. If readers are not used to providing feedback—and it’s good to have a few of those read your story—it can be helpful to give them a critique checklist or even a few items to pay attention to. For instance, when my daughter read my middle grade novel I asked her to let me know what she thought of the characters. (Darcy Pattison has gathered a list of critique checklists here: http://www.darcypattison.com/novels/12-writing-fiction-checklists/) As you read the revision recommendations, remember that you are the creator of this story—you can dump any request that doesn’t fit with your vision of the novel.

A novel often goes through at least one more revision after beta readers provide their feedback. Once you get the story to a point that works, it’s time to put on finishing touches: checking the manuscript for details like spelling, grammar, and consistency. Now it’s really time to throw a party! Not only have you written a great book, you’ve revised it enough that you can start submitting it to agents and editors! Hooray for you!

Rochelle Melander is an author, speaker, and certified professional coach. She is the author of ten books, including Write-A-Thon: Write Your Book in 26 Days (and Live to Tell About It). She’s still revising her 2010 NaNoWriMo project, but hopes to be done very soon. For more tips and a complementary download of the first two chapters of Write-A-Thon, visit her online at www.writenowcoach.com

This has been a good week. Exactly why is the topic of an upcoming post, but for now, let’s just say that it’s the kind of week that makes all the work worth it. So I thought I’d write a post about persistence. Specifically, I thought I’d write a post about two different ways of being persistent as a writer.

For many writers, persistence means not giving up on a book as long as they still have the slightest interest in it or energy for it. They write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, until the book is the best book it can possibly be. Then they query and query, and rewrite and rewrite again, because they believe in this story, in this book.

The danger of the stick-to-it method, of course, is that you believe too long in something that’s fundamentally flawed. There are some stories that are not strong enough to sustain a 90,000-word book. There are some characters too damaged for the mainstream market you crave. If you’re too blindly committed to the stick-to-it method, you risk gutting a work of art to create a salable product.

The strength of the method is that it teaches revision, and revision is the most powerful writing tool. Being a good editor—by which I mean a good hacker-upper-of-manuscripts, not a good poker-of-sentences—is more important than almost anything else. (There are a few exceptions. Daily word production. Having a wonderful critique partner. An ergonomic desk set up.) Sticking with a manuscript teaches revision and persistence fast and permanently.

I have the utmost respect for this way of doing things, and many writing professionals will tell you it is the only way to get your first book published. But I will tell you right now it is not my way. To put it in the best possible light, I am always eager for new challenges. This is me not-saying I have a short attention span sometimes. I can rewrite a book a few times, but then I want to work on something else. (This is also why I have a large drawer of unfinished needlepoint work.) My way is to put the manuscript in a drawer and call it collateral damage. I might come back later for another look, but for now, it is road kill in the rearview mirror.

My way is what I think of as the way forward. The way forward is not as obvious as the chipping away at the manuscript until its perfection is revealed, or never giving up on a story’s salability. Sometimes, I wish I were the chipping-away type. Often, I wish I had infinite faith in my creations.

Instead, my “way forward” has everything to do with not getting stuck, no matter what that means. Some days, it means accepting that thirty rejections are not just the first thirty on your way to eighty rejections followed by a surprise, precipitous trip up the New York Times bestseller list. Sometimes, it means rejecting your temptation to decide you suck just because there is no evidence to the contrary. What it always means is that you have to keep going. The path is unclear or impossibly brutal, but the impulse can’t die. You spend a lot of time in one of the two following binds:

One: You are standing at the foot of a path that ascends ridiculously high and ridiculously quickly, a rocky scrabble with an invisible destination at the end. This is the sensation of having to promote a book when you have never promoted a book before. It’s also the sensation of beginning to write a new book.

Two: You are standing in a clearing, surrounded by impenetrably thick woods. You know there is a path that you are supposed to be on, but you can’t see it. The world looks like a wall of woods. Or a wall of words. This is the sensation of knowing a book isn’t working but not how to fix it. It’s the sensation of not-knowing the next scene, or the one after that, or the one after that.

They are different binds. The way to deal with the first is to put one foot in front of the other. The way to deal with the second is to slowly, patiently, work your way along the wall, trying everything that looks like an opening, reminding yourself that there will be missteps, gently, soothingly, talking yourself out of panic. The woods will open. The path will become clear.

Only one thing is known for sure: If you quit, failure is certain. If you stop writing, you are not a writer. What follows from it is that the only way forward is forward. On many days the meaning of that is obscure.  I have no answers, only this advice: put your hands out, nudge your toe forward, greet the next moment.

One thing I love about Scrivener is how easy it is to create, store, and activate templates. To me, Scrivener means never having to stare at a blank page, because when I start a new project, I have an instruction set for how to ease into the scary writing part.

Here are my Scrivener templates.

How to Write a Novel This is my favorite, of course, mostly because it makes me laugh every time I look at the title. If only it were that easy! This is my checklist of things I do before I start stringing words together—most of the other templates are mentioned somewhere or other in this checklist. The first item on the checklist, just to give me some momentum right off the bat, is “Have an idea.”

Male Interview & Female Interview These are two separate templates, a blending of Karen Wiesner’s Character Sketch templates and Ruthie Knox’s interview questions for characters. Sometimes I do these at the beginning and sometimes I do them when I get stuck in the middle and sometimes I do them when I’m revising. But usually I do them all three times.

Character Setting Sketch & General Setting Sketch These are pretty much verbatim from Karen Wiesner’s First Draft in Thirty Days method—one helps me define the larger setting, like a small town and its characteristics; the other helps me nail down settings that are character specific, like workplaces and homes. I do a bunch of Character Setting Sketches, one for each character with an arc. (I don’t have the right to link to or distribute any Karen Wiesner templates.)

Research List When I first start working on a new story, there are a million things I don’t know, and if I stop to try to figure them out, I get hung up and lose track of what interests me about the characters. So I just make a list of what I need to know later. I’ve also found that I usually need to know about two percent of what I think I need to know, and if I save the research for later, it spares me and my interview subjects a lot of pain. (This is just a blank, numbered list.)

Summary Outline This is a Karen Wiesner concept, too. It’s a list of scenes I know are going to happen, in order. Karen Wiesner’s plan calls for a lot of sketching out of scenes, but I’ve found that doesn’t work too well for me. I’m more a pantser than a plotter. I need to put all the right pieces in place to make the plot turn out well, but if I know too much detail about scenes that are coming, I get bored and become inflexible about listening to the characters and going with the flow.

GMC for H&h I got this from Ruthie Knox, who I think got it from somewhere else online. It’s a boiled down version of what makes the hero and heroine tick (internal goal-motivation-conflict, the engine of character arc) and what drives the book (external goal-motivation-conflict, the engine of plot)

Six-Stage Plot Structure Also Ruthie. A way of mapping GMC onto Michael Hauge’s six-stage plot structure. If you know the engines of arc and plot, you can probably figure out what has to happen, more or less, at each other turning points in the book. I didn’t use this template last time around because I realized I felt more comfortable mapping it onto a horizontal timeline that I sketched on blank paper. (And the beauty of Scrivener is that if I’d scanned that timeline, I could add it to my research folder and stare at it any time I wanted.)

Hauge Plot Outline A slightly more evolved version of the six-stage plot structure. To be honest, I rarely get this far in my own planning process because at this point I am so eager to start writing that I want to scrap the planning and go-go-go. Which I usually give myself permission to do. But if I’m still rolling, I do a:

Plot Sketch This (via Karen Wiesner) can sometimes morph into a synopsis, but I also have a template for:

Synopsis But I never use it because the thing that works best for synopses is giving yourself no more than ten minutes to write them. Twenty if you’re really slow. This is also, as far as I’m concerned, the only way to write cover copy. The more you think, the worse it gets.

I’d love to hear about what templates you use when planning a novel (and/or other tricksy things you love to do with Scrivener).

I’m a bad boss.

I give more negative feedback than positive, frequently telling my team they’re lazy, behind, unimaginative, or doomed.

When I give positive feedback, it’s narrow and limited. Great job this morning! I say, when I should be telling them they’ve kicked butt every day for two years with dismal pay and grim working conditions. Who else, after all, would work for free, two to six hours per day, with interruptions at unpredictable intervals? (And with a bad boss?)

I grant vacation days unwillingly. I make them check email and social media even when they’re theoretically not working.

Sick days and personal days are almost unheard of. To qualify for one of those, you have to be barely functional. Cross-country moves and a month-long near-constant barrage of visiting family? Work later and get up earlier, you lazy bums!

I ignore the signs of burn-out. Mental health days are for wusses. Press on, team! Wrists hurt? Dictate! Throat hurts? Drink more water! Butt hurts? Stand up!

You, over there. Are you slacking? If you can’t actually put your hands on the keyboard, at least you should be thinking about work. Did you just start to relax? Stress up! Surely there’s something useful you could be doing.

I’m a bad boss, and here’s the thing: I’ve got to quit it.

You know how they say you should be as kind to yourself as you’d be to a well-loved friend? (And you know how hard it is?)

I want to run this team—me, my lizard brain, the workers in the basement, the hamsters on the treadmills, and all the other critters on team Bell—like the best boss I’ve ever had, not Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl.

So, starting tomorrow, Team Bell is getting a real vacation. The hamsters, the lizards, the dudes downstairs, and I are going to the beach, where we are not going to work, and, more to the point, we are not going to hate on ourselves for not working.

When we come back from the beach, and the next slew of visitors arrives—nearly two straight weeks of them—we are going to enjoy them, not see them as an obstacle to productivity. The lack of childcare? It is not the universe thwarting us, it is an opportunity to throw ourselves into mothering for a few more weeks before school snatches the kiddos away and tosses them into the fray.

Perhaps, if I am exceptionally kind to myself and my team, if I am loving and give myself space to think, if I really relax for a few weeks before the school year kicks into gear—perhaps my mental health will even improve to the point where I can stop talking about myself in the plural.

Patience is not my strong suit. I dislike tasks that are intricate, that require precision, that require sustained concentration. I get particularly cranky with projects that take a long time to complete.

This is, of course, why I’m a writer. Writing is the perfect training and testing ground for someone who needs to become more patient, and the universe, in its infinite wisdom, has given me the compulsion to write, so that I am forced on a regular basis to confront my weakness.

When I’m left to my own devices, my impulse is to write in the way that requires the least patience. I like to draft fast. I like to work too much, until I hurt myself, so I can get a story told as soon as possible and it doesn’t hang over my head. I don’t like to revise, and I particularly don’t like to revise carefully and thoroughly and in multiple layers until I’ve got things just right.

So writing is a constant battle for me between tearing through stuff at top speed and what I knows the writing needs, which is care and concentration and a willingness to go in and over and over and confront what I’ve got on the page.

The best way I know to force myself to be more patient is to make rules for myself. I stole my writing-process rules from Ruthie Knox. (I learn a lot from Ruthie, partly because she’s brilliant at what she does, and partly because she’s brilliant at explaining what she does, which not everybody is.) Ruthie uses a three-pass process for writing a new draft, in which she first lays down the sentences and paragraphs of the scene, then fills in what’s missing—all the blocking and emotion that got left out of the first pass—then smoothes out the words. It works well for me, because it forces me to slow down and pay attention. I can’t declare a scene finished simply because I’ve put the words on the page. I can’t declare a scene done until it’s good.

I’m revising a book now, and its biggest problem—often my biggest problem—is the beginning. So I rewrote the beginning, and then my Impatient Brain wanted us to be done. Like DONE done. And my new Patient Brain that I’m trying to encourage, the one that doesn’t let me get away with that stuff, had to explain that even though the beginning was the most messed up part, the whole book has to be revised so the new beginning fits with everything that comes after. Patient Brain explained to Impatient Brain that it’s just like writing one scene after another—each one needs three passes and it seems like it’s taking forever, but then you look at what you’ve produced and discover that you have one perfect scene after another, lined up to make a whole, entire novel. See, Impatient Brain? Patient Brain says. You can do this.

Samantha Hunter told me (wisely) that gardening and writing are a lot alike. I’ve been doing a lot of gardening since I got here, because I’m intrigued by the fact that things grow aggressively well in the area where I now live. I killed everything I tried to grow in the Boston area. Some of that was the sheer misery of the climate, but I believe patience was a problem there, as well.

A number of different people have told me that they don’t think you can garden until you turn forty (Which I haven’t. And never will.). You don’t have enough perspective. You don’t realize that it takes several seasons to establish something, or that a plant that starts small can grow and flourish and take over. You don’t realize that you have to cut back to grow perennials big, or that you have to tear down to a little stumpy bit to nurse a shrub back to health.

With any luck, my gardens will teach me more of what I need to know about cultivating words.