Last year, when I returned home from the Society of Children Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Winter Conference, I felt compelled to sit down with my manuscript and rewrite it. And I did. Twice. From two different points of view. It took me a year, but I think it is a much better manuscript, and I owe that to what I learned at the conference. This year, I don’t feel the urge to rewrite (thankfully), but I do feel the need to focus my writing efforts. And I suspect that if I manage to pull off the final polish of my manuscript and, gasp, actually send it out, I will owe that feat to SCBWI conference as well.
Sara Zarr, one of the keynote speakers and author of Once was Lost, devoted her talk to “Taking Care of Your Creative Life” and it resonated with me. One of the things she talked about was time management and she threw in funny bits about Twitter, Blogs, and Facebook and how they can creep in and take over your creative time if you let it. Boy-oh-boy is she right! Sometimes it is easier to read about what we need to do in our manuscript than to actually sit down and do it. It gives us a false sense of working.
When I first started this blog my concern with having one at all was that it would take away from my “real” writing and frankly, it has. I find that instead of working on the scene where I need to set the stakes for my main character, I’m freaking out about what I’m going to write here. I draft posts, never to see the light of day, and I spend time thinking about appropriate topics for a new person in the business to write about. While I’ve been writing, learning, marketing, and have self-published, I still don’t feel like I have enough to say – I’m an authority on being green and who wants to read that? And while it is good to write and good to set deadlines, I need to be using my limited time wisely. So I’m going to fade to black for a bit and come back when I have finished what I started. I believe in my manuscript and I need to take that final step.
So, off I go to write. If there is anyone out there reading, be well.
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