For now, I’m suspending my blogging intent.  Quite honestly, I’m spending every ounce of free time I can squeeze out of the day on writing books.  Which is as it should be in reality.  I’m not going to say I’ll never blog again — because I might, but at this moment in time my heart isn’t in it. My heart is with Super Spawn at the t-ball field and the soccer field and the school circus and gymnastics and then it’s at the day job and on my current WIP.  There just isn’t enough left for blogging at the moment.

Of course, I’ll still be on Twitter, and I’ll keep the website up to date with any news…plus, there’s always email. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I’ll still be haunting the blogosphere and commenting on your posts — I just won’t be posting any of my own.

We’ll keep in touch.

And you can bet your buns I’ll be writing.

Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway‘s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s unique take on the topic.

This Week’s Topic is: It’s (the day before) Valentine’s Day! Let’s jump start the lovefest by blogging about what you love most about writing (and/or reading)!

My bet is this is something most of us as writers think about frequently.  I know it’s my love of writing that keeps me pushing through the tough spots.

But what I love most? Well, it’s probably the same thing I love about reading, just a little…deeper.

I love the escape.

When I’m writing from another character’s perspective it’s like slipping out of my shoes and stepping into theirs. It’s putting on a new face and becoming someone I’d never have a chance to be in real life. Pushing boundaries, testing waters, making magic happen where the real world would never allow.

To me, writing is freedom of imagination and the power to both create and destroy people and dreams that wouldn’t exist without me.

I LOVE that.

I LOVE being able to let go of all my troubles, all my fears, all my personal qualms and become an uninhibited teen again.

What about you guys? What’s the part you love most about writing? Share here or over at YAHighway.

Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway‘s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s unique take on the topic.

This Week’s Topic is: What’s the best book you read in January?

Well, I’ve been doing a TON of revising and work has been nuts, plus Super Spawn played winter soccer which put us at the field a minimum of two nights a week, so…I didn’t read any YA novels in January.

But Super Spawn brings home a new library book every week from school, and some of them are simply amazing.  It’s awesome to have him choose stories for us to share completely on his own.  He has great taste in books!  lol

So this month’s best book is a picture book.

Africa Dream – written by Eloise Greenfield and illustrated by Carole Byard

Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway‘s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s unique take on the topic.

This Week’s Topic is: In celebration of the release of Kristin Halbrook’s NOBODY BUT US (hooray!!) we’re asking: Zoe and Will set off on the road to seek a better life and encounter loads of drama on the way. What’s the most dramatic road trip you’ve ever been on?

I’ve been on a lot of road trips in my life.  In fact, until last year I had never even stepped foot on an airplane! So, you can imagine the number of road trip stories I have from my childhood.

All the best ones though — and, yes, the most dramatic — involve my grandmother.

Oh, Granny.

From being lost in Orlando to waiting three hours for a locksmith in the Florida heat at Gatorland while the key was in her pocket, trips with my Granny have always been an adventure.

But maybe none so much as the time we went to Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Martinsville, Virginia.

You see, we have learned over the years that anything that is going to go wrong while we’re on a road trip, it will happen in public.  There’s just no other option. So we arrive in one piece, despite my dad’s best efforts, to a little historical site with lots of neat costumes and whatnot for lunch.

This is the lunch that has lived on in infamy, because after my mother asked for “sweet tea” which is apparently not a thing that far north, she was adding sweetener when she flicked three (not one, THREE) sugar packets across the restaurant and into the back of a man’s head. As if that wasn’t show enough, when Granny’s salad was brought out she started eating, naturally.  And only when she nearly put the blasted thing in her mouth did she realize there was a GIANT MOTH in her salad.

I’ve never heard someone shriek so loudly in my life.  She bolted out of her seat and across the restaurant, retching the whole way.  We were such a scene.  I can only imagine what people must have thought of us!

S0 the next day we drove up to Virginia for a Nascar race.  My dad LOVED Nascar.  Along the way this black car kept nearly running us off the road, and my dad — the race car driver — decided it’d be wise to try and outrun the guy. Which turned out in our favor, ironically enough, as the jerk got pulled over and I got to color a fast sign to wave out the window at him that said, “You’ve been black flagged.”

Wouldn’t you know that day was destined to be the hottest one on record too?  We got to that racetrack and people were dropping like flies from the heat.  Mom wound up packed in ice.  Granny went to check on her and collapsed. It was a right catastrophe.

And then, in that epic moment at the end of every vacation, as we were fighting to get out of the parking lot of the race track so we could head south and get some proper sweet tea (Really, what’s so wrong with sweet tea, guys? Get on that already. ), my mom said her signature line, “Well, good thing I never lost anything in Virginia since I’ll NEVER be coming back!” And it wasn’t even over yet.

(Side note: She has been back, but not to a race, and she rather enjoyed herself.)

You know how tensions tend to get super high at the end of a road trip?  Well, Dad is the champion of all things tension-related, so you can imagine his stress level as we crossed back over the FL line with five people in the car.  My little sister, who was maybe eight or nine at the time, had the impeccable timing of reading a bumper sticker that stated, “don’t be a dick,” right as Dad was going into full-on meltdown.

Yeah, we feared for her life…until we all cracked up.

That was most definitely the most dramatic road trip in the history of EVER.

What do you think, can yours top mine?

I found my own prize in my mentor, and once again in the completely amazing community of YA writers out there.

But what did I learn?

1. How to add depth to characters. One tip my mentor gave me was to add some form of internal dialogue anywhere that I find a chain of dialogue three or more lines long.  –  BRILLIANT.
2. Start at the beginning.  Okay, duh, I know.  But I have struggled with this story’s beginning for a YEAR now with some saying add, some saying hack away, and never really honing in on the problem: that it started at the turning point, not at the beginning of the story!
3. How to work on a deadline.  And it’s hard.  But I work well under pressure. 

And I’m sure I learned more than that (and more than you want to read about in a numbered list), but the idea here is that no matter who got requests or didn’t in the contest, ALL of us came away as winners.  We’ve all got awesome pitches, awesome openings, and awesome new friends in this crazy industry (And perhaps a propensity to overuse the word awesome?).

That’s prize enough for me.

I’m kind-of full of SQUEE this morning because I forgot!  And then Erinn reminded me!  And EEP!

If you’re at all interested in seeing the pitch and first 250 of my novel THE RIDDLE OF LEGEND, which my super fantastical mentor Danielle Ellison worked on with me, jump right over to Brenda Drake’s blog and see!

My lovely friends Erinn, Megan, and Ghenet are also up for the war today, so look for them too!  Good luck to you all!!  <3<3

So I had an awesome chat with my amazing mentor for pitch wars Sunday morning.  I swear, I feel so lucky to have Danielle as my mentor.  Not only is she brilliant (and she is very brilliant), but she also likes Doctor Who and Merlin and all the right TV shows, and that’s just full of WIN in my book. But we’re here to talk writing, not TV.  Not today anyway.

I’m laying in bed trying to go to sleep running through all the things Danielle and I discussed today about my story and directions I can take to make it even better.  You know how that goes…every time you close your eyes a new idea pops in your head and you have to run through how that would play out and fit with the rest of the story.  Yeah.  No wonder writers tend to have sleepless nights.  Anyway, amidst that I got to thinking about soccer.

Yep, Super Spawn is playing soccer.  I am an official soccer mom and loving every bug-bitten, freezing cold, hard-bleacher-sitting minute of it.  (And that was not intended sarcastically.  I really am loving it.)

(And as a side note, I’m starting to feel like I could make a writing analogy out of any scenario.  Maybe I’ll make it a game.  We’ll see how many I can come up with this year.  Ha. Feel free to tell me to shut up already.)

So soccer and writing.  Fun stuff.  When you’re playing soccer (or watching, as I am) the ball gets passed around a lot.  It gets run up field and down field and out of bounds, all the while you’re trying to steer it in direction of your goal.  You have that target and you know how to get it there, but making that dumb round bit of bouncy leather GET there, well, that’s the challenge.  Then you’ve got people out there blocking and parrying your moves.  Trying to knock you off course or even steal the ball right out from under you.

Nobody is in the wrong here.  They have a goal too.  It’s how the game is played.  You kick to your teammate, they kick a bit off course, and before you know it the whistle is blowing and the ball is being thrown in the other direction.  You’re scrambling to catch up and redirect it back toward that silly little goal with the ever-so-competent goalie.

It’s exhausting just talking about soccer.  But really, how different is all that from writing a book?  You write it, you get it beta’d, you edit it, and you kick it out there, hoping for the best.  Then that defensive player smashes it halfway down the field and you’re backtracking, trying to scramble and pull the game together again.

The thing is, no matter how many times the goalie deflects you, no matter how many trips up field you have to make, as long as you’re playing, you’ve got a chance at bringing home the win.

As Super Spawn himself says, “Never, ever give up. If you keep trying then you’ll learn to do it.”

How did I raise such a wise little boy?

And as a treat for enduring yet another writing is like THIS post from me, here’s (rather cute) proof of my soccer mom status:

Super Spawn is the goalie here.

In January of last year I made a list of goals to accomplish through the year.  They were:

1. Make TATE’S HELL query worthy — check
2. Query T.H. — I started anyway
3. Read more — check
4. Write another first draft — didn’t happen
5. Live a healthier lifestyle — check

So when I look back at the goals I accomplished, 2012 doesn’t look like too bad of a year.  In reality though, 2012 was a struggle for me writing-wise.  I know most of us struggle with self-doubt, and I am definitely the rule and not the exception in that arena.  In fact, I’m fairly certain my personality default is set to “second guess”.

Much of my year was spent struggling against that urge to just give up.  That question of why do I try kept cropping up, and it has taken every ounce of determination I have to push through it.  Which is why I backed off from blogging and everything.

I am happy to say that pitch wars really helped me get past that mental block I had built up for myself.  I was chosen by an amazing mentor, who has been encouraging and helpful on so many levels.  Danielle has helped me to not only look at my story from a different perspective, but also the way I write as a whole.

Hopefully this means 2013 will be an amazing year for writing.  I’ve got some incredible ideas that have been percolating for a long time that need to get written, and I’m hoping 2013 is going to be the year for them.  But I’m not making goals this year.  I’m taking it a day at a time and remembering to enjoy life.

Most of all the wonderful trips and adventures we took in 2012 reminded me to enjoy Super Spawn, because he’s growing up way too fast. My little soccer playing gymnast (who swears he’s going to the Olympics) is the light at the end of my day.

My very favorite saying is: Can’t never could.

My Pappy used to say this, which my mom picked up, which now I catch myself repeating to Super Spawn.

At first, I never got it.  Can’t never could?  Duh.  Because he can’t.  Says so right there in the first word.

Ah, to be a child. 

I realize now the wisdom my grandpa and mother were trying to impart.  The fact is that if you say you can’t, you never will.  If you believe you can’t, then of course you won’t!  But if you take that silly little word out of the equation, suddenly anything and everything is possible.  Even if it doesn’t wind up turning out the way you thought it would, you proved something: You CAN try.

And you should try, because if you never try you’ll never learn, and you may miss out on something wonderful.

With NaNoWriMo over halfway through, and my own WIP being a bit stubborn here lately, I’ve found myself thinking a lot of can’ts. I guess this is my way of acknowledging it and setting them aside.  Because all I have to do is try, and I can.  And that’s all you have to do as well.

Because can’t never could.

Well, we are back from Disney and had a fantastic time, but I am still utterly exhausted.  I’ve been taking on more responsibility at work, which is keeping me running like I’ve never run before.  Which is good and nice, but tiring anyway.    (I’m NOT complaining at all, I LOVE my job. I work for the best company on the planet.)

As expected I’ve only managed to add about 1,000 words all week to the WIP.  Which is fine.  I’m a little stuck too.  So I’m trying to decide whether I need to push through, make an outline, or maybe even add in another POV.

Hmm.  Decisions.

I’m pretty sure my problem is that I’m writing a very contemporary story with absolutely no otherworldly or fantastical elements – which I’ve never done before.  Eek!  It’s fun to try my hand at new things though.

So let’s hear it…how are your NaNo projects going?  Flying along smoothly or are you as stuck as I am?