Are you ready to take the lottery challenge?

The most ridiculous, yet true epiphany I had shortly before I wrote the first draft of my novel in a month was, “if you don’t play the lotto you won’t win.” Simple, true and everyone knows it. I’ve always known that and still I don’t play the lotto and probably never will. That’s not why that simple statement came to me though. It was about my 1^st novel, Exquisite Destiny. I started writing Exquisite Destiny about 15 years ago, yes you read that correctly. FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, more or less, give or take a year or two.

I was a different person back then, completely different. The only thing that remains the same is that I look relatively un-aged (thanks to cosmetic surgery – just kidding! Thanks to good eating and even better genes).

The first thing that happened was that I birthed the character. From the “Artist’s Way” book given to me by my still amazingly close friend Max I began writing morning pages. Morning pages is an assignment in the book where you write either 3 (I think it was 3) pages or you write for an allotted period of time, 10 minutes maybe, I can’t quite remember now – it WAS a long time ago. Regardless, my character Lizzy was born. And once I gave birth to the character she needed a venue.

Her playground was hammered out in my then office/closet. I wrote like a fiend for a month, maybe two. I had a full time job then too so I wrote whenever I could and though I don’t remember for sure I think I probably managed a few pages a day. At some point I had 50 pages and I thought they were good. I really did. My then husband (exh) wanted to read them as did a couple of friends so I started on the rewrites, without ever finishing the first draft. I re-wrote for another month or so. Ecstatic to get everyone’s opinion and not knowing the “rules” which consist partially of DON’T LET YOUR FAMILY OR FRIENDS READ YOUR WRITING, especially if you’re unpublished and have an easily crushable ego. So I did what any other eager young writer does – I printed out my pages and I handed them to my exh, who by the way doesn’t actually have a name, and 2 of my closest friends. I sat and waited with baited breath.

When the jury came back it looked something like this…. My exh hated it and thought I should shred the entire thing immediately. My “best friend” at the time, who it turns out was actually my exh’s best friend said “it’s ok.” But my other friend, oh Liisa thank you for believing in me! She LOVED IT!!! She ranted and raved and said these words, “please keep writing because I want to know what happens next, I couldn’t put it down.” Why didn’t I listen to the sage Goddess and her knowledgable advice? After all her husband is a professional writer, she would know!!!

But no, my ego was fragile and my exh’s demeaning opinion mattered to me. Still I sent out the first 3 chapters to an agent and got turned down and that was it. I gave up. Looking back, the agent’s letter was really nice and open ended but I didn’t realize that then. Sadly what happened was I put my stock and belief in the jealousy and control issues of another and I stopped working on my novel – for 15 years.

Why is this a blog topic? It will hopefully inspire others not to listen to naysayers, not to put their dreams on hold but instead to move forward with them. And don’t show your first time novel to friends and family, unless they are 100% supportive. I have a current critique partner who runs her writing by her husband and he is nothing but supportive. It can happen but often times it doesn’t and when it doesn’t, the results can be catastrophic.

If you don’t play the lotto you can’t win. If you don’t write on your novel consistently you’ll never finish it. If you don’t practice your sport of choice you’ll never be good at it. If you don’t play your instrument regularly you won’t get better. If you don’t speak the foreign language you’ve been trying to learn you’ll never learn it. Simple, very simple and we all know it but knowing it and doing it are what separates the doers from the dreamers. Are you ready to take the lottery challenge?

Scrivener - the ultimate writer's software friend

I love Scrivener! It's a fantastic writing system for Macs!! A quick search says it's for PCs too but I obviously have the Mac version so I can't vouch for the PC version. Plus there was other s/w that was highly recommended for PCs and I spent hours trying to figure out how to get it to work on my Mac before I gave up and did some research and found Scrivener. Sure it's $45 bucks but it's well worth it and has turned my novel writing into a dream!

It comes with it's own tutorial, which I am slogging slowly through and then I also downloaded David Hewson's template which I am trudging through as well. I love that both of these "tutorials" are completely different and you learn different things from each of them. And if you spend time writing in between reading the tutorials you can apply what you are learning while feeling industrious and creative.

Scrivener is a program that let's you add folders on the left hand side of the screen, write your text in the middle and fiddle with other pop-up boxes on the right side of the screen. I'm in the midst of the right hand side screen tutorial so I can't really comment on all the features (of which there are MANY) but I can comment on the handy dandy highlight/sticky note function that I am using far too much. When you write a bit of text in the main part of the screen - also known as - the body of your novel and you come to a point where you don't have all of the fine tuning dialed in (say you have a character and you know she's from South America but you haven't decided where exactly) you can highlight any section of text and add a sticky note (which shows up on the right hand side) and add notes there which will show up again when you click on the highlighted text.

But my favorite part of Scrivener so far are the folders. I was already an organizational folder junkie so Scrivener almost rewards my folder OCD. You can create folders for your chapters and the scenes in each chapter. If you click on each folder you get only the "scene" but if you click on the top folder you get the entire manuscript. And that's not all... there are folders for characters, folders for places and my favorite - a folder for research! David Hewson recommends adding a folder for "unplaced scenes" which is amazingly helpful and I highly recommend copying the one from his template or creating your own.

And then the other super cool thing: your project target. You set how many words you want to type in a period - for example I picked 6,000 words in 13 days and then with each writing session it will show you how many words you have typed and how close (or how far) you are to (or from) your target of 6,000 words for example. And at the bottom of each page in your manuscript you can see how many words you've written so there is no constant highlighting and choosing *word count*.

Also check out: Writing a novel in Scrivener: lessons learned by Charlie Stross. 

His review is much more technical than mine and he conscientiously lists what Scrivener can't do. I'm just a novice here, having fun writing my first novel. And if you fall under this category, I highly recommend Scrivener. Before transferring my data to this system I was lost. I had excel spreadsheets (and still do for my character info), pages of data in word and links saved in folders in my browser. For me Scrivener makes sense because I can keep everything in one place. You can also download a trial version to check it out first and I highly recommend that you do! With Scrivener I actually look forward to writing every day!