A Novel Creation www.WatersWords.com

I love this time of year. The holidays are always filled with noisy activity but the days following Christmas are full of quiet anticipation. It is a time of rethinking my life, reorganizing my space, and reviewing my goals. It is a time many people resolve to make changes with a “this year will be different” attitude. I had a friend whose husband always told people she lost 200 pounds. Everyone hearing this was shocked. “Really?” They looked at her in amazement, trying to picture this beautiful woman wearing a size mammoth petite. Her husband would smile. “Yep, she’s lost ten pounds every year for the last twenty years. She makes a resolution every January to lose ten pounds by summer and she does it!” New Year’s Resolutions can be tricky like that. We often find ourselves making the same promises every year. I hear it from people who read my blog. I hear it from people at conferences and workshops. “This is the year. This is the year I’m going to publish.” ...

I’ve made it a practice to share a Christmas memory each year. I know it is a busy time of year. I don’t know how many people will actually read this, but for those of you here with me now, I hope you will find a blessing in my story.   Tradition When our girls were young we spent much of our Christmas holiday traveling the interstate between Ohio and Florida. If you’ve spent much time in Florida you’ll find most people who live there are from somewhere else. We call them “transplants.” Tom and I were transplanted the other direction. We moved from Florida to Ohio. Every year we loaded our daughters, gifts, and a bagful of snacks and drove sixteen hours to spend Christmas with our family. No regrets. We did, however, try to have a few traditions apart from viewing the decorated houses on the route through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. Tom and I grew up with fresh cut Christmas trees. This proved to be one tradition we found difficult to continue when we moved to ...

Are you busy? Inundated with shopping, gift wrapping, cookie baking, and parties? Planning dinner around holiday concerts at school and caroling with your church family? Not to worry. It happens. Every year it happens. If you are a writer, it is easy to allow your writing time to be snatched away with a whispered promise of “tomorrow.” Tomorrow quickly turns into “next week” and next week becomes “after the holidays.” If you participated in the month long writing event in November you already know there is more work to do on your novel. Today’s blog is aimed at giving you three next-step-strategies to keep your writing moving in the right direction during this busy holiday season. Trust me, if you do even one of these, your January will look much brighter. Strategy One: We’ll start with the easiest one first. Write out three specific tasks you need in order to move forward in crafting your novel then choose one to complete before the new year. Here are my three: ü ...

The month of November was interesting. For this blog, I asked five relatively new writers to post about their writing journey. A big “thank you” to Joshua Curran, Robin Mason, Nancy Hallo, Laura Wood, and Deana Rogers. So, if I wasn’t writing a blog post every Wednesday, what did I do with all that time? I’m here to report this side of the blog was equally interesting and productive. Hmm…this post is starting to feel like a “what I did on my November vacation” report. The first Wednesday of the month I generally address the business of writing. Today I’m giving you a peek at how my writing business shakes out. I usually take on one major project to complete each month, but with the holidays just around the corner and a new year approaching, I hunkered down and put my fingers on the keyboard two to three hours a day in November. I map out my workload three months at a time so this was intentional. Here are the results of following my plan. The Writing to Publish Series I...