Last night I made a decision. It’s been passed through and ratified through my supportive family, and it feels right. It makes me extremely scared, but also I am feeling more stable than I have done in several long months. It feels right.

This afternoon I am resigning from my part-time employment. I currently spend 7 contracted hours a week (sometimes more due to absences) working at a before and after children’s club based at the local Primary School. I’ve worked there for two years now, but things have hit a head this week with family changes.

Juggling around working days to try to accommodate the increasing after-school activities of my daughter, missing out in the social interaction with her peer’s parents, and on several days having to negotiate with other parents to take my child to an after-school activity like ballet class, then missing out on seeing those myself – it’s all got too much recently.

The hours, and pay do not balance out what I and my family is currently missing out on. When I first left full time work two years ago, it was for a purpose – to support my own family (and the adoption) by being there. Previously my long commuter hours meant that I missed out on time with my daughter and husband. Now, with my daughter’s recent commitments to dance classes, brownies, art and craft clubs, and certainly with my work, the family is actually missing out on more time together than ever before.

Add to that more – we have just this week had a visit from two adoption social workers. It was ‘National Adoption Awareness Week’ last week, with several media presentations towards needing more parents to adopt. The anniversary of our own entering the adoption process three years ago.

Our social workers have given us some assurances that now that we have gone off ‘hold’ after the mis-match of last summer, and gone through our so called ‘mourning’ period, that in the new year there are several local children that we might be top of the list for. They have also assured us that we are considered an excellent family to adopt into. I’m not so sure I trust and believe everything that social workers tell me, but I’m no longer willing to give up all hope that there may be a little boy out there to complete our family.

Making the best of the decision to resign my meagre hours, I’m looking at this positively – the additional two afternoons a week that I will have freed up next year will allow for much more possibilities. No longer will I be stuck at reciprocating play date invites for my daughter’s friends onto a Friday, I can use other days also. Therefore I can also utilise those free-er hours for both cooking for the family, and for other things.

Like – writing.

With the resignation (in mind as well as reality) towards leaving work, came the slowly growing feeling that with such a fresh start and commitment to my own family, that I can use that commitment also for my writing. I’d already set aside January for writing that novel. Now I have no excuses not to.

There is also a financial incentive here. My pay for the work I am about to give up was extremely poor, and didn’t help out at all for the household. I’ve always been frugal here anyway.

But with that work I never felt like I was at all helping out the family finances. It didn’t make a dent in the bills, wasn’t helpful even if something like the washing machine broke down in a month. The best it could offer was enough for a birthday present for my husband in the month. The hours worked and financial benefits didn’t seem to balance with the negative impact of working that early morning and those afternoons every week.

My money was going simply on supporting my ‘Second Life’ habit. Which I consider a writing gig anyway, because I’ve managed to maintain my SL blog through all of this, and it’s made me feel a little better about my own writing work, if unpaid.

So, I’m committed to finding ways to make my writing help the family finances. That means, for me – getting that novel out and published. And submitting short stories that pay -  and all of that means cutting down in the new year on supporting my second life habit – unless I find a way to make a little money out of that (whether from writing or perhaps in the niche hobby field I’ve developed, I’ll have to think about that one…).

We have a lot of things yet to get through, as a family. December finds everyone in the silly season, I also have little doubt that my own resignation from work and month’s contractual working may be met with some disappointment from the boss and committee, and we also have a lot of things to do regarding the adoption – more social worker meetings to get through over the next few weeks, more planning from our end regarding how we’re going to find the money, and much more hope.

Christmas this year will also be a little difficult for us. For many months this year we had expected to be sharing it with a new family member, a little boy. We have presents purchased for that boy still sitting in our wardrobe, and every time I go in there, it still hurts to see them sitting there. The door to his bedroom has been semi-shut for months now – even my husband can’t bear to go into there. We have purposely toned down our Christmas plans this year, and are cocooning down into a little family just happy to have a few presents, but the day will still hurt a little. So will having to go to a larger extended family Christmas dinner, where our daughter’s cousins still tend to ask questions about why we sent away that little brother we’d announced a few months ago.

The social workers acknowledged that we have gone through a mourning period and have lost a child, but nobody in the community knows how to react to that, because they never saw the child. I’ve found myself even ousted from the school yard where many of the parents are slightly uncomfortable around me, particularly the many who have little boys the same age. It’s understandable, and I don’t hold anything against them, but I would like a new start for the new year.

So, my new start has the following commitments at a personal and professional level – Commencing January 2010

• Commitment to family – daughter’s after-school activities, support of husband’s work and family time. Cook dinner!
• Commitment to continue pushing social workers to locate and place a child/children into our family. Hold onto my heart and soul, this will be a bumpy ride for all of us.
• Commitment to writing professionally –
  • Maintain this writing blog – yes, this badly neglected Juiced on Writing blog.
  • Write first draft of (fourth) novel
  • Rewrites
  • Submit novel to agency / publishers
  • Write short stories or other projects to sell for money
  • Downsize on Second Life, and/or seek writing or work opportunities within SL to support it financially

Although the resignation side of things has been creeping up on me accumulatively over only a few weeks, if not this week, the writing commitment itself has been growing steadily in the opposite direction. It’s almost felt like as I let go of one portion of my life, another equal but more invigorating side has started to blossom.

Two weeks ago, as I was doing my Christmas shopping online (ah, the irony of buying gifts for my husband, when in truth – it’s he that is paying for them), I added some solidly big (in size and  price) books to my Amazon order. Manuals for me – my Christmas gift for myself (because husbands, no matter how hard they try, never actually get me what I really really want – or is that just mine?). Not books on ‘how to write’ this time, as I’m past learning how to, and just want to do it – but huge reference texts on the subject of forensic psychology.

That knowledge was a show-stopper towards my starting the novel, not knowing how my major character, a forensic psychologist, might react or her own career training – that was stopping me from starting properly. Now I have the research material – some of it anyway. I bought the books before deciding towards this resignation and accompanying commitment. Yin for Yang, or tit for tat, my world although disruptive and thunderous at the moment, is still coming out remarkably balanced.

It feels right.

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You’re probably right.

I had big intentions to get back into writing this month, with NaNoWriMo, almost inspired enough to join up with a supportive writing group, after attending some inspiring week-long writing workshops at the 2009 online Muse Writer’s Conference.

But.

No excuses. No procrastination. No tricks. There were many reasons this week not to start NaNoWriMo – including the added stress of having my study sessions come down on me to be completed.

But.

Really, it’s down to stress. My family went away for mid-term break last week, which was meant to see us relax. It had the opposite effect. More stress pored on top of sadness and stress, then this week’s study expectations, and I found myself finding that place where I just wasn’t coping very well. I leapt back to anger and fear, sadness and tears, just like I was two months ago. How easy it was to feel that hurt again, and not be able to stop it for a little while. It was scarey.

It’s been a couple of months now since the whole adoption thing fell out of the sky. We’ve not heard from our adoption social worker at all – I believe we’ve been written off. Except they did send out something in the mail – a council pamphlet on dealing with mourning. No letter, no explanation, just a brochure. My workmates and hairdressor think they know what it feels like, but nobody really does.

My family remains mourning about the death of a dream – a three year old dream. My hubbie talks of it like it’s the death of a child – that would be more easily understood by most of the people around us. But this child was intangible, we only saw him on paper, and some of those papers lied to us, as did the people we were forced to trust in.

To top it off, my next door neighbours, who have been going through infertility treatment for years, are finally pregnant, and my boss at work suffered through a miscarriage. I cried for both of them – tears of happiness that something can go right in the world for the former, tears of pain for the later. Despite what other people may think, I do still have the capacity to hurt or celebrate for others around me also.

My workmates walk around on hot coals around me, I walk around my boss and neighbours the same. But after two months my own family still seems to be working through this process in it’s own time, and we falter all the time, me in particular. Anything can set me off, yet I still work with children for a job, and feel paranoia around how people are watching if ‘I’m coping’.

Yeah, I’m coping. Slowly.

But I’m not writing much.

During Muse ‘09 I developed my two storylines further – one a steampunk fantasy, the other an urban thriller. The first I decided would be easy enough to blurt out during NaNoWriMo, but when I came back from my family un-holiday this last weekend, I’d decided against it. The other one, an urban thriller based on my own black emotions at times, is the one that calls for me. But I understand enough to realise that it’s dangerous territory at the moment, and not a novel which will grow during a period of self-driven stress within the NaNo format. I need to take this novel slower – and deeper – than any of mine have ever been before. It matters. Unlike my previous novels which I dismissed immediately they were born by calling them ‘pod-novels’ this novel really does matter.

So, I’m waiting until the hurt – both inside my whole family, and inside me, eases a little and we have decided what we are going to do about our life together. I’m waiting, and still thinking about the novel, still planning.

In the meantime, my own drive to write about writing has completely vanished. I have no energy for it. I should be telling you about the new Holly Lisle Redrafting course, and lots more. But I simply don’t have the energy for it.

Maybe I’ll return to this writing blog at a later date, but maybe I’ll close it down.

I’m glad that personally I can find I can still continue writing – if only on the fantasy that is Second Life. Blogging about that means I don’t have to think too much about real life, and sometimes that actually helps me. I’m not disappearing into SL, though – I stay away from that virtual world for long days and weekends now, and am feeling things get quietly more in control.

There is a readiness now to start planning for a different life – I’m not certain what it involves, but there is one surety – that sometime soon that novel will get written and it will be a hell of a good one, and it will be published.

And eventually our family will be okay just as it is now.

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But as for my real life….

Having experienced a huge loss in falling out of the adoption process in August, my mind and body just doesn’t seem to be co-operating very well. The first few weeks were difficult and intense. One day I would be okay, and the next I would wake up – physically sick, and mentally worse off.

But still, I had to force myself to go off to work (with kids, now that was incredibly difficult) and smile and act like nothing much was wrong. People didn’t understand – there was no missing child, just missing hope. So even my hairdresser went all quiet when dealing with unexpected tears over the hair washing basin.

Things have lessoned now, in time for me to put some effort into the Muse Online Writers Conference which starts – tomorrow!

So I’ll give the workshops I did register in my best shot, and see how that goes. I’m registered on ones for world building, and others for some psychological sides – making monsters in fact.

My problems in writing are ones similar to those experienced when I was simply introducing myself on the workshop forums for Muse just now. I suggested I currently had two different novels planned – and that’s the crux of the matter.

One is the Steampunk Fantasy Adventure – a true by-the-book hero’s journey. The other is the psychological thriller I initially planned out earlier this year. Triller versus Fantasy – I still haven’t even steadied myself on my writing genre.

Before the adoption issues, I was all about the Fantasy – a week before and you would have found me having already devised most of the main plot, built (in my mind at least) most of the world, and many of the characters.

After the adoption issues, with my emotions and mental tiredness overriding much of my life, and I leapt back to the Thriller. That novel is based on the angry emotions of a domestic surburban wife. I could understand her point, now. I’d re-found her, within myself.

Understanding that I need to live through this mourning process, I crossed out my normal writing plans of joining in with NaNoWriMo this year. Although I think I could still do it, I don’t feel I’ll benefit from doing so. This whole process, which somehow includes my writing work intermingled through it, seems to need a more natural pattern to it. Putting myself into a stress-induced writing environment won’t do me well this year, as there’s still enough of it around in my every day world.

So, back to the Muse Conference – my first real writers conference. Registrations for this year’s Muse are now closed, but will be opening up again in November for the 2010 Conference. I’ll give some of the workshops my best shot, and see how it helps in getting back my writing mojo.

In the meantime, just by reading through some of the forum introductory posts, I’m finding that there are a lot of interesting writers out there that I can learn from.

For those who missed the news, Holly Lisle has closed off her How to Think Sideways course to any new participants – from last Friday I think. Anyone who is currently in the course, or has graduated from the course, still has access – and mentoring – into the class forums. Just no new registrations. Holly is using the time to move onto working on her new course on revision.

For those of you who joined up on my recommendation (and I got a little money as an affiliate) I would like to thank you. I hope you are getting the best out of Holly’s first big writing course, and would suggest to you that you will probably be seeing me around the Revision course when she goes live with it, if I can afford it.

Now, I’m off to have a think about what my favourite monster is, and what his motivation for his tasks is, and I also have some homework on creating an idea for a new world – which shouldn’t be too difficult, I hope.

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Even Holly Lisle, who was onto a winner with her How to Think Sideways, has her share of failures in providing for the new writer market, it seems. However there are several new things of interest to wannabe writers within the Holly Lisle websites, and below I will wrap these up for you.

1. The Writing Craft : Motivation

Some time ago Holly sent out one of her regular newsletters requesting those readers to take a multi-choice survey. The survey involved copious questions driving at what type of courses or classes we might like to see being delivered.

I personally voted for quite a few, with an emphasis on revising a first draft, something I’m completely rubbish at. My choice wasn’t the most popular at that time, in fact most responders voted for courses on how to motivate ourselves into writing.

Holly spent some time coming up with a new course based on those responses. The outcome was the release early this month of ‘The Writing Craft : Motivation’. This was available as a course for $34.95 which sounds very reasonable for the content.

The content for The How To Motivate Yourself course includes:

• seven videos
• the course transcripts
• mindmaps for each section
• a course outline
• and worksheets to help you drill down to the core of what motivates you.

The course still exists on Holly’s shop online as I write this, however —

On the 15th of September Holly sent out another newsletter with the following starter paragraph -

I ended up canceling further episodes of my video series THE WRITING CRAFT because of a major lack of interest combinedwith the huge expense in time, effort, and materials of creating video courses.

This means there will be no further editions of The Writing Craft video series of courses (the second of which was to have been ‘How to Write Dialogue with Subtext’), although if you are interested in improving your motivation it may well be beneficial to take a look at that first course which remains complete and available.

2. Audio Books of Classes

In the same newsletter of the 15th, Holly mentioned that she was now trialing interest in MP3 audio books of the courses available through her shop. She enjoys listening to MP3s on her iPod whilst exercising, and thought it an interesting idea to create some for the courses offered.

The ‘How to Write Page-Turning Scenes’ course available in PDF format from Holly Lisle’s webshop has now been recorded as an audio book by Kimi Alexander.

The full package – PDF plus audio book, will be available online from September 23rd for $47. However at the moment it’s available in a trial run for an introductory price of $37. And if you already have purchased the PDF version previously, you can pick up the audio version alone for just $20.

Logging onto your Shop.HollyLisle.com account will automatically show you any discounts you may be entitled to.

Holly is currently trialling this concept out to see if the idea will take wings.

3. Coming Soon : Revising Your Novel

As the Writing Craft : Motivation course went live Holly Lisle was already working towards her next project. Obviously my choice of needing more information on how to revise was another popular option in her surveys.

Holly put out a request for two first time novels to work with their writers in revising them. Her initial thoughts were towards working with four different novels and writers, but she’s since changed her mind on this. One novel will have been written during something like NaNoWriMo, another in a different way.

The writers and novels will be worked through with Holly, and the material from that exercise used to create her newest upcoming course. Novel excerpts will be used within the course also, although Holly will change characters etc if requested.

As a note, within the successful ‘How to Think Sideways’ writer’s training program, the last month of this course is spent on revision, using a technique Holly calls her ‘One Pass’ system. For many very new writers, there has been a request to understand the structure of revision a little more before going into that type of revision process. The upshot is the current development of the new ‘How to Revise Your Novel’ course, coming our way sometime in the future.

For more on this new course, you can read Holly’s thoughts on it at her blog, or she has already opened a website specifically for the course.

4. How to Think Sideways

Holly Lisle’s popular ‘How to Think Sideways’ online course continues, although the website has had a complete refresh on the frontend since I last visited. You can keep up to date with the latest news on that front blog-style page, pick up the free module examples, or register for the course.

As a graduate of the first ever session of this course, and any grads afterwards, I still have access into the forums for this course, and in fact, can run through the full course as often as I like.

The HTTS forums now have a ‘Back to the Beginning Board’ where students who didn’t managed to complete the course can start over.

Additionally, new material continues to be added to the course, and previous grads can grab those also. One example recently is the addition of the first section of the Writing Craft : Motivation videos into the relevant motivation section of HTTS.

And although now seemingly defunct, the aside website, WriterCrashTest.com remains accessible, containing a few video productions where Holly took some passages of writing and provided some critique on them.

LinkMe : How to Think Sideways (note – affiliate link)

5. The 33 Worst Mistakes Wrters Make About Series…

This e-book series is building all the time. Available through shop.hollylisle.com, the books are written by various authors, and topics vary from -

The ‘33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make about Courtroom Law’ to ‘The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make about Construction and Construction Workers’, with Russia, Genealogy, Mother Nature, Ballet, Horses, The Celts, Hunting, Being Blind, San Francisco, Disappearing in the U.S.A, Dogs, Firearms and Camping forming the current series.

The series, although predominantly US focussed, makes an excellent reference item for budding writers, and points out where much more experienced and even successful novelists have made some huge errors in their published novels before.

6. Write a Book With Me

Back to Holly now, with her writing blog, Pocket Full of Words. Within her normal update blog she now has a category called “Write a Book With Me” or WABWM for short.

In this category she adds her own progress on her current writing project, and others can share their own progress in the comments field of each entry. On one recent entry of Holly’s there were forty comments, so the category and challenge is quite popular.

There are some minor rules – you should shoot for a minimum of 250 words a day, five days a week for instance, and the important – It has to be fun rule.

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As it stands, LSB XE is structured around writing chapters then building these into a book. The amount of ways of doing that are limited only by the imagination in Liquid Story Binder, as there are so many different file formats such as listings, chapters, planners, builders, notes, etc. Some have wordcounts, some do not, some work with other file types, others can be associated with them, but not built into them.

For me, like many other writers before me, I found manual workarounds towards my own needs. I am predominantly a scene-led writer, although because I am reasonably structured beforehand, I normally come at writing with a whole scene structure. So unlike many scene writers, I already have chapters in mind.

I therefore use the builder module to write in (as well as keeping research notes in an overall builder) and stay away from the chapter functions completely whilst writing. Each new chapter has it’s own builder and within that builder I write scenes – already plotted out scenes. Each Scene item (a builder item) operates with normal text editing functions and has a word count.

The scenes within the builder (chapter) can be rearranged in order, but currently can’t be moved into another builder. If I want to do this I have to copy and paste all the text out of that scene item and into the other builder.

From a builder where I have the scenes all written, I can then hit the build [to chapter] option, and the whole thing goes into a proper chapter file. I then need to manually add that chapter into a planner listing so that at the end, on publishing the book all the chapters are printed in order.

Because the builder itself doesn’t have an overall word count of it’s contents, I manually keep this in a note record type. Each scene that I complete I will need to go and add that to my manual record, and keep a tally as I go. That’s because I don’t normally finish a full chapter for a few days, and I want my day’s wordcount – especially when writing to a target.

My way of working within Liquid Story Binder is individual and suits me, but many on the LSB Yahoo group have recently become quite vocal about needing to write in scenes rather than chapters. As found in that chat, many who already use LSB use roughly the same process as I do, using the builder to write scenes into, but are frustrated by not being able to move scenes around as you can do in something like YWriter, for example.

The upshot is that Black Obelisk has suggested that the next release of LSB will include the functionality within builders to move builder items (in our cases, scenes) from one to the other.

Whilst other novelists want even more (ie. the ability to title scenes and have these appear in the draft publication under chapter headings, numbers and titles) the above changes will make me very happy indeed.

Whilst I was on holiday last month, I missed not one but two new upgrade releases of LSB. I’ve only just updated my own versions sitting on a PC and laptop from downloading from the website (the current public version available is V4.31d), and await the next version to see how well the new scene functionality will improve my own writing processes.

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