The Infinite If:
The chess of writing & publishing

This morning I hosted my Saturday morning writing circle, and while I try to stay in integrity and actually, you know, write my book while I'm holding space for everybody else to do the same, today I needed to use part of the time to organize my ass for these amazing retreats at Rowland Cottage.

(Guys, I'm so excited!! 🤸 I'm dying over here...we leave tonight at 10:25. By the time you're reading this, we'll be on the bus to MUSKOKA!!!!!! 🏡)

So I welcomed my two participants, checked in on their struggles and listened to what they planned to do during our work time together, started the one-hour timer, finished a handout for the retreat, stripped my bed, threw the sheets in the wash, organized my shirts and underwear for packing later, then sat down to work on my novel.

Half an hour left on the timer. Not a lot of time to get a meaningful amount of words on the page. But I have a promise to myself that I'm going to use that Saturday morning time for writing, and not for catching up on the million other things that running a business involves.

So I opened up my manuscript, jumped to the place where I'd left off last week...and stopped dead.

Groan. I'm still mired in the snowdrift of this one stupid scene.

I've been struggling with this one, and it's dragging. I've got a bunch of people in a gas station parking lot waiting for a bus to replace the one that broke down and left them stranded in this desert town. I could make them have all kinds of conversations to build out backstory and develop my protagonist, but I'm not sure it's helpful.

One of my challenges as a novelist is knowing when to go into detail versus knowing when to move on. I get bogged down with details. I have a whole other adult manuscript that I ran into the ground at 30,000 words after bottoming out in a scene where my protagonist is in a saloon having conversations that probably don't matter, and I can't figure out how to get him out of there and send him back to the hotel so he can get a good night's sleep before an iron spike blasts through his skull at work tomorrow.

I put that book away more than 13 years ago. That's how stuck I am with it. Truth be told—and you probably know this, seeing how you're in this writing game, too—it's not just the scene that's causing the problem. Getting egregiously stuck at the scene level points to a bigger, deeper problem with the book, and THAT's scary to look at. One day I'll go back and rebuild that book properly with the blueprint, and then I'll be able to face it again.

So yeah, this morning I found myself stuck at that boring bus scene in my current WIP. (Regular stuck, not egregiously stuck.) And I was like, "Well, I'm going to take the advice that I give to my clients and jump to a spot in the story that's alive for me and that I actually want to write."

And so I did. I moved forward in time by an hour or so, and picked right back up. I knew clearly what was happening in the scene: where my protagonist needs to go, the mood I need her to be in, the things she needs to get done before she goes to bed (sending a message to her love interest being among them).

I needed to get into the fun again—into the excited energy of her crush. Because that's where the fun is for me, too.

The words flowed so much more easily when I gave myself permission to follow the energy. By the time the Zoom timer went off, I had put 500 new words on the page. What started out looking like an unproductive day actually turned out to move my character farther along her arc.

If you get stuck, go write something else. Write what's alive—what's asking to be written. You don't need to work in chronological order—at least not if you've built your book with a blueprint. You know what needs to happen, when it needs to happen, and you know how it needs to happen

This is a sound approach to life, too: if you get stuck on anything, put it down and go do something else for a while. Then you can return with fresh eyes.

Off to Muskoka for a couple weeks. I'll be so excited to report back to you!! 🌲

What I'm paying attention to in the industry

Literary agent Carly Watters is a great source of insight into the publishing industry. You might already know her name from the podcast I'm always recommending, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. But Watters writes a newsletter on Substack too, called The Weekend Rant.

A week or so ago, Watters put out this excellent piece where she takes the piss out of writers who refuse to play by publishing's rules (which are admittedly archaic and sometimes downright absurd—but which exist as rules nonetheless).

This is a strange industry dominated by custom, expectations and boundaries, but they're all there for a reason, and it's usually a good reason. I love how Watters—an agent who spends much of her time fielding submissions that don't follow the rules—just winds up and lets 'er rip.

Upcoming workshops, courses and retreats

Rowland Cottage retreats

It's not too late to register for our Fern writing retreat on the weekend of October 3 and 4! We've got one seat left.

We would be delighted to see you and walk alongside you as you create.

Saturday morning writing group update

I'll be hosting our Fern retreat on the weekend of October 3 & 4, so there won't be a Saturday morning writing session that week.

This month's hippie flip

Sometimes I listen to tracks on YouTube to help me focus. I've discovered some brown-noise tracks that don't have any ads, and when I need to get some heavy work done, I'll headphone up and shut out the rest of the world with the hum of an airplane cabin or a hall full of industrial turbines.

YouTube also has a lot of wonderful tracks for meditating, or clearing and resetting your energetic state. Here's one that I keep coming back to again and again, by Meditative Mind. Their channel doesn't have commercials that I'm aware of, so you can just surrender into the lovely sound of the rain and the hang drums of this track.

Bonus points if you breathe into your heart chakra.📿

Thanks for reading The Infinite If. ♾️