Writer Mom – Cannons to Cruising

Happy New Year!

2024 is off like a rocket. I finished the first draft of my 8^th book last week and had a VERY exciting phone call about my 7^th book that I’ll divulge more details about later. But back to finishing the book!

My YA thriller ended up being 77,264 words long, which was close to my target word count. The working title is GYBE. For a book that was just ‘vibes’ in October, it only took ten weeks to become a fully-fledged novel by January. Ha, Gybe-vibes. I think my average pace of six months per book is realistic long-term, although I would love to reach the point where I complete a project every four months and do three per year. However, I don’t know if that will be possible until fall of 2025, when my youngest will start kindergarten. So, for now, I’m just enjoying the brain dump that happens once I’m done with a draft and letting the plot threads leak out of my ears.

I’m putting the draft aside for a couple weeks so it will be fresh when I start to revise. I’ve been focusing on some of my New Year’s goals instead. I like the word ‘goals’ instead of ‘resolutions’. ‘Resolution’ seems very constrictive and almost punitive, like one misstep and you’ve failed your resolution. Might as well throw in the towel for 2024! My goal for this year is to meditate more. My hope is that meditation will lead to improvements in other areas of my life—patience, creativity, and lessening anxiety. Instead of a bunch of small, individual goals, I’ve gathered them all up into one action: meditate! Efficient, no? I think it’s working so far (thanks, HeadSpace app!). I manifested the crap out of the first 2 weeks this year 😉

People ask how I celebrate being done with a draft. It is very nerdy and not at all exciting for anyone who isn’t me. Usually, I say, “Woohoo!” then I double-space the whole manuscript. I draft in single-space format, so after I type ‘The End’, I get to watch the manuscript page number multiply. I look forward to this moment for months (don’t judge me). Then celebrations might involve a cocktail at the end of the day while Conor cooks a nice dinner. Then it’s back to life as usual. Here I am, doing laundry and watching my kids bounce off the walls post-draft. The reality of being a parent writer!

Love,

Taylor

Halfway Through!

I’m halfway through NaNoWriMo, which means I am staying on track to actually complete it this year! I almost feel like making a post about it is jinxing myself, but the words are coming pretty easy for this book, which is definitely a surprise.

I think it’s due to three things:

A supportive partner. Hands down. I am dropping balls left and right with regular life and he’s there to catch them. Last night he was in the middle of asking me about something and goes, “Never mind. I just realized we should just discuss this once November is done.” I only have so much brainpower, and right now it’s fueling the creative side, not the logistical side. He gets it.

2. A habit established over the summer in my mad scramble to finish WHAT I WOULD DO FOR YOU before the PNWA conference. That project was 7 weeks straight of writing every day. NaNo is only 4 weeks long. The word count is higher per day, yes, but I had lots of practice to get my brain in shape for November in the months leading up to it. I just keep telling myself, only a few weeks left! I’m not finishing a whole book, just 50,000 words of one. It feels manageable.

3. I don’t feel as much pressure to get this story perfect. I’m able to have more fun with it as I go. As the years go on and I write more books, each one feels less precious. I know that’s a weird thing to admit, but it’s kind of freeing. I don’t agonize over my drafts for a decade. I’m not sinking years and years of effort into one project. My fountain of ideas is endless, and I can see a project through from beginning to end by simply sticking to a process. It’s not my life’s work. It’s a YA thriller that can be comped to Netflix’s Outer Banks. Don’t get me wrong, I love all my books, but it’s easier to separate my emotions from it compared to back when I thought finishing my first book was equal to climbing a mountain.

The confusing thing about NaNo is that even though I’m at the 50% mark, I’m only about 30% of the way through my entire book. I had a moment of panic yesterday when I thought my pacing was completely off before remembering that NaNo is only getting me 50,000/80,000 words. My story beats are where they’re supposed to be, thankfully.

To sum up the NaNo experience so far, I’ll leave you with this quote from EL Doctorow—“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Now it’s time to get my 1,667 words done for the day.

Love,

Taylor

I present this stunning visual representation of my first draft. Please note the crash helmet.

The Baby on the Fire Escape

I believe that books come into our lives at the exact right time, and The Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Philips is proof of that. How fitting that I just finished reading one of the best books on creativity, motherhood, and identity just as the door is cracking open to show me what the future looks like after five years of being a stay-at-home mom and struggling writer. R is headed to preschool on Tuesday. It’s just one day per week, a mere three hours, but the symbolism of it staggers me. The infant and toddler years are filled with so much joy and wonder, but, as Louise Erdich explains, “In the face of mother love, one’s fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.” I still tried to claw out writing time, but I didn’t want to admit that my brain had changed.

The women in this book explain what I’ve been struggling to define the last few years more eloquently than I ever could. I truly connected with the author when she said, “Early motherhood asked more of me emotionally than any experience ever has, sometimes insisting on my capacity for bliss and tenderness, sometimes leaving me despairing at my limitations. Motherhood challenged me and revealed me to myself; in that sense it was like writing, only more so, but it also, for long stretches, made my work nearly impossible I felt more myself in one way, lost to myself in another. To regain my footing, I had to learn about this new place; I had to undergo a psychic transformation.”

Moving back to the PNW and restructuring our lives has been hugely beneficial to my creative side. One of the points in this book is that the second thing a creative mother must have (along with time) is self. “She requires boundaries and the conviction that she has the right to make her art. She needs not to give away too many pieces of her being.” This, however, is almost laughable with very young children. The mother and child are one and the same for the longest, shortest time. “One day as I am holding baby and feeding her,” Louise Erdich writes, “I realize that this is exactly the state of mind and heart that so many male writers from Thomas Mann to James Joyce describe with yearning—the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great YES, the wholeness. There is also the sense of a self-merged and at least temporarily erased—it is deathlike…Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies.”

I am under no illusion that I should be comparing myself to such incredible artists. The biggest factor I struggle with, as Clarie Dederer explains, is that “Creative work is a series of small selfishness. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family…The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one… The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.” I have trouble giving myself this permission, especially because it is the selflessness of my husband and family members picking up the slack that allows me to do it.

My New Years goal this year is to be deliberate in where I place my energies and thrive in a space where motherhood and creativity converge. It will be a place of constant interruption, but also deep reflection. For now, it might only be three hours per week, but this is just one chapter in a long life story. My kids are only little once.

Love,

Taylor (and Conor, W,& R)

In Defense of Baby Steps

I promised myself six months. Six months before I needed to get my life back on track after the upheaval that is the newborn and post-partum stage. I gave myself grace when it came to workouts (ahem, none), sugar consumption (ahem, a lot), writing, blogging, marketing my existing books, research, cruising prep—all of it. I reveled in my baby time and let a lot of things go by the wayside.

But now we are here, at the six-month mark. Damn. The process of getting my life back in working order is daunting. I don’t want to start. There are too many facets I need to improve. My physical being, for one, has been neglected, as has letting my brain rot with Netflix during my ‘down time’ because I am too tired to focus on anything else. I am one of those people who wants to do it all perfectly the first time. I don’t like slow starts; I want to go all in and pick up right where I left off.

Motivation to suddenly improve every aspect of my life, though, is unrealistic. I need to celebrate the baby steps instead and know that it won’t all change overnight. I don’t expect my baby to suddenly learn to eat solids and crawl and talk on the first try. I see his progress every day, so minute that only a parent would notice, and cheer him on. I don’t get frustrated or wonder why he isn’t going fast enough. Why can’t I do this for myself?

I find joy in his baby steps, so here is me taking my own. Last week, I did a mini stroller workout. Walking lunges and squats got my heart rate up to 140. “Wow, that’s embarrassing,” I thought. I used to pride myself on being fit and strong. Now, 15 minutes of body-weight exercises leaves me gasping. But I would never call anything my children accomplished after a lot of effort ‘embarrassing’, so I am trying to do the same for myself.

Baby steps, day by day. This post is one. The 750 words I wrote for my work-in-progress novel draft is another. That was a doozy. I stopped working on it the day before my 30^th birthday in July and hadn’t looked at it since. I have never let a story sit so long, and getting my brain working again to put words on a page almost had me in tears. Did you know that pregnancy literally changes the structure and function of a woman’s brain? It also shrinks the grey matter, which doesn’t recover until at least two years after the baby is born. Combining that with hormone flux and sleep deprivation makes me feel so dumb.

I am trying to reframe my thought patterns. I am not dumb; I just haven’t used certain parts of my brain in a while. Things are slow. Sitting around in denial about it isn’t going to improve the situation. I need to put one foot in front of the other and not look too far in front of me for a while. I owe it to myself.

Love,

Taylor (and Conor, W, and R, who support me through it all)

SONDER VILLAGE Reveal!

Sonder (n) : the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

I’m proud to finally announce the details of my second book, Sonder Village! It will be published by The Wild Rose Press with a release date TBD. I’d love to hear what you think about the cover and blurb!

SonderVillage_w13307_med

Abandoned for over a hundred years, a small village in northern Spain enchants Remy into purchasing what could be the worst real estate investment of all time. It is located near the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage path renowned for miracles, and the disgraced painter waits for her own revelation while rebuilding the ruins of her village and her life. But this property holds dangerous secrets dating back to a Galician military coup in 1846 that refuse to stay buried.

Bieito is a local fisherman married to the sea, but he becomes enamored with the newly-arrived American artist. His decision to pursue Remy—when he can find her—upsets history’s delicate balance and endangers his family.

Engulfed in a past that no one else can see, Remy must find who—or what—is really in control of her fate, and if she can survive being torn between two worlds.

Love to all my readers!

Taylor, Conor, and W