Sydney Strand

My Darlings My Dear, Last week, we were able to take a last-minute trip to New York City. We live only 4.5 hours from the city by bus, but due to the hours of departure, we had to take the car. That meant 6.5 hours with pee breaks and food breaks.  But then views like this were worth the travel time:  A view from the Ramble Walk in Central Park The view when sailing remote control sailboats The New York Public Library Not Carrie Bradshaw's stoop--but the area where she lived What a lovely walk this must be for regulars I made sure that I did what I loved most about NYC: enjoyed books (at the Shakespeare & Co., Books of Wonder, and the B&N on the Upper West Side); enjoyed art (at The Met and The Museum of Natural History); and enjoyed Broadway (at the off-Broadway play, The Play That Goes Wrong). Getting back into the swing of life after this trip has been hard. Namely because we came home to an ant infestation (GAH!) and the mayhe...

It was a good year. Any year where you're breathing and talking and walking? It's a good year. Any year where your children give you snuggles and try to be good people? It's a good year. Do I wish that it had been a better year? Don't we all. ;o) What I Need to Improve On (In Regard to Writing) -My over-optimism. I am such a over-optimist when it comes to books to write and put out in a form that I'm 99.5% happy with. If I was writing stuff in its first draft form and sending it out, sure, I could hit my schedule. But as it is, I can pragmatically write 4 books a year. IF I realize that what I'm churning out for NY doesn't have to be perfect...and IF I keep to schedule. The plan: Stick to a three-month rough draft/middle draft/final draft plan. -My schedule. I am really bad about getting inertia when I think I'm sucking. I suddenly pull back on the gung-ho attitude and want to snuggle in with Gilmore Girls and a big bowl of Rice Crisp...

So I can be a little bit of a crazy monkey. Not the kind that flings poop. That's a disgusting monkey. But I am one who pushes herself into crazy deadlines and goals in order to make stuff happen in order to pave the road for bigger stuff to happen. And one of these crazy ideas? I am writing a short story as I'm revising my big story. Because I always like to have a B Project while working on the A Project. This Isn't the First Time, Either When I worked on His Favorite Regret , with Cadie and Bo, I needed to keep my creative juices up as I waited for beta readers and the editor to get the story back to me. So I started His Favorite Inconvenience , which is a story that focuses Cadie's sister Sera. I started it at the end of Draft 2 for His Favorite Regret , on October 16, and then on December 13, I put it up on Amazon, and in mid-January, I had His Favorite Regret up. The Second Time As I started on my B Project this time around, I noticed somet...

November cometh. With it cometh NaNoWriMo. The best month of the writer's year! And no, in my opinion, you do NOT need to be fast-drafting a First Draft. You can do what I'm doing: revising. Am I cheating? Uh, how is working on a book, in whatever draft, cheating? And I'm not giving up the awesome camaraderie of NaNoWriMo just because I'm ahead of the curve. Because I like to banter with fellow tortured souls. I do it on Twitter ( sydney_strand ), Facebook ( sydneystrandauthor ), and Instragram ( sydneystrand ). Come find me! Friend me! Offer me psychological help when I need it! Now back to your regularly scheduled program... So exactly how do you use NaNoWriMo if you're revising? Here's what I'm doing (and I highly recommend that you come up with a process, too, that's realistic for the way you work--time-wise and energy-wise): Days 1-5 (5 Days) I am re-installing the drives for my printer. It's messed up because I have a Mac and...

Edna from The Incredibles: LUCK FAVORS THE PREPARED A writer friend, Katrina, has asked me what to do when it comes to revising a book. I'm like "Hey, I'll send you my checklist!" Oh no. I thought I had saved my revision list, and I probably have, but it's under the name of Fuzzy Yellow Unicorn and buried 10,000 deep on my hard drive. Argh. Luckily, I have it printed out and inserted in beautiful plastic sleeves in my Writing Notebook (the cover features dear Edna, above). So that means: transcription! So because of that, this will be a multiple-part series. And it's dedicated to Katrina. (Writer friend, not hurricane.) Background About What This Part Does You need to see if you're writing the story you intended to write. After many years of revising stories, I've found that if I take the time to do this step, you will waste less time in the more active revisions to follow. This section serves the following purpose: Slowing down ...

So. I'm having the darnedest time with the latest book. I keep hating what I'm doing. I keep worrying that what I'm doing isn't good. I keep stalling and watching The Office. Ugh. Then I saw this: Writing is hard because "it is our irrational beliefs about writing that actually impede our progress more than, say, an uncomprehending public, transitions in publishing, or a lack of spare time." (Source: Why is Writing So Hard? ) The original article goes into the Seven Irrational Beliefs humans can have. But I rather solve being irrational than creating a list of the behaviors (I KNOW how I'm behaving irrationally). So first of all: the irrational stems from the illogical. How do we stop being illogical? (Cue Spock voice here.) I went to How to Overcome Irrational Thinking and came away with these main points: 1) Be Mindful. It's so super easy to get caught up in the day-to-day craze. The mom thing, the wife thing, the teacher t...

Me. Overwhelmed. And that's Inertia  I'm giving the stink-eye to. I have a confession: I have ADD. But I'm lucky. Since I was a child, I was given coping mechanisms in order to be a productive ADD person: schedules, habits, and the go-ahead to be a crazy-ass multi-tasker. Thanks Mom, you teacher and counselor you! The Positives of Being a Writer and Having ADD (with Coping Mechanisms) I can get a lot done, just not all 100% in the course of a day (ultimately, though, I do hit 100%--thank you, Type A personality). Right now, in fact, I just stepped away to 1) snap a picture for my new Tumblr account, 2) email a critique buddy about the way she should set up her new story (alternating POVs a la Holes was maybe the answer, but it ended up being more Shawshank Redemption), 3) make a cup of coffee and 4) pull up a website I saw in Writer's Digest ( Women's Fiction Writers ). Now keep in mind, I have not posted to Tumblr yet, I have not finished thinking...

So, there's a thing such as getting stuck in writing. Stuck can mean a few things, a couple of which may be 1) polishing and polishing and polishing the same scene, rather than moving forward and just getting going or even worse, 2) procrastinating and NOT writing because you can't unstick yourself. What can you do? String Up a Clothesline What the hey? What does that mean, Sydney you kook! We're all readers here, right? Well, if you've ever read The Little House on the Prairie series, you may remember a scene where Pa has to string up a clothesline between the house and the barn because during blizzards, he can't SEE the barn. He knows it's there, but he has no idea how to get there. So he strings that clothesline and even though he can't see he destination, he can feel where he's going based on that guide. And that's what you need to do with this stalled story: string a clothesline to get you to The End. How Do You String a ...

I'm so super proud of myself. Today, I saw a tweet from a publisher looking for the kind of stuff I wrote. This publisher--rather, this imprint--gets its books into Target--a big, huge deal (not that many books get into Target). I heard the siren's call. And for a moment...nay, five minutes' worth of moments...I contemplated speed writing a book of 50,000 words by the January 30 deadline. Nevermind that it would be total first-draft crap. Nevermind that I would pretty much be a very neglectful mother, putting her children in front of the TV for, well, every waking moment. Nevermind the chocolate and stress that such an endeavor would entail. Luckily, at Minute Six, sanity returned. And I put this story into my Goals for 2016. And I created a Pinterest board for that story and the ideas that came to me in those five gloriously insane moments. You see, I have a writing plan for 2015. And this Five-Minutes-of-Crazy Story doesn't fit in tha...

January is always a slow month for me in this semi-new world of publishing books for the masses. But why is it that I always forget that and mentally flog myself for being such a slackerly sloth?  Because I'm an imperfect human. Geez. When will I be self-actualized already?!! ;o) In late December through January, I like to plan, plan, and plan some more. See Page One below of my 12-page plan: I'm trying to incorporate more polka dots into my life. The thing is, if this plan is anything like 2014 Goals, it's going to change on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. And that's okay. It's like taking a road trip between California and Maine, and hitting blizzards, traffic jams, and hotels that you booked and just aren't going to work out due to the drug dealers hanging out there (true story!). Like that road trip, you have to adjust. Change plans. Maybe be a little late or so late you feel uncomfortable. But the thing is, just like my 2014 Goals, a roadtrip tha...

So I started this post a week ago. I have the Blogger app on my phone, and I downloaded the images I wanted into a post and that post was supposed to be written last week. Uh, yeah. Not so much. I've been a bit scattered since I finished La Petite Adult's book on Christmas Morning. Or at least, on the writing front I have been. But then I started to look back and realized that the way I do things IS scattered--but I get sh*t done.  I took a minute I figured out everything I've done for my writing career since Christmas Morning 2014. I only wrote down career-related stuff...all the "other stuff" doesn't count. Since Christmas Morning, I have: 1. Revised a Cover Flat (Bad Mom: Mother's Day) 2. Created from scratch Two Cover Flats (Bad Mom: Glampfest! and His Favorite Distraction) 3. Created from scratch the print edition of a book (His Favorite Distraction)  4. Finished the JPG cover for my Bad Mom Short Story 5. Worked on the branding/lo...