Debbie Schubert’s terrific post got me thinking, and I came to an amazing realization: I have confidence about my books.

“Huh?” you say. Hey, this is a new thing, I say. Let me revel in it for a while.

I know it probably seems like I already had this confidence, what with deciding to do this “for reals” and posting about it all the time. Well, it’s a funny thing about creative effort: you can want it more than anything, want it enough to be willing to throw all dignity to the wind and be open to criticism, want it enough to try for years… but that doesn’t mean you believe that you’re any good at it.

Maybe will-be-good-someday. Not now, though. Surely not.

Except… I think I finally am.

I’ve been studying this. How to plot, how to keep scenes moving forward, how to edit viciously and maliciously if necessary. How to love characters I barely know, how to make them important to the reader so the reader loves them too, and how to behave professionally so other professionals think I’m one of them.

Notice that? “Think” I’m one of them – like I’m not.

I still don’t feel like I am. I do, however, feel like I’m finally writing. What I turned out in The Sundered is the best I’ve done to date, bar none. I can look at it, open it up to any random point, and not hate what I see.

This has never happened before.

So now I’m working on a paranormal romance – a genre I’ve never written in, though I’ve read a lot – and I know I have a looooong way to to before this becomes fully readable.

Yet, at the same time, I can do this:

There was an angel on the steps behind Murphy.

For one shiny, shattered moment, Maggie thought she’d gone mad. It wasn’t impossible. She worked a high-pressure job and shared her innermost self with no one. Willing the vision to go away, she blinked.

He was still there. More importantly, it suddenly seemed strange that anything other than he had ever mattered.

Everyone went quiet and still, from bankers to gawkers to EMTs. Distant car horns and the rumble of underground trains, oddly discordant, only emphasized his perfection. “Oh,” Maggie whispered.

The angel was luminous. Light spilled from his golden wings, and his long gold hair wafted in the breeze. He stood with a glorious smile like a beam of sunlight piercing deep water, her water, and when his eyes passed over her, something happened. Warmth shivered up her legs and over her nipples, sensitizing her skin, warm enough to shatter ice, to melt gold, to misshape silver.

The scared rabbit in her heart bleated a warning.

No, this was bad. What was this? Disturbing and unnatural, that’s what, but she could not look away. Maggie bit down on her tongue hard and reached for her inner isolation, fought the nerve-ending cry that burned for his touches. She managed to anchor herself enough that when the crowd surged forward, she stayed still.

All around her, officers and reporters and gawkers began stumbling up the steps toward the glorious golden man like metal filings toward a magnet. Maggie made a small, helpless sound, but she held her place, clawing at control with the desperation of the falling. “Stand still, Maggie, stand still, Maggie,” she chanted, and hugged herself so tightly her fingers bruised her arms.

The angel ignored them all. He smiled with a beauty that ached like old memories or half-forgotten songs, and he touched the child’s face with hands dappled by the light from his wings. Then in a movement too fast to track, angel and child vanished.

It was like a slap to a sleepwalker. Half the surging crowd fell, too shocked to find themselves moving to maintain their balance. The rest started shouting.

Maggie realized she’d nearly drooled on herself and shuddered hard, her deep-water place gone suddenly cold. The angel was gone. He wasn’t anywhere on the street or overhead – never mind that looking up was a conscious admission that the wings might have been real. Not that they could be. Beauty like that could exist. It was too painful.

The skies were clear. The child was gone. The mayor’s child was gone.

Half a dozen steps higher, Murphy shouted over everybody: “What the fucking hell just happened?”

Good question. Maggie shook, but that was okay. Everybody else shook, too.

Is it the best thing ever? Of course not. Is it actually decent for a first draft? Yes. It is.

This has never happened before.

I feel good.

Greetings from NYC!

 I love this town. I love the energy, the creativity, the culture. The food, the architecture, the way it most emphatically does not roll up the sidewalks and close at 9PM.

I especially love the new and wonderful knowledge that I can take a train and be here in four(ish) hours.

The really amazing thing to me is this: NYC is so inspiring that I can write here even in the midst of crazy family issues, of health problems, of financial fright. I don’t know why or how, but coming to Manhattan – for any reason – gives my soul a much-needed shot of creation.

Which brings me to the purpose of this post (see what I did there?).

When is the last time you treated yourself to something you needed?

It can be as simple as going for a walk. Opening a book. Taking the time to bury your face in fresh, clean laundry and enjoying the scent. Listening to good music. Or watching a movie that used to inspire you back in the day. It doesn’t have to cost money.

If you’re anything like me, you often spring right over the line between working-too-hard and oops-I’ve-collapsed. Inspirational speaker/poet/playwrite/etc.  Julia Cameron talks about the importants of “artist dates,” which is a cute way of saying “all work and no play makes creative-human go a little nuts.” So take one today. However you need to do it. Take some time for yourself. Your brain will thank you.

And now, with no segue, here is an excellent article by agent Kate Testerman about taglines. Taglines, you say? Why, yes – the one sentence summary of your book, the kind that usually ends up in publishing trade magazines. Examples from KTLiterary:

Carrie Harris’s debut NO PAIN, NO BRAIN, in which a science nerd must cure a zombie outbreak in her high school before she and her homecoming date join the ranks of the walking dead.

Maureen Johnson’s three-book series starting with a thriller about an American high-school student who enrolls at a London boarding school for her junior year, where a series of murders begins to take place across the city, on the exact dates and in the exact style of Jack the Ripper, and soon her ties to the killer bring her in contact with a secret paranormal branch of the British police.

Julia Karr’s XVI, in which a 15-year-old uncovers the mystery surrounding her mother’s death and her missing father, while dreading the coming of her sixteenth birthday and the government-mandated tattoo that references her sexual status.

 Taglines. Your whole book in one sentence. The beauty of it is that reducing your book to one sentence forces you to say what it’s really about. It’s not to say that other issues/characters/conflicts don’t matter. But the core, the heart of the story, that’s what the tagline’s about. 

My turn to write some.

Guardian, a modern fantasy in which a boy with wings struggles with his half-human heritage as he comes between a chaos-cult and its prey: the entire Unseelie kingdom.

The Sundered, in which a young man searches for hope in a world filled with broken but powerful beings and black water that kills humans on contact.

Notte, the ten-thousand year tale of the first vampire’s transformation from biological weapon to perfect gentleman.

No Place for Fey, in which a policewoman must crack open a kidnapping case and handle the romantic attention of a child-like fey prince at the same time.

So what about your one-sentence tagline? Feel free to share in the comments! I’d love to read yours.

Puppy photo by Dave Apple

I cried a little today. I was going to keep it quiet – as one usually does – and then I thought, “Hey. I can’t be the only writer who deals with this sort of thing,” and decided a better idea would be to talk about it.

You see, a friend on Twitter decided to post something inspirational, and she chose the first lines of great books. She highlighted everything from old(er) classics like Jules Verne to new(er)-and-fantastic like Richelle Mead. I thoroughly enjoyed them. They were a great way to jump-start my brain, to get into the proper mood for writing. Yet as I read these fantastic first lines, a funny thing happened.

I suddenly saw – finally saw, where I was incapable of seeing it before – a very amateur error in the book currently on submission.

It’s an incredibly basic thing – a tweak of POV, necessary to engage the reader – and yet I missed it. I missed it completely. And that manuscript is currently sitting on the desk of people I’d really rather did not see that error.

Oops.

Of course, this happened when I’m trying to fight the flu, so I was hardly in any condition to deal with it. For about five minutes, I was absolutely sure my chance was ruined. That was it; all gone. My writing life was over, I’d failed, my favorite baby book would never see the light of printday.

AND THEN… I did not come to my senses before getting back in the saddle.

I mentally knew this was a ridiculous surge of emotion, half-caused by the painful growth of patience, half-caused by being physically unwell, and so, though I did not feel like it at all, I put on some good music and went back to writing. Writing while sniffling and occasionally wiping my eyes, but writing well. The emotion didn’t go away just because I got busy, but do you know something? I accomplished a metric tonne of work. And it’s good. Better quality than before, in large part because of the wicked-hard realization I had regarding my already-submitted-manuscript.

So I guess what I’m saying is this: get back in the saddle. Learning while we go is one of the priviliges of being alive, and if we’re not willing to take a low blow once in a while, then we simply won’t learn. Learning makes us better, and stronger, and more capable.

Even when it means disastrous first lines.