Lessons of Revenge Writing

Revenge writing, it's a thing.
Not quite as gross and well known as revenge porn, or going Carrie Underwood on someone's car, but I promise, it's a thing. Ask the Swift.

I revenge write from time to time. Hell, I've even revenge written for other people (see Sacrificing Sapphire, out on December 12.) As a writer I work things out consciously or subconsciously through my writing, and revenge writing, I suppose is a part of that. It's seems, to me at least, like a very healthy way of dealing with issues that would otherwise have remained unresolved. And, since it's just storytelling, revenge writing, isn't something that ever comes back to bite you in the ass. By all means, it's absolutely bulletproof.

Or so I thought...

The first time I found myself revenge plotting (I always revenge plot before I revenge write, otherwise it leads to too much revenge editing) I had been in a long-running argument with my husband about...actually, to properly tell this tale of love and hate--mostly hate--I have to take you back to its beginnings.

2006

I was studying Screenwriting in Los Angeles at the time, and was involuntarily crushing on a guy in my class. It was involuntary because the last thing I wanted at that time was to be distracted by anything unrelated to writing. Nonetheless, I was crushing hard. So hard that I was too mesmerized by his charming smile and bright blue eyes to notice what was on the black T-shirt he wore every once in a while.

2007

I was now married to my crush, and though I was still mesmerized by his charming smile and bright blue eyes, I'd become well aware of what that black T-shirt, with the bold white letters, stated:
I don't take shit. I don't give shit. I'm not in the shit business. 

Not that bad, right? The slogan moderately annoyed me, but it could've been worse; he could've owned one of those FBI - Female Body Inspector shirts.
But the more he wore this shirt, the more it annoyed me. He wore it like it was any other shirt--to the movies, the grocery store, and once to a fairly nice restaurant in Beverly Hills. I'm generally not one who cares that much about how one should look, act, and speak, but this shirt was starting to rub me the wrong way. Every time he put it on I started feeling as if the shirt, along with its now majorly annoying slogan, initiated a Eastwood-like stare down, while singing I'm ba-aaack.
Over the coming years, my relationship with the T-shirt went from dislike, to detest, to hate. And my husband really couldn't see what my problem was.

2009 (maybe..?)

I was in the middle of my initial bout with writing my first novel, Stalking Sapphire, in which the male MC, Aston, starts out in the series as an assh**e. As I sat there typing away, the thought struck me and my fingers froze momentarily over the keyboard. What would an asshole wear, if not THE T-shirt hanging in the closet at that very moment, silently mocking me.
I saw it all play out in my mind's eye. It was top-shelf vengeance. I would write the novel, and one day so many people would read it that when my husband and I walked down the street, readers would stop me and say: "Gosh, that really was one terrible T-shirt in chapter 6."
After which my husband, who may be the most stubborn person on earth, would look at me and say, "Yes. I can see now. It is the second worst T-shirt (the first being the FBI one) since the history of T-shirts. Let's BURN it." 

Yes! I thought and smiled, that was exactly how it would happen. And then I typed.

2012

The T-shirt in question mysteriously (eh...) vanished while I was doing laundry.

2013

Stalking Sapphire got published earlier that year, and had just been put up on Wattpad because its sequel was coming out. For those who don't know, Wattpad=online Mecca for readers and writers. After a few months on there, and right around the time Stalking Sapphire reached a million reads, I decided to shut off my comment notifications to save my email inbox from filling up.

Present Day (-ish.)

A couple weeks ago, I went into Wattpad to check on something and ended up at the beginning of chapter 6 of Stalking Sapphire. That's when I saw them, the amount of comments that had been filling up over the past four years, all centered around this dialogue cluster.

My fantasy had (kind of) come true. I was Thrilled! Ecstatic!  People hated the shirt just as much as I did. Practically radiating with gloat, I clicked on the comment bubble and waited as the page loaded, the way Ralphie waited for the secret code to be revealed in A Christmas Story. The moment the comments appeared I would run up to my husband while pointing and yelling: "See! Seeeeeeee!"
After which he would immediately admit that yes, it was a terrible shirt, and it was a good thing it mysteriously (eh...) vanished in the laundry.
As the comments appeared on my screen, my victorious grin tapered off. The longer I scrolled, the further the corners of my mouth dropped, until finally, I looked like the saddest of all emojjis.
Here are just a few of the comments I saw:

They all loved it. My husband's shirt had not gotten a single negative comment. What else was I wrong about, I wondered. Did red and pink not really clash? Was the ending of Dexter not actually terrible? My way of viewing the world could be completely upside down.

"Oh my God," I said, baffled.

"What?" my husband asked.

"You win..." I said, in shock. "They love your T-shirt. I don't know why, but they love it."

He squinted. "What T-shirt?"

"Come on, the T-shirt. The one that mysteriously (eh...) vanished  in the laundry a few years ago."

No response.

"The one that I hated so much that I wrote about it in my book..."

Still nothing.

"The one that said 'I don't take shit, I don't give shit, I'm not in the shit business!'"

"Haha! Right...hilarious," he laughed, then his eyes grew wide with excitement, and he reached for his phone. "I wonder if I can find it again!"

F*******ck!

So...lesson learned. Will now proceed with revenge writing more cautiously as it appears not all of it is as bulletproof as I once thought. It seems it may actually come back to bite you in the ass after all...even if it's a decade later.

Xoxo,
Mia

SACRIFICING SAPPHIRE Cover

Just received the cover for Sacrificing Sapphire (Sapphire Dubois Mysteries #4) and I am so excited to share it with you all!

I can't believe the fourth book in the series is about to come out and that there's only one more book to go! Despite the fact that I wrote the first book when I was 22-23, and that I'm now 29 + 1 (this is the proper way of writing 30 because, as everybody knows, 30 is basically still 29) it feels like Stalking Sapphire just came out yesterday. 

For anybody interested in an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy), you can contact my publisher, Diversion Books via FACEBOOK or TWITTER and request a free copy of Sacrificing Sapphire in exchange for a review.

And so, without further ado, here it is, the official cover for SACRIFICING SAPPHIRE!

Xoxo,

Mia

Time Management

So...time management.

Once upon a time, I had 10, 12, even 13 hour writing days. This was not my atypical schedule, I'm not that ferocious, but it certainly happened...especially during deadlines. The only things to ever interfere with my writing day back then, were walking and spending quality time with the dog, getting more coffee, and bathroom breaks, a side effect from all the coffee. Looking back at my old self now, I see how spoiled with time I was. I was SO damn time-spoiled that I sometimes wrote a scene, then rewrote it twice, then rewrote it back to its original state. This was before I started saving my deleted scenes in a separate folder, and clearly I didn't need to; I had time coming out the ying-yang. I was Joffrey, sitting on my iron throne of time. I was Scrooge Mcduck, doing back strokes in my pool of spare minutes. DuckTales, anyone? I was that dude at the strip club, swiping 20 dollar time-bills out of my hand like they were nothing.

Fast forward a few years and add a baby, a strict schedule, and general life that you a) didn't care about when you're 22. Or b) opted out of because the time-fairy would soon return with a fresh bag of more time, just for you. Back in the day, I made a conscious decisions to not have a life outside of writing. If I had the option to hangout at the pool with friends, or write, I chose writing every time. Now that I have a child and have to lead by example, I can't do that anymore...unless, of course I want to raise an asocial recluse with agoraphobia.

So, here we are...time management.

There are 24 hours in a day and my baby naps about 2-3 hours if I'm lucky, spread out through the day. That's what I have. So, what do you do when your writing day is cut from 8-13 hours and down to 2-3?

One: Acceptance.

You cry a little, because you realize life is now different and there's nothing you can do but accept it.

Two: It's not how much time you have, it's how you use it.

The time you don't spend writing--e.g. changing diapers, doing spread sheets, going, Hi! Hello! Bye-Bye! Toodeloo! If you're a Walmart greeter--spend it thinking, plotting, and planning out your scenes. I've always been a big plotter, but I've generally let the scenes write themselves, only knowing the scene's opener, closer, and the plot point. I always liked the surprise of not knowing every event of every story-line before it was written. Sure, it took a few passes to get it right at times, but it was worth it for the chance to strike gold.

Well, luxuries like that are for people who bathe in time, which, again, I no longer do.
Also, because I know I'll have less time for rewrites later, I now need to feel sure about the direction of the scene before I start it.

Three: What can go?

Dinner? In order to live one supposedly needs to eat, so probably not.

Sleep? I can hear other parents laughing at this, because, well...it's not like there's much to begin with. But see if you can make it on one less hour of sleep 1-3 days a week, not 5-7. Whether you're a parent, a worker, or like most, both, set the alarm an hour early, or go to bed an hour later. It's amazing how much you can write in 60 minutes.

TV/Reading time? Most of us need to unwind, and it usually involves a TV. Since I love shows, movies, books, hell, I'd take story in pill form it they had it, I don't want to give up all my TV/Reading time, if I even get any. I am, however, willing to cut it down by a half hour to get some extra writing time.

Favorite pastimes?
My favorite thing to do now days is hangout with my daughter. Since she happens to be the cutest baby in the world, it's not something I'm willing to give up. Just yesterday she laughed at her own foot for fifteen minutes, and if that's not worth watching, I don't know what is. It falls under the Life category and it is, as the scientists put it, real friggin' important to body and mind. Writing makes your life better, and life makes your writing better. It's about balance.

Social Media Time?
Sorry, it has to go. Unless you're doing promos or work, cut it down. If you have time to scroll the newsfeed for 30 minutes, you have time to write. FYI: I took me three days to complete this post. Why? Because in times like these, that may or may not go down in my personal history as the Great Time Famine, I chose to write instead of write about writing. Make sense?

That's all I got. It's not much, but every minutes counts. Even if you only have one hour a week to write, and it takes you three years to finish a project, by the end of those three years, you'll actually HAVE a completed book. Yay! Meanwhile, if you instead spend those same three year saying "I don't have time to write." you'll have absolutely nothing. Boo!

As my favorite greeter once said: Thanks for shopping a Walmart. And, Toodeloo!

Xoxo,
Mia

Death by Post-it

I'm likely to be found buried under a pile of sticky notes. That's right, that's how I'll go: Death by Post-it.

For those who have followed my tweets and posts (at this blog or at The Book Stops Here) in the past few months, you've probably come to the right conclusion. Yes, I'm suffering my worst bout of writers block ever. I've written about visits from my old pal Writers Block before, but this time it's different, something has evolved. Like a virus, Writers Block, whom I've always found a way to get rid of before, has mutated into a new kind of super Block, one I cannot beat for the life of me.

While I still try to write with the mutated Writers Block, every writer will tell you that forced writing, is merely an imitation of writing. That said, while the words are not in my favor, some things in my mind are still working. Much like how they claim Hope to be the last things to leave the human body, it seems Inspiration is the last thing to leave this writer. While I can't seem to put a story together on the laptop, not even at a second grade level, I can still come up with ideas, concepts, and scenes.
So, what happens to writer when they have been infected by a mutated Writers Block virus, but is still able to get inspiration? While being hit with an extreme feed of images on a daily basis, and without the ability to get the images out in a piece of work, the writer may A) go bananas. B) end up creatively dead. Or C, be forced to find a different outlet.

I, refusing to creatively die or go bananas, opted for C. And the answer, my dear Watson, was elementary. Post-its. That's right. The only thing keeping me mentally afloat right now is the multicolored sticky notes, possibly invented by Romy and Michele. Post-its: the prefect size to hold my discombobulated thoughts.

And while they are saving me from dying in a literal sense, I've come to realize they may be the
actual death of me as the probability of me drowning in them grows by the day. There are Post-its everywhere. My car. My purse. My bedroom. My desk. I even found one on my butt yesterday. No idea how long I'd walked around with a pink sticky note reading: "And...a partridge and a pear tree?" (Aston - Chapter 7.) I just hope it ended up there after I went to Walgreens and not before.

I think there comes a time in everyone's life where they approach the cross roads of keep fighting (Right) and moving on (Left). While pondering whether to go right or not, one should simply ask oneself the age-old question: is this really worth me drowning in a pile of Post-its?

My answer: yes, of course it is. Anything worthwhile in life is worth drowning in a pile of Post-its over.

Xoxo,
Mia