I’m also excited to be moving into the phase of book production that has before now been purely hypothetical to me. Although I’ve seen dozens of magazines, one poem, and one short story through publication, this will be the first time that I’m moving through the post-acceptance process of something that I’ve pulled together on my own, and not because I was hired to do so by someone else. I also very much appreciate knowing that I’m “on the right track,” as our publisher referred to our submission as one of the “most professional proposals” he’s ever seen. That’s encouraging, since I’m now regularly putting together similar proposals to shop my young adult novel to agents and publishers.

If you want to meet some of the writers featured in the upcoming Hungering and Thirsting for Justice anthology, check out the Young Adult Catholics blog. And if you’d like to read some high-quality, thought-provoking Catholic/Christian/Spiritual literature, definitely check out ACTA Publications, a publisher I admired years before knowing they would publish my first book project. In particular, I recommend one of their newest offerings, Grace Notes by Brian Doyle, and the book that first put them on my radar, Remaining Catholic: Six Good Reasons for Staying in an Imperfect Church by Martin Pable. I have a long list of additional books from their catalog on my “To-Read” list. They’re definitely a publisher to watch, and I’m thrilled to be working with them.

At first glance, this seems incredibly hopeful — it means that the true secret to excellence isn’t inherent talent or special opportunities or being in the right place at the right time, but simply putting in the time. Dedication is the only thing needed, and dedication is one thing we have control over. Right?

Except that twenty hours a week for ten years IS a lot of time. If you have a full-time job that does NOT give you a chance to practice your passion, 40 hours are no longer available to you for practice. So if you add 20 hours of practice per week, you’re now essentially working one full-time job and one part-time job, which people have to juggle all the time — but often to the detriment of their homelife, their housework, their sleep schedule, and ultimately, their health. And remember, these 20 hours are unpaid.

An ideal situation would be one in which you could work part time and still make enough money to practice those 20 hours — but access to that ideal situation does, in fact, fall under the category of being granted a special opportunity (an unusually lucrative part-time job, a substantial reserve fund, a supportive spouse, etc.) For the rest of us, we have to make a choice: excellence in our passion, or balance in our lives?

I used to think there was nothing I wanted more than to excel as a writer. But you know what? That’s not what I want more than anything anymore. What I want most now is to love my life. And squeezing in twenty hours of writing per week on top of my paid labor would quickly deplete me. The state of mess my house would fall into would drive me crazy. I’d resent the time not spent with my loved ones. I’d eat less well, and I’d sleep less well. I might become an excellent writer, but I’d feel like a zombie as a human being. Not only that, but the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve come to appreciate a sensibility like Don Miller’s, in which he refers to sitting down to write as “harvesting the crops,” whereas the planting and sowing of those crops comes in living life. And it doesn’t do anyone much good to harvest crops when we’ve had no time for planting.

So far, Gladwell hasn’t commented on how important it is to get those 10,000 hours in a relatively short period of time. When I do the math on my own writing practice, which has been about an hour a day since the age of 13, I come up with a mere 4,000 hours. If I add to that the amount of writing I do for work, I can bump that up to about 8,000 hours. If condensing “putting in the time” to ten years isn’t  required to achieve the excellence promised after 10,000 hours, then I feel quite content letting those hours continue to trickle in, slowly but steadily, over the course of my lifetime. If I don’t reach true excellence in writing until I’m middle-aged or ready for retirement, it’s a trade off I’m willing to make. I have a lot of crops to sow in the meantime.

I’ve also recently written for Young Adult Catholics, a post in memory of my aunt Marian, who passed away one week ago today.

And speaking of young adult Catholics … the manuscript I’ve been working on with the co-editor of the blog went to the publisher one week ago today, too. And now that it’s off my desk for a while, I’m finally returning to my neglected Rumplestiltskin retelling. I’ve found it hasn’t been hard to pick up where I left off, and I’m relishing the excitement of being in the “creative” phase once more. I’m on the homestretch — a few more pages, and I’ll be able to write those magical words, “the end” (of course, we writers know it’s never really “the end”). Perhaps I should make it a goal to be finished with draft one by Valentine’s Day and present it to my fiancé, who gave me the initial idea for the story.

Woman with fun in bra arrested

A convicted felon has been arrested by police in a Phoenix suburb after telling officers that she was hiding a handgun in her bra. By: Associated Press report, Arizona Republic 

I don’t think any more needs to be said. 

I also made some writing “wishes” way back in July that I haven’t given up on, either!

So far, my writing year has started out with a bang. In addition to the first phase of the Catholic manuscript project coming to a close, I found out today that a manuscript I edited for a private client has landed a publisher. I can’t wait to hold the book in my hands this summer! (I’ll let all of you know where to get it when it’s available, too!) I picked up a new freelance client this week, and I also gave a presentation on “Building a Fantastical World” to three groups of 6-8 graders at today’s Young Author’s Conference. I attended this conference when I was a middle schooler myself, and I credit it for instilling in me the importance of writing every day (a goal I still strive for, and in striving for it, write a lot more than I would without it.) Although presenting to any age group is a little nerve-wracking to me, doing so always leaves me with a new energy, too. And I’ll definitely need it for the year of writing ahead!

I also got another rejection for my YA novel today, which, believe it or not, actually made me feel good. It was the tangible proof that I’m attaining my goal of getting my writing *out there*; I’ll cross another market off my list for now, and move on. There are plenty more where that came from! (markets, and rejections. )

Except, if you take these books as your only indication, not a lot WAS happening.

SheWrites features an important post about how underrepresented women are on these “best of” lists. This is especially discouraging because women’s brains are especially wired for language, which means we should excel as writers. And we do. But even in this field for which we are uniquely qualified, we’re still asked to “dance backwards” as Meg Waite Clayton so aptly puts it.

But it wasn’t just the absence of women that I found discouraging — it was the absence of VARIETY. I probably read about a dozen “top ten of 2011″ lists, and was probably exposed to a grand total of 25 books. Were these REALLY the only 25 books that deserved accolades in the past year? I doubt it. Were they the books that got the most promotion and publicity from their publishers? Probably. Are they the books that are displayed most prominently in brick-and-mortor bookstores and cluttering up the ad space on Goodreads? I suspect so. In other words, the uniformity of the “best of” lists from so many different outlets let me down in two ways. One was that I felt like the reviewers were lazy — “Hey, everyone says this book is good, we’d better review it too;” or “Let’s read these books first because the publishers are really excited about them,” rather than a true examination of the potentially “hidden gems” amongst everything that was published in 2011. The second was that I felt like these “best of” lists only served to give the books with the most exposure … more exposure. While these lists should be an opportunity for the highest quality books to shine — even if they may not most marketable —  it felt instead like just another popularity contest.

So that’s why I’m interested in knowing what YOUR favorite books of 2011 were. No marketing machines, no one to impress, just your honest-to-goodness favorites. Please leave a comment to let me know, or make a post on your own blog if you have one. Below are my favorite 10 books from 2011 — although most of them were published prior to 2011 because, well, I’m about 4-20 years behind on my reading. In no particular order …

1. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood - This is Atwood’s follow-up to Oryx and Crake, which is enriched by reading the first story but can stand alone without it. Although some may call me blasphemous for saying so, I prefer this volume.

2. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert - This is Gilbert’s follow-up to her phenomenally successful Eat, Pray, Love. Although it didn’t receive as much attention, this is still a superior piece of non-fiction — part memoir, part examination of marriage, all fascinating.

3. The Unfinished Angel by Sharon Creech - “Peoples are strange!” This is a charming, beautiful book about an angel who’s not sure what her purpose is. You’ll love the angel’s voice and her observations on life.

4. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert - I end up reading many best-sellers even though I’m years behind the curve. I was particularly resistant to this one, but I loved Committed so much that I had to give it a try. It’s one of the few books I’ve read that is worth the hype.

5. Emotionally Engaged by Alison Moir-Smith - I was frustrated to find tons of books on planning a wedding, but very few that addressed the emotional upheaval that accompanies this big life transition. Alison Moir-Smith’s Emotionally Engaged finally fills that gap.

6. Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Has Ever Lived by Rob Bell - If you’re tired of “being religious” being equated with “being judgmental,” check out this book. I read it while at the bedside of my grandmother as we thought she was dying; but even outside that setting, this book has a message powerful enough to make me cry. (We won’t go into how easily I cry these days — trust me, it really is powerful. And short!)

7. Boy Toy by Barry Lyga - The title makes people laugh, but it’s hard to carry that laughter far into this book. A rare book that examines the sexual abuse of boys by women, and that does so in a heart-wrenching, sensitive, captivating way.

8. Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law by Clara Bigham and Laura Leedy Gansler - This was one of the books I was least excited to read this year. But I’m so glad that I did.

9. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton - The sense of quiet isolation and unfulfilled longing in this subtle book really sticks with me.

10. I Am The Messenger by Markus Zusack - Markus Zusack is better known for The Book Thief, but this story is equally powerful — while being a whole lot less depressing.

I was so resistant to participating this year, and for good reasons; and yes, some of my other priorities DID suffer (I’m still playing catch-up in my freelance email account). But it was such an important reminder of what it feels like to be a writer. NaNoWriMo keeps me conscious of my writing every single day. It forces me to make it a priority. It also gives people in my life for whom I usually “put writing aside” the opportunity to see what it really means to be a writer who writes. I took my writing everywhere–to Thanksgiving, to my fiance’s house for the weekends I spent there, to Florida for a wedding (although I couldn’t get the technology to cooperate enough for me to actually accomplish anything down there).

Because of this, and because there’s just no time for writer’s block, and because word count is the ONLY thing that really matters, NaNo ends up being a total immersion experience. It allows me to totally sink into the world of my writing in a way I haven’t done since I was a teenager, and writing was my escape from a real world I wasn’t all that thrilled about. I’m endlessly thankful that I’m much happier living in the “real world” these days — but I also appreciated the reminder of how rewarding building and inhabiting another world can be.

I am glad to be taking a break and back in the “real world” full-time again. But I’m already hoping to take the plunge again next year.

What I won’t do is finish this novel; I think I’ve probably about hit the halfway point this month.

Since this is a “rewrite from scratch” of a previous novel, the main purpose of NaNo this year wasn’t to create something new, but to see whether it was worth returning to something old — something very, very old. The first draft of this novel was the first novel I wrote, fifteen years ago.

About 45,000 words in, I’m still not sure whether this is a story that is worth revisiting. Last night I had the rather jarring realization that I think I’ve been going about this story all wrong. It’s hard not to feel like all those words written so far were wasted — did I REALLY have to write nearly 50,000 words to realize I should have been doing it differently all along? (Although, if I’m going to be honest and count earlier incarnations of this story, it’s really about 250,000 words later).

I’m still not sure whether I’ve answered the question I set out to answer–namely, whether this story is worth investing in outside of the frenzy of November. I know that after Wednesday, I’ll put this novel away for a long time, as I focus on my other competing writing priorities. There is something about this novel that continues to haunt my psyche; in fact, I think it’s something of a roadmap to my unconscious. Whether I ever do something “more” with this story or not, I have a feeling that even after November 30, I won’t have seen the last of it.

By the end of the week, I remembered, “Oh yeah — I have to keep up this pace all month long.”

So far, I’ve written at my kitchen table, on my couch, in a random library in South Dakota, at a coffee shop, at the library where I work, and at my fiance’s half-finished house. This week, I plan to expand those locales to an airplane and a hotel room in Florida. I’ve fueled my writing with Powerbars, green tea, coffee, and Starbursts. And although I’m already exhausted, I’m grateful for the reminder NaNo gives me that, when there’s a will, there’s a way. There are so many excuses not to write, but in my performance-obsessed little finisher brain, during NaNo I make writing a priority and I find a way to make it work. No, I can’t keep up this pace all year long. But what I can do is remember how I managed to steal half an hour here, twenty minutes there, to write. And hopefully, I will keep doing that. Because if nothing else, NaNo at least makes me feel like a real writer.

My intention was to be a little more relaxed about NaNo this year, but so far, that ain’t really happening. I went to my first write-in last weekend, and found myself annoyed that most of the participants sat around talking about their novels instead of writing them (so I sequestered myself at the bar and kept driving toward that word count.) But I did have a virtual write-in with the friend who convinced me to do NaNo this year, and I exchanged several emails with another friend who is trying it for the first time. And since then, I’ve wondered if those folks who annoyed me at the coffee shop had something right. For a lot of people, NaNo is about the shared experience more than the word count. I’ve never been a social writer, but one thing I want to learn this November is to let go just a little bit. I’ve successfully been able to let go of the desire for perfection that keeps many people’s word counts low, I’ve successfully been able to embrace the mantra of “quantity not quality.” But next, I want to find a way to hold this “driven-ness” that overtakes me during NaNo a little more lightly, so that I might, once in a while, choose sitting around to chat over my word count. And so, at the end of it all, I can feel both accomplished and sane. A girl can dream!