However, writing is also hard. Daily writing is a habit, and it’s oh-so-easy to fail. Habits need accountability, reinforcement, and encouragement. This is where a writing group becomes invaluable. My group consists of five women, including myself. We’re all interconnected, through work, existing friendships, or both. No one in the group is published, and though we’d like that to change, we write because we enjoy it.

Because all five of us have dark hair and Apple laptops, we have been humorously dubbed the “Brunettes With Macs Write Better” group. We get together for a couple hours once or twice a week to eat dinner and then write. It gives us a chance to commiserate about the tough times, rejoice in the good times, and be sociable while also increasing our word count.

Even though the group is highly informal, just knowing I am going is often enough to get me to put words on paper. We don’t guilt each other for not writing (well, except for the occasional good-natured ribbing). We meet in order to be lonely together, which is a whole lot more fun than being lonely alone.

If you’re a writer who is tired of being cooped up in your house, I highly recommend joining or starting a writing group. It doesn’t have to be formal or rigid, a group of like-minded friends is good enough. Just make sure that social time has a set time limit, such as while you’re eating dinner, and writing time actually happens, or you’ve created a social group instead of a writing group. Which is fine, but it’s not going to help you write your novel any faster.

Well, they all had the high honor of meeting me this past weekend. I know they must have been pretty excited, but they managed to play it cool and professional. I even let each of them scribble in some of my books. I’m awesome like that. :)

Dustin and I spent last weekend in Houston, or more specifically, at book signings at Murder By the Book, an independent Houston bookstore. We originally saw that Patrick Rothfuss was going to be there on Sunday, so we figured we’d pop over for the weekend and get our books signed. In a stroke of luck, both Patricia and Kim (am I the only one who feels weird calling famous people I’ve met once by their first names, like we’re pals now?) were signing on Saturday night, so we went over a little earlier and spent Saturday at Murder By the Book, too.

The turnout was crazy. The bookstore is fairly small, so if you go to any of their signings (and they have a ton!) make sure to get there early. We barely got a seat for Patricia and Kim and we arrived two hours early. For Patrick we arrived before the store opened on Sunday and there was already a line. They were expecting over six hundred people for his signing.

Overall, the bookstore was very nice. The staff was super awesome, even though I know they must have put in some crazy hours. If you’re in Houston, you should definitely check it out.

Here are a couple pics we took.

Patricia Briggs and Jessie

Patrick Rothfuss and Jessie

Jessie and Kim Harrison

Patrick Rothfuss and Dustin

The good news is that unlike NaNo, I’m editing as I go.  This means I have two fairly quality chapters.  I’m sure they’ll still change, but I’m pretty happy with them.  The novel is based on the short story I wrote for ArmadilloCon.  I received some positive feedback about it, and I really like the world I’m building.  Of course, I’d like it a whole lot more if the plot would fall nicely into place.

Here’s a little snippet from chapter two:

Ethan didn’t move.  I could move him, but that would very likely start a war, and I already had enough drama in my life.  Maybe just a little push.  Magic welled up inside me, drawn by my thoughts, eager to please.

“Fae!” Gabe barked at me.  He appeared behind Ethan.  I shrugged a shoulder at him and tried to look innocent.

“Ethan, are you going to stand there all night?” Gabe asked.

As sovereign, Ethan could deny me entrance.  As a witch, I could make him very sorry for that decision.  My smile was full of teeth.  Bring it.

Friday was the Writers’ Workshop.  Before the workshop started, I sat and talked to Rachel Caine for probably ten minutes before I introduced myself.  When she said her name was Rachel, it finally clicked on why she looked familiar–she was the guest of honor.  I then had that “I’m sitting next to someone famous” moment, but she was very cool when I turned all fangirl on her for a couple minutes.  I’ve read the first two books in her YA Morganville Vampire series and they were fun, fast reads.

The writers’ workshop was awesome.  There were four other aspiring authors in my group, and the group was led by Gordon and Ilona Andrews.  Gordon and Ilona are very nice, very cool people.  They gave me great feedback on the story I submitted.  Some of it was critical, but it’s what I needed to hear to be able to see the story through their eyes.  They also said some very, very nice things about my ability, so that was awesome.  I even got a mini shout-out on their blog.  The Jessie in the second paragraph… totally me.  ::dies::

Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday were mostly panels.  I took a bunch of notes but haven’t even started to process everything yet.  All I know is that my To Be Read list just got a whole lot longer.  The con was smallish, but it was a nice size because it felt intimate, like a group of friends getting together to talk books.  I guess I was basing my perspective on A-Kon, which is freaking huge, but I was expecting more people.

Sunday afternoon, thanks to the urging of the greatest husband on the planet, we got to hang out and have a drink with Gordon, Ilona, their friend Reece, and Stina Leicht (who also organized the workshop).  I totally wouldn’t have went over to talk to Gordon without Dustin’s urging, because I never want to be “that girl” that bothers people.  That fear coupled with my seriously introverted nature almost guarantees I avoid talking to strangers, almost-strangers, and especially almost-strangers-that-I-really-admire.   However, Dustin talked me into it, and I compromised by saying I’d just go say thank you and then leave.  A couple hours of chatting later, I realized it was getting late and we really should leave this time.  It was amazing!

I ducked under the police tape, Isa right behind me.  The moon provided enough light to barely see the empty yard stretching to the house.  We hadn’t seen any policemen patrolling the area, but we weren’t taking any chances.  We’d left the car at Mark and Emma’s and hiked over.

Isa touched my shoulder.  I turned and she tapped her nose and pointed to a piece of darkness off to the left.  As a werewolf, her senses were better than mine.  She had smelled someone lurking in the shadows.

We circled to the right and crept up to the patio door that led to my parents’ bedroom.  I pulled the key from my pocket and slipped it into the lock.  The door swung open silently and we stepped inside, glad to be out of sight.

Isa took a deep breath and barely suppressed the coughing fit that followed.

“What do you smell?” I whispered.

“Blood, old, but lots of it.  Your family and other humans, probably the police, but the scent is old so I don’t think anyone is inside.  And…”  She paused and took another sniff.

“What?”

“Vampires.”  She spat the world with a slight curl of her lip, as if it tasted bitter on her tongue.

“Vampires?  Like ‘I vant to suck your blood’?” I asked in my best fake Dracula accent.  I scoffed.  “Vampires don’t exist.”

She raised an eyebrow.  “Neither do werewolves.”

She had a point.

When I emailed my submission, I very politely asked to be in a group with Whitney. Then, I ultra politely asked to be in a group led by one of my favorite authors, Ilona Andrews.

I was told that I might be able to be grouped with Whitney, but that all guest of honor groups were chosen by a jury process. I didn’t think anything of it and figured it hadn’t hurt to ask. At least Whitney and I might be grouped together.

Imagine my surprise when I received an email a couple days ago, letting me know I was in Ilona and Gordon’s group. I almost died. I don’t know if it’s because I asked politely or because my story was good (or bad?) enough, but I’m now a combination of excited and terrified.

I was already slightly worried about the critiques, as this will be my debut sharing my work with people who aren’t friends (or the few people who read the blog), but now an author whose writing I totally adore is going to be reading my story.  Gah!  ::breathes in a bag::

The good news is that I get to read the stories/first chapters of the four other people in my group.  I’m super excited to see where their imagination takes mine, because the scifi/fantasy world is so varied.

I crossed the threshold and felt the shimmer of a ward caress my skin.  Interesting.  Mr. Reynolds should not have needed a protection ward unless he thought he was being targeted.  It also meant that whoever killed him was a friend because he or she was invited inside.

The ward was weak but still intact.  If I became a danger to the one it was meant to protect, the ward would activate, with nasty results for the attacker.  At that point, the killer would have had two options:  break the ward or vacate the building as quickly as possible.

I thought perhaps the killer used a third option—kill Mr. Reynolds somewhere else and dump the body back into the house.  If he was already dead, then the ward wouldn’t activate.  But why?  Why move the body back into the house?

The question plagued me.  A murder to send a message was possible but all of our info on Mr. Reynolds said he was quiet and straight-laced.  He wasn’t involved with the mob and had no known enemies or even activities that would create enemies.

I followed the bloody streak on the floor.  It led from the living room into the kitchen before abruptly ending in the middle of the floor.  I scanned the room.  Magic remnants were thick in here.  So this is why I was called in.

The bloody smear ended in a perfectly straight line.  Something had erased the blood and left clean floor in its wake.  Two things came to mind.  The first was a teleportation circle, though that should have left the blood in an arc instead of a straight line.

The second was an illusion spell.  I moved closer, watching the ground carefully.  It shimmered ever so slightly as I moved.  I walked past the end of the blood.  Nothing.

An illusion that altered space was a difficult trick.  This meant a very powerful witch or wizard was involved and that narrowed the suspect list to only a handful of people, myself included.  I stepped back out of the area of illusion and called up my magic.

The illusion shivered as my magic rose, like a mirage or heat waves off of the hot August pavement.  I felt the edges of the foreign magic, a square about six feet across and two feet high.

The illusion was good, masterfully crafted and completely generic.  My eyebrow rose.  Magic was linked closely to the wielder.  Like a thumbprint, magic could be traced.  It took an enormous amount of time and effort to remove that thumbprint.  The list of suspects narrowed again, but without the magic link it wouldn’t stick to any of them.

I pushed gently, my magic curling around the edges of the illusion spell.  It held.  I pushed harder and the spell still didn’t budge.  Interesting.

“Mike,” I shouted, knowing the police chief was nearby, “you may want to pull back.  No telling what is going to happen when I crack this thing.”

Mike’s bald head popped into the kitchen.  “You find something?”

“Yeah, illusion spell.  Good one, too.  Going to take some doing to break it.”

“Okay, we’ll be outside.  Try not to blow yourself up…again.”  He smirked and ducked out of the kitchen.  I sighed—blow yourself up one time and you never live it down.

During NaNo, a 2,500 word scene in which my main character meets with a lawyer seemed like a good idea.  After all, that’s a day and half’s word count done in one scene.  It’s genius!  I’m a fantastic writer!  Book contract here I come!

Cue the harsh dose of reality.  That scene added almost nothing to the book.  I axed it and summed up the whole scene in two paragraphs.  Two short paragraphs.  And so it goes.

The first three chapters of my NaNo novel were just over 15,000 words.  The edited version turned into four chapters and just under 12,000 words.

That’s a 20% cut.  At this rate, my 50k novel ends up 40k.  It needs to end up 85k.

Hmm…maybe that scene wasn’t so bad after all…

I have three main problems with revision. The first is that the English language is no friend of mine. Sure, I’m a native speaker, but I’m also a Computer Science major so they almost cancel each other out. I spent four years in college learning to write code, not prose. In fact, many of those years were spent trying to figure out how to avoid taking any humanities classes at all. Whoops. Who knew that was going to come back to haunt me?

My second problem is that I’m a huge, HUGE procrastinator. (See what I’m doing here? Writing this post? That means I’m not revising.) The only reason I finish NaNoWriMo is because I’m competitive and I have a hard daily word count goal. With revision, it’s a bit trickier because goals aren’t as set in stone. Some chapters need major rewrites and others need minor proofing so a chapter-by-chapter breakdown isn’t that easy. A friend and I are both revising right now, but since we’re both procrastinating, we’re neither getting anything done. Procrastinators unite!

My third and final problem–and the one that is contributing to my lack of motivation–is that Novel One currently stands at around 50,000 words. For a first-time author in the genre, it needs to be more in the 85,000 words ballpark. That’s an extra 35,000 words that I still need to write.

Thirty-five thousand words. During NaNo that would take about 21 days.  In this case, it’s going to take a lot longer because I have to fit it in with what is already written and I just don’t want to write it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real problem. Writing a novel is fun; revising a novel is work. Both are required if I want to have any hope of getting published. I just have to tough it out. Wish me luck.  :)

I opened one eye, only to squint angrily at the clock.  The red digits glowed brightly at me, oblivious to my foul mood—3:08 AM.  Ugh.  “Nicolae,” I said without turning my head, “go home.  It’s an ungodly hour.  I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

Nicolae is the vampire sworn to protect me by an oath to my father—the father I never knew.  He also had the worst habit of popping in unannounced in the middle of the night to check on me.  It woke me up every time, even from a dead sleep, because I could subconsciously feel the change in the room and it set off little alarm bells in my head.  Tonight was especially bad, though, because I had gotten to sleep less than an hour ago.

“Ava,” he gasped, “help.”

I sat straight up, adrenaline surging into my veins.  Nicolae never, ever asked for help.  I’d seen him single-handedly take out an entire coven without requiring any assistance from me.  I scrambled for the switch of my bedside lamp and flicked it on, throwing the room into stark light and deep shadows.

He was crouched at the foot of my bed, his body hunched in on itself.  The left half of his shirt was shredded.  A wound in his side that looked suspiciously like a bullet hole was bleeding steadily.  It was his eyes, however, that put me on edge.  Blood red and practically glowing, those eyes meant trouble.