book giveaway!

Today was our very first snow here in Boston. I find writing in the winter particularly satisfying, because I don't have that feeling that I should be doing something else. Are you kidding me? It's freezing out there! Why not stay home in my cozy socks and sip tea? As long as I get some work done, of course.

And work is exactly what I have ahead of me. If the draft in my bag at the moment is any indication, there are global revisions on the horizon. This is enough to give me a writerly crisis, but as it is a holiday-ish time of year, I'm trying not to stress about it. Too much. Where will the doubt and worry get me? Nowhere. Just wound up like a peppermint twist by the time I actually sit down and work on my new draft.

As a distraction from my current writing woes, I've got a book giveaway to share with you! To enter, follow my blog at it's new home: www.alisalibby.com/blog. I'm giving away Lauren Strasnick's new novel, Her and Me and You; The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan; Bewitching Season by Marissa Doyle; and, of course, signed copies of The King's Rose and The Blood Confession. I plan to send the books out next week, after the holiday rush. Please check it out.

I'll be sure to blog again soon about my revising (rewriting) adventures. Until then: deep breaths. Cozy socks. Lots of tea.

monster in the box

Hi all - sorry for the long hiatus. My day job has conspired to keep me away from all things extracurricular this summer, but I'm trying to get back into the swing of things!

That said, I'm contending with a different kind of monster at the moment - the monster of my current draft. I've been away from this project for a while now, and it's time that we meet again. It's time that I print out my novel-in-progress and sit down with a red pen and start diligently making notes about what I should fix and rework. But wait - I have to do laundry. And buy groceries. And maybe this evening I'll bake a batch of cookies for no apparent reason...Yeah, I think you get the picture. There are some real life issues that keep me away from this book (My full time job for one, plus a distracting little book entitled Mockingjay) but that doesn't entirely solve the issue. Were all things to miraculously disappear from my schedule and I was packed off to some writer's retreat in a sufficiently pretty woodland region with nothing to distract me - well, I would be thrilled, but I think I would also be terrified of what I would find on the printed page. The words that are trying - and failing - to evoke what I see in my head.

So, I think I'll give myself a deadline: one week to get my act together, get back to blogging regularly (mea culpa) and then get on with it. And now I've made this statement public so I'll have to stick to it. Or else bake more cookies. It's really a toss up.

For the past week I have been home from my day job, revising my work-in-progress. I've been writing, drinking mass amounts of green tea, not doing laundry or dishes, and generally living like a hobbit nestled in her hobbit-hole. If not for my basset hound, I probably wouldn't leave the house.

If this doesn't sound glamorous, then...well, you're right, it's not very glamorous. It's challenging work. I could revise a scene a dozen times only to cut it entirely in the next revision. I've written and then discarded dozens of pages—at one time a full 190 pages—in my gradual, sometimes painfully slow efforts to make a book better. But all of those pages that I deleted from the manuscript weren't entirely wasted. That experimentation is part of what writing is, for me. That's how I get to know my characters, figure out what they want most and develop their narrative voice.

Do I wish that it took me less time and fewer drafts to write a book? Yes and yes. In fact, it's probably my number one writing complaint. But wishing that my process was different doesn't make it easier, and in fact I'm convinced of the opposite. There are days when I get very frustrated. And there are other days when I embrace my process in all of it's slow, inefficient, haphazard glory. I take a journey with the characters I write about, and on the way we get to know each other very well. When we arrive, the landscape has changed, and I like to think the book is better for it.