Overheard on a walk along the river (snowflakes whirling, carrying toboggans after sledding at the frozen beach); my older son saying to his friend, “My mom’s a writer.”

Click.

Take a picture of this moment, I thought, because here are all your dreams realized at once.

• Two healthy boys: check.
• Writing for a living: check.
• Living alongside the river: check.
• Having the freedom to be sledding with my children in the middle of a weekday: check.

The thing is, I could have picked this apart. Not the boy part. They’re perfect just as they are. But the writing. I mean, sure, I’m a writer now. I’m not anything else. But I’m still working hard to get my novel published. Still climbing that wall. Believing I’m going to get there but with no guarantees. And, the “living” part of it. Well…that’s all relative. I wouldn’t have much of a living if it wasn’t for my full-time employed husband.

And the living by the river thing. It’s not the rural idyll I pictured as a kid. We’re very much urban dwellers. We crossed the transitway to get to our beach sledding spot and our path took us alongside the Ottawa River Parkway.

In terms of freedom, well, it’s true to a point. I still have a million things I have to do every day. I do quite a bit of time juggling to make sure the house is clean, the laundry’s done, we all get fed and I keep up that “living” of mine writing.

So, you see, if I’m determined to feel that my dream hasn’t come true, I can do so.

On the flip side, though, if I’m prepared to count my blessings I can do that too. I can even see extra beauty in the twists added to my dream. Living centrally, urbanly, a ten-minute bus ride from Parliament Hill and also being a three-minute walk from the river? Bonus!

And in terms of the activities competing for my time, well, what would life really be without them? I’ve always wondered if you had someone to do everything for you then what would you really be doing with your life?

So, for now, I think I’ll take the double luxury of saying my dreams have come true and I still have room left to realize them more fully.

Are there ways in which you can see your dreams have been realized?

What do America’s Next Top Model, Taylor Swift, Heartland, Coca-Cola and writers all have in common? Or, what should they have in common?

Brand.

I apologize if you hate the term. I kind of hate it too. It’s become so overused. It’s like “team-building” and “thinking out of the box” (although I had a recent career client whose first language was not English and told me he was “thinking outside the square” and I really liked that…). “Brand” has become a jargonny word and we’re all supposed to jump on the brand bandwagon and people can now make their living as brand consultants and I’ve been sort of ignoring / avoiding it. Up until now.

Because a better word for “brand” might be “promise”. Your brand is a promise you make to those around you that they can expect something particular from you.

You might not always think about someone’s / something’s brand, but when their brand “promise” is broken, you notice it. I know it’s happened to me and I’d be surprised if it hasn’t happened to you as well. A much-loved restaurant fails to deliver the meal you expected. An established author branches out into a new genre you didn’t anticipate. The brand of bathing suit you always buy, because you can count on it fitting, seems to have been given a whole new cut.

If I think of a brand as a promise instead, I start to be able to think of myself as having a brand and I start being able to narrow down the brand I want to be offering.

Lynn helped with this!

Lynn recently read my latest manuscript (now out on submission – fingers crossed!) and gave me some fantastic “real-life” reader critique points. She also went a step beyond and told me how the book made her feel. This was huge for me. It was when I read her description of the feeling she was left with after she finished reading that I realized it was exactly what I wanted (thank goodness – because I can fix typos and spelling and grammar mistakes and even iron out inconsistencies but changing an entire “feel” would be a tough slog…).

And then I realized that’s my brand. That’s the promise I want to make to my readers. I want to give them a certain feeling that they can carry around with them while (and hopefully for a while after) they read my books.

So, thanks Lynn. And, as for “brand”, well, I’m coming to accept that I have one – or at least would like to.

P.S. Can I please take the moment to emphasize how good Lynn is at putting things into words and summing up people / their work in a concise and precise way? Perfect for the web. And now you can get her expertise working for you.

When in doubt leave it out. When it doubt cut it out. When in doubt Keep It Simple Stupid.

This is my message, mantra, reminder to myself as I open a manuscript I haven’t worked on since October of 2010. Long story, and maybe one I’ll tell more completely another time, but this is a story I worked on and re-worked and switched the protagonist and changed into third person, then changed back into first person and pretty much killed myself over (I swear there are five separate 60,000-word versions of this story in my files) and then I took a big break and worked on another manuscript and while it was out for revision I figured out what I wanted to do with this one.

So, for quite a while now – since May – I’ve known where I want to try to go with this story but I wanted to get the other one revised first and now it’s out for a read-over (by a wonderful, generous, clever angel-reader of this blog) and I’m finally (finally) opening my old ms again.

And I want to get it right this time.

Or pretty close to right. I don’t want five more 60,000-word versions floating around. So trying hard to stay on the KISS path.

What does KISS mean for me? Well, in both my other manuscripts, what’s come out of the professional – and tough – critiques I’ve had done, is the elimination of one (or more) complete subplots. In both cases it was surprisingly easy to eliminate said subplots and – IMHO – they were so much better without them.

So, with this one, I’m thinking let’s keep the subplots to a minimum to start with. So that’s (1) Minimize subplots. I’m in the process of moving the old, Word file, into Scrivener chapter-by-chapter and when I came to a chapter which introduced a sub-plot I just skipped it. Skipped it! And I don’t think it’s going to affect the story in the end. Which means no need for it. KISS!

Then there’s the explaining. Less of that my friend. Resist the urge to explain every detail. Do not tell the reader, ad nauseum, about how the protagonist got where they are and why they’re there – the story is forward; not backward (or at least minimally backward and only as strictly required). My thoughts / philosophy on explaining and how much to do it are still very much evolving and I think they require a separate blog post at a later time but, in a nutshell, I think this is part of giving up a bit of control. Allowing the reader to inject their own thoughts; come to their own conclusions. I need to tell the part of the story the reader can’t fill in for his or herself. Other than that I’m trying to avoid overbearing hand-holding. So (2) Be judicious with explanation.

What else? Resist the urge to complicate. I think most stories, at their core, are very simple. Think about the stories in your life. Think about your work dramas, your family tales. Sure, you can go into lots of detail, but at their core they’re straightforward. A mother and daughter have conflict. An employee resents her boss. A parent loves his child. I think the hardest part of writing a novel can be finding that core. We (or at least I) want to layer stuff on top; make it more interesting; inject the drama and details. However, I think the real art is in identifying, holding onto and telling the simple story. It can be so hard. Sometimes I feel it slipping away from me. Fairly often I have to say “What is the story again?”. Then just tell the things that illustrate that one simple story. Before you know it you have 60,000 words without all the additions you were tempted to throw in there. So (3) is Focus on the core story.

I haven’t really kept this post simple. If I had, I would have just said this:

1. Minimize subplots.
2. Be judicious with explanation.
3. Focus on the core story.

Just goes to show, Keeping it Simple is a work in progress and a lot harder than it seems…

Hi Margaret!

This post was inspired by Margaret; the inspirational, thoughtful, attentive, creative, passionate (oh, and funny!) children’s librarian at my fantastic branch of the Ottawa Public Library. She put me on her favourites list today so I thought I’d give her something good to read when she checks in.

While I’ll sing the praises our my particular branch and its team all day long, I also know many other people in Ottawa who will do the same about their particular branch. I’m hoping my readers elsewhere in Ontario and Canada will also have the same things to say.

We are lucky, lucky, lucky to live in a society which still values putting public resources toward the greater good. Which supports literacy and the arts. I’m not saying it’s perfect and I’m not saying it couldn’t be better but I’m still saying, we’re better off than most and we should make sure we value it so we don’t lose it.

Here’s what I love about the library (in no particular order):

1. Eye candy – new books all the time! Everywhere! Beautifully displayed! Catching my attention and encouraging me to try something new.
2. Books on CD – better than TV for kids sick / bored at home. I never feel guilty about plunking them down to listen to hours of literature. I think listening to stories develops their brains in interesting and useful ways. And they save car trips (we still don’t do in-car DVDs – partly on principle and partly due to the very real fear of carsickness).
3. DVDs – in case you hadn’t noticed there are no more places to rent DVDs (OK, not strictly true – if you live in downtown Ottawa you can take your pick from about five amazing independent video rental stores – but move just a few kms out of the core and you’re SOL). And Netflix hasn’t really worked for us. But at the library there’s always this cool, eclectic, quirky selection of free (FREE) DVDs. Love it. We see movies we never would otherwise and we’re much less critical because they’re FREE!
4. Programming – oh my goodness my kids have been shaped by the library. Every summer there are so many fantastic programs with such worthwhile and interesting topics. And my son’s in a monthly book club (which he loves). I’ve taken free workshops at the library (How to find government information on the Internet - how useful is that?).
5. Everything E – there’s so much of it. Audio books and e-books available from whereever whenever. When I unexpectedly have a sick kid home we browse until we find something good for him to listen to. When we were in PEI the other summer, I kept getting new Hardy Boy books for the boys to listen to when they needed downtime away from all the family excitement – from PEI I did this! Also there are so many good functions online. I can browse, find and reserve materials. It’s great!
6. Everything I haven’t used yet but is still really cool – this includes museum passes, cross-country ski passes, pedometers, kill-a-watt meters, etc., etc., etc. I’m at the library all the time and I still haven’t had time to use everything they offer.
7. Relationships – our librarians care about us (at least we sure believe you do guys!). They know me and my kids. They know my next-door neighbour. They know she’s my next-door neighbour and will tell me things to tell her if I’m in and she’s not. They support our schools. They support us all. They’re fun to talk to. They tell you the latest info on publishers and books and info and fun stuff.

I LOVE THE LIBRARY!

Especially today when it was -28 with the wind chill and the kids were home from school and where else are you going to go?

Thanks for being there!