Balancing Promotion & Creativity with Rory Power

Welcome to the SNOB (Second Novel Ominipresent Blues). Whether you’re under contract or trying to snag another deal, you’re a professional now, with the pressures of a published novelist compounded with the still-present nagging self-doubt of the noobie.

Today’s guest is Rory Power, who grew up in New England, where she lives and works as a crime fiction editor and story consultant for TV adaptation. She received a Masters in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia, and thinks fondly of her time there, partially because she learned a lot but mostly because there were a ton of bunnies on campus. Her debut, Wilder Girls, released this week!

Is it hard to leave behind the first novel and focus on the second?

I’ve actually found it to be something of a relief! By this point I’ve read my debut, Wilder Girls, so many times, and it’s refreshing to be diving into something new, where I can make as many mistakes as I like with the knowledge that I’ll fix them later. It is hard, though, to keep myself from comparing this new book to the first. I’ve found myself struggling with where to draw the line between keeping a consistent brand, so to speak, and covering too much of the same ground.

At what point do you start diverting your energies from promoting your debut and writing / polishing / editing your second?

I try to do these at the same time. They require very different parts of my brain, and for me particularly, it’s good to not let myself get too deeply entrenched in any one project. I can definitely go full tunnel vision if I allow myself to, so it’s nice to have two things to bounce back and forth between. The trick, I think, is making sure that you don’t let one distract too much from the other. I try to set aside some time at the beginning and end of every day to check in on social media, and keep the middle of the day for drafting, revision, and other work on my second book.

Your first book landed an agent and an editor, and hopefully some fans. Who are you writing the second one for? Them, or yourself?

The original kernel of the story is absolutely for me, but I find that some of the ways in which I’ve developed this second book have been more for the reader. Through editing my debut novel I learned that there are some things I don’t personally value all that highly in a story that in fact matter hugely to most readers. For instance, I don’t mind at all when books are ambiguous or not entirely clear, but especially in books with a mystery at the core, a lot of readers like solid answers. So while the original idea, or the question, so to speak, of this book is for me, the answers, and the clarity with which I express them, are for my readers.

Is there a new balance of time management to address once you’re a professional author?

Absolutely. There are so many things you don’t quite realize will fall onto your plate - emails, so many emails - when you’re starting out, and dealing with them can absolutely sap your creativity. But there are so many ways to make your schedule work for you, whether it’s reserving different days for different tasks or dividing up your time into blocks. I’ve found that changing my location around really helps. I try to draft in one spot and do other work in another, which helps me keep my focus.

What did you do differently the second time around, with the perspective of a published author?

I outlined in much more detail this time. With my debut, I had all the time in the world to rip it apart and put it back together. Nobody was waiting on it. But this second book is on a deadline, and I don’t have the time to make as many mistakes. By outlining, and re-outlining, and outlining again, I’ve cut down on the rounds of revision I’ll have to make later. Or at least, hopefully I have.

Victoria Lee On Moving Forward After Your Debut

Welcome to the SNOB (Second Novel Ominipresent Blues). Whether you’re under contract or trying to snag another deal, you’re a professional now, with the pressures of a published novelist compounded with the still-present nagging self-doubt of the noobie.

Today's guest for the SNOB is Victoria Lee author of The Fever King. She’s been a state finalist competitive pianist, a hitchhiker, a pizza connoisseur, an EMT, an expat in China and Sweden, and a science doctoral student.

Is it hard to leave behind the first novel and focus on the second?

I’m working on drafting two different books right now: one is a contracted sequel to my debut, The Fever King. The other is an unrelated fantasy novel that I started writing while I was on submission with The Fever King. And for both books, I’d say yes—it’s been really hard to move on from my first book to focus on writing new material, but for very different reasons.

With the sequel, there’s a fear that it won’t be as good as the first book. I wrote The Fever King in just two months, but then I spent over two years revising. I don’t have nearly that much time on my deadline for book 2! I’m worried that whatever readers love about the first book won’t come through in the sequel, and people will end up disappointed. And…on a more recent timescale, that the same might happen with my editor. So there’s a lot of self-imposed pressure on the sequel for it to feel like a good follow-up to the first book, to tie up all the loose threads and feel like the natural and inevitable conclusion to the story.

With the new book, the pressures are very different.

At what point do you start diverting your energies from promoting your debut and writing / polishing / editing your second?

There’s a big chunk of time between sending off your edits and needing to begin promotion. Usually promotion shouldn’t start in earnest until six months before your publication date—and really, more like three. I tried to use that chunk of time to get a large amount done on The Fever King’s contracted sequel. But…promoting your debut is fun. At least, I think so. I constantly had to distract myself from planning promo and focus instead on actually writing the second book! I also had the pressure of a new grad school semester beginning, and studying for my Ph.D. comprehensive exams, so I was pretty motivated to get as much done on the sequel as possible before I got too sucked into grad school again. It’s still a process, though. One thing I find helpful is scheduling out time during my day for both tasks. I’ll block a few hours for preparing promo materials, then another few hours for writing book 2, and so on.

Your first book landed an agent and an editor, and hopefully some fans. Who are you writing the second one for? Them, or yourself?

As I’m writing the sequel, I’m thinking of my potential readers. And of myself. I have a definite vision of the “ideal reader” in my head—the kind of reader I think will most like my books, who my books will speak to. And that ideal reader is a whole lot like my own younger self. I want to write the book that will satisfy young, creative, slightly-pessimistic yet idealistic queer Jewish teens hoping to see themselves represented in SFF. I want to write a conclusion to this series that will make any reader who fell in love with the first book feel like the second book didn’t let them down. But for myself—I want to spend more time with these characters. And in a lot of ways, I feel like I have to do the characters justice, too. I’ve fallen in love with them. It’s hopeless.

Is there a new balance of time management to address once you’re a professional author?

Oh, definitely. Not just between promoting your debut and working on a sequel, but planning the book that comes after that. And the one after that. I have way too many ideas I want to write, and it can get frustrating to know I have to wait to get to them. …Especially now that I know how much editing effort is involved in polishing a book for publication.

I was already pretty good at time management; it was a skill I learned in grad school. I just had to apply it to a new domain, too. I’m actually one of those weird people who functions more efficiently when super busy? I like to have as little free time as possible. Free time breeds procrastination, for me. But if I know that this is the only hour today I’ll be able to work on my book, then dammit, I’m gonna get so much done on that book in an hour.

What did you do differently the second time around, with the perspective of a published author?

I outlined more.

I wrote my debut as a “connect-the-dots” writer—I had a few major milestones I needed to hit, but then I just kind of discovery-wrote between them. Now, I have more than just a few milestones planned out. I still discovery write, sort of, but the way it works now is that I’ll religiously plan in detail every next 10,000 words. What comes after those 10k is still undecided until after I reach the next milestone, but I’ve learned that I definitely need to at least plan 10k in advance to avoid rambling on for pages with character introspection that—while fascinating to me—proooobably doesn’t propel the story forward.

I also cut myself a lot more slack in drafting.  I’ve learned this book will likely go through ten drafts and at least two rewrites before it’s published, so, no need to obsess over line-level prose. I’m just trying to get the story down. The nuts and bolts, even—right now my draft pacing is all off. It’s way too fast. But I’ll get the story skeleton on paper, and I can expand it later, once I’ve established what bits of the character arcs and subplots are really integral to the story and need to be fleshed out.

Gail Shepherd on Balancing Writing Time As A Published Author

Welcome to the SNOB (Second Novel Ominipresent Blues). Whether you’re under contract or trying to snag another deal, you’re a professional now, with the pressures of a published novelist compounded with the still-present nagging self-doubt of the noobie. How to deal?

Today's guest for the SNOB is Gail Shepherd who received her creative M.A. from the University of Florida in poetry. She has collaborated on radio plays, written comic serial magazine stories, and published her own biweekly indie newspaper. She currently works in the K-12 education industry, supporting teachers and schools with training and technology. She is a fourth generation Floridian on her mother’s side, and she lives in South Florida now with her little family, two dogs, and an awful lot of mosquitoes. The True History of Lyndie B. Hawkins is her debut novel.

Is it hard to leave behind the first novel and focus on the second?

Actually, not so much. Most debut novels go through multiple developmental revisions (I did three full revisions with my agent and three with my editor), and once the developmental revisions are done, there are several rounds of copy edits and smaller line edits on the pass pages. By the time you’re through with that process, you are pretty much sick of reading the book (or writing it). I do find that I think about the first book a lot—but in a quite different way. I ponder on how I might talk about it to a bunch of 12-year-olds in a classroom, or to an audience of other writers, or how I might use elements from it as an example in a writing workshop. I think about my process, about notes for teachers who may be presenting the novel in class, and about sideline material that I’d like to offer readers to help them go deeper.

My middle-grad debut, The True History of Lyndie B. Hawkins, is about a girl obsessed with history and also with discovering the truth. I find myself now reading books like Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, and thinking about how a history class might look at Lyndie’s quest to find out the truth about her family and her town’s history. In that way, Lyndie is still very much alive for me.

But also: How incredibly refreshing it was to turn to my next book! My new main character is very different from Lyndie. I really love the process of discovering her.

At what point do you start diverting your energies from promoting your debut and writing / polishing / editing your second?

Boy, that’s a really tough question. As a member of two debut groups, I find that a lot of time is going into pre-promotion. You’ve got to get your website up, your business cards done, your swag, your video. You’ve got to organize any author appearances and plan your launch. And you try to do a lot to promote your fellow debut authors, as well as keep up with prior commitments to critique partners. At the same time, your publisher has ongoing requests for you. I’ve also signed up for some sideline gigs, for example, I joined the staff of From the Mixed Up Files of Middle Grade Authors blog, so all those extras tend to pile up. I now have to keep a really, really detailed calendar or I’ll blow my commitments.

Ideally, you would have started the second book while drumming your fingers waiting for the first book to make the rounds, go through edits, etc. It didn’t work out that way for me. I had two other books partially or fully done, but my editor and I decided to go in another direction for book 2, so I was starting from scratch with less than a year until I was supposed to deliver the second manuscript. To ensure that I kept working on book 2, I signed up for an intensive six-month online class that will keep my nose to the grindstone, and, I hope, help me deliver that second manuscript on time.

Your first book landed an agent and an editor, and hopefully some fans. Who are you writing the second one for? Them, or yourself?

That’s complicated. You can never write entirely “for yourself.” What you do, ideally, is filter your own unique sensibility through the lens of the marketplace. Right now, I’m interested in historical fiction with a southern voice. But I have to consider how my 11- or 12-year-old readers will relate to my historical character, how many similar books are being published, what makes my book different from those, and the many questions that will come from my editor, Kathy Dawson, who is brilliant at finding the kernel of your best story and helping you flesh it out.

I find that I also struggle a bit with the social and cultural considerations that are very much part of the current conversations in kidlit. I know want to write characters of color and diverse backgrounds, I’m deeply drawn to these characters, or to any characters who are underdogs of some sort, but I’m hyper-aware of the pitfalls of doing so as a privileged white middle class author. So there are a lot of forces that act on a novel, from within and without.

Is there a new balance of time management to address once you’re a professional author?

Absolutely, and I don’t think I have a handle on this yet. I’m a bit of a procrastinator, so any shiny thing that can grab my attention away from the hard work of writing exerts a tremendous draw. I have to fight this tendency to go chasing after something that feels easier than sitting my butt in the chair and plotting out my 300 page novel, or writing a thousand words, or struggling through a stuck point, every day.

What did you do differently the second time around, with the perspective of a published author?

Well, I’m not technically published yet, and won’t be until March 26, 2019, although The True History of Lyndie B. Hawkins, is already up for pre-sale. And I’m still just baby steps into a “second time around.” I find the business of writing pretty fascinating, so I’m lucky that the promotion and planning doesn’t feel like a drain.

I think if I’m honest, as a published author, I’m going to have to commit to and prioritize my writing time, every single day, even if I’m doing no more than just thinking about the next book and making notes. I can tell you that at certain points during writing my first book I was breaking down in tears, because I found it so, so hard. And then at other times, I was vibrating with pleasure. I do love the process of learning to write, and I will never stop pursuing getting better at it. But there are times that writing a book just doesn’t feel good. And as a human being, I’m pain avoidant. So the sooner and more firmly I can get into a daily writing groove, on book after book, the better off I’ll be.