As anyone can see who reads this blog, I hate writing about myself. I put it off as long as I can, and ignore the whisperings of my guilty conscience. I know I am not the only writer who struggles with publicizing her work--many writers are, by nature, introverts, and we would much rather bury ourselves in writing or writing-related projects, guarding our privacy. At the same time, I enjoy doing presentations and talking about my books, so there is a tension there.

Rereading my last blog post, about a student writing activity last school year that didn't go as well as I had hoped, reminded me that later that year, I had just the opposite experience. One day I was subbing and a girl asked me how to write a book. An idea popped into my head, and, seeing we had some extra time, I decided to use her question as a class activity.

I wrote a basic story idea on the board, then we played with it. The class helped me add detail after detail until we had the whole board covered with possibilities. Not only was it fun and instructive--at recess two teachers came in, saw it and asked me about it, so I explained what we had done. One asked if I could come to her class and do the same activity! So a few days later I popped into her room (which just happened to be my granddaughter's class) for an hour and we did the same thing. Then she used it as a class assignment after I left, to write the story we had outlined.

I found it amazing that the unplanned idea turned out so good that I know I will use it again and again, yet the one I had slaved over did not turn out as well as I had envisioned. This often happens in writing. Books, or characters in books, sometimes take on a life of their own, beyond what you had originally planned.

I haven’t blogged for awhile. Actually, I took a break from book stuff for a month or so, other than a few phone calls and emails. To tell you the truth, the book was starting to feel like my slave-driver; I felt guilty any time I was not spending my spare time on selling or thinking about the sequel to The Orange Slipknot (my summer project). I had been hitting the marketing aspect pretty hard, so I decided to just relax, do other things in my spare time, and hopefully let all those contacts bear fruit.

I enjoy reading about how the brain works; I recently read something interesting about how to increase your creativity. Work on your project for awhile, then leave it for an hour, or a few days, go do something else. Relax, do something different and enjoyable, don’t think about your project. Meanwhile, your brain will be working on solutions, and next thing you know, ideas will come to you.

My school job will turn to summer vacation in another week, and I plan to spend a good part of my summer working on the sequel. I haven’t worked on it for a few months, devoting my spare time instead to marketing. So I am now rereading what I had written; I will then leave it alone for a few days before starting to work on it. I will trust my brain to be working on it in the background, kind of like my computer is working in the background as I type, updating my anti-virus system. Hopefully when I am ready to bring up that “program” (the sequel), my brain will provide me with the updates it’s been working on. It’s worth a try, and I like this idea better than forcing myself to work on a project so hard that it seems like a chore.

Meanwhile, I have been spending more time seeing grandkids, reading, surfing the Web, playing the piano, visiting with friends on the phone, riding horses, yard work, watching TV (mostly news and horsey stuff), and chatting with my horsey Internet friends. I took a vacation from working on my book so that when my REAL vacation starts, I’ll be ready to get back to work. That’s kind of a paradox, isn’t it?