The school parking mom leans in the window and smiles at Michael Keaton as he delivers his kids through ~gasp~ the wrong driveway the first day of being Mr. Mom. “Hi,” she smiles, all swollen volunteer authority. “You’re doing it wrong.”

My husband and I still use this line. And just recently the epiphany of it hit me anew in relation to writing fiction. I’m doing it wrong.

I’ll ask you the same question: “Are you doing it wrong?”

If you’ve been reading Routines for Writers during their sophomore offering of Author Crush Month, you’ve been reading some of fiction’s best writers confess/reveal their writer routines. Or lack thereof. Which, if you think about, is a routine. Sorta like Harvey Cox’s quote, “Not to decide is to decide.”

In a serendipitous dovetail, I’ve been dipping a toe into logical fallacies with my essay students. We were discussing “part-to-whole” faulty reasoning as explained by The Fallacy Detective. This book, written by two twenty-something guys, products of homeschooling, stipulates that folks should reason better. The authors define part-to-whole thusly:

“When someone tries to say that what is true of part of something must also be true of the whole thing together.”

Hmm. In my earlier guest blog on RFW regarding productivity, I had unknowingly blundered into a partial understanding of my faulty reasoning with the two-parter, The WMB. That day in class, the crux of it burst upon me like a grand finale on July Fourth in the park.

Here we go.

• the WHOLE of what I want…to be published
• the PART – the magic bullet, the routine, the book, the conference, the blog, the online class

Example

Liz Curtis Higgs, Author Crush Month writer, is published (THE WHOLE of what I want)

She has two desks on two different floors, one lined with bookshelves where “no food, no phone calls, no kidding” (the PART of the WHOLE of being published)

Therefore, I need to work in two different places, stop eating M&Ms at my desk, and pull the plug on the phone by my elbow. Ah, that will give me the motivation/edge/entrée to agents to publishdom.

Don’t be laughing now. I know you’ve thought this. These wonderful writers, who spin tales that take us out of our day and into special worlds, have found and are still finding their routines. See my outstretched hand coming through your computer screen with a sympathetic expression. Are you doing it wrong? Are you trying to make someone else’s part be your part?

Let’s get ludicrous, ludicrous…

More part to whole. More “If they are published and I do what they do, then I will be published.”

• Fortinbras Fourbooks publishes four books a year because of his _________________ (insert any routine you’ve heard from a keynote speaker at a writing conference) schedule.

• Susie So-Published writes _____ words a day for ____ days a week without fail except for the days she’s already xxx’d out on her calendar.

• Bill Bestseller creates extensive personal histories for each of his characters before he writes word one of a new story.

• Fergie Focused never does anything else before she sits down and types out her ______ number of words a day on her current work in process (wip).

• Multipublished Fred Freespirit abhors an outline because he says they are agents of death for creativity.

• Nelly Notecard, NYT Bestseller, scribbles her plot points on note cards and tapes them on a white board that covers one wall in her office.

• Harry Hiker, always on the bestseller list, dictates all his novels on his digital recorder while hiking steep trails, then downloads them to a voice recognition software.

What if:

• You accept that “procrastination and avoidance are not the best routine for an aspiring author” (Donna Lott) and you pledge to dabble in many types of routines until you find the one that fits you…for that season, that book.
• You look at the whole you, your whole life which is so much more than simply your writing: “Choose according to your needs and self control.” (Lauraine Snelling)
• You go large. Large overcomes small, tight, and limiting. What might you try this year? This month? Tomorrow?
• Writing never does become a routine for you, but you still finish compelling stories with each one written a different way, in a different place. “It’s the feeling of the space, and the sanctity of what can happen here” (Lois Lowry) that makes your part the whole.

And when you do, come back to Routines for Writers and tell us all about it.

Kathleen Damp Wright caught, rather than sought, the moniker The What If Girl. She’s a fiction coach for beginning and multi-published writers, writes her own fiction, and blogs inconsistently on her website.  In addition, she gets to teach writing to fascinating junior and high school students in an educational co-op. Living in the Wasatch Mountains, she writes and plays and not always in that order. Catch her on Twitter.com also as TheWhatIfGirl and join her fan page on The What If Girl, A Fiction Coach on Facebook.

          One thing I’ve noticed as I read our Author Crush guest blogs is that routines are inevitable. Even when I think I’m not organized or methodical, I WILL have a routine. Even if it seems as though I’m procrastinating and ignoring the work, like Tosca Lee and others, that seemingly non-routine IS the routine. Even when, like Zilpha Keatley Snyder, I write pretty much when I want to, I still have habits, like her keeping a notebook, that support the writing. (And sometimes sabotage it, but that’s not the focus of this article. ) That’s really all a routine is. A habit. The key is to form those habits and routines that best support my writing, that propel me into productivity, not away from it. As Lauraine Snelling stated, I need to find what works for me and then work it.

          In reading last month’s Author Crush blogs, I have discovered several authors who seem to share with me similar styles of working. The difference is they are productive. Me? Not so much. Yet. I’m realizing the reason behind that lack of productivity is NOT lack of discipline, but lack of trust. Trust in myself. I convinced myself I was doing it all wrong. That kept me looking for better and better ways to organize my time and work. I try to force myself to write when the words don’t make it into my mind, much less out of my fingers. Or I insist on too high a word count for each day’s work. Or, after a few successful low-word count days, I “raise the bar” and place ever-increasing word-count expectations on myself. I didn’t consciously realize it until Liz Curtis Higgs mentioned her 5000-word day and its aftermath, but my consistent habit of raising my target word count is not the best way to motivate myself. Consistent success is.

          In January, I set a goal to write 115 words each on two different projects every weekday. I felt guilty and failure-ridden that I had to “back up” to such a tiny word goal. I felt like a slug next to Kitty and Shonna’s more ambitious goals. Intuitively, though, I knew that’s all I could really do. Any larger amount and I would be tempted, as I had many times before, to not write that day because of . . . any number of good, bad or ridiculous reasons. But I could easily force myself to write 115 words. And I did. Every weekday. Even the week I was sick and wanted to stay in bed all day. Even the days (twice in 4 weeks!) when I was reformatting and restoring my misbehaving computer.

          Except for a few stutters in the beginning weeks of January, I have added to each of these projects. One is a personal journal whose end product is still unclear; the other, a cookbook, is nearing completion. Maybe. This has all the earmarks of a never-ending project. I’m getting definitive glimmers of how to proceed, though, and that means it’s time to reassess my January goals.

          Instead of upping my word count and adding even more projects, though, I’m going to trust that I’m on the right track to my best process and add small, easy to reach goals. I’m also going to add in some flexibility. (Just a little. I don’t want to make myself so flexible, I flop back into non-productivity.)

          My continuing projects will be the journal, the cookbook and blog posts for this site and my personal website. My new projects are to write a manual for Time Tracker, the software my husband wrote to help me track my time (I hope to offer Time Tracker to our blog readers for beta testing in a couple of months.) and some short homeschool stories that have been blossoming in my mind lately. (Yay! Fiction is finding it’s way back into my schedule.)

          My goal is still to write 115 words each weekday on two projects. The difference is I get to choose from the above list of projects which ones I work on for any given day. This might mean I don’t open some files for weeks, but that’s okay; I can evaluate and assess my goals at any time if I decide a project needs more “face time” from me.

          Taking my cue from our Author Crush guests, I think I’m well on the way to discovering my best process and work it. What about you? What is your best process? Work on one project at a time or cycle through two or more? To write everyday or give yourself a one or two-day break? To give yourself an easily attainable goal or a must-stretch to make it goal?

My husband and I were talking about our 2010 joint goals and individual goals this week, and I remembered a little booklet I found on the Internet a few weeks ago. I was sure I’d shared it with you all, but I just looked over all of my December posts and I haven’t!

The web site is called I Set My Goals and they have a one-sheet printable, foldable booklet for writing down all of your goals for the year. The great part is that there are six sections – Health & Fitness, Family & Relationship, Education & Training, Financial, Recreation & Leisure, and a blank section for you to choose the topic. I wrote “Writing” in that blank.

In each section there are five lines so you can write down five goals for each area. Now I could write down what John and I said two of our Health goals are – “eat less” and “exercise more” – but the web site reminds you to use the SMART technique for goal setting. Make each goal Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

The single page printout can then be folded into a little booklet that you can put in your purse or wallet. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to cut and fold it just right, but it worked. I’ve been carrying it around in my purse the last week or two trying to decide exactly what to write in it. (Yes, remember me? Afraid to mess up the pretty blank page! LOL! I’ve decided to write in pencil in case I think of better goals than those that first come to mind!)

I wanted to tell you about this web site because when John and I were talking about our goals, there were so many and they were all over the map! But with this goal booklet, I can keep them organized in my mind and see how they can intersect, support each other, or conflict with each other. For instance, I need to eat healthier and exercise more to increase my creativity and productivity, so I can write those goals in such a way that I really want to follow through on them.

On the other hand, we said we want to travel around Australia next year, but we had no plan for when or where or how. Looking at the “Leisure” goals along with my “Writing/Work” goals and as compared to the calendar for my “Education” goals, I can see that I must plan our vacation for the first week in May because it’s my school break. That means I have to start looking into locations and prices in the next month or two. Without being forced to think this through, we would have gotten to the end of the year without any idea why we hadn’t traveled except to blame it on being “busy.”

I can see how all my goals are going to work together to make 2010 a better planned-out year. I hope this booklet helps you to do the same! Happy New Year!

        Oops! I’m not sure how it happened, but writing this blog totally slipped my mind! Somehow, even though my new list of schedules and routines and to-dos clearly has “Write RFW blog” written in several places, I have nothing written. No jumbled page of disjointed thoughts that make up my initial draft, no half-written idea that was discarded from one of those jumbled drafts, no stray, not-quite complete, forgotten, almost-posted blog. Nothing.

        And there is absolutely no time to write one.

        I’m not just going to send you this apology, as heartfelt as it may be. Last year about this time, I wrote a post, “Goals-When and How to Evaluate Them.” Because it is so foundational, in my mind at least, I think it really deserves to be seen again. I hope you do, too!

For most people writing is a long, self-directed apprenticeship. You need to be able to focus on where you are going and how you are getting there.

Publishing can be such a slow business that sometimes you can feel like years have gone by and you have only moved an inch from where you started. That’s one reason to keep up a list of accomplishments like I talked about last Friday. You may not have a book on the shelf yet with your name as the author, but knowing that you wrote 50,000 words more this year than last year will help you see that you ARE progressing.

As you think about setting your goals and routines for next year here are some items to consider:

What is your ultimate big dream? Bestseller list? Newberry award? A popular series?

Of course, we can’t expect to reach the big dream in a few months time. We have to set our expectations for the long haul so we don’t get disappointed too easily. But we still need to have the big dream, tempered with the knowledge that it’s going to take some work to get there.

Why do you write? What keeps you writing even when things get tough? Do you want to make a difference? Touch people’s lives? Do you just have fun when you write and want to share that with others?

Where are you in the process? The basic steps to publication look like this:

Write the book. Polish the book. Submit the book. Write the second book. Polish the second book. Submit the second book…rinse and repeat until you get the coveted publishing contract. (And if you are already published, toss in some marketing!)

Knowing where you are will help you plan out your year. One step at a time, get closer to finishing, polishing, and submitting your manuscript.

When are you going to write? We’ve talked about Randy Ingermanson’s theory that writing needs to become one of your “Three Big Chunks” if you are going to make it as a published author. Looking forward to next year, can you set up some routines that can help you funnel more time into writing?

I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my favorite writing books, ON BECOMING A NOVELIST, by John Gardner:

Writing a novel takes an immense amount of time, at least for most people, and can test the writer’s psyche beyond endurance. The writer asks himself day after day, year after year, if he’s fooling himself, asks why people write novels anyhow—long, careful studies of the hopes, joys, and disasters of creatures who, strictly speaking, do not exist. p.xxiv

LOL, I love it. Now let’s go write!

http://twitter.com/ShonnaSlayton

Last week I told you how I start planning out my new year with a calendar. I figure out how many days I think I can write out of the 365, mark off the ones I don’t expect to write, and figure out how to meet my goals with the remaining days.

There are two ways to look at your goals – 1) how much can you get done at a nice easy pace, or 2) what do you really want to get done and what pace will you need to set to get there? The second option is the somewhat necessary way of looking at your next year if you already have deadlines you have to meet. It also happens to be the way I used to plan my year when I had no other ideas for planning. “I’m going to write and polish and send out a book this year!” Or “I’m going to write two books and twelve articles this year!”

That’s all well and good, but how are you going to accomplish that? (The question I never asked myself.) And for me, one of the more important questions – how are you going to feel if you don’t meet your goals?

For me, the answer is “awful!” So after hearing lots of other writers talk about their goals and their planning methods, I decided to start making goals I really could reach. (Duh! LOL!)

STEP 4 – Calculate how much you can write next year.

So after I finished the first three steps I mentioned last week, I took the number of days left times the number of words per day to get a total. When I did my calendar, I had 238 open days for writing. But I told you I want to offer myself 1 sick day per month, so that gives me 226 days. I decided I wanted to do some writing on a new book every day, and editing on the previous book every day to try to create a schedule that will continue to work after I start selling, so I’m setting 500 words a day as my goal. That’s a total of 113,000 words for the year.

STEP 5 – Figure out what to write.

Now that I have an idea of what I can write if I stick to my routines and schedule, I can plan what to do with my time. For 2010, I am going to try to write two more first drafts of category romance books. At 50,000 to 60,000 words per book, that should be an achievable goal. If I change my mind part-way through the year, I can still re-evaluate at that time and figure out how much of a single title book I can write before the end of the year. So even though I’m giving myself some solid goals now, there is enough flexibility in the system to change my mind.

That means I can also make changes after grad school starts in March. If focusing on a single project every six months is too difficult, I can change my goals to write articles and one book, or whatever seems to work for me at the time. I do believe there is a certain amount of consistency that will be necessary to keep up the discipline, so I will continue with my current goal (two category romances) until something happens that really shows me my goals aren’t workable. Like anything else, I believe goals should be a balance of choosing not to quit and knowing when to make a change for the better. That being said…

STEP 6 – You’ve planned your work, now work your plan.

If you’ve taken the time to work this out, and if you have been honest with yourself about what you can really achieve without stressing out, the new year should be looking bright and shiny to you right now! Be sure to keep balance in mind where possible. Balance focusing on your work with regular time with other writers. Both will help you to succeed.

I hope this helps you figure out how you want to plan your writing for 2010. Tweak and change and ignore anything that isn’t working for you, and combine it with other things that do work for you. And let us know how it’s going!

NOTE: When I bought my 2010 laminated calendar, it came with sheets of little round stickers in 6 different colors. I really want to find a way to use the colors to stay organized, or to track progress, or… but I don’t know what would be a good way to use them. What do you think? What would you use them for?

          As I stated last week, I like routines. I need routines. Without routines, I flit from project to project, not finishing any of them. Routines make my life less complicated, more ready for spontaneity. I will re-establish my routines! I dub 2010, for me at least, the Year of the Routines.

          The past few weeks, when I’ve actually had time to contemplate such things, I’ve been reviewing my life. I’ve considered and evaluated those seasons of my life when I felt good about my writing routines and/or productivity. I’ve compared them to other times in my life and have discovered some commonalities in those fruitful and fulfilled times, commonalities that are missing from the unproductive years.

          I felt most successful and productive in two places. In Phoenix I joined a writer’s group and met Kitty and Shonna. During my time in Phoenix, even in the midst of actively homeschooling my three children, I wrote! A lot! In between planning and executing lessons, cooking and cleaning and laundry, I daydreamed about my characters. In those rare spare moments I grabbed time and spent it writing. I always had something to share with the critique group and I often struggled to capture all the ideas flowing past my consciousness. (Many of the files in my Ideas folder are from this time.)

          Living in Korea was a similar experience. I had a dream schedule teaching English as a foreign language classes throughout each day. My first class, kindergarten, started at 10 am. After that, I was free until afternoon, when I taught several elementary through high school classes, finishing around 6 pm. A couple nights each week, I had an evening class of adults. Saturdays and Sundays were mostly free, with periodic classes where I was expected to attend and assist. I soon fell into a routine of writing every morning before my first class and in the evenings before bed.

          I’ve been evaluating those two times of my life in an effort to understand what made them so productive. I’ve discerned several things, which I hope to re-incorporate into my life. I seem to thrive when I live in densely populated areas, when I engage in moderate activity, when I have limited demands on my time that force me to chose and guard my writing times and when I have other interests and activities besides writing that fill my days.

          While the place I live now is not nearly as populated as Phoenix or Korea, I can take my computer to the coffee shop a couple times each week. That will satisfy that desire/need to be among people and, for those days at least, confine writing to those hours at the coffee shop. I can incorporate exercise, in the form of short walks and visits to Curves, into my morning routine. I can designate certain hours for writing and only allow myself to write during those times. I can rediscover other creative outlets such as sewing and scrapbooking and baking that I have allowed to slip out of my life. I can do all these things and endeavor to recreate the environment where my creativity can thrive. I can and I will. Starting today.

          What about you? When have you been most productive, most satisfied with your progress? What elements during that time made it so? What can you do to incorporate them into your life now and increase your productivity and well-being?

It’s that time of year again when we roll out our goal-setting routines. If you want to be ready to run with those New Years Resolutions you need to start making your plans now.

In yesterday’s blog you’ll see Kitty already has her calendar out and is marking off days. I’m a little bit behind her, still reflecting on this last year. I’m wondering if I got enough done this year. Am I a better writer now than I was last year? Am I more organized? Here’s the biggie—am I more disciplined? And, how do I know?

I love a good routine, so this is the one I have come up with so far for my end-of-year-thinking-about-starting-goal-setting time.

A Writer’s Performance Review:

Step 1 – Accumulate
Step 2 – Analyze
Step 3 – Act

Step 1 – Accumulate

Gather the facts. Here are some ideas to get you (me) started; pick what is relevant:

Productivity:

-words written
-days/hours spent writing
-queries sent out
-work completed
-contests entered/results
-partials/fulls requested
-???

Craft/Education

-number of writing books/lectures read
-number of conferences
-critique group meetings attended
-number of classes taken
-list specific topics worked on
-???

Marketing:

-number of blogs posted
-blog/facebook/twitter followers
-number of postcards, bookmarks, business cards, freebies etc given out
-number of media interviews
-number of book signings
-number of media mentions
-number of speaking engagements
-???

Step 2 – Analyze

If you have some of these numbers from last year, pull them out and see what the changes are. Highlight the items you did well with and circle the ones you want to improve upon. Don’t blow past this step too quickly. Looking at these items will help you to see patterns in your working habits. Maybe you took five classes, but you only got nine chapters written in your novel. Look at both the raw numbers and the quality of each item in order to figure out the effectiveness of each activity. Do you need to do more or cut something out that is not working?

Step 3 – Act

Not the full-blown goal sheet yet. This step is only to focus on those areas you need to improve on from the past year so you make sure you incorporate the changes into your overall plan. Pinpoint the areas you need to work on. Decide on what routines you can put in place to make sure you will do it.

Still working on my list here. Anyone else have a favorite way to do a year-end review?

http://twitter.com/ShonnaSlayton

Routines For Writers is thrilled to have James Scott Bell with us today. He’ll be sharing his routines with us as well as launching our very first contest! Details on the contest are below this post. After you read his blog, go check out the free download of a sampling of his new book, “The Art of War for Writers” (Writers Digest Books).

          My day starts early. I get up while it’s still nice and dark and start the coffee brewing. I hop on the Internet for news and blogs and some email. I usually get to my writing desk around 6 or 6:30.

          First order of business is to prioritize my writing day. I always have a list of projects, and stack them according to their importance. Obviously, if I’m on deadline, that project will be at the top. But I’ve also planned out my writing a year in advance, so I always have more than one thing to work on.

          I’ll take a look at my previous day’s writing and clean up obvious errors, make things clearer, touch up the style. No major revisions, though. I do my major edits after a draft is done.

          Then I’m off to the races, as it were. I have a weekly quota of words to do. This is, I think, the most important practice of all for a writer. You have to produce the words. Doing that makes you a better writer, teaches you discipline, and eventually adds up to a book. Then, over the course of time, many books.

          I aim for a daily quota, but know there are just some days where things happen and I can’t write. By keeping focused on a weekly count, though, I can adjust. I aim for a thousand words each day, but if I miss a day I know I can make it up tomorrow.

          I also take one day off from writing each week, Sunday. This recharges my batteries and makes Monday more productive.

          I try to get my daily quota in as early as possible. It makes the rest of the day go more smoothly. I’ll write in my office at home, or pack up and go to Starbucks. I like to have a little activity going on around me. Often I’ll pop on the Bose headphones and listen to movie soundtracks as I write.

          Coffee, of course, is a given. But I don’t overdo it. I don’t want to end up like Balzac, who drank dozens of cups of thick, black tar each day. He was convinced of its magical effects on the imagination and the speed of his writing, but he died of caffeine poisoning at fifty-one.

          I try to write when I’m not writing, too. I carry around a little notebook, so when ideas occur to me I can jot them down. Or I’ll do a voice memo on my phone so I don’t forget something. This causes me to get a far off look sometimes, even if I’m in a conversation with someone. It’s a curse of the writing life.

          If I’m editing a draft, I’ll have a file folder or notebook of pages with me. I do that work only after I’ve done my writing quota.

          Now, I well understand most people don’t have total flexibility for their writing. There are full time jobs, family obligations, maybe health challenges. But I do believe everyone can get in a weekly quota of words. How many words varies. My advice is to set a realistic goal, one you know you can reach, and then up it by 10%. Make that number what you go for.

          Maybe there’s only one day a week when you can write for a length of time without interruption. Plan accordingly. You’ll be pleased when you look up six months from now and see a book, or most of a book, completed.

          That’s pretty much all there is to it. I look at my writing for what it is, my job. I get up every day and go to work. I try to do my best with every page. Then I clock out.

James Scott Bell can be found online at his webpage , on Facebook on KillZoneAuthors facebook blog and on Twitter. He is offering a book to one commenter who can tell us his favorite movie director.

We will perform a random drawing from all those who post the correct answer in a comment by midnight tonight. The winner gets their choice of one book from this list.

• Plot & Structure
• Revision & Self-Editing
• Try Dying
• Try Darkness
• Try Fear
• Deceived
• No Legal Grounds
• Presumed Guilty
• Sins of the Fathers

For a children’s writer, writing 50,000 words in one month is a lot. In fact, it is more than the average number of words in a middle-grade book. I’m not the fastest writer in the world, so I needed to do something to make sure I’d win NaNoWriMo 2009. (Stephanie and Kitty can say Pshaw! to winning this year because they have already won in other years. I had no such luxury.)

I planned my work and worked my plan. About mid-month I thought I was going to die. I decided that I had to win this one so that I never had to do NaNo again. Now? Sure, I’d be willing to give NaNo another go!

Here was my battle plan:

1. Outline before November.
2. Write more than the minimum each day.
3. Prepare the family.
4. Plan no other events for the month.
5. Automatically say “No” to people.
6. Plan rewards.

Here is what happened:

1. Outlined one children’s novel. Used note cards. Highly recommend this! If you read my blog of Michael Stackpole’s NaNo advice you may recall he suggested writing one chapter a day. My note cards pretty much came out to one chapter a day for that novel. I say for that novel because, as a children’s writer, I had to work on two manuscripts to add up to the 50,000 words. (As I learned from last year.)

The first 2.5 weeks were outlined and went smoothly. I spent less time thinking about what I was going to write and more time actually writing. The hardest part was forcing myself to write to the word count. The last weeks, working on my non-outlined novel, felt more disjointed, patchy, and somewhat flaky. I really like the story (done the panster way—Stephanie will be proud!), but I should have outlined it. Now I’ve got a bit of a mess to clean up.

2. I wrote about 2,000 words a day near the beginning to build up some cushion. I liked that my word count graph stayed ahead of the NaNo chart. I want to be a writer who can deliver before the deadline. This was good practice.

3. My family was on board. My kids signed up for the Young Writers’ Program. They went strong for the first two weeks before they petered out. They are both proud of the stories they wrote. My husband’s expectations for the month were so low that he was happy when I didn’t completely disappear into another world.

4. I managed to attend no extra events in November except for one baby shower and Thanksgiving.

5. No one asked me to do anything! Could it be the blank stare plastered to my face as I walked around? Or the fact that I let all calls go to the answering machine?

6. My rewards? Mid-month I bought some books. At the end (after finishing 2 days early) I went to a book signing. Debbie Macomber has written a great nonfiction book called Knit Together. I got her to sign it. Below is a picture of her talking about her latest book, One Simple Act, Discovering the Power of Generosity. Note the uber-fan in the front taking pictures. She took about 30.

I’ll end with a quote from my “reward.” I just now flipped through some pages and this caught my eye. Debbie is talking about a revelation she had about her writing:

I could no longer afford to dream of being a writer someday. I could no longer stuff my dreams into the future with a long list of justifications. Life holds no guarantees. I realized then that it was time for me to move my life purpose forward. It was time to go after my dream.

http://twitter.com/ShonnaSlayton