My Almost-year of Writing Glacially by Colette Auclair

Today Chiseled in Rock is pleased to feature a guest post from a member of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

A native of Pittsburgh, Colette Auclair now lives in the Denver suburb of Westminster with her actor-husband and serious Portuguese water dog. She makes a living writing advertising copy. She also writes contemporary single-title romance novels that often include horses. 

Colette hopes to have her first novel, Thrown—a 2012 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award finalist—published soon. Her second novel, Love in the Time of Colic, is now getting some love after being pushed aside as she finished Thrown. 

Besides writing, Colette loves riding her horse, eating (especially bacon), drinking wine, cooking, hiking with the aforementioned spouse and dog and not weeding her garden.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


My Almost-year of Writing Glacially by Colette Auclair

If you’re a writer—and I assume you likely are—this post will make you feel better. Trust me.

I finished revising my very first manuscript a few days ago. I started writing this thing three years and one month ago. If my book were a human, it would be gearing up for preschool. If it were a mouse, it would be in assisted living.

This is a tale of the cheetah and the sloth.

When I started writing this in September of 2009, I finished a first draft to the tune of 130,000 words in four months. It was easy! It was fun! It was a traipse through Candyland. I went to my first Romance Writers of America (RWA) national conference with a baby book. I eagerly attended workshops and returned fortified with more tools to hone my novel.

I wrote a second draft. Armed with my word machete, I whacked my way through the sentence jungle until the thing was an acceptable 100,000 words. Again, still a joy to write. Still fun! I was a cheetah! What were these whiners talking about, who hated to write? Who struggled to put words on a page (screen)? Who thought writing was hard? By December of 2010, I was ready to send my baby into the world.

Enter Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers member Joanne Kennedy, who I met at that RWA conference. She read my manuscript and gave me six pages of notes. I set about revising anew, re-energized. I went to the 2010 RWA conference in New York and pitched. After all, I had been revising for ages. Oh, and my book won a regional romance novel contest! This writing stuff was great!

I sent my manuscript to a toddler-sized handful of agents. The agent who repped one of my favorite authors asked for revisions. I was crestfallen, until someone pointed out that she liked my work enough to request revisions! I was then delighted. On cloud nine. A giddy cheetah once more.

Well… Um… The cheetah morphed into a tree sloth. I was stumped by one of the revision requests, even though I agreed with it. The holidays came—an automatic speed bump/excuse. The winter of 2012 wore on, and I wasn’t writing. Not at all. It went on for months. My book and I were no longer on speaking terms. We had retreated to our corners to reassess our relationship. My novel waited, completely passive. Would I be able to fix it? Would my characters hate me? What had happened to my boundless enthusiasm? Here I brought this novel into the world, and now I had abandoned it.

After months of telling kind friends that I was “still revising” (which was, technically, a lie—I should have said, “I’m still banging my head against the wall and feeling guilty about not writing, unless you count cutting a word here and there when by some miracle I manage to open the file”), inspiration struck. A friend had an idea for how to solve the issue that had stumped me. I wrote the scene and—poke!—the cheetah stirred. Stretched. Scanned the savannah and spotted a tasty gazelle.

And took off.

Whoosh! I was writing again! And in the nick of time, because in July I attended the 2012 RWA conference, this time as a finalist in the Golden Heart contest. Agents and editors were interested, so the sloth had to become a cheetah. Pardon another animal reference, but I became a social mole, turned down all invitations, and wrote wrote wrote to get the manuscript ready for public consumption.

At the beginning of this post I said you’d feel better. Why? Because either you’ve had this happen to you and now feel better because another poor schlub has been through the dark forest too. Or you’ve never had it happen or you’ve overcome with more aplomb than I. Either way, don’t you feel better now? Oh, and you’re welcome! Here’s hoping we are all cheetahs more often than sloths.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks for submitting this fun post, Colette. I was in the sloth phase all summer, but my cheetah side has put in an appearance just in time for NaNoWriMo.

For more information about Colette, visit her website/blog. She can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

Posted by Pat Stoltey. Pictures of the cheetah (credit Malene Thyssen) and sloth were found on Wickimedia Commons, a site you might want to check out. I have Collette to thank for pointing the way to another great resource for bloggers.