Overheard in my backyard, a conversation between two five-year-olds:

Kat: Let’s play hide and seek. Turn to the tree and count to ten.

Friend: Okay. One . . . two . . .

Kat: Wait! That’s not long enough. Count to twenty.

Friend: But I can’t count to twenty! I can only count to twelve!

Kat: Fine, count to twelve then.

It’s funny how you have to keep relearning the same lessons. Like if you stay up late, you’ll be tired in the morning. Like making sure to check the laundry carefully before putting it in the dryer, so you don’t end up shrinking some of your wife’s clothes. Or like making sure you meet your writing quota for the day before you allow yourself to do the things you like to do for pleasure.

All right, that one might not apply to everyone, but it definitely applies to me. I’ve written about it before, but the idea of pages before play always does wonders for me. Whenever I feel my productivity slipping, I reinforce this rule — no Internet, no pleasure reading, and absolutely no television before I hit my thousand words for the day — and the ship gets righted.

In writing-related news, steady progress is being made on the new novel, the copyedits for Water Balloon Boys have been turned in, and I’m waiting for word on the two new books my agent is marketing. Ah, yes, waiting. The constant friend of the professional writer. The solution? Write so much you don’t have time to think about it.

As some of you know, for the past year I’ve been running a series of interviews with debut novelists — usually one a week, published on Mondays, always the same five questions.  Today marks the 50th interview — a short and sweet one with Barrie Summy on her book, I So Don’t Do Mysteries.  It’s also the last. 

To bring the seires to a close, I thought I’d offer up a few thoughts on running the blog — and of course, I had to do it as a series of five questions.  Here you go:

1.  Why are you stopping the interviews?  Don’t you realize millions of people eagerly await each one of these installments?  What, has New York suddenly stopped publishing debut novelists?

Nope.  There are thousands of debut novelists published each year by the major publishers alone, and despite all the gloomy economic predictions, very little sign of this changing any time soon.  However, as much as I tried to make The First Book Blog as simple as possible to run — only one interview a week, the same five questions — it still takes time, especially hunting for those first-time novelists.  From the beginning, I wanted to run interviews with novelists publishing with major NY presses, with a few quality small presses thrown in for good measure, and I think I succeeded in doing that.  But this was never meant as a permanent project — just something fun to do to pay it forward a little and meet some new writers.  And the blog will remain in existence, of course, even if I’m not posting fresh interviews any more.

2.  All right, I suppose we can live with that.  Tell us, what did you learn from all these interviews?  Are writers nutcases?

Well, that’s a given, of course — I mean, you’ve got to be at least a bit screwy to spend all that time alone banging on a keyboard when you could be watching, I don’t know, reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond.  But what was really interesting to me were how different the paths were that writers took to publication.  Some wrote for years and years, and after hundreds of rejections and lots of heartache, eventually sold their twelfth of thirteenth novel.  A few sold their first books.  Some writers endlessly revise; others clean up the typos, run a spell check, and call it good.  A few writers won contests, and many, many others went the traditional route of writing a good query, getting an agent to ask for the book, landing representation, and eventually selling their manuscripts to a publisher. 

What do they have in common?  Well, one, they didn’t stop, whether they wrote one book or twenty.  And two, they dared to put it out in front of people who could pay them money for it.  Other than that, not much.  Writers are as different as everybody else.  Some write in the morning, others at night.  Some have families, others are single.  If you are an aspiring writer looking for the one true path to publishing gold, you’re not going to find it here.  Other than what I already mentioned:  you write stuff, keep sending it to people who might pay you money for it, and you keep doing it — whether for weeks or years —  until it works.  However, the writers who found early success, without years of practice, were certainly the exception.

3.  What kind of traffic did these interviews get? 

Well, that’s hard to say, exactly, because the older ones are obviously more read than the newer ones.  But in general, I’d say 500-1000 unique readers the week they run, with a bit more trickling in over time.  Not exactly the Drudge Report, but hey, every little bit helps up-and-coming writers.  There are two, however, that got a lot more traffic as all the rest — Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why and Claudia Gray’s Evernight.  They were bestsellers, of course, so you might expect that, but they weren’t the only bestsellers on there.  I think it’s a combination of them being both popular books and that they were geared to a very “wired” audience.  Jay’s book was almost double Claudia’s, so there’s obviously something extra special there – it’s really resonating with people who are compelled to seek out more information about him.    

4.  So what about your own interview?  Don’t you have a book coming out in the near future?

Well, sure, but you’re going to have to wait.  The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys is indeed my first book, but it’s publication date is still more than a year off, and one of the few rules I had with the blog was that the book had to be either out or coming out within a week or two.  But in the meantime, I’ve got plenty of other work to do.  You know, write fiction and stuff.  I don’t spend all my time doing interviews with myself.

5.  Okay, smart alec, one final question.  So after all those interviews, did you find out if there is truly a correlation between cat ownership and writing success?

Sadly, for all your cat lovers out there, no.  I’m not even sure cat ownership crossed the fifty percent threshold, and I’m not quite enough of a nerd (almost, but not quite) to go find out.  However, almost everybody had a pet of some kind.  Me, I’ve got two cats and a dog, so I keep my bases covered. 

Great questions by the way.  Now I need to go watch a Charlie Kaufman film to clear my head.

Thanks again to all the writers out there, and good luck with all of your books!

Up this week on The First Book blog:  Patrick Balester and his debut from Avalon, IN THE DISMAL SWAMP.

A snippet:  “When I began looking for a publisher, I didn’t have an agent, and wasn’t sure how to get one, so I targeted small publishers that accepted submissions directly from writers. Then I moved to Missouri from Virginia! 18 months after sending out the manuscript, I got a letter from Avalon Books on Christmas Eve 2006. The associate editor had been looking for me and had managed to track me down, and told me they wanted to buy my book.”

Read the rest of the interview here:  http://thefirstbook.wordpress.com

Still working diligently on the latest novel, a middle grade fantasy that could be the best thing I’ve written or the worst, as is always the case when I’m this close to it, as well as plugging away on a new short story, but otherwise life goes on as life does.  My daughter finishes up her last week at preschool next week, and then it’s on to kindergarten.  Sniff.  Got the first part of the advance on my first novel, which was nice.  Most of it went in the bank or to retire some minor debt, but I did take part of it to buy a nice used pop-up tent trailer (pictured there on the right).  We love camping and hiking, especially in the Redwoods, but we wanted a little step up in comfort without breaking the bank.  Should be fun this summer. 

When you realize you’ve made more money on half your advance than you made on the three dozen short stories you sold up to that point, it really does drive home where the bulk of the writing time must go if you have any goal of making a living at writing fiction at some point.  I won’t give up short stories for lots of reasons, but it certainly makes it easier to justify to the family all those hours I spend in my office by myself when I can point to a check with commas in it.  (Well, let’s not get carried away, it only had one comma in it, but one comma is a very nice thing when you’ve been used to worrying about how many cents a word you’re getting paid for your work.)

Good stuff this week:

• “Crichton believes that we live in an age of conformity much more confining than the 1950s in which he grew up. Instead of showing news consumers how to approach controversy coolly and intelligently, the media partake of the zealotry and intolerance of many of the advocates they cover. He attributes the public’s interest in Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to its hunger for a wider range of viewpoints than the mass media provide.”  From “Michael Crichton, Vindicated.”  My own feelings the last year on the mainstream media has gone from indifference to outright disdain, so I couldn’t agree with him more.  What passes for news is now just poor entertainment, and if I want entertainment, I can do a lot better.
• Advantage Obama.  Seriously, folks, all this talk of Obama losing the election is just nonsense.  An unpopular war, a President with sky-high disapproval ratings, a faltering economy, and a Republican candidate who morphed into Bush III to get the nomination.  Obama will get a 10 point bounce in the polls over the next month (as Clinton pulls out) and — unless he somehow blows it big time — trounce McCain in the electoral college with 300+ votes.   It’s not even going to be close.  If he’s ahead now in the polls, after a contentious primary, McCain is in big, big trouble.  Of course, Democrats could always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as they’ve been prone to do, but I think the chances are slim this time. 
• Oregon Web cams.  A great resource of Web cams all over Oregon.  I don’t know why I get so giddy looking at Web cams of places I’ve been, but I do. 
• Head over to The First Book blog. Josh Emmons and his book, The Loss of Leon Meed, is profiled over there.  It’s our 20th installment in the series.  A snippet:  “I wrote a few books in my twenties and went through the motions of trying to get them published-querying agents, rubbing talismans-without any luck . . .”

Up this week on The First Book:  Jenny Gardiner and her debut novel,
SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER.  Go read the interview.  Fun stuff.

The traffic has been steadily increasing on site, which is great for all the authors over there.  There’s no reason to do this unless it’s helping writers.  You may have noticed that I made some changes to the design.  There were some things that bothered me about the old design — the main one being that if you linked to an individual interview, you lost the sidebar.  So I switched over to this design and made a few other improvements, too.  Don’t worry, I don’t plan on being one of those obsessive types who changes the design every few months.  It really was for functional reasons.  When I came up with this idea, I wanted to keep it simple since I don’t have much free time as it is, but I still wanted to do something that would 1) help writers — my way of paying forward, 2) help keep me up to date with what publishers are coming out with these days, and 3) raise my own Internet profile in a way that wasn’t obnoxious.  I think it’s accomplished all three things, while providing interesting information for readers, writers, agents, and editors.

Other stuff:

• My goal of writing 1000 words every day, no exceptions, has paid off big time; my productivity is back where it was before my Second Child Drop Off.  I wrote a post a while back on the differences between a project writer and a process writer, and it’s clear I’ve got be a process writer right now.  But man, the pages do add up when you’re cranking out three or four every day.  It feels good to be rolling again, and what’s really great is that I think I can even do better. 
• If you’re a newly pregnant woman or know one who is, consider buying my friend Jodi Neelin’s little book, The Pregnasaurus.  It’s a great little book, funny, charming, and touching at the same time.  Think of it as a children’s book for adults.

Sometimes I amaze myself at the lengths I will go to avoid writing. I often write during lunch at the day job — in fact, it’s one of the most reliable places I can find time to write these days, sadly. Today, when I should have been writing, I was suddenly struck with the dire need to buy new brown socks from the local Bi-Mart. I was halfway to the car before I realized what I was doing.

Yes, it’s true I need new brown socks, but was it really all that urgent? Not really. In fact, one of the things I hate is going to the store to buy one item, because it seems so incredibly inefficient. It was writing avoidance, pure and simple

I still haven’t figured out why exactly I do this. Writing is, after all, something I love. But I have noticed that writing avoidance increases when I’m in that middle part of a book, the part when a lot of the early passion has subsided and the rush I get from writing the end is still a ways off. It’s something I have to guard against. I may love writing, but it can also be damn hard at times, and the harder it is, the more my subconscious mind devises ways to help me avoid actually cranking out the words.

From here on out, I think I’ll refer to writing avoidance as “looking for new socks.”

Of course, writing blog posts can be a form of writing avoidance, too. Sigh . . .

Elsewhere:

• Check out the The First Book Blog: New York Times bestselling writer Lisa McMann, author of Wake, is up this week. If you enjoy these mini-interviews, consider posting a link on your blog or website. The more web traffic these authors get, the better.
• Doug Cohen, assistant editor of Realms of Fantasy, has an interesting blog post (and online poll) about writers factoring in whether a magazine accepts email submissions (or only postal ones) into their criteria when they’re deciding on where to submit their work. Frankly, looking at the poll and the comments section, I find it astonishing that so many writers use that as a criteria at all. I can’t say that doesn’t factor into my decision making a little, but it’s waaaaay down the list after such things as 1) how much the market pays, 2) the size of its readership, and 3) how much prestige it offers. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the lengths writers will go to hurt their own careers. If you want your work read, you try to get it into the best market. Period.
• Have you been reading Andrew Sullivan? If you want some relief from the madness of the mainstream media, look no further than Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, published at the Atlantic Online. I don’t always agree with him, but I frequently do, and his comments during the political season have helped me keep some perspective on this whole silly process.  It’s also made me realize how useless the mainstream media is becoming. 

Two minor things for a cold and damp Friday afternoon here in the Willamette Valley:

• If you’re into the social networks, check out my Myspace and Facebook pages.  And add me as a friend, if you like.  I doubt I’ll ever be as into these things as some people are, but with a book coming out down the road, I’ve been trying to put a little more effort into my Internet presence.  And it can never hurt to have a few more friends, can it?  Well, unless you’re someone like this guy.
• Check out the First Book Blog:  the focus is on James Van Pelt, and his book Summer of the Apocalypse.  Van Pelt’s a great example of someone who used a quality small press — rather than a big NY publisher — to great effect.

Up this week on The First Book:  Misty Massey and her debut from Tor, MAD KESTREL, a tale of magic on the high seas.

A snippet:  “Dennis Wong of Tor was interested, but he wanted to see a rewrite, with another subplot woven in.  I cried for about half a day, then took a deep breath and got busy.”

Read the rest of the interview here:  http://thefirstbook.wordpress.com

Running the First Book blog has been fun.  Not only have I got to interact with lots of fascinating writers, in the process of searching for these writers I’m forced to keep up to date with what books publishers are putting out these days.  Traffic on the site has been steadily increasing, too.  That’s the great thing about the site — the interviews are permanently archived, so hopefully they’ll keep helping the authors even down the road.

A few minor things:

• I’ve decided to do an Internet Fast for three weeks, which is basically limiting my personal Internet time to less than fifteen minutes a day. Some mental toxins have crept into my system, and this is my way of clearing them out. The fifteen minutes will mostly be spent checking email and keeping up with writing-related business, but it will also be a challenge to see how much I can keep up on with those fifteen minutes. I’ve been doing it for a few days already, and it’s been good, but it is a challenge even dealing with all my email in that time.
• I turned in the mini-collection to PS Publishing: A Web of Black Widows and Other Stories of Love and Loss. Thirty thousand words. Six stories — four or which are original to the collection. Right now it’s scheduled for an early 2009 release, but we’ll see. I’ll be posting a page with more information about the collection in the coming months.
• Check out the First Book blog: Jennifer E. Smith and The Comeback Season.
• Read Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Hugo-nominated novella, “Recovering Apollo 8,” for free over at Asimov’s. Wonderful story. Plus if you want to see how a great writer can break the rules (not that there is such a thing in fiction), this is a good one to study. There’s only a few scenes and much of it is told in narrative summary, with the first third almost entirely exposition, but it works beautifully.  It works because it gives you a sense of a small story within the larger scope of history, which was the right tone and approach.