(Ooops) I Did It

I sent Britney Spears a copy of May Day. I really did. I figured that dream where I was her nanny, followed by the book club meeting on Britney Lane, all meant something. It had to. So now Britney has something to read whilst chewing gum on the treadmill and getting back that tight little body of hers. Enjoy, Britney.

Oh, and maybe I sent a copy to Sandra Bullock, too, while caught in the throes of star fever. Maybe. But you can't prove it.

Onto the grist. Gristle. Grist. The stuff that matters. I was at the St. Cloud Barnes & Noble today, talking to their MS book club, where I was asked how I deal with writer's block. I actually am too shallow to get writer's block with any regularity, but the times that I do get it, here's what I do to overcome it:

1. Outline. If the scene won't come to me whole, like it usually does, I outline it. Creating a sketch of it usually gets me past the mental hairball clogging my creative process.
2. Stop and go to bed. The trick is, it has to be close to bedtime and I have to be thinking about what I am stuck on as I fall asleep. I usually wake up with an idea, if not a whole scene. I have a notebook next to my bed for just this purpose.
3. Write crap. Oftentimes, writer's block is not an inability to come up with an idea so much as the fear that the idea lurking in the back of our head is crap. If you allow yourself to put the crap on paper, you can move past the block. A lot of time you'll find out it wasn't really crap, or at least that it's easier to shape crap into something worthwhile than it is to start on a blank page. As Ernest Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit." I think that's the shortest sentence he ever wrote.

Ah, pearls of wisdom. Next time I blog, I will be in Madison, Wisconsin, enjoying the premier mystery convention in the world, Bouchercon. While there, I'm going to do my darndest to antagonize that famous writer who was rude to me at Love Is Murder last fall so I have something exciting to write about. Stay tuned.