S. J. Pajonas

I remember attending the SCBWI NY conference in February and being solely focused on my YA Sci-fi series. It was all I thought about, all I worked on, and I had moments when I wondered, “Is this all there is for me?” I’m sure a lot of authors wonder the same thing. Is this the only original idea I’ll ever have? And honestly, I was ok with only having this one idea. Maybe because It’s a really BIG idea with at least 10 books in it? I can see the story arc that far out, and I have synopses written for the first four. I really love it, and I just know that an editor and readers will love it too. I’m waiting on this.

So imagine my surprise when I got a totally new idea! Not YA. Not Sci-fi. I got a Romance/Women’s Fiction idea, and, in the beginning, it was just a speck, just a little seed of an idea. I talked about it with friends, and I sat on the couch with Evernote every night and came up with even more ideas. Then, it wasn’t just a speck anymore. When I looked at Evernote one night, I realized I had written a synopsis! People, I am a pantster. I write by the seat of my pants. I never write outlines in advance. I never write a synopsis. To do so goes against my very nature! Ha! But this time, I had something.

I sent it immediately to my lovely agent, Margaret (I call her Maggie but I’ve known her for ages), and waited to see what she’d say, and she loved the idea. I created the Scrivener project on February 22, 2013. I finished my rough first draft May 19, 2013. Less than 3 months of hard work. I have a list of five things I want to fix in this draft before giving it to readers, but, wow, I went from nothing to 101,544 words in 3 months! Crazy.

Sitting at the dinner table talking with friends at NESCBWI a few weeks ago, I realized that my crazy-fast writing is not the norm that I thought it was, but it’s what works for me. When I have a story in me, I NEED TO GET IT OUT. It’s like trying to hold back a full-term baby that’s fully-effaced and ready to go. You don’t cross your legs and wait! For a first draft, I don’t worry about my exact words, and, sometimes, I don’t even worry about whether the story totally works. Those are issues I take care of during revisions. And I also love revising, tweaking a story until it feels perfect. That’s the time to be careful about word choice and story progression. It’s when I listen to my readers the most and make the biggest changes.

And, here we go! First draft should be off to readers by June 1. I’m excited and nervous. What if they don’t like it? I need to tell myself they will. That’s probably the hardest part of writing.

Next up on the blog, what I’ve already previewed on Tumblr, my muse for this Adult Book 1, and techniques I used to explore far away places I’ve never been to but needed to include in this story!

Two weekends ago, I attended the Northeast SCBWI chapter’s annual conference in Springfield, MA, and it was so much fun! Not only was it amazing to spend time with other people in my business, but I got to have a three-day weekend all to myself without the kids! Being a stay-at-home mom who also writes means that I have very little actual free time. Free time? What’s that? Usually every minute of every day is jam-packed with an activity of some sort. I even schedule grocery shopping (we leave in one hour for that, actually) otherwise it wouldn’t get done and we’d starve (just kidding, there’s enough food in my freezer to feed us for a few weeks).

So three days of learning about books, publishing, writing, and all that it takes to keep up in our world was a great time. I attended a ton of workshops and met new authors. I talked to adults all day long! It was fantastic.

But for some reason, every conference I attend teaches me more about human interaction than how to write a better book (though I did learn a lot about that too). Here, let me give you a few tips, if you’re considering attending a conference:

• If you have a bunch of works-in-progress and want to talk about EVERY SINGLE ONE, please get yourself a critique group. After three days, I knew all of the plots and characters of every one of Betty’s (an alias to protect the lovely woman) books. She dominated every workshop she was in and took away from other authors learning from the instructor. Ask a few questions, sure. But please look around to see if there are people sleeping through your meandering questions about your work.
• Think about your first impression. Approach people with smiles and a nice handshake. Listen and try to remember names (though the beauty of a conference is name tags!)
• Please consider if what you’re going to say will sound rude to 90% of the people in the room. For example, when attending a workshop about writing tense and 70% of the people write in present tense, please do not say that writing in present tense sounds “uneducated.” Everyone in the room just memorized your name and promised themselves they would never buy your work.
• Bring lots of snacks and a water bottle. This is from personal experience only.
• Wear comfortable but stylish clothes and shoes. I just talked about what I wear to conferences over on Flickr, but I think it’s important to have your own style and make your own impression. You never know… You may meet your future agent or editor at a conference!

So besides observing human behavior, I learned a lot through all of my workshops and panels I attended. My favorite takeaways from the weekend were:

• Every author, even the most successful, has to learn to live with rejection on some level.
• Edgy YA fiction is important and is not just drugs and sex. It can involve anything that teens struggle with.
• A novel’s theme is just as important as its plot, setting, or characters. Figuring out the theme of your novel can help you give direction to plot and/or characters and the outcome of the entire story. I thought the theme of my current novel was “Love transcends all obstacles” but really the theme is “You can’t let others control you. Only you can make your own decisions.” Enlightening.
• Historical fiction is fascinating! No, really. Sometimes an author can take a particular place or time for their historical fiction or an actual event. It’s a fairly wide field you can play in.
• If you write multicultural characters, be sure to get someone in that culture to read your work.
• Once you’re published, you still have a lot of work to do to market your book and yourself! I really love giveaways. If I get the chance to be published, I’m sure I’ll be doing a lot of them and writing blog guest posts on Japanese traditions and history.
• Crafting the voice of your character is key to keeping your reader engaged. If the voice slips or isn’t genuine, the reader will be torn from the story.

My friend, Kim Sabatini, also attended the conference with me and did a great wrap up on the workshops she attended. I really enjoyed my weekend at NESCBWI and I hope I can go back next year.

I’m not a winter person. I do not like it, not one little bit. I don’t like the cold, the snow, the short days, the lack of sunlight, the 17 billion layers of clothing I need to wear to feel warm. I don’t like being restricted to the indoors to exercise. I don’t like shoveling the sidewalk.

I think you’re understanding what I’m saying, right? I obviously live in the wrong part of the world! Or need to win the lottery so I can have one house here and another in Brazil or Australia. That would give me summer all year round!

But the good news is that spring is finally here and I no longer feel the need to research SSRIs. The trees are blooming (so are my allergies), the sun is rising earlier and setting later, and it’s warm enough for short sleeves and skirts.

Finally, we’re seeing flowers on the trees and in yards. Finally, we’re getting thunderstorms instead of snow storms. Finally, my afternoons are bright and sunny again.

You know what this means, right? HOOPING!

I’ve gotten out a few times already and it’s been heavenly. I’m very ready to start the HoopCity.ca lessons I bought at the New Year and learn some new tricks. Just one hour out in the sun with some great music and my hoops makes me happy every single time. Have I inspired anyone else to hoop? Even my oldest daughter wants to try! I need to get her a hoop that’s not all bent and broken. Still, she has a great time with it.

Here we are playing outside during her Spring Break!

I’m spending the weekend in Springfield, MA with fellow YA authors at the NE’s SCBWI conference. It’s going to be so much fun and totally exhausting for sure. I have signed up for a ton of workshops that are pertinent to my work and I hope to reconnect with old friends and meet new ones. I probably won’t blog from the actual event, but look for activity on Twitter and Tumblr/Flickr. I’m the type of person that likes to take notes during a keynote or workshop and then tweet the good stuff after. If I try to tweet and listen at the same time, I miss too much! I’ll also be sure to pass on great bits of knowledge from my friends there.

One thing to love about conferences is how energized and, yet, exhausted I am when I get home. If one thing is for sure, I will take what I learn back to my table at Panera and apply it to my work as I always do. If you’re going to be there, reply! I’d love to meet you!

Sometimes it takes something simple to break my heart: a kid crying for daddy, a lost object, a snub from my best friend. Other times, a heartbreak comes at the expense of something much larger: your worst fear realized, a huge investment tanking, the loss of family or friends. Thankfully, for this Heartbreak, all I had to do was pick three lovely yarns to knit it with. Let’s not talk about how addictive it was! But it did make for great knitting in between big writing ideas.

So, another project complete for 8 in 2013. I’ve actually already started another shawl and am close to finishing it. If you want more details about my Heartbreak in Greens, you can check Ravelry.

I’m a prioritizer. (My dictionary doesn’t seem to think that’s a word. Hmmm.) When faced with a ton of things to do, I make a mental list and prioritize one thing over another. Unfortunately, my blog is always at the bottom of that list. This past month while the blog has laid silent, my own health has stayed at the top of the list, because, as an evil man once said, “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.” I kept getting this recurring cold over and over again, and no matter what I did, it just wouldn’t go away. And my kids were sick. And my husband. February and March were the worst! I gave up exercising to rest and I’m not even sure it helped. Now I’m out of shape! Ha. I can’t win. Once the cold was done, seasonal allergies kicked up. Not much different than a head cold! Ugh. I’ve been on a merry-go-round of Allegra, Sudafed, and Benedryl for at least a week now. I hope no one else is suffering like I am!

So, my list of priorities were such: take care of me, take care of my family, write, relax, knit, twitter/tumblr, blog.

Writing is always near the top. I may not update here or even tweet about it much, but I still have my writing time each week, and I make progress almost every day. Adult Book 1, my newest venture into the world of Women’s Fiction, is going really well. Sometime yesterday I crossed the 50k mark on it! And I keep coming back to my computer happy to write this story. There’s something special about it that I can’t ignore.

I’ve also had a lot of feedback on my YA Scifi series and will be ready to start revisions again on Book 2 by summer time. Book 1 is still out on submissions! And I’ll be talking about it at the NESCBWI conference May 3-5. I used the first pages of Book 1 for a critique there. We’ll see what comes of that.

In the meantime, I’ve completed another knit for 8 in 2013 and started a new one. I’ve posted to my tumblr and I’m participating in chats on Twitter. If you can’t find me here, I’m elsewhere on the internet!

That’s the update for now! I’ll be back to talk about my last finished knit, hooping, upcoming conferences, and inspiration for my latest novel.

See? That didn’t take long. I had a week off from being sick, and now I have a cold again. Living with kids means that I play Germ Roulette everyday. This week, it’s a cold. Next week, it could be the flu. You just never know.

In the meantime, I am consuming copious amounts of DayQuil and writing… and knitting. Here’s a photo to distract you from the fact that this post isn’t really substantive.

I’m making great progress on this shawl and already have my yarn lined up for the next 8 in 2013 project!

I started this shawl just after the new year as part of my 8 in 2013 initiative, and boy was I glad to have something to knit while all the craziness was happening in my life the last month! I worked on it most nights when I was watching West Wing on Netflix (LOVE!) and then I also knit on it while I was listening to keynote speeches at the SCBWI Winter Conference. I was one of two knitters that I saw there actively working on a project! A lot of people around me were taking notes and blogging/tweeting while listening to speeches, but for some reason, I can’t do that. It hurts my brain! And I end up missing a lot of what the speaker has to say. Knitting helps me focus on them, and, at the end, I remember a lot more of the speech. I write down a few notes and then tweet them later or just save them for myself.

I finished up the shawl about a week ago but I didn’t have time to take photos until recently.

What a great knit! I enjoyed working on it so much, I was actually surprised when I was done! It traveled well and was easy to memorize, so I never had to have my pattern ready at all times. Just when I was done with a big chunk of it.

The yarn was a delight to work with too. Cashmere and silk. I was constantly squishing it or hugging it.

I would probably make another one! For more info, see the project on Ravelry.

Really, the only thing that keeps me from writing or being HERE FOR YOU is sickness and, wow, were we struck by the plague recently. My friend Lolly says I should get someone in to exorcise the demons from my home, because they just won’t quit, and she’s probably right.

In my last post, I spoke of how I just finished a huge revision on Book 1, REMOVED, and I was off to NYC for the weekend to attend the SCBWI Winter Conference. As you can imagine, I put my heart, soul, and any last bit of energy I had into both the revisions and the conference. I attended the conference both Saturday and Sunday, met new people, listened to a lot of great panels and keynote speeches, and introduced myself to editors my agent is querying RIGHT NOW. It was a fantastic time! And despite how tiring the whole weekend was, I was genuinely inspired and raring to go.

But then something happened. My 5 year old got the flu, and we’re not talking a cough and a stuffy nose, we’re talking all of that plus 105 degree temperatures, dangerous fevers that didn’t want to go down, and my daughter wanted nothing to do with the Tylenol or Advil.

And it lasted for 10 days. Then she got a double ear infection. She was home for two weeks! And it wasn’t just hard on her, it was hard on everyone. Poor thing. The good news is that she’s almost all healed up and back in school now.

But being so worn down from working so hard then attending the conference and my sick child, I got sick with a cold too, and I’m only just now recovered. So, that’s what happens when you drive yourself into the ground, folks! You get sick in ways you never thought you could.

I’m back now! And I have things to look forward to. Not only is my book back out on submissions, and I’m excited to get to another round of revisions on Book 2, but I also have something new I’m working on. Something totally different from what I have been writing.

My series books are all Japanese-inspired YA sci-fi and this new idea is contemporary women’s fiction (I will tag it here on the website as Adult Book 1). I’m writing in the same style (because it’s what works for me) but my characters are in their early to mid-30s and the time and place is New York City, Seoul, and Seattle in 2012. I think it’ll be a great compliment to my other work. It’s romantic, sweet, and a explores a lot of what makes living interesting RIGHT NOW. I told my agent about it this morning and she’s really excited by the idea! I’ve even written a blurb and a synopsis already and that is VERY unlike me. VERY. I usually save that for last. But the ideas are just pouring out of me and I’m harnessing them in Evernote like a pro. P.S. Evernote is my new favorite thing. I have access to it on my iPhone, iPad, and computer so I can use it for just about anything!

Now that I’ve made it through that rough patch, it’s onward and upward from here. I keep hoping spring comes early and March proves to be easier than February. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

I’ll be back tomorrow with photos and notes about my latest finished knit!

There really is something about completing another round of revisions and ticking up the number on your draft. In this case, from 7 to 8. My agent and I are planning another round of submissions next week and it’s one I’m super excited about. The last draft of Book 1, REMOVED, was really great. The story was tight and there was a lot of potential there that could easily capture the attention of an interested editor. It had some lazy writing in a few spots, but overall, I still think it was completely ready for submissions.

But this draft is special. I hadn’t touched Book 1 since April of last year! And in the time since, I have worked on 3 other books in the series. I’ve learned a lot about being an active writer, not a passive one, and my eye for revising has become even more critical. I also know more about my characters and where their actions ultimately take them. It’s like seeing into the future and knowing what I can change in the past to make everything fit in the puzzle perfectly.

For this draft, I eliminated a lot of repetitive phasing and words. The word “look” was heavily over-used in my last draft and I’ve all but gotten rid of it unless it’s being used in an active construction. I combined a few scenes and condensed some others. I didn’t touch any of the major plot points but merged a few minor ones and clarified some history (Sanaa’s past romantic failures being the biggest one). I rearranged some material in the two parts to balance them out better. It was a lot of work! All in all, I shaved 5700 words off the total word count. My goal was 5000-8000 cut, so I came within goal.

I’d call this one a success! I’m compiling it to PDF and rechecking my work right now. Then off to my agent and on to submissions next week!

This round of submissions is being spurred on by SCBWI’s Winter Conference this weekend in NYC! I’ll be there, and I have 3 editors I really want to meet and hoping to meet a few others as well. They are people I want to read my work and I think will be interested in it. Fingers crossed!

And most of all, I can’t wait to see my author buddies that I met last year in PA. I’ve missed them and our chats and the laughter we share. If you’ll be at the conference, I’ll be tweeting from @spajonas so let’s meet and say hi! I love meeting new people