How Does Your Speedbo Garden Grow? Part II

by Pam Hillman

So, you spent the entire month of March hard at work sowing words in your writing garden. But now you have to tend that garden if you want it to flourish. For some, this task might be hard work, but for others, it might be a breeze.

If you’re like me, I decide on a whim to plant something, so I don’t do the prep work I need to. Goodness, I’ve decided to plant flowers and within 24 hours, I’ve hoed the grass out of a small plot, bought flats of flowers and popped them in, hoping I’ve added just the right amount of fertilizer and water, all the while admonishing my poor confused dog (who just wants to play) to STAY OUT OF THE FLOWERS.

Unfortunately, my flowers (and my poor attempts at vegetable gardening) never end up as gorgeous or bountiful as I envisioned. To be honest, the poor suckers are lucky to even survive! If they could talk, they’d probably beg me to take them back to where they came from.

So it is with us writers. We come from all kinds of backgrounds. Some of us prepare a lot in advance, sow our words, then tend our garden carefully. Some don’t prepare a lot, sow abundantly and wildly, and then gleefully (or not so much) work really hard to clean up the mess.

We won’t even talk about some of MY past failures of not preparing the plot, sowing seeds willy-nilly, then staring at the bug-infested, weed-choked, holes-dug-by-the-dog mess until I finally give up, scurry back inside and ignore the whole thing. Nope. We really can’t have any of that here in our Speedbo gardens!!!

So, what does tending your Speedbo garden look like?

Fertilize and Water

Nothing grows without some food. Water and fertilize keep your plants thriving. Tending your Speedbo garden is much the same. A computer, dictionary, plenty of rest, a healthy spirit and body, time, pen and pencil, research. All of this is part of nurturing those seeds and bringing them to life. If you sowed 50,000 words in March and then just left them stored on your computer hard drive without ever nurturing them, I’m afraid nothing much is going to happen. The GOOD news is that—unlike seeds planted in the ground—there isn’t a time limit on coaxing those seeds to come up. So if you haven’t done anything with your Speedbo garden yet, all is not lost. You can STILL work that field! Whoot!

Ruthy's Son Working Hard in the Garden!
Thanks for the gardening photos, Ruthy. :)

Plowing and Hoeing

Once those seeds burst forth and start to resemble a well-organized garden with row after row of pretty green plants, you might discover that you accidentally planted corn with peas, tomatoes with potatoes, squash with cucumbers, and then there are the dreaded weeds that somehow always look exactly like the good stuff! Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop out unnecessary words, paragraphs, whole scenes of weeds, leaving them to shrivel up and die by the wayside. Yes, it sounds harsh, but all they’re doing is hogging the food and water that the good plants need to grow. Do it.

Replant Skips?

After all this chopping, you might discover long stretches of “skips” or plot holes in your Speedbo garden. Or in some cases, just a few bare hills. My husband’s grandfather was notorious for replanting the skips, which in a vegetable garden didn’t make much sense to me: if the peas didn’t all mature at the same time, it just made picking them that much more difficult. Again, good news for us writers. We can plant in the skips and plop a word or a whole sentence in the bare spots and with a bit of smoothing, I guar-UN-tee nobody will ever be able to tell the difference. All the words will mature together. Amazing, huh?

Scarecrows, Spraying, Dusting, and plain-out PICKING HORNWORMS

Don’t you hate planting something, then seeing your dog (or worse, the NEIGHBOR’S DOG!) happily digging a hole and plopping down in the nice cool dirt? Or the screeching sound of crows as they converge on your corn patch and peck away at your juicy corn? Worms on your tomatoes? Raccoons sneaking in at night? Deer trampling your vegetables? Ugh!

It’s the same with the interruptions and responsibilities in your writing life. Sometimes you have to put a scarecrow on your office door. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of an analogy for spraying and dusting your kids—maybe it’s best just not to go there.

And other bugs and worms? Oh, yeah. We know all about those nasty worms in the cyber-world, don’t we? Don’t leave your Speedbo words in danger of being eaten by worms. Back them up. Spray or dust those buggers with virus control. Don’t be squeamish… pick those hornworms off your Speedbo tomatoes by HAND if you have to. Come to think of it, I imagine when God dictated the words "little foxes that spoil the vine" to the scribes thousands of years ago, he had computer viruses in mind!

           

Harvest

A well-tended garden yields fruit or vegetables. Sure, there are times of drought and calamity that no amount of care and knowledge can overcome, but generally a savvy gardener has more fruitful years than not.

I think we’ve established that I’m not a very productive gardener, but that’s because I don’t work at it. When I was a teenager, I hated working in the garden. When my mother said we had to work in the garden, I asked to go to the hayfield and bale hay. When told there wasn’t any to bale, in desperation, I blurted out, “Well, let’s go cut some then!”

It’s the same with my writing. When I tend the words I’ve sown, when I water them, fertilize them, search and destroy the grass and the bugs and replant the areas that need tending, my Speedbo garden flourishes.

And yours will, too! So grab your tools and get to work.

Currently, Pam is reaping the rewards of her most recent harvests with stories in The Oregon Trail Romance Collection, and in the Seeker’s With This Kiss Historical Collection. Pam also has a couple of summer harvests and a fall harvest, AND, not to beat a metaphor to death, she’s still enjoying the fruits of labors from year’s past out of her “freezer”. Ha!


Check out Part I of How Does Your Speedbo Garden Grow?

Part I: How Does Your Speedbo Garden Grow?

Photo by Pam Hillman

Since my novella in the With This Kiss Historical Collection deals with farming, I must have gotten bitten by the farming and gardening bug. And the more I pondered the mess my characters were in, the more I realized that writing is a lot like gardening.

Photo by Pam Hillman

First, I mean NO disrespect to our resident Marys, or to anybody named Mary anywhere. I am sure that most people named Mary are NOT contrary.

So, with that disclaimer in place, let’s talk about your Speedbo garden! I’m so excited to see how many words everyone is planting this month, and I know you didn’t get to this stage of your Speedbo gardening project willy-nilly. There was a lot of preparation ahead of time, right?

Choose Your Plot

First, you had to decide where to plant, or rather, what story you wanted to tell. As is usually the case in the first blush of spring, this is the most exciting part… the part where an idea floods your thoughts like the first burst of sunlight after a long, dreary winter. It’s all you can think about for weeks, until your fingers are itching to start digging in the dirt, or at the very least to grab your laptop and start typing.

Photo by Pam Hillman

Prepare the Ground

Tilling the ground for a garden is backbreaking work, but it has to be done if you’re going to have a successful harvest. So, once you decide where to plant, you know you have to get to work. Now, for some that means mapping out your story very loosely in your head, for others, it means a very detailed synopsis.

Some might write everything on little sticky notes, or in a spreadsheet, or in Scrivener. Whatever method you use to prepare the ground to sow your story words, it must have worked, because here you are, on the FOURTH AND FINAL WEEK of Speedbo, still sowing away. Good job!

Photo by Pam Hillman

Gather Seed, Tools, and Supplies

But I'm getting ahead of myself. If you’re like me, as soon as spring hits, I tend to buy before I prepare the ground. As soon as I see all the rows and rows of flats of bright flowers in the gardening center, I can hardly resist buying a bunch, adding 50 lbs of potting soil, as well as a new shovel (because My Cowboy has absconded with the last one). I usually need a new hoe or least have to get the old one sharpened before I can even begin to think about digging. But none of that stops me from dreaming.

Photo by Pam Hillman

Since we’re on day 24 of Speedbo, and many of you have been merrily sowing away for over three weeks, then it’s safe to say that you had an ample supply of words and ideas to work with. You have your tools on hand: computers, pen and pencil, alphasmart. iPad, dictionaries, thesaurus, character sheets, Pinterest boards. Music! And every farmer or gardener needs nourishment after working all day in the blistering heat of the day. You stocked up on coffee, tea, sodas, and water. You pulled out the ol’ crockpot so that meals would be a snap. (My grandmother would have loved to have such a device while working in the fields!) And, I know, I know, I know as sure as cockles grow, that you have CHOCOLATE on hand, yes???

Photo by Pam Hillman

Planting Days!

What seeds are you planting in March? 

WORDS!

Lots and lots and LOTS of words. Tens of thousands of words. Keep planting, friends. You are so close to the end of planting season. Only seven more days to go. You might have had to weather a few storms that kept you out of the fields this month, but as soon as the sun came out and dried up your cares and worries, like any good farmer, you hooked up your mule and started planting. A bit of rain and mud can’t keep you down.

In a few more days, you’ll look over your field of words, anxiously waiting to see them flourish and turn into an ORGANIZED story. But there’s still work to be done. Stay tuned for next month when we’ll discuss Part II of How Does Your Speedbo Garden Grow?

In the meantime, keep sowing those words!!!

And... today's giveaway is a humongous pack of Wildflower Seeds guaranteed to draw butterflies and hummingbirds to your Spring garden OR if you're not a gardener, an e-copy of With This Kiss, either Contemporary or Historical, winner's choice.

From Blurb to Book Love Inspired Contest!!!!

WITH!!!! Love Inspired Senior Editor Emily Rodmell!!! 

As an editor, I’m always in awe of authors who work full time, raise children and still find time to write multiple books a year.  When I’ve asked them how they do it, I’ve gotten answers ranging from getting up before the chickens (and children) to write or staying up late to get words on the page or writing on lunch breaks from work or in the car while kids are at soccer practice. The one thing they all have in common is that they make the commitment to sit down and write, and they stick to it.

Did you know that if you wrote 1,000 words a day, you could have a Love Inspired book (55K words) in less than 2 months? You could build in time for editing, revising and vacations and still complete 4 books a year.

 Your average manuscript page has somewhere between 200-300 words per page depending on font, margins and spacing. So 1,000 words is about 3-5 pages. While a whole manuscript may seem daunting, 3-5 pages is a manageable chunk. If you can write those small chunks every day, they can really add up. If 1K is too much for you, break it down even further. 500 words a day (a measly 1-3 pages) could give you a manuscript in 4 months. With time for editing, you could have 2 books a year, which is the number that a lot of our authors strive for.

To offer you further motivation, Love Inspired just launched a new pitch opportunity yesterday. From Blurb to Book: Pitch, Write and Sell Your Book in 5 months. We’re on the hunt for fresh new voices and are giving you the chance to pitch us your idea. The authors chosen to move on in the pitch contest will get guidance along the way from the Love Inspired editors as they work to complete a proposal and manuscript. Check out our announcement here: 

http://community.harlequin.com/showthread.php/2658-Announcing!!-From-Blurb-to-Book

You’ve got a little less than two weeks to submit a 100 word blurb and your first page of a book targeted to one of the three Love Inspired lines (Love Inspired, Love Inspired Suspense and Love Inspired Historical). All you need is an idea and the drive to write to take that first step. And you’ll find out if your initial entry wowed the editors 10 days after the deadline!

Last year we had a pitch session called The Search for a Killer Voice, and many of the entrants said that having to meet deadlines along the way helped them stay on track and finally finish a book. We hope the same will be true this year. We’ll be offering guidance, feedback and inspiration as you write your books. We’ve posted two blogs in the forums on Harlequin.com already. One on how to write a great blurb and first page and another on what the Love Inspired lines are looking for (cowboys, Amish, law enforcement heroes and more). There are also forums to ask questions of the editors and to support and interact with your fellow writers.

Looking for even more motivation? In the past few years, we’ve offered contracts to more than 20 authors through our pitch sessions. They’re sharing their success stories here: 

http://community.harlequin.com/showthread.php/2661-Success-Stories.  In fact, three of the authors who sold less than a year ago through our pitch The Search For a Killer Voice, will see their books on the shelves next month. If you want to see what we bought last year, check out Fatal Freeze by Michelle Karl, Presumed Guilty by Dana R. Lynn and Royal Rescue by Tammy Johnson. April also marks the debut of Targeted by Becky Avella who sold through the prior year’s Happily Editor After pitch session.

Anyone who has not been published with Love Inspired can enter. New authors and authors published with other houses are welcome.  Agented and unagented alike can enter. You can use a pseudonym as long as your legal name is in the entry for our records. I hope that you all take advantage of this opportunity. If you’ve never tried to write a Love Inspired book before but always wondered if you could, this is your chance. Love Inspired books have a wide distribution. They are sold through our book club, in mass market retailers such as Wal-Mart, in bookstores and in all major ebook retailers. It’s a great way to get your writing in front of a wide audience of avid fans of inspirational fiction. Start writing today, and you could have a contract by the end of the summer. We’re eager to find and nurture new voices for the Love Inspired lines, and so get started on your blurbs and first pages. I’ll be stopping in today to answer any questions you might have, so fire away.

Bio: Emily Rodmell is the editor for Love Inspired Books. She started her career as a newspaper journalist and at Scholastic before coming to Love Inspired 10 years ago. She has acquired more than 30 authors for the Love Inspired lines in that time and is always on the lookout for more. She loves to see unique plots that surprise her and keep her guessing. When she’s not at work, she loves watching procedural TV shows, exploring New York City and doting on her adorable nephew. Find her on social media here: Twitter (@EmilyRodmell), Instagram (@NYC_Editor_Life), Pinterest (Emily Rodmell) and Goodreads (Emily Rodmell). 

Ruthy note!!! First, thank you Emily for being here, for making Seekerville part of this amazing and fun contest launch and for running a contest to benefit authors. This contest rocks, and it's a premise we encourage daily here in Seekerville... because it's so effective! I've always loved how open Love Inspired is to unagented... untried.... unpublished authors. That gift of opportunity is never taken lightly here! In honor of The Love Inspired Team's surprise, we're giving away 14 (FOURTEEN!!!) surprise packages to several lucky commenters.... so head in, grab coffee courtesy of Caribou and a chocolate stuffed croissant... #Speedbo On to your next great opportunity!

Was that a Truck that Hit Me, or a Deadline?

Was that a Truck that Hit Me, or a Deadline?

By Guest Blogger DiAnn Mills 

Two writers vacationed on a yacht when a horrible storm capsized their boat. The two grabbed pieces of wood from the debris and floated for three days until they reached a small island. They lay on the beach, gasping for air and staring up at the hot sun.

“We’re no better than before,” one writer said. “We just prolonged dying.”

“I’m not concerned,” the other writer said, and cradled his hands behind his head. “We’ll be found.”

“How can you be so sure?” the first writer said. “We’re on this island with no food or water.”

“Relax, won’t be long until we’re found.”

“What’s your source of information?”

I’m on deadline.” The first writer chuckled. “My editor will find me.”

I hope you smiled in reading the above. Laughing about a deadline is a huge stress reliever, but a plan to finish a manuscript on time eliminates worry and loss of creativity. The statistics for writers who are late and request extensions is far greater than those who are punctual. I’m not talking about illnesses and tragedies, but writers who fail to use a method of timely completions.

For those who need a fresh approach to deadlines, here is how I handle finishing strong and ahead of my contractual due dates. It’s easy, but it does require two essentials: diligence to craft and discipline. With those attitudes, a writer can tackle any writing project with success.

Below are eight steps to meeting a deadline that result in a quality manuscript delivered on time.

1.     When a contract is approved, examine the number of words needed to complete the manuscript. Write this down.

2.     Study your calendar. Subtract two months from the due date. Count the number of working days leading up to the new early due date. Don’t count weekends, holidays, vacations, or days you plan to attend writing conferences.

3.     Divide the word count by the number of solid writing days. That figure is the amount of quality words to be written every working day.

4.     Two months before the deadline, a strong draft of the manuscript is finished. Don’t look at the book except to send chapters to critique partners. One month before the deadline, complete a line edit and do this in one week.

5.     I suggest using text to voice software like GhostReader for Mac (http://www.convenienceware.com/ghostreader). Other software is available to audibly read the manuscript to the writer. It is an incredible editing tool.

6.     Reread your manuscript and make any needed changes. If you have time reread again.

7.     Compile your manuscript and send it to your editor at least three days early.

8.     Celebrate!

I’ve used the above method for the past several years, and I’ve never turned in a late manuscript or asked for an extension. Yes, life happens, but with the two-month cushion, your editor will be singing your praises.

Now, take a look at your calendar. It’s really your friend.


GIVEAWAY! Today DiAnn will be giving away a copy of her soon-to-be released novel, Double Cross. Please leave a comment letting us know you'd like to entered!

 

Available for Pre-order Now!

Double Cross

FBI Agent Laurel Evertson’s investigation into a scam targeting the elderly takes an unexpected twist when key evidence leads her to Morton Wilmington, a felon she arrested five years ago on her first undercover assignment. That case has haunted her since, and though she’s vowed to forget Wilmington—and what she sacrificed to put him away—he is now her best lead.

Houston Police Officer Daniel Hilton fears his grandparents may be the scammer’s next targets, and he’ll do anything to protect his family—even force interagency cooperation. But he’s quickly drawn to Laurel’s empathy and zeal and agrees to follow her lead . . . even if it means teaming up with a felon.

As the unlikely trio uncovers evidence suggesting the scam is more extensive and deadly than they imagined, both Laurel and Daniel find themselves in the crosshairs of a killer. Together they must decide if they can trust Wilmington’s claims of redemption, or if he’s leading them straight into a double cross. 

Bio:

DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure. She combines unforgettable characters with unpredictable plots to create action-packed, suspense-filled novels.

Her titles have appeared on the CBA and ECPA bestseller lists; won two Christy Awards; and been finalists for the RITA, Daphne Du Maurier, Inspirational Readers’ Choice, and Carol award contests. Library Journal presented her with a Best Books 2014: Genre Fiction award in the Christian Fiction category for Firewall.

DiAnn is a founding board member of the American Christian Fiction Writers; the 2015 president of the Romance Writers of America’s Faith, Hope, & Love chapter; a member of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association, and International Thriller Writers. She speaks to various groups and teaches writing workshops around the country. She and her husband live in sunny Houston, Texas.

DiAnn is very active online and would love to connect with readers on any of the social media platforms listed at www.diannmills.com.