Michelle West

All disruption, no routine

A writer friend said this to me recently because I was whining, as writers--or anyone, really--often will when things are not going smoothly.

I did, however, get my book review column out on ...

Copy-edits are gone

I have one book review column and page-proofs and I will be able to fully focus entirely and only on writing new words for the next several months. I am really looking forward to that...

Just a quick note

I am working on copyedits for the next Cast novel.

I had been writing new West words without the prior huge struggle (there was a lot of write-delete, write-delete), but it's difficult for me...

It probably won't come as a surprise

It probably won't come as a surprise that recent political developments caused possibly the blackest of crashes I have had since November 2016. It's not just me; almost all of my various writer fri...

Well, that took longer than I'd hoped

But I also looked over the second line-edit pass that came back to me as I was trying to stop myself from rewriting every sentence I could see in the West novel. 

This is part of the rea...

Still revising

I am hoping to get this off my figurative desk by Monday; book is not cooperating.

I turned in the book at 148.5k words. This is too long. I had cut about 4k words before I submitted, but, we...

I am currently working on revisions

No matter how many times I've tried over the course of the past three decades, I can't actually write new words while fixing old words. I've tried writing new words first, and that works for a day ...

I've been looking at the old words for this book

... and they are very, very, very different than the words that are the book now.

I may have attempted to preserve one scene from those words. Again. I should really know better =/. The two b...

Well, after beating my head against the nearest wall

I have realized why my writer-brain has been dragging its feet, kicking and screaming.

So: a little bit about the two dreaded words Writer's Block. I know people who stopped wri...

Sorry I've been more absent than usual lately

Things have been hectic in the background here, and - unfortunately for my writer brain - I find the news coming up from the US enormously, enormously stressful, and that eats up space in the creat...

Over on the writer site

I've posted some news. https://michellesagara.com/state-of-the-author-april-2022-e...

What authors mean when they talk about being orphaned

It occurs to me that the minor stress of the past couple of weeks--well, all of 2022, if I consider Margot Mallinson--is clear to all the authors I know, but possibly less clear to people who aren'...

I have a new editor

I have a new editor (at Mira). Hopefully things will now stabilize on the inside of Michelle's hyperventilating brain.

I have a dental appointment this afternoon, but it's just a normal check...

I'm home

I am back home. I have taken covid tests every morning for 5 days, and seem to have escaped LAX unscathed. I passed through several airports on my way to -- and from -- Australia. LAX was, by order...

What Michelle has been doing in Australia

1. Dental work, unplanned. Upside: dental work was not ruinously expensive for dental work. And also: the dentist took pictures of the work she was doing during each stage of said work. I have them...

Well, that was an adventure

Post-covid, there are fewer available flights and the routes that I used to take to come to Australia don't exist yet. I imagine, should things continue to open up, they will. I headed to Vancouver...

The next time I post I will be in Australia

...if PCR covid test results are good and I get them in time to board a plane T_T.

I tend, when anxious, to try to get whatever is causing anxiety squared away immediately, but ...

A little update

I am not quite finished the book with the killer deadline. I was on track to finish by today, but when I told new editor about the reason the book was going to be a tiny bit late, she... walked ove...

Only tangentially about writing, character

I want to talk a bit about sympathetic villains. Or characters. Let me start again.

There is a school of thought among readers or viewers that appears to go like this: If I understand the rea...

Writing thoughts: emotional investment

I have - while tearing up all of chapter 26 because, frankly, it was garbage - too frenetic, too chaotic, been thinking about respect. Again. So I am taking a break from pulling all my hair out at ...

Small update

I am on track to make my deadline--but it's very, very tight. A minor communication snafu meant that I thought that deadline was a month later than it actually is T_T. At the moment, there is no wi...

Patreon posting interruption

This is not actually about the West novels, but I have a fairly hard deadline--which I can meet--but not with a lot of mental space for, oh, anything else T_T.

So I just wanted ...

Writer Anxiety

Writing - for me - has its roots in reading. I was a reader before I was a writer. I didn't understand, initially, how books were produced, so the very first book I tried to write (at the age of si...

Progress Report, January 2022

Hunter's Redoubt: 117k words.

It occurs to me that I didn't actually make a progress post for December at the start of January. I did talk about the state of Michelle, but that's not quite th...

Structure thoughts, workshops

I have been on a couple of writer's workshop panels at various conventions. I stopped doing them for a couple of reasons, but the biggest one is this: I find it very difficult to evaluate a pa...

Story vs ?

In my time as a writer, I often get asked: What's more important to you - character or plot? This has always been a bit of a head-scratcher for me, because my writing process means that charac...

Thank you all so much

I'm almost overwhelmed at the number of responses my question received.

I want to quickly say couple of things. First: I didn't intend to criticize people for their expectations - I was worri...

A question for Patrons

When I started the Patreon at the end of July, I had only one worry: that people wouldn't support it. I tried to be clear what I hoped I would achieve with the Patreon, and I offered only what I co...

Answering Questions, part 2

I am sorry to have taken so long - I started to answer this before the omicron meltdown here - which is still ongoing. For some reason the last three days have been playing air-pressure yoyo, so ha...

Well, that was an interesting holiday

I had a choice between getting a booster in January or getting a booster on Christmas eve, and my long-suffering spouse, who does so much and asks for so little, asked me to take the soonest possib...