Rita Rudner once said, “I know a woman who was in labor for thirty-six hours. I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for thirty-six hours.” I sympathize with her. And while I have some war stories about childbirth that would make your hair curl, I’ll spare you the gory details and instead talk about another kind of birth - the birth of a story.

As any midwife will tell you, labor should be productive. All that moaning and groaning and pushing ought to be doing work for you–work in birthing a baby. The same can be said for the labor a writer goes through when she’s giving life to her story. How much of your “story labor” seems to be unproductive? How much time do you spend avoiding writing when you’ve got prime time to do it? If you’re like me, when you get an uninterrupted stretch of two hours of writing-alone time, why do you suddenly recognize an all-consuming urge to reorganize the linen closet, or do you develop a sudden and powerful love for ironing clothes?

Rita Rudner had it right. Long stretches of doing anything will gradually reduce your productivity. And when it’s something as labor-intensive as crafting story, burnout comes quick.

Pacing is just as important in your writing habits as it is in your writing. While nothing thrills me more than the idea of a muse-driven all-nighter of furious, fast-paced writing, waking up the next morning hung-over from the adrenaline rush of writing twenty thousand words in a single session does not come without its price. Sooner or later, the time to push will come, and if you’ve already spent your energy reserves, what have you got left for the rest of the ride?

The answer is found in nature. In labor, contractions are intense, but controlled bursts of activity followed by short periods of rest, and get the work done with maximum efficiency. Try applying the same thing to your writing time. Choose a short amount of time - somewhere between ten and thirty minutes. Focus and write for that amount of time, and when the time’s up, lean back, get up, walk it off, go clean the oven, or whatever other pressing need emerged when you first sat down to write.

Short, controlled bursts of ten to thirty minutes of focused writing time will give you enough time to get into a single scene, move from one plot point to the next, or create a meaningful exchange of dialogue between two characters. After which, your inner five-year-old is free to bounce around, get her snack, or steam-clean the curtains. Accumulate enough of these “quickies” and you’ll be delighted to discover you’ve made real progress.

Then you can go do something that feels good for thirty six hours.

…and it’s “Queen of the Universe.”

No…really.

Okay, yeah, not so much. But hey, a girl’s gotta have ambitions. Liquid Silver has given the go ahead for the title of my upcoming book. “Alien Communion.”

And because I’m proud of the way I banged my head against the wall to come up with a half-decent blurb, here it is:

How far would a woman go to fulfill her deepest desires?

For researcher Dr. Rayne Warren, an illicit “experiment” with alien simulation technology opens the door. Then she discovers her “simulation” is a real-live Alcaini warrior with an out-of-this-world hunger of his own, who will stop at nothing to keep his human lover–even if it means interplanetary war.

I did a LOT of worldbuilding for this book when I sat down and started writing way back in 2003. One of the things I so loved about writing it was not just the incredibly liberating sense that I could feature really hot sex as a prominent plot thread in a cultural sense, but the development of the Alcaini, the race of aliens with whom a select few earthlings, among them my heroine, Rayne, are engaging in a cultural and scientific exchange. As I wrote, I peeled back the layers of what the Alcaini culture and people were like, and fell in love with them right along with my heroine. That’s part of the magic of writing that keeps me doing it.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m no big fan of dressing up. My usual uniform is jeans and t-shirt, or cargo pants and t-shirt. Unless, that is, I’m in the other extreme of wearing medieval garb or dressing as an alien. Then, of course, all bets are off. I’m a mother of young children, and anything I put on is going to get messy in the course of the day.

Dressing up on the web, however, is a completely different story. I think I’m a terminal fashion victim when it comes to website design. Perhaps it’s because for years, site design, like my writing (I was a tech writer) had to be functional before it had to be artful. Plus, it had to use a lot of corporate doublespeak and company logos, so the artistic side of it just couldn’t get creative. The mindset was that usable and pretty could never cohabitate functionally. I say nay (and did say nay at the time, too, but functional and pretty were both high-maintenance princesses, so the words “over” and “budget” were frequently the wacky sidekick pair.  Of course, that time in my life taught me a lot about clean writing, so I walked away from the old life with some valuable, if painful, lessons.
Now I’ve got my chance, though. I’m determined to make Xandragregory.com the functional and lovely site I know it can be in my heart. So the changing fonts, graphics, and layout may hurt a little…

since I’ve blogged…but in playing with the fun new shiny, I kinda got sidetracked into loading XAMPP on my laptop and faking an apache server and MySQL database so that I could test-drive the bazillion wordpress themes I’ve been teasing and tweaking and trying to emulate without looking like a schizophrenic with serious colorblind issues. And depending on how I like what I do on my laptop, I might just end up junking the wordpress install and redoing it in its own directory. If I can find the tutorial. And understand it.

Some days I feel like I’ve got two brain cells, only one of them’s dying and the other bravely went for help.