My blogs are all behind, but that’s not as important as the fact that I didn’t do anything to sell my books, both the published and the unpublished ones, didn’t  send any of my writing out, and didn’t write anything new except these articles. Yes, these articles are pretty good, I learned about some cool stuff, and I love that people where I live will read them. I appreciate the money and the clips, too. But is this what I should have been doing?

My week would not have been so clogged if my “day job” as a church music minister didn’t also ramp up with a special service, a liturgy meeting and a funeral, but there’s always something calling our attention away from writing, isn’t there?

Did I use my time well? Several friends have died lately, showing me all too clearly that none of us knows how much time we have. So what is better, taking the easy-but-time-consuming assignment or taking a risk on something bigger?

When you’re starting out, you publish wherever you can, paid or not. There’s value to everything we write, but as the years go by, we have to ask ourselves: Is this moving my career forward? Is this taking me toward my goals? Or am I just treading water because the next step scares me?

At a long-ago writers conference, one of the speakers said that every day we should write something and do at least one thing to advance our careers. I think it’s good advice for all of us.

Meanwhile, my article on Antique Week is online at www.oregoncoasttoday.com/lincoln-city-antique-week.html, and my article on salt water taffy is scheduled to appear in Oregon Coast Today next Friday.

Driving home through the rain after an interview in Lincoln City, OR, I found myself thinking that writing is like making taffy. Sometimes you have to gather, mix, and boil the ingredients, sometimes you have to let the taffy cool, sometimes you have to stretch, pull and shape the taffy, and sometimes you have to cut, wrap, and sell it. Does that make any sense?

What do you think about this?

P.S. Later in the day, as I closed the office for the night, I realized I had been more efficient, more productive and more confident than I had been in ages. Sometimes completing an assignment and knowing that it’s going to be published, even if it’s not a career changer, can put you in the right frame of mind to do other work that is. Just be careful that it doesn’t take all of your time and energy.

We all need incentives to keep writing. Maybe it’s that chocolate chip cookie you promise yourself if you just get X number of words done. Maybe it’s a celebratory round of computer solitaire. Maybe you’ll dive into that new novel you just bought. We all need a reason to keep going. Money and deadlines are good, but they’re not much fun, are they?

You might not know that I have four blogs (see links off to the side of this post) and a newsletter, in addition to my work on books, poems, essays and articles. How do I keep it straight? I use sticky notes that I put on my calendar. It’s amazing how good it feels when I remove that Post-It with a triumphant ta-da!

What do you do to keep yourself going?

As all the gurus say, from Anne Lamott with her “Shitty First Drafts” to Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones to Julia Cameron with her Morning Pages , open up your writing brain by writing whatever comes to mind. Just let ‘er rip, and you will find that it enables you to focus on the writing that you want to do. It doesn’t matter whether you use a pen and paper, a computer or an iPad. Nor does it have to be in the morning, if you’d rather write at a different time of day. Magic happens. I promise.

So give yourself one hour. Take the phone off the hook if you can. Lock yourself in a room. Go to the coffee shop. Write in your car, if you have to. Sixty minutes, not a second less. Just try it. Merry Christmas from me.

I was out of town on a book-selling expedition. After a long day of driving, I had checked into a motel in Roseburg, Oregon and was sinking into a warm bath when it hit me. I had to change the ending for my book. Words and scenes tumbled through my mind. Forget the bath. I had to write this down. I got out, wrapped a towel around me and hurried to my laptop, still wet as I started typing as fast as I could.

Outside, night fell. The parking lot filled with cars as people checked in. The murmur of a television filtered through the walls. Unaware of it all, I let the words flow for the next three hours. I had found the key to my book.

What happened? Two things: I got away from the usual distractions of home, and all that fiction I’d been reading seeped into my bones and showed me how to write my creative nonfiction project.

Non-writers chuckle when I talk about writing creative nonfiction. They assume that means I make stuff up. Not true. Creative nonfiction, also known as narrative nonfiction, uses the techniques of fiction to tell true stories. Those techniques include the use of scenes and settings, characters, dialogue, suspense, and rising and falling action that leads to a climax.

The book I’m working on had a lot of these elements in it, but it lacked the through story that would pull readers from beginning to end. It was all bits and pieces, and I interrupted the narrative too often with my research gems. “Info dump,” my fiction-writing friends call it. It was all good stuff, but I needed to make it more of a story, and suddenly I knew how, thanks to all those novels I’d been reading. I could see my people as characters and could see where I could increase tension, add suspense, turn telling into showing, and lure the reader on by making him wonder what happened next.

The writing world is full of books, magazines and websites telling you how to write. But I think we can learn the most from sitting down and reading good books. So go ahead, dive into a good novel. Enjoy the story, then go back and study what they did to make you keep turning the pages. It will make you a better writer.

Then, go write.

Here at the motel buffet breakfast, where we authors stare gloomily at our powdered eggs and bagels, a theme keeps running through my head: what if they gave a book fair and nobody came?

They did. I was there.

I am beginning to see that any event that has writers sitting around at tables waiting for people to buy books is doomed to fail unless they offer a good reason for buyers to show up. A chance to buy books from authors they’ve never heard of isn’t it. If you’re trying to sell books, you need to give the customers something to make them want to come to where the books are being sold. My tablemate and I joked about setting up a bluegrass band in the middle of the big open space in front of us. Or belly dancers. An open bar. Or at least an open mic for anybody who wanted to use it. Offer workshops, readings, entertainment, raffle prizes, a petting zoo. Something.

We also need to be selling the kind of books that regular people—non-writers–buy. Most of the authors at the fair were self-published or published by friends who have decided to call themselves publishers. Poetry, mysteries and memoirs dominated. The authors  included a guy with a clown hat who makes tiny haiku books, a death and dying nurse who decided to put her grief expertise into a book, and a retired psychologist who put his stories into books ala James Herriot of All Creatures Great and Small. From past experience, I know that some of these books are wonderful, but others are dreadful, poorly edited and lacking polish. There’s a place in the world for all kinds of books, but if you want strangers to buy them, you have to make your name known, and you have to sell something they want. Reebok, Microsoft and Coca-Cola know this. We writers need to know it, too.

If you’re selling ribs and pork chops, you want to make sure the customers are not vegetarians. And you have to make sure they’re hungry and know you’re out there. Otherwise all the signs and crazy hats in the world won’t sell your merchandise. My tablemate had Snickers, Milky Way and Baby Ruth bars and couldn’t even give them away.

We writers were the victims of organizers who thought that if you just put out the books, people would come. Why should they?  This morning as I return to my computer, I’m thinking hard about this question. What can I write that people will want to read? People like my mother or the people who sit behind me at church. What will make them think, I have to get that book? And my mother, friend, co-worker needs a copy, too?

It’s important to write our rough drafts freely without worrying about the market. Nothing stops creativity faster than wondering if anyone will ever buy our words. But eventually, if we do want to sell our writing, we have to make some compromises to fit the product to the market and bring the customers in the door. Then we have to give them something really good.

Now go write.

While I was eating breakfast this morning, I started to read an essay in a respected literary journal. The subject seemed interesting enough.  The writer has published several books and teaches in an MFA program at a prestigious university.  But I couldn’t get through more than two pages of that essay because every paragraph was littered with parentheses and dashes. She couldn’t seem to get through a single sentence without interrupting herself for an aside. Most of these side trips were so long I had to go back and reread the beginning of the sentence to connect it with the long-delayed end.  It was like trying to drive over a road that was nothing but speed bumps.

I suspect the writer was trying to create a casual voice, perhaps to mimic the haphazardness of speech, but it’s impossible to read. I gave up on that essay and decided to share my frustration with you.

Parentheses have their place, but use them sparingly. I had an English teacher who would flunk anyone who used even a single parenthesis. To this day, I stop and think before I use one. Most of the time, they’re unnecessary, but if you feel that you must use parentheses, use only one set,  and don’t forget to close the other side when you’re finished.

As for dashes, they signal an interruption in the idea being expressed. “It’s getting–my God, the house is on fire!–hot in here.” That might be appropriate. But don’t overdo it. Sometimes it’s just laziness. In fact, I had to stop myself from using too many dashes in this post. If you find yourself using dashes in every paragraph, knock it off!

We’ll have to talk soon about using too many exclamation points, too, won’t we? That’s becoming an epidemic, too.

Now go write some clean sentences without interruption.

We have a project going in Oregon called Oregon Poetic Voices. Poets from all over the state have been recording their poems to create a visual and audio archive. I have four poems there myself. Listen and enjoy.

If you want something a little more left-brained, you might want to look at http://www.mediabistro.com.  I hadn’t been there for a while and I was bowled over by everything that’s there. Mediabistro serves as a clearinghouse for jobs in the media, including print, broadcast and online gigs, both staff and freelance. You can search jobs and also post your qualifications in the hope the right employer will find you. The site also has a lot of marketing information for those who write freelance articles. I’m going to add it to my favorites. Yes, it has a lot of advertising, but you might also find your dream job here.

FYI, the address of my companion blog, Everything But Writing, all about the many aspects of being a writer that aren’t actually writing, has changed slightly. It’s now http://www.everythingbutwriting.com.

I filled three pages in my notebook today before I started doing this. Have you done your writing today? Go write.

NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, starts Nov. 1. For those who have been living on another planet, NaNoWriMo is an annual writing adventure that challenges folks to write a novel–or at least 50,000 words of one–in a month. That means 1,600 words a day. No one expects perfection to result, but it’s a great exercise and may just get that book you’ve been talking about well on its way to completion.

Last year I signed up and then chickened out, but I’m going for it this year. NaNoWriMo offers an online community, incentives to keep writing, and opportunities to meet with people in your area to write together.

If novels aren’t your thing, about about the Poem a Day challenge? Robert Lee Brewer, editor of Writer’s Market and Poet’s Market, hosts this at his Poetic Asides blog. Every day in November, he will post a prompt which you can use or not to write a poem. You’re welcome to post your poems and read those of others doing the challenge, but it’s not required. When it’s over, you can put your poems together in a chapbook and enter a competition for the best chapbook.

In reality, every day can be a writing challenge day. But these two challenges give you a chance to join others to write together. Give it a try. I’m going to.

I have two prompts for you today. First, I want you to put yourself in the mind of someone completely different from yourself and write a page from that point of view.

The second prompt is: “toothbrush”. Huh, you say? But think about it. If you’re writing poetry, it doesn’t literally have to be a toothbrush. If you’re a fiction writer, what is your character thinking as she brushes her teeth? If you’re writing nonfiction, compare toothbrushes from the past to what they are now, consider memories associated with toothbrushes, or go totally factual with an article on how to buy and effectively use a toothbrush. Do whatever you want with it. Fifteen minutes, toothbrush. Try it.

I have created a new blog called Everything But Writing. Here we will talk about all those aspects of the writing business that are not actually writing. I plan to continue posting advice there at least once a week to help sort out the many aspects of being a writer. Like posting this blog. There is a lot involved in blogging that is more computer work than word work. We’ll talk about it.

See you at Everything But Writing.

Meanwhile, so you don’t think I forgot about writing, here’s a quick prompt: Potato Salad. That’s right. What does “potato salad” bring to mind? As Wild Mind guru Natalie Goldberg says, Go!