S.G. Browne

Over the past several months I’ve spent the focus of my creative energy where it does the most good: on my writing. It didn’t hurt that I had deadlines for both I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus and Big Egos, which gave me a reason to be motivated. And during that time, I tended to avoid getting derailed by the time suck of Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads.

Now that I have a little more flexibility in my schedule, I’ve discovered that scaling back on Facebook and Twitter has had a markedly positive effect on my productivity and general frame of mind. While I’m aware that the popular way of thinking  is for authors to spend a couple of hours a day on Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites in order to be successful, I’ve decided to scale back my engagement on social networking sites so I can focus on other things: like writing and going outside and experiencing life without feeling the need to share every moment.

As I’ve said before, if you’re constantly connected electronically—either by text message, cell phone, status updates, or tweets—then you’re disconnected from your experience and can’t truly appreciate the present moment.

This is not to say that I’m going to vanish from the Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads landscape completely. I’ll still be popping on to say “hey” and share my occasional thoughts or updates and respond to comments or messages or Tweets sent to my attention. So please don’t think I’m not interested in hearing from you. I love my readers. I just need to step away from the distraction a bit. Unplug, you might say.

As my friend John Hornor Jacobs once noted, there’s a big blue sky out there and we’re supposed to spend as much time as possible beneath it. So if you’re looking for me, that’s where I’ll be.

Either there or at my local coffee roastery, working on my next book.

Well, August went by pretty fast. Time flies when you’re doing edits and copy edits and galley edits on your zombie novella that’s been pushed up to an October 30 release date, while in between you’re finishing up your next book that you promised to your agent the day after Labor Day.

Yes, for the past month I haven’t had the time to do any writing that doesn’t involve either I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus or Big Egos, thus the dearth of blog posts. Actually, I haven’t done much of anything else, as I’ve been bouncing back and forth from one project to the other—which isn’t always the easiest transition to make, especially when you’re switching from a sentient zombie who is dressed up like Santa Claus to a narrator who sometimes believes he’s Elvis Presley, James Bond, or Captain Kirk, among others.

In case you’re wondering what it’s like to work on two projects at the same time, both of them under deadline, the last month went something like this:

• Turn in first draft of I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus on August 1
• Spend three days reintegrating with human beings, who you haven’t seen for the past two weeks and most of the past two months
• Catch a cold and get so sick you can’t write for most of the next week
• Work on edits of your next novel, Big Egos, which you stopped editing at the end of May to start writing your zombie novella
• Receive first round of edits on zombie novella; stop working on Big Egos for 4-5 days
• Send in edited draft of zombie novella; start working on Big Egos again for the next week
• Receive copy edits for zombie novella; spend entire weekend reading your novella out loud—twice; make edits; send back to publisher
• Work on Big Egos for the next ten day, rearranging chapters, fixing plot holes, and tying things together
• Send Big Egos off to agent the Wednesday after Labor Day
• Receive 1st Galley Page edits for I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus; spend all day Thursday reading galley pages out loud and making final fixes
• Take a long bike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge on Friday morning, eat some breakfast, watch a couple of episodes of Robot Chicken, and then write this blog post
• Go visit your mother

Now I get the weekend to relax, visit some friends and family, and then start working on Big Egos next week once I get edits back from my agent. Then it’s on to Super Duper. Or maybe another project I’ve been working on. Hmm…

While blogging has never been my passion, I realize that it’s been nearly a month since I posted anything. And there’s a reason for that. Unfortunately, it doesn’t involve sitting on a remote tropical beach with no Internet access.

About three months ago, I was approached by my publisher to see if I was interested in writing a Christmas themed zombie novella. I thought about it for a few days, wrote up a synopsis and pitched them an idea, and a couple of weeks later they came back and said OK.

Now I’ve never written anything on spec before. My first three novels were all completed, vetted by my agent, and then sold, so selling a book before I’d written a single word of it was a new experience. And writing a 40,000 word novella in a little over two months meant any creative energy I had was channeled into writing that novella.

Thus no blog posts. And a limited amount of interaction on Facebook and Twitter. I just didn’t have the time.

The good news is, the novella is done. The title?

I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus: A Breathers Christmas Carol.

Yes, the novella is a sequel to Breathers and picks up a year later, about a week before Christmas, with Andy waking up in a body farm in Portland, OR, where he’s spent the last year being experimented on at a zombie research facility.

I won’t give away too much of the plot, but it involves an escape, a Santa Claus costume, a lonely nine-year-old girl named Annie who reminds Andy of his own daughter, a couple of zombie handlers, and a trio of inept zombies.

I’ll share more about the novella in a later post, but at this point it’s scheduled for release on November 13, 2012, both in print as a small hardcover and as an eBook.

Now I need to get back to edits on my next novel, BIG EGOS.

I’m often approached by people who tell me of their struggles in trying to write a novel. Since I’ve managed to write several novels with some degree of success, I get asked for advice. But rather than going into a lot of detail about plotting or character development, I thought I’d simplify the process of how to write in novel in four easy steps:

1. Sit down at your desk or on your couch or at a table in a cafe
2. Turn on your computer or pick up a pen and a pad of paper
3. Write
4. Repeat

Now I’m not saying this will help you to write a good novel. And “good” is a subjective term anyway, so let’s leave the classifications to literary scholars and Pulitzer Prize juries, because they’re the only ones who know what’s worth reading. Yes, that’s sarcasm. It’s one of the mediums I work in.

And just for the record, chances are your first novel isn’t going to be “good.” It might not be “bad,” but it’s probably not something that you should publish. I wrote three novels before I wrote Breathers and while they weren’t bad, they’re not something I would ever want to upload on to Amazon or Smashwords or Barnes & Noble. I realized they were flawed not long after I wrote them because with each successive novel, I discovered I was becoming a better writer.

The only way you can improve as a writer is by writing. Which means that before you can write your second novel, you have to finish the first one.

So the most important thing to remember about writing your novel is that you can’t write it if you don’t write it. Yes, I realize that sounds like circular logic. But if you’re constantly trying to figure out your outline or developing your character sketches or coming up with excuses about why you haven’t sat down to write it, then the novel is going to remain this thing you tell your friends you’ve been working on for the past three years and you’d be able to finish if only you had the time to write.

Screw time. You can always make time. It’s just another excuse you’re giving yourself not to write your novel. So screw excuses.

And while we’re at it, screw perfect. Stop worrying about finding the perfect word or the perfect phrase or re-writing the first paragraph or the first page or the first chapter over and over until it’s perfect. You can always fix it later. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: It’s never going to be perfect. Even after you’ve found an agent and worked with a team of professional editors at a New York publishing house and had your book published, you can always find something you could have fixed. Something you could have done better.

So stop trying to be perfect. Stop making excuses. Stop worrying about whether or not something is working and just WRITE.

Then start all over again at the beginning.

Over most of the past two weeks, as I’ve been working on my new Breathers Christmas novella and not doing much of anything else, I’ve sort of forgotten to do certain things. Like clean my apartment, post to my blog, and remember to floss.

Another casualty of my writing has been my stack of books to-be-read, waiting for me to give it some attention. Them some attention? Whatever. The problem isn’t so much that the stack of books isn’t getting any smaller, but that it’s growing taller. This is due to the fact that I keep doing book signings in book stores and am either offered an author’s discount or given my choice of a book for free as a gratitude by the book store.

Don’t they know I have a problem?

Some of the books in my stack have been there for nearly two years, like The Passage and Spook and L.A. Confidential. Others, like Monster and Divine Misfortune, both by A. Lee Martinez, were impulse buys at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. And Sacre Bleu and Pest Control came courtesy of one of the bookstores where I had a recent signing.

And this doesn’t include two new books I picked up or the other dozen books I have waiting on one of my bookshelves.

I’m wondering if there’s some sort of Twelve-Step Program for buying books:

1. First I have to admit I have a problem, which I’ve done.
2. Then I need to recognize a higher power who can give me strength. I’m thinking Stephen King fits the bill. Or maybe Neil Gaiman.
3. Next there’s admitting past errors, like Twilight, and then making amends for those errors, like re-reading Bloodsucking Fiends.
4. After that, I’d need to live a new life with a new code of behavior. I’m still working on that.
5. Finally, there’s helping others who have the same addiction or compulsion. I’m here for you.

Obviously I’ve missed a few steps, but then I never was good at math.