Interview with author Kiersi Burkhart

It's here! My first interview on this blog! And I'm super excited to introduce you all to Kiersi Burkhart (@kiersi), a fabulous woman I met a few months ago at a local event for writers. She, like me, is a writer and a freelancer. She also writes about writing and publishing on her blog, The Prolific Novelista. And her first book is coming out later this year. But I'll let her tell you more about that.

Without further ado, the interview:

Q: What do you write?
Young adult [YA] and middle-grade [MG]. I love both--MG is young and carefree, YA gets to be intense and emotional and even get a little sexy. I believe you can have your cake and eat it too.

Q: Tell us a bit about your current work(s) in progress.

Writing prompt 3

You writing prompt for this week consists of a few of lines of dialogue. If you're using these as warm-up exercises, remember that you don't have to come up with a coherent story or anything; the prompt is just a jumping-off point. Try letting your mind go wherever it wants and see what happens.

Prompt:
"Hey! Girl! Didn't I see you walking here a couple days ago with a dog?"

"Yeah, what of it?"

"Where's your dog today?"

"Oh, that. I had to eat him."

What's working

Leaps and bounds this week! Over the weekend I stumbled upon a writing process that actually seems to be working for me. Meaning I've made significant progress on my pseudonym's novel...took it from about 8,000 words to over 21,000. It's not done yet (I think it's going to end up being around 40k words--so a novella), but at least I feel unstuck.

Here's what I'm doing:

Writing prompt 2

Not that these are in any kind of order or anything; it's just that this is the second post since I decided to give away some of my writing ideas.

In this post, though, you get a twofer: one prompt in the same vein as last week's, and a second, different kind of prompt that I sometimes use to help me get unstuck while at the same time process my feelings.

Wanted: boredom

When I quit my day job last fall to freelance full-time, one of the main things I looked forward to was having the time and energy to write. What I hadn't counted on was how busy I would be. You see, I had forgotten that what helps me get into the writing groove more than anything else is boredom. As I once explained to a friend, "The trick is to get really really bored until I start telling myself stories to relieve the boredom."

But I'm not bored, darn it! Last week I had a couple of great editing jobs that kept me busy through Saturday. Obviously not complaining about that. And then there's the Facebook and the Twitter and the social engagements and the meetings with clients, potential clients and business coaches and the TV shows to catch up on (thank goodness they break for summer!) and the word games to play and the Internets to surf...you get the idea. And that's before I even get to household chores. Don't get me started on household chores.

So how do I make myself bored?

Diane English article published

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of talking with Diane English, one of the founders of VoiceCatcher, about the birth of that journal and organization. Today the article about that conversation has gone up on their website.

Click here to read "In Dreams Begin Collaboration: A Conversation with Diane English."

Writing prompt 1

This week on Twitter--or it might have even been today...time has been funny lately--some of my fellow writers and I lamented the fact that our Muses visit us with new ideas while we're still in the midst of trying to follow through on other, older ideas. In my experience, if I drop what I'm doing to follow a new idea, nothing ever gets finished. But just making notes about new ideas while pressing on with the current WIP results in an ever-longer list that I rarely go back to because by the time I'm done with the current project I've got ten more new ideas. Either way, I have far more ideas than I could possibly ever follow through on.

And yet I hoard my ideas, keep them locked away from other people's sight, thinking...what? That someday I will stop needing sleep? That I'll be able to clone myself and thus be ultra-productive? That someday I will be able to stop time by touching my fingertips together like Evie Garland in the 80's TV show Out of this World, and then I really will have unlimited time?

The do-nothing place

Like some of my fellow ROW80-ers, for the past few weeks I've been suffering from general lack of motivation. Is it the stars? My diet? My irregular sleeping schedule? The warmer weather? Who knows. All I know is that I've spent the majority of this last week trying to get myself to write, to do my marketing work, to do the laundry, to do more than one thing a day. To be productive.

Be productive! One of the cardinal sins of our culture is not being productive. When's the last time you spent a day off doing nothing? No plans, no grocery shopping, no cleaning, no catching up with the family or those friends you haven't seen in a while, no yardwork...just existing. Just being with yourself and recharging. Watching movies all day if the fancy strikes you. Wandering aimlessly around town. Taking the time to ask yourself in the moment, "What do I feel like doing right now?" and then doing it. (You know, assuming it's not something like "sprout wings and fly away" or "teleport to Alpha Centauri.")

ROW80 update

1. Be a ROW80 sponsor.
Ugh. Totally failed last week at checking other people's blogs, commenting, and writing my own post. I blame life. Will do better this week.

But on the bright side, my guest post, "You can't get there from here," went up today on the ROW80 blog. Woo hoo!
 
2. Write my chapter of the chain story I mentioned in this post. 
Still waiting for it. Still not ready to write it when it does come.

3. Do three public readings.
On Friday I attended the second Fridays on the Boulevard open mic at The Attic Institute and was chosen to read. Woot! I read "Like a Woman in Love" and this other, short poem that originally appeared, untitled, in a post on my World Citizen blog: