But it’s ten years later, and I am now 28 years old as of today, driving (late) to my fancy-pantsy corporatish big-girl job in a ’12 Mini Cooper (because I am SO OLD that I have driven one entire car into the GROUND), blasting Dimmu Borgir, with too-long hair, wearing a prim tweedy Ann Taylor suit (in black, naturally, with some gothtacular jewelry), and a bookshelf full of Young Adult novels and a very hungry sheltie awaiting me back home.

Clearly, I have learned many invaluable lessons about adulthood and maturity and responsibility on the way, which I shall now impart to you!

As a VETERAN ADULT, you will NEVER find yourself in the following situations:

• Standing in front of the fridge in your kitchen in your underwear and a nerdy video game-themed t-shirt, drinking juice straight out of the bottle, wondering where the past 48 hours have gone and why you smell faintly of cheese, then looking over at your computer and remembering it’s the final hours of the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend and you just spent FORTY-EIGHT HOURS PLAYING A VIDEO GAME WITH CHARACTERS YOU WILL NOT EVEN GET TO KEEP WHEN THE GAME RELEASES and half your manuscript edits are staring back at you forlornly, waiting to be typed up, judging you for the mojito stains on them. And this will CERTAINLY never happen to you the weekend just before you turn 28, because you are very nearly a VETERAN ADULT.
• Taking paid time off from work to attend a midnight release showing of The Hunger Games, and wondering why you are older than every other person in line (except for your boyfriend, who is kind of excited for the movie but not MIDNIGHT SHOWING excited), and then you make him hold your place in line because the line curves around some cute little Mexican joint’s patio so you sit on the patio and drink a margarita. And a Coke, for the caffeine. And then you spend the rest of your three-day weekend trying to recover from being awake until 3am, which is just EMBARRASSING, because when you were 18 you hit a new midnight release showing every weekend.
• Tossing and turning after a big social outing because even after 27+ years of life you still get social anxiety and treat conversations with new people like a vomiting of your very essence because how the hell else are they going to get to know you and you forget to put your listening hat on even though these are awesome people and you could listen to them talk for hours and oh god social anxiety no adults never deal with that.
• Sitting down to watch Battlestar Galactica, Season 1 and next thing you know it’s three weeks later and WHO IS THE FINAL CYLON and you’re in your underwear and a dorky  t-shirt with Edward James Olmos on it and sparkly text that says “edward” in the Twilight font, smelling faintly of cheese, and your office has sent out the national guard to find you because they think you’ve been kidnapped by the Russian mob.
• Coming home from work and your dog has eaten one of your dorky video game-themed t-shirts and half of your boyfriend’s sock and dear god you didn’t even know you HAD that many dishes and they are ALL in your sink and then you open up the washing machine and find the laundry you put in there ten hours ago and now it smells faintly of cheese because you never transferred it to the dryer and jesus christ how can one sheltie PRODUCE this much hair and you cannot possibly clean this all up in the four hours until you have to go to bed in order to sleep in order to get up in order to get to work only five minutes late in order to come home to clean again. So you just say “fuck it” and change into your underwear and a ratty Sisters of Mercy t-shirt that’s older than you are and watch trashy ghost-hunting shows for four hours.
• Forgetting to send presents to your dearest friends and relatives to commemorate MAJOR LIFE-CHANGING MILESTONES like babies and passed bar exams and weddings and so on. Or forgetting to send cards. Or even forgetting to send emails. Hell, even forgetting to log onto Facebook despite your consummate hatred for it just to merely click “Like” on the status update announcing said milestones.
• In fact, veteran adults pretty much never find themselves in their underwear and dorky video game/’80s goth band/ironic internet meme t-shirts. Or unbathed. In a dirty apartment. With everything they own covered in sheltie hair. In fact, veteran adults live in houses, because they can afford mortgages and stuff, and don’t spend their money on rare discontinued nail polishes and gothtacular jewelry and five-course Belgian beer-pairing dinners and video game-themed t-shirts that they just HAVE TO HAVE. Or books. They definitely don’t buy books by the boxload (we’re talking like 12, 13 books a month, because you had a COUPON CODE and not using it would be more physically painful than amputation).

So there you have it! Veteran adulthood awaits you! By the time you’ve been an adult for a whole goddamned decade and are getting invites to your 10-year high school reunion, you will magically learn vaulable time management, cleaning, and maturity lessons, and will be just as polished and with-it as me. Enjoy!

Fun things!:

1. The Atlantic has a new feature! YA for Grownups! The perfect antidote for literary snottery.

2. My boyfriend is surly! And a gamer! And he is blogging about his surly gaming. Specifically, how good it is to play a bad character.

3. N. K. Jemisin, one of my super-hardcore-fangirl-crushes, talks about how she’s a sexist (and you are too) (and that’s okay!). (In fact, go read Fantasy Book Cafe‘s entire month of Women in SF&F. And stand up and cheer, coz women writing SF&F rock.)

4. DC Mafia friend C. T. Richmond shares her intolerably adorable wedding photos, and  why her hubs is the best hubs for her. (1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . AWWWW!)

And a question for you . . .

How/when/why do you outline? What is your worst tale of when pantsing backfired on you? (Hmm. Pants–backfiring–yikes!)

So instead of sharing photos for SEKRET 2: MOAR SEKRETER, which I obviously can’t tell you about it because it’s SEKRET, I’ll let you have a little peek at another WIP I’m tinkering with in my free time, which doesn’t really have a name yet but is tentatively titled ENCLAVE and is a YA story and kind of contemporary but also a little bit futuristic:

So, what do you think ENCLAVE is about?

(Also: hello and welcome to the new website! Please ensure your feed reader is updated, and points to http://lindsaysmith.net/feed .)

Sure, it’s repetitive, you say. But are you saying Young Adult books aren’t? No, of course not. YA has its tropes, its trends, its outright obnoxious cliches, its embarrassment of riches when it comes to pretty thin white girls whose lives are just absolutely going to END because they can’t decide whether to make out with this smoking hot werewolf, or that smoking hot angel, and they might not even get to go to prom because the super-oppressive government is going to, like, take over prom dress assignments in a process known as The Dressening for NO OTHER REASON than to be super-oppressive (and then randomly shoot one prom-goer in the head). So, yes. YA can exhaust, also.

What bothers me is that one genre, with all its conventions and touchstones and vast ranges of quality and taste, is lauded as high art, in fact the only literary art worthy of adults’ time, while another genre with equally if not more vast ranges of quality, tastes, and subject matter is deemed despicable and embarrassing for a GROWN-ASS WOMAN to read.

When I pick up a book in hopes of reading it, I’m filled with a fun, scary blend of excitement and anxiety. Excitement: A new world to sink into! There might be beautiful words between these covers; there might be rich characters and exotic locations and fascinating insights into the human psyche! But there is fear: What if the characters are repulsive to me, and make horrible choices, and the writing is flat and lifeless, and the plot is slipperier than a garden slug, and the author smugly tries to impart their horrible banal wisdom to me in a cellophane wrapper of story? It’s a huge psychological and temporal investment, choosing a book. I’m putting down ten bucks, and in return I’m either going to feel enlightened and wonderful and emotional and joyous, or I’m going to wish I’d just set that ten-dollar bill on fire instead.

With YA books, I at least feel like I know what I’m getting myself into more often than not. If a book is written in a more commercial, matter-of-fact, thrillery, James Patterson manner, then it doesn’t try to hide that fact (and for my own personal preference, I can avoid it—but hey, if that’s for you, then you can easily find it!). Likewise, if the prose is going to make me weep in awe and want to smash my fingers with a hammer because I’ll know I can never create anything so beautiful, I have an easy time learning that, too.

The problem with literary fiction is that it’s all supposed to be staggeringly gorgeous in its prose and insights. But there’s no infrared vision that will show me that there is smugness ahead, that here be asinine observations. It all gets breathlessly lauded (though more often if the author’s male—but that’s a post for another day). At the end of the day, I may be a Grown-Ass Woman, but I can’t relate to a lot of serious, ponderous grown-up books.

But those that I can, I love.

Some of my favorite Grown-Ass Woman reads:

FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French

THE GARGOYLE by Andrew Davidson

DARK PLACES by Gillian Flynn

DEMONS by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Pevear/Volokhonsky translation)

PATTERN RECOGNITION by William Gibson

“I’m sure all those books are well written. So is “Horton Hatches the Egg.” But Horton doesn’t have the depth of language and character as literature written for people who have stopped physically growing.”

Stein’s target audience.What does Mr. Stein and his ilk consider literature? Thomas Pynchon, of course. David Foster Wallace—naturally. Mr. Stein says he’ll get around to reading YA when he’s done with the 3,000+ books of “real” literature he intends to read, most of them no doubt written by snotty old white men such as himself.

Let’s save him a little bit of time, shall we? I would wager that I can compress 90% of the books Joel Stein is dying to read into one tale. Because, hey! If he can dismiss an entire category of books without reading a single one, that means I can, too, right?

DISTILLERY OF SOUL
by Ian Flann

Iain Flannel, distinguished professor of White Guy Literature at Stuffington College, is on the eve of his 50th birthday. In one scotch-soaked night while he is locked in his oak-paneled office, he must ruminate on the dissolution of his marriage to his once-beautiful wife Nancy, who has become distant/fat/a nervous wreck in her advanced age. He fantasizes about his steamy affair with a smoking-hot ethnic maid 20 years his junior, who taught him about her simple ethnic ways and cooked him delicious, fragrant ethnic dishes while somehow never gaining an ounce herself. Also, she took it in the butt.

Iain is packing away his belongings to leave this singular, unique life behind, dwelling for entire stream-of-conscious chapters of the significance of a paperweight here, a book given to him by a smoking-hot ethnic grad student there (cue 40-page long sex fantasy that never came to pass). He dreads what the morning will bring: divorce proceedings and a new job as the totally un-distnguished professor of White Guy Literature at Not-so-stuffington College. But then he comes across a tear- and scotch-stained manuscript, one he wrote while under the spell of the smoking-hot ethnic maid. Now he can finally earn his place amongst the pantheon of the Great, the White, the Old Men.

Pynchonesque turns of phrase! Identity crises! Yes, it’s masterful, gripping, and For Adults (White Men). Perfect for someone like Mr. Stein and his forthcoming book, Man Made: A Quest for Masculinity (is this a joke?!? Because seriously?!?).

If, somehow, the above plot leaves you less than fulfilled in your literary cravings (though I can’t imagine how, because it is High Literature and the only thing deserving of your Adult Ponderings), might I suggest the following infinitely inferior books that are, by definition, totally artless and un-thought provoking because they are written For Babies:

CHIME by Franny Billingsley
Franny Billingsley’s prose can write circles around your favorite Grumpy Old White Man. Throw in an unreliable narrator, mystical intrigue, and amazing, heartfelt, five-dimensional characters.

DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE by Laini Taylor
Her descriptive powers break my heart. And then the third act of the book, fantastical and epic and utterly real, breaks it even more.

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS by John Green
The truths and emotions in this book are so universal and shattering that it would take only the Grumpiest of Old White Men to deny.

IMAGINARY GIRLS by Nova Ren Suma
All the delicious confusion, wordplay, and misleadings of a Wallace novel, but a third of the weight. Also, with girls.

And some more that I hope to read soon:
-MEXICAN WHITEBOY by Matt de la Pena
-DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth
-LIKE MANDARIN by Kristen Hubbard
-AKATA WITCH by Nnedi Okorafor
-FIVE FLAVORS OF DUMB by Antony John

P. S. I do read grown-up books, too.  Great literature comes in all shapes and forms. My favorite author? Tana French. Because she doesn’t just write beautifully—she plots marvelously, too.

Why do we procrastinate? There are myriad factors, but fear is right up there, for me. Fear that I won’t get it right. Fear of not being able to fix things. Fear of having left something for too long. And leaving things alone makes them so much worse, makes them a blister in your mental space. The longer that I didn’t poke and prod a manuscript that needed prodding and poking, the more of a ragged, knotted-up, dilapidated piece of garbage it became in my mind.

Writing is confrontation because without confrontation, we have no story. Perfect characters who always make the right choices are insufferable. But so are characters who won’t do anything about their problems. Stories have to bring about change. Lose and gain.

Blogging is writing is confrontation, is the recognition that sometimes I have no idea what to do with this space. Then I would let it sit for too long, and I’d come up with an idea for a post, but then I feared that I couldn’t just parachute in, drop a non sequitur in your laps, then smokebomb out of view once more.

Talking to people is confrontation, but the very idea of other people makes me feel small, so small. So I refrain, and that blister in my mind just grows and grows.

I lived in DC for three years now, and have never made it down to the Cherry Blossom Festival. This year was the 100th anniversary. I took a couple hours of work; I grabbed the camera. We drove around the Tidal Basin, and dear god, it was swarming with tourists. But no. I’d put it off long enough.

So I poked that manuscript again. And I talked to people. And I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival.

Confrontation can be worth it.

Welcome! Over the next month, I’m going to share some of my strategies and suggestions for surviving National Novel Writing Month, for those who’ve decided to take the challenge. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is an annual online writing challenge to participants to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Many of your writing friends are probably pulling their hair out right now, trying to hit the first day’s word count quota. But I also know there are plenty in the writing and publishing community who dislike NaNoWriMo for a number of reasons, or feel like it promotes bad or sloppy writing, but I think that when used wisely, writers at any stage in their journey can benefit from the challenge.

Choose which category fits you best, and see how you can use NaNoWriMo wisely. And please—don’t take the titles as a reflection of the quality of your writing; only your writing experience.

Beginning Writer
You’ve just chosen to begin the strange and mystical journey of writing a novel. You have a story begging to be told, though you aren’t completely certain how to tell it. Or maybe you know the plot from beginning to end but aren’t confident you can do it justice just yet.

November is your opportunity to shake the nerves from your fingers and let them start flying. It’s good to have a roadmap for your novel, but don’t sweat this too much—just ensure there’s enough framework there to keep you going. Don’t be afraid to write the same chapter, scene, even sentence over and over from multiple angles until you find what’s comfortable. Get a feel for the shape of your writing, and learn what works for you. If you haven’t been writing consistently—like a daily or weekly word count, for instance—then the first week will be the worst by far. Let go of your inner editor and give yourself permission to write poorly. You can always, always rewrite, as long as you write something to begin with. Put one word in front of the other, and don’t be afraid to veer off course from your plot. You never know what great new ideas will spring up.

Developing Writer
You’re starting to find confidence in your writing; maybe you’ve even reached The End of your first manuscript, but now you’re looking to prove you can replicate that success. Maybe as you trialed and errored your way through one story, you started formulating a new plot—a stronger plot, a killer tale that you just knew you could do wonders with once your writing was where you wanted it.

Use NaNoWriMo to continue to develop your voice, and nail the rise and fall of a great story structure. I know it’s too late right now, but if you spent extra time before November pre-planning your outline, you will be well ahead of the game to finding the necessary confidence to excel again.

Veteran Writer
Maybe you have a few NaNo wins under a belt, or maybe even—awe of awes—you’ve managed to write an entire manuscript or two outside of November’s crazy confines! Congratulations! Now is the time to work on your writing discipline: getting into the writing habit, even on those days when you don’t particularly feel like it.

Strive for consistency in your daily word count. Try to make yourself write every day in November, instead of scrambling at the end of the month to reach the 50,000 word finish line. If you have gotten into a pretty good writing habit outside of NaNoWriMo, then now’s the time to really push for higher word counts, or experimentation. Find a voice you’re unfamiliar with and run with it.

My number one rule for surviving NaNoWriMo and learning from the experience: high confidence, low expectations. Believe in your writing and your ability to produce a finished manuscript—perfection is not the goal.

That comes in December.

Good luck!

It’s hard. Some days it feels impossible. And it’s definitely not pretty: I’m a sweaty mess with hair wisps jutting out every which way, and my shirt keeps riding up and my pants keep riding down. I thought I was in decent shape reaching for better conditioning, but running makes me feel horrendously incapable of the slightest exertion. But every time, it gets easier.

So I’ve been staring at a stack of notecards for a story outline these past few weeks. (I WARNED YOU.) I know the layout of the book, more or less, and I’m satisfied with the prologue, but the first few chapters are killing me. I tried blaming it on the voice—it’s mostly third person, which I haven’t written in for several manuscripts now—but I think it’s just fear. There are so many elements I want to pull into this story, so many things influencing it (it’s also set in contemporary times, something else I’ve been lacking for several mses), that I feel overwhelmed.

So I’ll push through it. I’ll bang out those first few chapters in their sweaty glory and get on with the scenes that I know I can do. Each time, I’ll get better. And once I master it, I have plenty more ideas who deserve to be written as well!

And yes, absolutely, you want your reader to stop whatever they’re doing—fidgeting in the bookstore, sorting through their bookshelves, or half-heartedly browsing “Look Inside”—and sink into their chair with a stunned look on their face. Front-load the intrigue, and work the narrative in later.

But you can get away with a narrative opening. It’s tricky, and it’s rare, but it can be done. How do you make it work? Treat it the same way as you would any other opening—arrest your reader’s attention with details that make them ask questions and wonder about more.

Here are some of my favorite examples of an expository opening that works wonders:

Amelie

On September 3rd 1973, at 6:28pm and 32 seconds, a bluebottle fly capable of 14,670 wing beats a minute landed on Rue St Vincent, Montmartre. At the same moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby, the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a tablecloth. Meanwhile, in a 5th-floor flat, 28 Avenue Trudaine, Paris 9, returning from his best friend’s funeral, Eugène Colère erased his name from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome, belonging to Raphaël Poulain, made a dash for an egg in his wife Amandine. Nine months later, Amélie Poulain was born.

This one sinks us into its peculiar details. Why do we care about this date and time, and what does a fly have to do with anything? And the narrative doesn’t stop there—we learn about all of Amelie’s quirks, like her love of the sound of creme brulee cracking, before we really delve into the actual plot. But they’re such unusual details, that we are left wondering at their relevance and their strangeness.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N. K. Jemisin

I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore.

I must try to remember.

[…] My name is Yeine. In my people’s way I am Yeine dau she Kinneth tai wer Somem kanna Darre, which means that I am the daughter of Kinnet, and that my tribe within the Darre people is called Somem. Tribes mean little to us these days, though before the Gods’ War they were more important.

Yeine tells us exactly who she is and where she stands in her culture, but it raises more questions than it answers. What is the Gods’ War, and who are these people who have torn out her heart? Why does her tribe no longer matter? Why can’t she remember?

Her uncertainty about herself, despite her certainty of her place in the world (for now), leads beautifully into her inner discovery throughout the book, and we learn just how honest she really is in these uncertainties.

Rocknrolla

People ask the question… what’s a RocknRolla? And I tell ‘em – it’s not about drums, drugs, and hospital drips, oh no. There’s more there than that, my friend. We all like a bit of the good life – some the money, some the drugs, others the sex game, the glamour, or the fame. But a RocknRolla, oh, he’s different. Why? Because a real RocknRolla wants the fucking lot.

What I particularly love about this narrative is that the man speaking the line, Archy (Mark Strong), wants you to believe he’s talking about the only actual rock’n’roll star in the film, Johnny Quid. And Johnny certainly lives for the money, the drugs, the sex game, and the music. Archy is none of these things. And Archy is such a modest narrator he scarcely introduces himself before diving into another narration of other characters’ troubles.

But by the movie’s end, there is no doubt that Archy—despite not fitting his own description of a rocknrolla—is way more of a brilliant badass than he’d ever give himself credit for. So much so that Johnny Quid tells him, “I’m gonna be just like you, Uncle Archy. A real rocknrolla.”

Anna and the French Kiss, Stephanie Perkins

Here is everything I know about France: Madeline and Amélie and Moulin Rouge. The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, although I have no idea what the function of either actually is. Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, and a lot of kings named Louis. I’m not sure what they did either, but I think it has something to do with the French Revolution, which has something to do with Bastille Day. The art museum is called the Louvre and it’s shaped like a pyramid and the Mona Lisa lives there along with the statue of the woman missing her arms. And there are cafés or bistros or whatever they call them on every street corner. And mimes. The food is supposed to be good, and the people drink a lot of wine and smoke a lot of cigarettes.

I’ve heard they don’t like Americans, and they don’t like white sneakers.

Anna betrays a certain modesty here, too: she actually knows a decent amount about France, and in revealing this knowledge, she reveals much of herself. And what she reveals of herself also conveys her trepidation that she, as a white sneaker-wearing American, won’t be well-received.

What are your favorite expository openings?

We have to be our own nag. Our own inspiration. We can’t wait on others to help us along.

When I feel like my writing has stalled and I’ll never improve, I plunge into a great book. I’ll linger over every beautiful phrase and taut scene. (See Weronika Janczuk’s post at WriteOnCon for some inspiring openers.) I never want to stop growing as a writer, but every sentence I lay down comes with the fear that I’ve used these words—images—emotions before. Keep reaching. Keep filling your head with gorgeous art and words and ideas, so it never turns stale.

But don’t dread the times that the skill you want just isn’t there. My favorite stage of the writing process is when I’m line editing. I’ve already thrown down the clay of the basic story and sentences, and now I get to shape them into whatever I want. Because I know I can make these changes for the better, I have an easier time pushing myself through the rough draft. It’s okay if the best way I can think to say something in the draft is “She got pushed out into the street by the thick crowd,” because once I’m line editing, I can take the time to find what I really mean to say: “The crowd washed her onto the street.”

Pushing yourself into unfamiliar territory can be the scariest task imaginable. The past few weeks at work, I’ve been in an environment so incredibly foreign to me that demanded me to exert aspects of my personality (namely, extrovertedness) that I wasn’t even sure I possessed. The first few days, it exhausted me so much that I came home and immediately went to sleep. But after about day 4, I wasn’t so tired anymore. I wasn’t so terrified, because I’d been confronting that terror head-on for so long that I had no choice but to cope.

Dive into something new and flail. Make mistakes. And keep pushing. It’ll become second nature in time.