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EDIT: If you like this journal entry, check out The Sarcastic Guide to Writing ebook www.amazon.com/The-Sarcastic-G… for exclusive content on world-building, character, and dialogue!

1. Work on something else. I know, I know. You've been working on that story of yours for twelve whole years, and it's your baby. Sure, it may have been inspired by that Dungeons and Dragons session you had when you were thirteen, but you're going to make your fortune with it! It's the next Harry Potter! When my pals and I have gone to writing conferences, we've made note of an interesting phenomenon: when someone has written a first novel in the fantasy genre, it is invariably a sword-and-sorcery novel or a portal fantasy. I will bet money on it: show me a first novel and I will show you a sword-and-sorcery or portal fantasy. There's nothing wrong with sword-and-sorcery as a genre, don't get me wrong. It's just that in writing Lord of the Rings, Tolkien provided a simple, easy-to-follow template for amateurs. C. S. Lewis wrote one of the greatest portal fantasies in existence with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. (Incidentally, Lewis was best pals with Tolkien, and when he decided to foray into fantasy for the first time guess what he wrote? Portal fantasy. Coincidence? I think not!) Portal fantasy provides a comfortable setting to start in: your own world. Not quite so many balls to juggle right out of the gate. The thing is, your writing reflects your level of skill in a first novel. It takes ages and ages to make a first novel work. That's why authors take the easier route and write something else. I write many, many stripes of fantasy: xenofiction, steampunk, and urban fantasy. And I may just be about to, gulp, write straight YA. I am not immune to this rule: guess what my first novel was? Sword-and-sorcery! The thing is, even a different story in the same genre can teach you things you didn't know. To paraphrase Disney's Pocahontas, "You'll find out things you never knew you never knew." When I meet someone who has held their baby novel to their chest for twelve years, refusing to change anything about it and reacting aggressively to critique: that's someone going nowhere fast. Only slightly less pathetic than the person who roleplayed once and has had this great idea for a novel for years but hasn't written jack squat. By working on something else, you free yourself from stagnation. You start fresh, and can try again. One of the things I've recognized about my own improvement is that I've begun to world-build based on my plot, so the neat fantasy details I come up with serve an actual purpose to the story. That took me years to figure out, ages! And I've gone back to older work and been like "What the hell is this? What was I thinking?" Working on something else gives you more than one basket to put your eggs in, which makes you more likely to be critical of your own work. The writing is the easy part, my friends. Making your writing publishable is a whole new ball game, and only something like 2 percent of the population ever gets to see their work in published print. Enjoy those odds, crappy writers!

2. Learn to incubate. The ability to leave your writing alone is a valuable one. First, you have to come back to manuscript with a reader's eye, and not the bleeding heart of an author who loves their flawless work. In traditional publishing, edits and rewrites can take up to 18 months before the book comes out in real form. And during that time, you better believe you're expected to write something else. Even before that, there is the special, fresh hell known as querying, which requires you to wait ages and ages for an agent to get back to you on whether or not they like your story. Waiting on that reply is wasting time. Start on another story. Let the first one sit for a while, and age like good wine. Don't get caught in the trap of rewriting endlessly (something I found myself in danger of doing recently so I panicked and decided hell or high water I was going to collect some rejections.) It is very easy, especially for people in violation of Rule #1, to fiddle endlessly with the same thing. It is entirely possible to overwork a manuscript. I've done it at least several times, and come back to it hating what my brain fizzle managed to crap out on the page. Me personally, I have a built-in boredom paradigm that kicks in after about 6 weeks. I've got 6 weeks to actively write on something before smoke starts coming out my ears and I start to hate it. I can world-build and play with ideas all the live long day, but it takes a lot of fuel to write a novel and I run out. After that I need copious doses of movies and video games to feel even remotely inspired again. Incubation is a natural "season" of the writer, assuming you have honed the necessary self-discipline to finish a project in the first place. When I was a teenager, I didn't have that requisite skill yes, and enjoyed leaping from one project to another project willy-nilly. Whatever. I cared enough about what I was doing and wanted to do that I matured, and you probably will, too.

3. Value rewrites. One of the most appalling novels I have ever had the displeasure of reading was when I attended a week-long writer's conference and had to read about 12 of the first 50 pages each from my fellow classmates. One of them was a sword-and-sorcery fairy tale retelling, but the grammar was so terrible it was damn near indecipherable. I'm talking like something I read out loud to my writing buddies while we howled over breakfast each day and wiped away tears of mirth. This manuscript has become a running joke among two of my pals and I. I think I managed to get through about ten pages of it before I flipped to the last page and wrote "This will never get published in its current incarnation. You need to study grammar, because no agent is going to read past the first page." Later, this fellow posted indignantly on Facebook that he got "rude critique." Well, I thought his manuscript was rude. It was definitely an offense to anyone with eyes and a functioning brain. And seriously, grammar? If you don't have proper grammar and spelling down, I am under no obligation whatsoever to suffer through your crap. I used to get really indignant about the idea that agents only need 5 pages of your novel to decide whether they'd go with your project or not. "Tyranny!" I'd say. "How unfair!" But before this conference started, I put the manuscripts to a simple test to decide which order I'd read them in: reading the first sentence. And I'll be damned, the manuscripts that had good first sentences were good, meh first sentences were meh, and bad first sentences were bad. An agent can tell if you suck just by your first sentence! I can tell if you suck by your first sentence! So pay attention to what you're doing in rewrites. Don't just slap a first draft on paper and expect it to fly. It beggars belief that Mister Grammatically Incorrect thought his stuff was good when he was literally changing tenses midsentence. Who does that!? I believe it was Ursula K. Le Guin who said "Rewrites are where the magic happens." And it's true. It's where you find your first sentences and make stronger character arcs and better plot twists. Don't delude yourself into thinking that just because you wrote it down means it gold.

4. Read outside your genre. I recently came across a self-published book about dragons and elves whose main character was named Paolini. Gee, I wonder where they got their inspiration from!? (Incidentally, their first sentence was pretty hilarious in its badness, and it violated Rule 1 by being something the person had worked on for 12 years straight.) You don't make things easier for yourself by making your story a funny sword-and-sorcery idea for adults and kids that deals with serious subjects like rape and slavery. An agent ain't touching that. Sword-and-sorcery is an accessible genre, but man, too many people never go beyond that. Read historical fiction to find out how plate mail and arrows worked. Read straight YA coming-of-age to learn how to make the emotions of the character the only stakes in the story. Read nonfiction to research the impact of technology and environment on science and history. And for god's sake, read more than one kind of fantasy! There's like a million different stripes out there: magical realism, urban fantasy, steampunk, xenofiction, grimdark, allegorical, dying Earth, paranormal, mundane, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, on and on. And you think you're clever because you gave your character a baby dragon and a staff instead of a sword? Spare me. One of the biggest beefs I have with Stephanie Meyer (and believe me, I got plenty) is that she never read any vampire stuff. And if she had, it probably wouldn't have just been the sparkling vampires that got fixed. Your ideas are not as unique as you think they are, and the more you read the more you will realize this. You're supposed to be reading anyway, because you're a writer. I'm constantly dismayed by a lot fantasy being published today, because it's same old stuff so often. Maybe the agents are to blame for that. But the people who write in the first place sure are, too.

5. Accept that ideas adapt or die. I have two dead worlds in my gallery: The Dragon Rose and The Bronze Key. These are books that will never be published and that I no longer work on, because their ideas no longer appeal to me. (They also have sequels which I could never, ever write.) However, my urban fantasy, Daemonfire, is still going strong after 16 some-odd years. The fundamentals of the characters is still the same, and the very idea that I came up with a set of dynamics that actually worked at the age of 16 is nothing short of a cosmic roulette win. However, the story itself has changed shape many, many times. It started out as a sword-and-sorcery (Told you.), jumped to portal fantasy (WHAT DID I TELL YOU?) and then finally made the leap to urban fantasy. And even then, the manuscript still needed about 6 more iterations before it reached its current incarnation. Those manuscripts will never see the light of day, and those who read those manuscripts have been both sworn to secrecy and promised hush money if I ever make it big. The original execution of the idea was nothing short of total shit. It was ludicrous. But somehow, the idea kept appealing to me, and I kept trying again. The thing is, I was writing other stuff in the mean time. New ideas and new lessons about structure and arcs and characterizations came to me. At a fundamental, animus kind of level, I suppose the idea is still the same. But its methods of execution are worlds apart. I didn't keep trying to make the same darling of my 16 year old self work at 20, or 25. Ideas adapt or they die, and if they don't die, you're probably writing crap. Over and over and over again. Things that were life and death at 16 change when you turn 21, to say the least. Don't cling to things because of nostalgia or in memory of better times. Cut what doesn't matter to the story. In some cases, it means scrapping the entire story idea altogether. I don't lament the years and years I spent in a story world now dead. They taught me very valuable lessons. But just like an artist doesn't show off preschool finger paintings, you don't need to keep working on something just because it's earlier work you have feelings for. Yeah, yeah, growing up sucks and all that, but being brave enough to say "This isn't working, I'm going to try something else" will take you to knew places just as enjoyable as the old.