You would think after six plus years of being relatively familiar with the publishing industry, I wouldn’t fall prey to one of the most dastardly errors a writer can face—Rushing Things. The things everyone tells you NOT TO DO at conferences. It’s truly an awful temptation. And deserves such a big shout out when you catch yourself at it.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer to get things done, quickly. Usually this doesn’t translate to my stories; I could happily pore over one of my own worlds for the rest of my natural life, probably. But when it comes to Important Things like meeting an agent at a conference—something that is scheduled to happen this very weekend—I go slightly haywire. I don’t think I’m the first writer ever to go through this, mind you. I just wanted to share my surprise and pride in being able to reverse the horrible spiral before it got too dark.

My thinking was as follows: oh God I’m meeting an agent, and must edit this darn manuscript (YA I’m working on) within an inch of its life before I meet her (never mind that in the great scope of things, this is somewhat unrealistic as the book isn’t even finished yet). How can I live with myself if I have only a ridiculously unfinished project by the time this conference happens? How could I live, period? I must remedy this! NOW!!

The result is that for this brief week I have lost all joy in the story and can hardly see straight when I look at it. The scenes have become cardboard backdrops, rather than rich with life and depth. My anxiety was such that I hardly CARED about the story anymore, while scrambling to perfect it in time. It was not until my sagacious boyfriend said, “What’s the worst that can happen? The very worst?” and I said, “Everyone will hate my story, or worse, be indifferent to it, and that will therefore prove to me that it is nowhere near ready to submit to agents, like I wanted it to be.” And he said, “OK, so what then? What would you do if all those things were true?” and I stopped, and dropped back into my body, disappointed and relieved at the same time. “I would just keep plugging away at it. For another twelve years if I have to, to make it the story it needs to be.”

And I meant it. I’m like that. This story needs to be what it needs to be.

I mention all this because I wish I’d had the sense to take a step back and remember all this before the conference, and in the event you’re in the same boat, perhaps it can be of some help to you.

I had planned on having the book ready for sub by March or so. But my story, in its wonderful unwieldy way, has changed in that it has begun to ask More of Me. It has gone from a thing that I relentlessly polished with my internal Mental Editor to something that is now ready to breathe its own life, its own soul, and is telling ME what it wants. It doesn’t give a diddly about conferences. It’s like a full circle back to the glorious moment that an idea pops out of nowhere into your head, and then you spend months/years writing and revising it, trying to keep the marriage between your heart and mind alive so they can produce the healthiest story-child possible. And you sweat and sweat and then think you’re finished, but…..now it’s different again, wild and new like in the beginning, and back to the heart of things. It’s very similar to when I’m drawing, and the drawing looks finished, but something is missing until I deepen the shadows in it. The story wants its shadows.

So it’s not done after all, or maybe not even close to done. And though I am disappointed about the timeline I’d imposed on myself and have had to abandon, I am learning the very, very hard lesson that a story will tell you when it’s finished (or at least ready to sub. I don’t know that we ever feel “finished.”) And that I can trust my story. And so now I am sitting here having to mentally adjust to this new, open-ended way of thinking about things, but so happy that my story had the heart and wisdom to speak up.

The result is that I am with the story again, it’s not a cardboard backdrop anymore, and I’m telling myself that if this story does not feel compelling to people, it is because it is not finished. And that’s OK.

So I presented at the awesome Young Writers and Illustrators Conference in Belton, Texas today. Yep, it’s as amazing as it sounds—a bunch of kids who are sincerely interested in writing and illustrating show up in a big room to hear professionals speak. Most of the kids come accompanied by their encouraging parents, which is doubly awesome.

I must send a shout-out to some key folks: the Central Texas Reading Council and the Harker Heights Public Library, of course; the lovely Teresa Hough for putting it together; librarian Lisa Youngblood, who is the hippest, cheeringest, getting-a-crowd-goingest librarian you’ll ever meet; and her awesome daughter Sheridan, who helped with everything from madly scrambling to get a computer set up to procuring ever-important dry erase markers. Sheridan is in seventh grade and is a writer herself. We all expect great things from you (no pressure) someday, Sheridan.

I did a big, general presentation about being an author/illustrator, and then two smaller breakout sessions. During my opening presentation, I had some intimidatingly intelligent questions posed to me, both by people under 11 years old. The first was: “How do you feel about formulated writing?” I admit I paused a moment, stumped. Eventually I was informed that the student was partially referring to the way the curriculum teaches writing for the *TAKS tests.

Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I would have loved to have said, “I think it depends what you’re writing, of course. If formulated writing helps you learn to think about the structure of a piece of writing, that’s something you’ll have to learn anyway, especially if you want to be a storyteller. But free-form writing, where no one is judging you and you’re not judging yourself, and there is NO right or wrong, is just as important. Critical, even. That’s where you learn what you really think and feel about things, that’s where you learn to love words and the way they’re put together. It’s where you discover that you can make things up on your very own. Your imagination needs just as much practice as your technical skills do. Those two things don’t always work gracefully together, even for adult professional writers. But sometimes, once you know how to trust your imagination, you can soar easily through a standardized test, because you already love and care about words.”

What I did say was considerably less eloquent, but if you attended the conference yesterday, please know that’s what I meant.

The second awesome question (also posed by an 11-year-old) was, “What’s your advice on writing a memoir?”

This one I think I answered a bit better: “Well, as always, reading a lot and practicing writing is key. But as for the memoir genre, believing that what you have to say about yourself is very important. That you are unique and special and no one sees the world quite the way you do.”

Whew. These kids were on it. They were delightful.

During the breakouts the kids and I collaborated on creating a picture book. I drew their suggestions on the board (hence the need for markers) while they created dynamic characters placed in various moral dilemmas. Featured were Icenberg the Evil Ice Cream Cone, Farmer Bob the Mouse, and Nimbo the Ninja Banana. (I will say that this is not the first ninja banana that has ever appeared in an interactive presentation. They seem to be in vogue this year.)

I had one earnest young boy come up to me before presenting to tell me that he didn’t want any remedial art lessons. He quite literally said, “I don’t mean to offend you, but I already know how to draw a circle. I want something more challenging.” So we adjusted the art accordingly and I made Farmer Bob a rather sophisticated mouse, rather than the Mickey-type. Wrinkled overalls, hat, pitchfork and all.

Afterward, several young artists came up to show me their incredible art and writing. Kids who’d been sitting there DOODLING came up with characters so detailed I thought they were going to amble off the page. Kids with sophisticated vocabulary suggested things like, “Mr. Mittens deviously rubbed his hands together, and Farmer Bob sensed a dark ploy.”

I am super impressed. It looks like our great-grandchildren will have plenty to read and look at.

May I just say something about writing? And how incredibly, absolutely fun it is? I just rewrote a scene—or a chapter really— yesterday. It’s the chapter I was dubious about handing over to my beta readers and crit partners, since it still seemed like a congealed funk and was primarily written at a time when the book itself was a mess. Even the editing I’d done on that chapter seemed like just polishing the *rubbage (I think I just made that word up; I was trying to write “rubbish” and “garbage” at the same time) that was underneath—almost a cop-out. Still, I thought, hey, we’ll see what people think anyway. Surely the book has bigger problems than this.

Sure enough, every single person remarked on the plodding and meandering nature of this chapter. Kind of that it made them feel like they’d just watched **”Benjamin Button” forty times.

So I’ve been ruthlessly editing it, taking a chisel to it with the eye I’ve developed since the poor thing was first set down. I hacked it to pieces and smoothed it out and removed all unnecessary fluffery that was making the thing weigh a metric ton. And now, with just the bones of the chapter underneath, I am free to fall in love with the characters and their urgency and their agenda in a whole new way. And I so do love them! For all I know this version is crap as well, but it is a closer-to-perfect version of crap, and I am so happy to see the thing deepen and quicken and grow, to see the world reveal itself.

Yay yay yay. Remember this, writers, when you are on the brink of despair and the editing process is relegated to the hopeless part of your head. Where the little editor man sits with bleak eyes and ring-around-the-collar. Once you get through some of that joyless slogging and the soul of the story emerges, it’s all so worth it.

*I am very sad. I did not make this word up, it turns out. It just means plain old “rubbish” after all. Oh well.

**I love this film. But you do have to admit that by the time you’re done watching it, you feel like you’ve lived Benjamin’s life with him.

Growing up German (or any other foreign nationality) in America has its advantages. Its disadvantages too, mind you. Hearing things like, “Ew….you have a smelly lunch! Where’s your Wonderbread?” comes to mind. But one of the great things was the way I was raised to view Christmas.

For the most part, I must say I am grateful that Christmas always had a….would Gothic be the word? A dark quality. Not sinister—just somber, contemplative, eerie and still; a time of silence and wonder; a time of reflecting and magic and sensing a deep, thumping heart under all the world’s busy doings that pumped more audibly at Christmas. To me, the idea that St. Niklaus was a porcine merrymaker at the North Pole was utterly alien. Elves and Mrs. Claus? Ridiculous. My personal St. Niklaus was a pensive, solemn old man who wandered the woods and was glimpsed—if you were lucky—once in a lifetime. Trekking through thick clusters of frost-covered trees, he had a statuesque frame draped in a thick robe, a long, chiseled face, and eyes that reflected the strangeness of life itself. A glimpse of him left a person dazed, as though waking from a dream. His sack was full of things that someone desperately needed, and he was on his way to deliver them—quietly, stealthily. They were not for me, nor were they supposed to be.

That’s not to say that during the rest of the year I wasn’t as much of a glutton as any other kid. I would have happily forsaken my parents’ paying the mortgage in exchange for every My Little Pony that Hasbro churned out. But on Christmas, things were different. It had little to do with the version of Christmas foisted upon me every year by commercials and school and gargantuan purple baubles at the mall. It was about mystery and music and snow and history.

True to the German tradition, a bit of horror managed to worm its way in amid the deep joy of Christmas. For the Germans, a man called Knecht Ruprecht accompanies Santa on Christmas Eve Night. The two of them have a routine that’s a bit like good cop, bad cop. Santa gets to be nice, but Knecht Ruprecht has a whip, which he wields as he questions children about their behavior. If you’ve been bad and admit it, you only get whipped a little bit. If you’ve been bad and lie about it, you will be whipped within an inch of your life. He does other delightful things too, such as leave whips for parents to use on you, if you are bad.

Yes, ‘tis true. And we wonder how Hitler happened.

Anyway. I didn’t believe in the ridiculous Santa everyone talked about. But I did believe in Knecht Ruprecht. You’d be a fool not to believe in him, I reasoned. To me, he looked like a cross between Zorro and the Hamburglar, his whip held on high, studying me with X-ray eyes. I was terrified of him. Would he come through the chimney alone? Did he really know EVERYTHING, including the time I threw a banjo at the teacher? The time I told my sister she was from another planet? He surely did, and what was worse, I’d have to admit my crimes in front of my parents and be punished twice.

Thankfully I only lay in bed agonizing about Knecht Ruprecht for a total of two or so years, after which point I observed that several of my most bullying classmates returned to school after holiday break free of whip-marks, still unimpeded in their paths of tyranny. I was free.

(Peaceful St. Niklaus, the wanderer in the woods, felt very removed from all this mess, and I was glad to leave him out of it. Slither on, St. Niklaus, and stay unseen on the fringes of this world! was my silent plea. In the unlikely event that he showed up on my doorstep, I planned to thrust a map of the nearest forest into his hands and urge him to save himself. That civilization was currently hazardous to his health, but that I’d come join him ASAP to chill with him and the deer.)

As an adult, it seemed so unlikely that anyone would propagate a rumor as terrifying as Knecht Ruprecht that I had to check online to be sure I hadn’t suffered some fevered delirium as a kid and imagined the whole thing. And sure enough, here he is, though not nearly as dashing as my personal childhood vision of him.

The good news: now only the great parts of Christmas, those I’ve always loved, stay with me. (Though I still think Knecht is much likelier to fit down a chimney than Santa.)

I’m dying to know: did anyone else have any bizarre childhood Christmas beliefs? Any horrific traditions from other countries that would make our politically correct day and age cringe?

1. For one, there is nothing like having support. Nothing. If it weren’t for those five other people out there with whom I meet every other week for three or so delicious hours—hours spent considerately, lovingly, brutally plucking apart each other’s work—I don’t know what I’d do. We all know how it is; we have all swooned over, wailed about, been furious at, and wanted to dunk into a cold and airless chamber that thing which haunts us till it’s realized—our stories. And that, friends, distinguishes a small, specific sub-group of the human race. Most people do not mentally wrestle with an untold or half-told or nearly-told tale as they attempt to calmly go about their workday—whatever that work may be. I find it lovely that I can picture Jennifer at her cubicle, mentally fighting with whether her protagonist should discover the murderer in the bathtub or the phone booth; and that I envision Leroy diagnosing patients as he secretly wonders if his hero should REALLY swallow a whale? (This one may be a tad more questionable.) But really, who does that? We do, and goody.

2. It prepares you for working with an editor. If I had managed the nigh-impossible task of churning out a workable manuscript and hooking an excited editor WITHOUT having previously worked with a critique group (whew, that’s a long sentence), I would have been a frustrating client indeed. I would have whined and needed hand-holding and dared to argue that parts of my story were ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY even with the editor prostrate, sobbing that they made no sense at all. Yes, I would have been that silly, falsely proud client with little perspective about my own work. But with a critique group, you learn that sometimes you can be blind when it comes to your writing, and that that’s OK because other people can see for you. You are honing your project under the watchful eye of people who care about you, but hopefully, care about your story more—people inclined to reign you in when you need wrist-smacking, or to prop you up when you are about to re-enact the printer scene from Office Space.

3. It is the next best thing—or, dare I say it, possibly an even better thing—to an MFA. Not to begrudge any of my friends who have doled out tens of thousands of dollars to a university to learn the art of writing creatively, and who are still paying off said schools. I think MFAs can be helpful in many cases. In terms of being critical of those programs, I have only the words of several MFA graduates I know to back me up—that they could have done just as well with a wonderful critique group, and that hardly any MFA programs out there address the nuts and bolts of actually breaking into this industry. And after seeing the shape some of my fellow critiquers (and I) were in when we began, I can’t help but agree. I, for one, had only an abstract, diaphanous bubble of an idea so unwieldy that it once led our most vituperative group member to slam his fist on the table and exclaim, “I have NO IDEA what’s going on here!” Yes, that was my story. With their help, it is now, I dearly hope, a much more structured way of telling a very abstract story. But only with their help.

4. We meet at a yummy place that has a fireplace and a long table we can hog if we get there early enough, and we sip hot chocolate and tea and eat cookies and think about writing. Really, what’s better than that? I even pretend it’s cold and Christmasy outside, even though it’s Austin and that takes more imaginative fuel than my entire story did.

5. And really, it’s just a miracle to me that I know these people. Sounds cheesy, but I so mean it. Like I said, it takes a special, very specific kind of person to keep going, going, going with a story when all you really have is your own faith that it’s any good, to just plain love your story enough to see it through. And that’s just the writing side of it. After all that, the writer may have developed thick skin or be a withered husk on the roadside—it matters not to the publishing industry. You still have to hunt for an agent, which can be devastating, or an editor, which can lead one to despair; whatever it is, you must endure rejection from the world at large—the Large World of publishing, which can loom over an unpublished writer like a scene from the movie “Brazil.” And I know five people personally who are doing just that. Count them—five. Five brave amazing single-minded souls determined to bring their work and passion into the world. I can’t help thinking if they’d been alive in Babylonian times, they would have majorly challenged the Assyrians to get out. Or been right behind William Wallace when he took on the British. They are warriors, innovators.

And as far as the members’ names go, they have been changed, of course. Worry not, fellow group members; I am a ninja of stealth.