My all-time favorite author is Tamora Pierce. She writes books where with every scene, you think, “That’s the perfect thing to have happened!” Plus they include girls with swords, talking wolves and cats, and dragons.

My all-time favorite book is Beauty by Robin McKinley. It’s a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It’s one of my “comfort books” that I reread on rainy days.

Other favorites include Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane, Jack the Giant-Killer by Charles de Lint, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (okay, yes, there’s no sword and no dragon, but there is Darcy!).

I read almost exclusively YA fantasy these days. I’d like to pretend it’s for “research” (because those are the kinds of books that I write), but the truth is I read them because I love them… not-so-coincidentally, that’s the same reason that I write them.

The problem is that there are lots of people (and I mean LOTS) who want to be published and relatively few books that hit the shelves every year.  Because of this, it’s not enough to simply write a good book.  You have to be in the right place at the right time with the right thing.  You have to be lucky.

Here’s the thing, though: I firmly believe you can make your own luck, or at least that you can put yourself in a position to get lucky.  You can have the “right thing” by continuing to write.  As soon as you finish one story, start another one.  Through the act of writing, you will get better at it.  You can be in the “right place” by doing research.  Submit your manuscripts to agents and editors who are interested in work like yours.  And you can hit the “right time” by perseverance.  If you stick with it, then when the right time comes along, you’ll be there.

If you’re looking for the secret to publication, this is it: sheer, pig-headed stubbornness.

I think of my first draft like the skeleton. I don’t worry about the words at all. In fact, some scenes include lines like “And then something cool happens.” The goal of draft one is just to see if all the pieces connect together and if the shape looks like a person or like a marmot.

Next draft, I add the muscles. I fix the pacing and make the story move. Later comes the internal organs — heart so that the story has emotion, brain so that the story makes sense, lungs so that the sentences breathe with the right rhythm. Finally, I add the skin — fixing the words so that the sentences are as beautiful as I know how to make them.

The final novel (or person or marmot or whatever) usually has zero words in common with that initial draft. (Except, you know, words like “the” and “and.”) But all the underneath stuff that I developed over the course of all those drafts is in there.

Guess it’s kind of an odd process. But it works for me. Through each draft, I am reimagining the story, re-dreaming it as I rewrite it. For me, this is what makes the story come to life. It is as much a magical process as it is mechanical.

If I don’t write or if writing doesn’t go well on a particular day, I feel unsettled and unbalanced.  And really, really grumpy.  Suddenly, the house feels too messy to stand.  Everyone seems to have developed really annoying habits.  I obsess over the drip in the kitchen sink.  My socks feel too tight.

But if writing goes well, then I walk around and smile at everyone.  Everything is sunny, and I want to hug the world.  In other words, I feel like me.

So I try to write every day, and I keep writing through the bad writing days so that I can get to the good writing days quicker.  My husband thanks me for this.

I also think it would be cool to be able to talk to animals like Daine in Tamora Pierce’s Wild Magic, but I have the sneaking suspicion that that power would get annoying pretty fast. I can already guess what goes through my cat’s mind, “Hate you, hate you, hate you, eat you, hate you …”

Invisibility is an obvious “no” for me. (See klutz comment above.) I have enough trouble not tripping over my own feet when I can see them. I also have to say no to fire power and ice power. I like to be temperature regulated. Telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition all seem like they’d cause serious migraines. Telekinesis would be nice. I’d like to be able to feed myself some Raisinets without walking to the kitchen or to move the car to a better parking spot with just the power of my mind…

If I truly had the choice of superpowers, though, I’d want some sort of power (either a special healing power or simply ridiculous good luck) to keep the people I love healthy and happy. I think that’s really the only super power worth having.

I stopped listening at the word “writer.” I had always loved books — that’s thanks to my mom, who introduced me to Charlotte the spider and Faun Tumnus and Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper — but I had always thought of writers as these magical, mythical beings who cast these spells that enchanted me. Until my practical father listed it out as if it were an ordinary career, it simply hadn’t occurred to me that an ordinary person could become a writer.

After that, I latched onto the idea. I raided the library for every how-to-write book that I could find. I drew maps of imaginary places. I created lists of superpowers and magical objects. I even read the phone book in search of perfect character names. (Probably the only middle schooler for hundreds of miles to do that.) And of course, I wrote and wrote and wrote. And I never stopped.