Good writing is hard work!

It’s Pacific Northwest Writer Blog Hop time!

The hilarious and very smart Tiffany Pitts, author of Double Blind, tagged me with the following four questions about the writing process:

What am I working on?

Right now, I’m busily promoting my first book, Bark and Lunge: Saving My Dog from Training Mistakes, which has been so rewarding and fun, but it’s time for me to get back to work on the novel I started in 2009.

Fight Like a Lady is about a young woman who competes in mixed martial arts and rescues dogs from dog fights. Officially, I will resume work on it in November.

It didn’t start out being a dog book; the focus was meant to be on mixed martial arts, but evidently, I have a calling, and that is to write about dogs. I’m looking forward to adding a Fight Like a Lady page to this site, complete with a summary blurb, but first, I need to get a picture of a blue pit bull to represent Apollo, the leading dog in the book. We saw a really cute blue pit bull puppy at the dog park a few weeks ago, but I didn’t have my phone or other picture-taking device on me, so I didn’t get his picture. Hope we see him again.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I don’t know of any mainstream novels about women in mixed martial arts, so I’m hoping to break some ground there. The Battered Hearts series is the closest I’ve found, but that’s erotic romance, which my book is not.

There is an emerging category of fiction that fits between young adult and adult adult, which they are calling “new adult.” Most of the popular titles in this category tend to be erotic romances as well. I hate to say that my book differs from others in the genre because it is not erotic, so I’ll put it like this: I think there is a market for fiction about a young woman in her early twenties, when she is out of college, but not yet on the path toward her life’s work, when she is trying to figure out what that might be.

But there is a romance in it. And sex. Perhaps I should make the sex steamier to sell more books.

Why do I write what I do?

I chose mixed martial arts because I wanted to write about something I knew a bit about, but where the character was not based on me. My earlier novels in progress were all thinly veiled memoirs. Then I actually wrote and published a memoir, and I certainly could write a few more of those, but not until I know how they will end.

I didn’t know I had a memoir to write about Isis until after she died. Only then was the narrative arc of her life clear. I may have a memoir to write about Leo and Mia and future dogs; we’ll have to see how their lives unfold. Other memoir topics I could explore are being “a little bit mentally ill,” and being “shacked up and child free.”

Writing is part of who I am. In the past few years, it’s become increasingly clear that dogs are my passion. That’s why I write about them. No offense, but I like them better than people.

How does my writing process work?

Quite a bit like this Peanuts cartoon I’ve had on my bulletin board for roughly 10 years:

I write a word. I get up and pace around the roof of my dog house. I write another. Sometimes I eat a cookie or take a nap. Frequently ideas come to me while I’m walking my dogs.

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I hereby tag:

Nancy Schatz Alton, ParentMap contributor and author of The Healthy Back Book and The Healthy Knees Book, as well as an upcoming memoir about parenting challenges.

and

Cinthia Ritchie, a marathon and mountain runner in Alaska and author of Dolls Behaving Badly, which was called “a fun read” by Publishers Weekly and “a compelling debut novel” by Booklist.