This came up because I went to the February Space Bar Write In Yesterday.
I wrote about my first visit at the inaugural Space Bar last month, so this was my Second Time. Space Bar is communal writing space for isolated writers. They offer tables, quiet space, power (drinks and books for humans, electricity outlets with multi-plugs for devices).
The January Space Bar came just when I needed it: my editor had just retired and I wasn’t sure what would happen to the history mysteries that had been contracted through her. Ordinarily I would have started work on the next book by now, but I was having a bit of trouble getting down to it. Plus the next Su Lin trilogy is set in the Emergency years, which makes for depressing research.
So I decided to use my first Space Bar session to generate a new series. What did I have to lose, spending a Sunday afternoon in the library? And I came out with a vomit draft of almost 3000 words for my first middle grade fantasy—not bad, I thought.
One month later, we come to what I find the single most useful thing about having a monthly Space Bar check in; it gave me a point of external accountability. I told myself I would turn up for the February Space Bar with a (very, very) rough draft of Lily Lee and the Greedy Ghost to start on editing.
This is where are the flower tea balls come in.
My drawing's not great, but flower tea balls look really drab in real life too.
Flower tea bowls are dried flowers wrapped up in dried tea leaves. They're really more of a gimmick, but you can get some made with really good tea and the flowers are pretty.
This is kind of what they look like when you see them in tins in the Chinese tea shop.
Anyway, I stuck (figurative) flower tea balls all through my draft as place holders, so I didn't spend time expanding/ researching what I wanted to put in right away. Because I had a play target – to make it to the next space bar with something as close to 40,000 words as I could get.
The biggest benefit of having the Space Bar Play Target was the challenge it gave me. I didn't have to worry what someone might think of my writing—I just had to put words down in the draft, export it to Word (I work on Scrivener, but my agent and most editors I’ve encountered prefer documents in Word) and show up.
And I got over 30,000 words, a rough outline full of flower tea balls—
With all the flower tea balls in place, all I needed was time and hot water… and at the space bar I sat down and started stewing my way through it, expanding them as I moved through the text--
It seemd to work too, I got into a comfortable rhythm where I'd write for 50 minutes then walk around for 10 minutes, trying to chalk up at least 250 steps in that time.
Walking around the library looking at Books is one of the best ways of taking breaks from writing!
But then when I got home, there was a minor freak out! I couldn't find any record of any of the work I’d done that afternoon!
It turned out(thankfully) to be just a mixup. When you are kiasu (Singlish term term for being overly Singaporean) like me, you save multiple versions of your precious WIP when working on it anywhere other than home: in iCloud, in OneDrive and on a dongle… I'd spent the whole afternoon working on the OneDrive Copy and went home to look for it on the iCloud where of course it wasn't.
So – happy ending for now.
Flower tea in bloom, seen from above. Doesn't taste too bad either!
In a couple more days I'll have enough to polish up and show to my agent, just to see what she thinks and hope she finds it worth pursuing.
But it's no longer such a desperate case because it turns out, she'd got Happy news for me too – the new Editor at Little, Brown wants to talk about a new contract for the next Su Lin books!
If we get the contract signed, I know what I'll be doing at the March Space Bar write in: brain dump my first vomit draft of the (tentatively titled) Tembusu Tree Mystery!
Please wish me luck and happy reading and writing everybody!!
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