Writing on Tuesday with Cyn Balog

Hello guys! This Tuesday, I will be posting a guest post by Cyn Balog, the author of Fairy Tale and the upcoming Sleepless! I asked her if she encountered any struggle with her writing career. And I think, all authors go through struggles.

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Things went fairly easily for me when I was writing FAIRY TALE. I only did one draft and had minimal revisions, so maybe I got a little too confident in my abilities. When I was writing SLEEPLESS, things did not go very easy. First I was pregnant, and throwing up pretty much every time I breathed in. There is a thing called "pregnancy brain", and I had it, because I couldn't think of anything except how uncomfortable I was. I couldn't even dress myself properly, I kept tripping, I didn't know what day of the week it was, and I had to write a book, too???!! And I guess that gave me super-super-bleak outlook on life.

When I turned in the first draft of SLEEPLESS, my editor came back to me a couple weeks later, saying I needed to make it more cheery. Supposedly it was the most depressing draft of a book ever created. It was all about mutilations and death and hopelessness. Basically I needed to start over. Which I did. But of course, that was when reviews of FAIRY TALE were coming out, and not all of them were very nice. I had to ignore them, which was tough. And I remember sitting in bed thinking that writing was my career, the thing I'd loved and wanted all my life, I'd come so far already, and I was NOT under any circumstances going to give up and be a one-book-wonder. I wrote the next draft of SLEEPLESS in three weeks, with very little sleep, and I had to force myself to make it a little more cheery, even though I was nearly 8 months pregnant at the time and still feeling not-so-great. Let's just say I was very happy to hear when it was finally accepted and the editing process went very smoothly after that. But it is NOT FUN having to rewrite a book from scratch after you've poured so many months of blood and sweat and tears into it!

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Afterwards, I asked Cyn what she did to rewrite the draft. And she claimed she didn't know how she did it! This my dear readers, is what we call pure talent. There are things that can't be fully understood and explained, only fueled by creative juice and perseverance...and Cyn's rewriting of her draft without exactly knowing how she did it is one of those things.

A big thank you to Cyn for this guest post!
Check out Cyn's books! I must say this: I LOVE the cover of both books, especially Sleepless! Ack! I'm dying to read Fairy Tale!

Sleepless is coming out on July 13, 2010! For more information please go to Cyn's website.