THE ART OF FORGETTING is out in paperback today! DailyCandy calls TAOF “fast-paced, funny and renewing” and The Chicago Tribune says “Pagán writes with both a subtle sense of humor and great wisdom.”

To (re)launch my novel into the world, I’m hosting a big giveaway: Get a copy before Friday and I’ll send a free copy to the friend of your choice.

If you’re interested, email me the name and address of the person you’d like to send a copy to along with your receipt or other proof of purchase.

As always, thanks for your support!

—Camille

Mother's Day weekend with my little animals

Did you read this Motherlode post, about a woman who knew her Mother’s Day would be the last she spent with her children? As her friend Jody Becker recounts,

But it happens. Every year.”

I’m happy to report that novel number two is going swimmingly! I’m at the 20,000 word mark—which means I’m about a quarter of the way through the first draft. For me, that’s the point at which I can tell if a book is going to work or not, and this story shows no signs of letting up (neither in my head nor on the page).

That said, the novel has been so all-consuming that I’ve been neglecting this blog; by the time I do my “day job” (magazine journalism) and work on fiction, I don’t have the brain power to regularly put together the type of posts that I had in mind when I first created theWAHMdiaries.

I’m okay with that. My goal has always been to be novelist, not a blogger. A blog is a wonderful creative outlet, but I’ve come to realize that I have a few too many creative outlets—and that I’m most productive when I focus my attention and efforts. With that in mind, I’m rolling theWAHMdiaries into my main website within the next week. (I’ll post when that happens so all thirteen of you who stop by regularly can bookmark the new page ). There, I’ll continue to post thoughts about writing, parenting, and making the whole mess work—while also sharing news and updates about my novels (like the new cover for The Art of Forgetting‘s paperback release!) and the rest of my writing. I hope you’ll swing by.

—Camille

Gang, I’m taking the rest of the week and the long weekend off. I’ll be back after September 5th (my seven-year anniversary!) with some news about the blog. In the meantime, have an amazing holiday.

—Camille

How funny is this?

You can see the real poster here. (By the way, the movie actually looks cute, and I loved the book—did you read it?)

—Camille

I haven’t been home for an entire month since February. And I’ve only been home for one whole weekend since mid-July. Which seems impossible—but between family travel to introduce our son to my husband’s family (who are scattered across the country; we went to Puerto Rico, Atlanta and Orlando and still didn’t manage to see everyone); book-related events on various coasts; and weddings and baptisms, we’ve been living out of suitcases for what seems like forever.

That’s about to change. Our family loves to travel, but after spending last weekend in Chicago, my husband and I had a pow-wow and decided that it’s time to slow the pace for the rest of the year. I have some mandatory trips planned—New York over Thanksgiving and a fun trip to Providence for a wonderful breast cancer benefit at the end of September—but that’s it. (It almost pains me to type this; I’m itching to get to Seattle to see my friend Sarah and I want to head back to Chicago to see my girlfriends and their new babies soon).

Still, I’m excited to settle back into a comfortable rhythm at home. Not only was constant travel making it hard to sleep train our little guy (who was once a champion sleeper, but is now waking up one to two times a night, making this mama drag), it was also preventing me from making adequate progress on my novel: it’s hard to spend all morning writing when you’re in a hotel room with two kids squawking, or when you stay up until the wee hours with old friends.

I’ve written more than 1,000 words a day every day this week (yay!). Simply knowing I’m not gearing up for chaotic, schedule-upending travel this coming weekend is calming my mental chaos. And though I wish it weren’t the case, I work best when I’m sticking to a routine. How about you?

—Camille

A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook that she adds trivial tasks to her to-do list just so she can cross them off. Confession time: I’ve done this, too. My bigger sin, however, is doing small stuff—think phone calls, filing, checking in with my accountant—early in my day so I can shrink my to-do list and feel productive (there’s something so addictive about crossing off to-do items, isn’t there?)

It’s a decent strategy on days where I’m dragging; then, at least I’m accomplishing something instead of staring at a blank screen.

More often, though, it means that I end up feeling rushed or burned out when I begin to do important work, like writing a magazine article or working on my novel.

Research from Roy Baumeister at Florida State University shows that humans only have so much willpower on any given day. Essentially, if you use all of your mental muscle on, say, attempting to stick to a strict diet, then you’re going to have a really hard time getting yourself to the gym, too. There are some ways to replenish willpower: taking a mental break and having a small, carbohydrate-rich snack (love that!) seem to help. In general, though, Baumeister’s research confirms what I’ve been feeling anecdotally in my own life: you have to put first things first if you want to make sure that you do them, and do them well.

With this in mind, I took a closer look at my schedule and realized that my worklife was upside down.

My career priorities are:
1. Write my second novel
2. Pay the bills with interesting magazine and online stories
3. Grow my blogs
4. Stay on top of paperwork and taxes

Yet this is what I was doing (in order), on an average day:
-Schedule sources for SELF story
-Check in on Twitter
-Check email
-Post event on Facebook fan page
-Write SvelteGourmand post
-Write draft of Arthritis Today story
-Check email again way too many times
-Fiction – revise last three pages, write 200 words
-Draft WAHM post
-Attempt to squeeze in more fiction

See what I mean? Totally backwards. So I’ve decided to make some changes. Namely:

1. Starting the day with what’s important. Right now, that’s fiction. It’s true that I’ve been writing novels at night for several years; I love that the evenings are quiet and my inbox isn’t blowing up. I don’t intend to entirely give this up, but I’m also going to start writing for a minimum of one hour, and ideally two, each morning before I move on to magazine stories, blogging and the rest of the day’s work.

2. Making smarter, priority-driven to-do lists. Now, the non-urgent stuff gets grouped together in its own section and listed after everything that’s important.

3. Using online diversions as rewards rather than time-sucks. The willpower research I mentioned above supports the notion that it’s impossible to do intensive work around the clock—i.e, as much as I’d love to, it’s not realistic to think that I can spend three hours on a novel then dive right into a research-heavy magazine draft without a break. So, instead of allowing myself to pop into Twitter and check email whenever the mood strikes, I’ve begun using them as a reward for when I finish an intensive task. So far, this has cut down on the amount of time I waste online, and I’m more focused while I’m writing, too.

4. Taming trivial tasks. In the name of a less-intimidating to-do list, I’ve resolved to stop doing things that don’t really need to be done, rescheduling things that don’t have to be done today, and delegating tasks that someone else can do. Yesterday, for example, I was on deadline for two stories, so I opted to skip all administrative tasks and scheduled them for later in the week instead.

I’ll check back in in a few weeks to report on whether my new strategy is effective. In the meantime, any to-do list or willpower techniques to share?

—Camille

A reader contacted me to see if I’d weigh in on a career question. She asks,

I’m a freelance writer and I don’t have a website. I worry that when editors Google my name, they won’t be able to easily find my contact information. But creating a site seems overwhelming (scanning my clips will take ages and I don’t have a scanner) and expensive, too. What should I do?

My initial reaction to this question was yes, as a freelance writer, you should have a website—even a basic, one-page site or a blogger page that bears your name so that when editors search for you, they can quickly and easily pull up your contact information.

It’s true that LinkedIn allows you to make your résumé easily accessible to anyone who wants it—but having a website seems even more professional. (When I was working as an editor, I felt that writers with websites made my job easier; if my boss asked, “What has this writer done before?” I could simply email her the link and bam, job done).

As for scanning, at least a few of your stories should be online, so in the short term, use those links on your website and worry about scanning some of your best clips later (you don’t need to put every single thing you’ve ever written on there—just the best or most reflective of the writing you’d like to do in the future is fine). Registering a domain name at a site like GoDaddy or Domain will run you around $10-$30. Hiring a web designer will be more expensive, unfortunately (expect to spend anywhere between $300 and $1,500 for a basic site with a decent design and a few pages), although it’s a worthwhile investment, and a tax write-off, too. If you want to do it on the cheap and are willing to spend a bit of time tinkering, consider using a DIY Thesis WordPress theme.

To get another perspective, I reached out to Maggie Mistal, who CNN calls “the nation’s best known career coach.” (By the way, if you’re not following Maggie on Twitter, you should be—she has amazing advice for freelancers and traditional 9 to 5ers alike). I asked Maggie if a website is a must for running a business, freelance or otherwise. Here’s what she had to say:

“You don’t have to have a website to have a successful business. A client in consulting has been doing very well without one though his reputation and network (very important for his business success) are things he has been cultivating for years.

A website isn’t a must because you can’t do business without it, but because it makes it so much easier to do business. It offers immediate legitimacy to a start up or freelancer and makes it easy for people to know who you are, what you can do & easily send referrals your way. Now sites can also capture a lot of data too, so you can better target your product or service with the insights.

I usually recommend a splash page (a simple one pager that is an online brochure of sorts). It doesn’t cost as much as a full blown site nor do you have to have everything decided. In other words, your business or brand can evolve with a splash page at first, until you get to the point where you know the kind of full-blown site you really need.

With the proliferation of social media, you can create a brand using just FB, LinkedIn and Twitter but eventually you will want a custom designed home for your brand, and I think a website still delivers in ways these other tools cannot (yet).”

Thanks, Maggie! Readers, what do you think? Does being a successful freelancer writer require having a website?

—Camille

P.S. If you have a question about writing, being a work-at-home parent or anything in between, email me at camille (at) camillenoepagan (dot) com. I’ll keep it anonymous, and if I can’t answer your question, I’ll reach out to an expert who can.

Many writers don’t read their reviews. I wish I was one of them, but alas. I’ve become much better about it; however, I still like to see what people on Amazon are saying, and let’s be honest, I’m not going to not open a review from a major paper, magazine or website. (Glowing reviews are always a nice boost, but I also think it’s possible to learn from constructively critical ones, too, which is part of the reason I read them.) However, over the past few months, I’ve realized that there are a couple types of reviews that aren’t worth a second thought—whether they’re about my book, or someone else’s:

1. The entirely negative review. Can you think of a single novel that’s completely without merit? I can’t, and I say this as someone who reads authors from Homer to Alice Munro to Janet Evanovich. There are tons of books that I haven’t liked, but I can always see why other people might enjoy them. Plus, to read a book is to learn something new about writing. When I come across reviews that fail to describe any of a book’s strengths, I have to question where, exactly, the reviewer is coming from and whether they’ve really thought critically about what they just read.

2. The troll review. The week my novel was published, I discovered I had a troll. This person left, not kidding, nearly a dozen dreadful reviews and blog comments (which I discovered via Google alerts, which, by the way, is not your friend if you’re trying to avoid reviews), essentially warning readers not to waste their money. I told my husband and he deemed this individual a troll, a label that immediately put things in perspective. A troll a) has too much time on his or her hands and uses said time to repeatedly blast a book, and b) has a bee in his or her bonnet about the author, for whatever reason. Although once you’ve dealt with one, you’ll be able to spot the next one from a mile away and realize that their ridiculousness is not worth getting worked up over.

3. The anonymous review. I’m sure many people would disagree with me, but I put zero stock into a review if it doesn’t have a name attached to it. When your own reputation isn’t on the line, the temptation to be nasty, insincere or overly critical is too high, and I suspect this is why certain trade publications that publish anonymous reviews are the ones that consistently have the snarkiest coverage. It’s true that by dismissing bad anonymous reviews, I’m saying the good anonymous reviews don’t count for much, either, but it’s a trade-off I’m willing to make.

Writers: do you read all of your reviews? If you do, do you ignore certain ones—and why or why not? Readers, how much do reviews influence your book choices?

—Camille

Need a good summer read? I loved Jael McHenry’s debut novel The Kitchen Daughter (and not just because it contains an amazing brownie recipe, although that didn’t hurt). It’s the story of Ginny Selvaggio, a woman with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome who copes with family tension by cooking.

If you haven’t read it yet, Svelte Gourmand—a.k.a. the other site I blog at—is giving away a copy. Head over there and post a quick comment to be entered.

—Camille