In this stage, there is so much opportunity for doubt and second-guessing, for getting sidetracked, for fear. The goal is to finish, which seems a simple enough task at first, but can quickly become daunting and even crippling. Revisions, while they can also seem daunting, are often split into many smaller and more concrete tasks — clarify this character’s motivations during this scene, refine your word choice here, let’s spice up this action scene. Revisions are basically items on a checklist.

But drafting? Quite frankly, OY. There are days when finishing a book, when wringing this screaming, bursting, wild creation out of the nethers of the universe, can seem as completely insurmountable a task as, “Hey, list all of the ways in which Nathan Fillion, dreamy international superstar, is, like, totally the dreamiest.”

Ryan Gosling? No thanks.

Many writers in this situation — including myself, at times — seem to cope with the enormity of drafting by resorting to some pretty bad habits. We call our workspace “the drafting cave” or some other such term. We talk about binging on junk food, not getting enough sleep, falling out of touch with friends and family, forgetting what sunlight looks like (hint: it’s that bright thing that makes vampires sparkle), forgetting to shower, forgetting everything but our word count goal, and the next chapter, and the next. We tout this as something to be proud of, something to inspire awe, to emulate, to cheer about, as some kind of unspoken contest that proves us to be badasses or real writers or something.

No. WRONG. We do not need to sacrifice ourselves to “the drafting cave” in order to write a book. We do not need to forsake all other tasks, responsibilities, and non-fictional people to the abyss until we type the words “the end.” Yes, some sacrifice is necessary, of the flesh, mind, heart, and social life. Without sacrifice of some kind, there can be no true success, no learning, no art.

But, people, we don’t have to sacrifice our sanity and health to write a book. We in fact should not do such a thing, for the sake of ourselves and also for the sake of our writing. We write better when we live better, when we take care of ourselves. We need all those little brain trees functioning and firing at optimum capacity, after all, to fully realize the genius wordsmiths hacking their way out from within.

I therefore present to you 15 easy ways to survive drafting (with your sanity intact):

1. Stock your kitchen with healthy snacks. The evil, eeeevil evolutionary instinct to binge on Twizzlers and Chex Mix and JUMBO CHIPZ is never stronger than when camped out writing a book. But, friends, we must resist this urge for the sake of our brains (and our thighs). Snack on healthy items instead — fresh fruits and vegetables, hundred-calorie popcorn bags, nuts, cheese (but in moderation, and in small portions like string cheese, or with apples or something, not in the disgustingly gluttonous way I often have to resist scarfing down all the cheese in sight). Some of my favorite writing snacks: baby carrots, bell pepper strips, granny smith apples, bananas, pretzel sticks, and THIS AMAZING ORGANIC POPCORN FROM THE FAIRWAY MARKET (which I originally typed as FAIRYWAY MARKET, which is pretty accurate; the place is magical). These foods satisfy my urge to munch while keeping my brain sharp and my body from turning into mush.

2. DO allow yourself treats, though. Every now and then, have some Chex Mix. Have some Twizzlers. Get a big ol’ slice of pizza after a hard day torturing your characters into bad decisions and existential crises. It’s important for morale. But the key here, as with normal eating habits, is moderation. Too much junk slows down your brain, and can make those long hours at the computer even deadlier for your body.

I could eat this every day. But I won’t. FOR MY CHARACTERS.

3. Take breaks to exercise. Whether this is taking a walk around the block, going for a hardcore run, or just doing some stretches and crunches in your living room, taking the time between bouts of writing to move your body, get the blood circulating, and breathe some fresh air can do wonders. You are not a Tibetan monk, achieving enlightenment by sitting still and meditating on the wonder that is life the wonder that is your soon-to-be bestseller. You’re a normal human being going for the mental equivalent of running a marathon, so pace yourself. Work that body, baby.

4. Read while you write. Don’t read books that are so similar to what you’re writing that plot details from that book start to bleed into your own. But books that achieve the sort of emotion, complexity, and tone that you want to achieve with yours? Books that inspire you and remind you how much you love writing? Books that make you want to climb to your roof and bare-breastedly shout out their virtues to the entire world? Yes, read those books while drafting. If — no, when — we encounter stumbling blocks in our writing, few things can push us through them more effectively than reading something that makes us think, “Yes. This. THIS is what I want to achieve. I can do this. I CAN DO THIS. BARE BREASTS*.”

If you thought you’d see a picture of bare bosoms here, you would be wrong.

5. Don’t let that shiny new idea distract you. We’ve all been there: we’re slaving away on our draft, and it’s getting to that point where all the words are blurring together, and we’re tired of this, and it’s hard, conflabbit, and then . . . oh, then we’re sudsing in the shower and inspiration hits, the tricksy hobbit. It says, “Forget that story you’re working on now. It’s lame. You’re wasting your time with it. But I’m exciting and awesome, and I’ll be the next big thing. Promise. Let me be your Hunger Games.” RESIST THIS HOBBIT, Y’ALL. Don’t get distracted. If a shiny new idea comes to you, great! Welcome it with open arms and a big, happy smile — and then slam it down in your idea file and don’t look at it again until you’re done with your current draft. Otherwise you’ll keep getting distracted by every new idea that pops into your head, and you’ll never finish the current one, and you’re not a raccoon, okay? (If you are a raccoon, and you can read this, shoot me an email, because UNICORN would like a playmate.)

The raccoon, he nibbles at all the ideas. And then he gets hit by a car.

6. Don’t pay attention to other writers. I don’t mean shun your writer friends until you’re done with your draft, and I certainly don’t mean forsake all writerly social media in favor of breeding your darlings. What I mean is, don’t focus on who’s getting what deal and for how much, and how many words per day this person is writing, and that person’s drama, and all the noise that generates from thousands upon thousands of writers all clamoring for attention and understanding and publicity in a forum where anything goes (read: the Internet). A person can only take so much, and you’re already taking on more than your allotted amount simply by writing a book. So turn off the noise and ignore what everyone else is doing. They don’t matter; your book matters.

7. DO pay attention to the non-writers in your life. Having this external focus, this perspective on life that is much grander and more important than your main character’s love triangle, will keep your brain focused and clear, and therefore result in a clearer and more focused draft. It’s very easy for us writers to get stuck in our heads; what makes us better writers, though, is balancing the internal with the external, craft with experience, thinking with doing. And it’s refreshing to spend an evening ragging on celebrities with your roommate, or chatting about decorating ideas with your mom, or exchanging recipes with the guy who sits on the corner in his lawn chair. You’ll come back to your draft refreshed and emptied out of all the braingook that builds up when the only thing to consume it is fictional characters, aka, braingookians.

Brains are awesome and everything, and I’m glad I have one, but they are also pretty gross.

8. Make sure your writing area is your own. Some of us write in the same place, at the same time, and for the same duration every single day. Some of us write whenever and wherever we can grab a spare minute, whether that’s a desk at home or a coffee shop on our lunch hour. Wherever it is, take a minute or two at the start of your writing session to make sure your space is your own — you have your coffee mug, your water bottle, your (healthy!) snack reserve; you have your necessary research materials, your headphones, your lucky pen. You are ready to go, and you won’t have to get up for anything once you begin.

9. Don’t go back and re-read earlier parts of the draft. Other than the bare minimum we have to read sometimes to check plot details or character consistency from earlier portions of our drafts, we really shouldn’t go back and re-read stuff we’ve already written until we’re completely done with the draft. We can’t know the true state of our story until it’s finished and we can step back and look at it all at once, from beginning to end. Drafting is for getting the words down; revisions and re-writes come later.

10. Write offline as much as possible. This is kind of a no-brainer, but seriously — it blows my mind how much more productive I am, not only in word count but in quality of words, when I close everything — my email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even sometimes my entire browser — and focus solely on my words. Sometimes we have to do research while we’re writing, but I maintain that most nitty-gritty research should be done in the planning or revision stages, not while drafting. That’s what outlining, brackets, and again, revisions, are for. Write where there is no wi-fi. Use a program like Freedom to force you offline, or just simply have the willpower to stay offline yourself. “But I have to network and stuff!” our inner promoters shout. Yes, we do. But not while we’re writing.

11. GET GOOD SLEEP. There is nothing romantic or impressive about the sleepless writer slaving away, kept awake only by insanity and all that caffeine the grocery store once had. Lack of sleep does bad things, very bad things, to our brains, and therefore to our writing. Also, it’s bad for our skin. Truth! Sometimes there will be those long nights when we’re on a deadline or when inspiration strikes, but all those other times? Really, we should just suck it up and go to bed when it’s time to go to bed. We’ll feel better in the morning, and our words will show it.

12. Establish good, frequent, and healthy rewards for yourself. “When I finish this chapter, I’m going to chat with my boyfriend!” “One more scene, and then it’s candy cane shopping time!” “After I type 1,000 more words, I’m going to blast some Madonna and get jiggy wit’ it! Or some other reference that is not so heinously outdated!” These are healthy, and I think we would all agree awesome, rewards for working hard. Positive reinforcement: it’s a powerful thing.

13. Don’t be afraid to jump around. I don’t mean like physically jump around the room, although that could be fun, too! Especially if you look like this. What I mean is, if you hit a stumbling block mid-draft, don’t be afraid to jump to a different part of the draft to get the juices going again. No one said we have to draft our stories in order from beginning to end.

14. Read passages aloud. Okay, so I know I said don’t go back and re-read earlier portions of your story, and I still mean that. But reading aloud a passage that you’re currently working on, or reading aloud a bit of what you wrote yesterday before beginning today’s writing, is a great way to 1) refresh yourself about what you need to write next, 2) work through a tough scene, and 3) have fun. When you read aloud, do all your characters’ voices! Especially if there are people around, because it can be fun to freak out passersby. Pretend like you’re reading for an audience who has never heard the story before. Nothing illuminates odd word choices or logical fallacies like hearing the material read aloud.

15. Don’t stop until you’re done. Ignore your doubts and fears and just barrel through. As I said before, you can’t possibly know the true state of your draft until it’s done, until you’ve set it aside for a few days and come back to it with a clear head. And if you stop before you’re finished, you might lose all your momentum; you might lose focus or inspiration. A rolling stone gathers no moss, and a writing writer doesn’t have time or brainspace to freak out. A writing writer is writing, and that’s it; and a writing writer will soon have a finished draft, which is cause for celebratory cheese, and isn’t that what this is all about? a nice way to cap off a job well done?

*Please don’t go out on your roof and yell things bare-breastedly. Just, don’t. I cannot be held responsible for your tomfoolery.

For years now, I’ve been planning and fantasizing, watching movies and television shows located here and wondering what it’s really like and how I can just get there already, and now it’s actually happened: I’ve moved to New York City.

Moving here, halfway across the country and away from everything I’ve ever known, was an ordeal.

But I’m rapidly discovering that while the move itself was, yes, an exhausting, terrifying, and exciting experience, what comes after the move itself is even more so:

Developing a new routine.

I now live in a place that is completely unlike anywhere else I’ve ever lived. I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. I now live in Harlem (which, according to Google, many New Yorkers consider to be “up in the suburbs,” which makes me LOL AS I HAVE NEVER LOLED BEFORE). I live in a huge, crowded, noisy city. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a beautiful city, too, and I think my neighborhood is awesome. But it’s still huge, crowded, and noisy. I knew that it would be huge, crowded, and noisy. But it’s one thing to know something and quite another thing to live something.

Little luxuries that I enjoyed my whole life and always took for granted — a dishwasher, a washer and dryer in my house, a garbage disposal — have disappeared. Is this shallow of me to care about these things? I don’t think so. It’s an adjustment, being used to one lifestyle and then suddenly having another one. I can’t just pop in my laundry one evening while writing and watching 30 Rock. I have to go down the street to the laundromat and adjust my schedule according to the laundromat’s schedule, to the other patrons’ schedules. I can’t just hop in my car and drive around to do all my errands in one fell swoop one afternoon. No, I have to walk everywhere, and then lug it all back up four flights of stairs. Granted, I will be in killer shape by the time all is said and done, but STILL. The convenience factor is way past gone. (Yes, I am totally thinking “#firstworldproblems” as I write this.)

Now, I don’t mind doing all these things; far from it. I’m incredibly lucky, to live in such a dynamic whirlwind of a city, to have achieved my dream of living here and doing exactly what I want to do (writing). I love walking, and I’m certainly enjoying the exercise, and exploring my neighborhood is so fun.

It’s just different. And I’m feeling a wee bit intimidated. And flooded with things to do.

The actual act of moving in, comparatively speaking, is easy. You box everything up, figure out a way to get it here, get it here, and unpack. Easy peasy.

But then what?

Then, you have to figure out the best place to do your laundry. Find a new gym. Find a new doctor, dentist, hairstylist, grocery store, pharmacy. A new sandwich shop, a new hardware store. You have to decipher the rhythm of your neighborhood, find the shortcuts and the places to avoid.

I can’t tell you how close I came to crying when I realized there was a Subway sandwich shop at the corner of my block. Yes, a cheesy Subway sandwich shop, which most New Yorkers would probably turn up their noses at or something. But that’s what I grew up around. And it was so nice to see even that cheesy slice of familiar in the middle of . . . everything else.

I had my cheesy Subway sandwich. And it was GOOD. And now, after a relaxing weekend of writing and recovering from the move, I’m putting together a list. Every day, I will write. And every day, I will go do one or two things in my neighborhood and then cross them off my list: find a branch of the library and sign up for a card; find the gym I like best; figure out the laundromat and wash my towels.

I already did one thing, the other day. I found the post office and mailed a couple of things. It felt like such a TRIUMPH, let me tell you (even though, in my fluster . . . ment, I put the stamps on the wrong way, and the postal worker had to take them off and put them on the right way while there was a line building behind me, and I was so embarrassed I thought I would either DIE or start screaming I PROMISE I KNOW HOW TO MAIL THINGS OKAY, and I have never in my life felt more like some stupid spoiled girl from the suburbs, even though I am sure this incident will soon be surpassed by many others, and even though the postal worker was perfectly nice about it and called me “Honey”.)

And each of these little triumphs, each little task that I complete, no matter how intimidating and terrifying they may at first seem, will take me one step closer to developing a new routine, a new life. Each task will be like a little handshake with a different part of my neighborhood, and soon I will have gotten to know all of it, and soon everything will be okay.

In the meantime, hop on over to the gals at Swoontini, a fabulous blog run by Lauren Billings and Christina Hobbs, YA writers agented by Holly Root. These girls are hilarious, sweet as cupcakes, and interviewed me as part of a blog series highlighting authors they love! Check it out! I talk about The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, books that make me swoon, and I do not talk about unicorns at all.

. . .

HAHA I’M JUST KIDDING there must always be unicorns.

Oh, and did you know it’s Valentine’s Day today? Crazy, huh? We are indeed creeping ever onward toward the apocalypse.

To celebrate, below is one of my favorite 30 Rock clips, and lo! It is Valentine’s Day-related!

*HUGS FOR EVERYONE*

I’ve been waiting for hours.

The thing about life is, it’s one giant Kobayashi Maru test. You know what that is, right? It’s this test from Star Trek, which sounds funny — haha, Star Trek, cheesy special effects, nerds in basements — but first of all, if you think that about Star Trek, we can no longer be friends, and secondly, the Kobayashi Maru test is not funny at all.

It’s a test young military officers have to take before they can graduate. It’s a test you can’t pass, a no-win scenario. The point of the test is not for you to beat it (I’m talking to you, James Kirk), but rather to measure how you handle it.

Life is like that. No matter what trendy Internet vernacular says, you can’t really win at life. You can’t beat life. At the end of the day, it isn’t how you die or how much money you make; you can’t really compete with others and rank lives according to greatness because living is subjective. Who are we to say that someone else’s life is greater or lesser than ours? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure; one man’s destitution is another man’s boundless riches. One man’s tragedy could contain a jewel greater than the entire sum of another man’s triumphs.

And at the end of the day, everyone lives and everyone dies, and everyone goes on to whatever is next, or goes on to nothing.

You can’t get out of that; you can’t cheat the inevitability of death; even Voldemort couldn’t do that.

What matters is how we live. How do we handle the Kobayashi Maru test that is life?

Do we take the plunge? Do we try for the impossible, do we dare to love deeply and wildly? Even though the opposite of these highs are lows more bottomless than the deepest hellish inferno, even though by dreaming and imagining and striving for what others say can’t be done, shouldn’t be done, can’t be done we risk unimaginable failure, despair, loneliness?

We don’t have to; we can stay safe. We can stay stable. We can only love halfway, never quite giving away our full hearts. We can reach for only unremarkable heights, because the higher you reach, the more spectacular the potential crash; and if we reach only as far as we can around our middles without stretching ourselves too much, there’s little danger of disaster.

This, of course, is a Kobayashi Maru test in itself: Do we try for ecstasy and risk catastrophe? Or do we choose stability, steadiness, safety? Do we open ourselves to all experience and ambition, to all emotion? Or do we remain closed off, never running too fast, never flying too high?

Huge stakes or small stakes? High risk or low risk? Uncertainty or guarantees?

Either way, we are hurt — whether from action, or inaction; whether it is a piercing, violent pain or something subtler than that, more muted, less immediately agonizing.

Lots of things in my own life recently have posed these questions to me. I’m afraid of what’s coming, of what I’ve committed to, and at times, I admit, I’ve been tempted toward safety, toward the road free of twists and turns, bumps and bruises and bloody knees. It would be so much easier. It helps the knots of fear unwind, to imagine traveling down this road.

But what about those mountains over there, with their steel-slick precipices and glorious summits? What about the valleys, the bogs, the temptestuous oceans rolling to shore?

I want to see what secrets they hold. They are not kind, these places; they are shaped by both happy and unhappy chance.

But their secrets. What of those? I want to know them, no matter what.

If I must take the Kobayashi Maru test, and fail, as everyone must, I will do so not meekly, not dispassionately, not hiding behind my fears and my desire for straight, clean roads. I won’t cheat the test, either, trying to find a way out of it. I will barrel through this test with grace and verve, guns blazing, sparks flying. I will risk doom, and I will risk bliss.

Come with me?

I’m excited, too, don’t get me wrong. But, oh my god. The closer it gets to moving day, the more I find myself thinking, “So, you realize you’re crazy, right?”

Rationally, I know it’s not crazy, this move. People do it all the time. Even people who, like me, have only ever lived in one place and for whom picking up and moving is not a matter of “Ugh, I’ve got to get AWAY from this place, I HATE it,” and more a matter of “I want to try this. I’m going to miss home and my family and friends — DEEPLY — but I want to try this. I have to.” It’s not that I don’t like my home. No. I just want to see what else is out there.

And that’s great and all, but it also makes it much harder to leave. I’m not running from something; I’m running toward something, and that’s much more difficult to do.

So, I’ve found myself driving a lot lately, since I’m selling my car and won’t have easy access to one in the city. I love driving. Love it. I love racing down the highway (smartly, of course; I’m an excellent driver; I buy my underwear at K-Mart) and letting the wind run through my hair, or singing at the top of my lungs, or cranking up my favorite Hans Zimmer score and letting my brain percolate some story ideas. I love driving for miles under a big Texas sky.

Below are some of the songs I’ve been listening to, because the car is one of the few places I’m allowing myself to get emotional over leaving because, you know, I HAVE A BOOK TO WRITE, and also, I’ve got to get in the wild highway singing while I can:

And then, for a change of pace (and when I feel like avoiding the danger of crying while driving), I’ve been listening to a lot of Hans Zimmer’s Angels & Demons score lately. The problem is it makes me want to drive like ninety miles per hour. I cannot emphasize enough the dramatic WONDROUSNESS of this music. Add a little epic to your day:

Just . . . just go to like 5:40 in on “Air,” the track below. Just do it.

You want to go driving and crank it up now, don’t you?