Many a professional athlete utilizes a pre-game ritual to rev up their engines. These rituals can be as simple as kissing a rabbit’s foot for luck. Or as jolting as taking a cold shower 45 minutes before every match.

Writers have their own rituals to help them slip into the writing zone. I know one author who drinks a cup or two (or six) of coffee to crank the writing gears. Standing on one’s head for a solid length of time can do the trick, too, so I’ve heard. It’s a surefire way to rush blood…and ideas to the brain. Here are a few examples from well known authors:

– Charles Dickens wandered around London without any destination, sometimes for a dozen miles. This allowed his feet… and his mind to roam freely. If he didn’t walk, he said, “I should just explode and perish.”

– For some authors, it’s not any one thing, but a series of actions needed to sink into the zone: NBA basketball player turned author Paul Shirley starts his writing day with a bit of exercise and meditation, followed by a “fun” song; one that “energizes” him to get into the groove.

With all of this said, I confess that yours truly doesn’t have any set ritual. I’m a Dr. Jekyl and Mrs. Hyde when it comes to my writing. I tend to write in fits and spurts, as time permits, around my day job. On weekends, I’m expert at wasting a good amount of writing time before I sit myself firmly behind my laptop. And even then, I drift around before I throw out my anchor. Over the past two months, I’ve written 10,000 words of the first draft of my third novel. Do you think that’s a good amount? Wow, I nearly went deaf in one ear. I don’t either. Especially when those painful first drafts are crying out for revision.

But reading about other authors’ methods has inspired me. As I hope it has for some of you. I know that when I do sit and complete my writing goals, I feel utterly fantastic.

So, I’m going to dare myself, no double dare myself, (and any other willing participants) to find a writing ritual and stick to it. For the next month, I’m going to do just that…and report back. How about you?

I was fortunate to find a wonderful publisher fairly soon after I’d reached The End of my first manuscript. To reach that point, version #1 went through multiple revisions by yours truly (some say the number of rewrites was close to a hundred. I say it was 142). Although I had a few interested agents, when the offer to publish arrived, I couldn’t sign fast enough. And my publisher (The Wild Rose Press) ended up being absolutely wonderful. Author friendly, all the way. And my editor? Well, she, too, is fabulous.

When it came time to write Book Two, I was in a state of constant activity – between my day job, and writing and promoting, my head rarely stopped spinning. In a good way, not the demon possessed way of The Exorcist. Marketing opens many doors and some of these doors led to meeting truly great authors who write mysteries. But I was also lucky enough to have a book signing at a wonderful bookstore that catered to fans of romance. I discovered that romance authors were just as fab as mystery authors! Life was good.

Although my heroine skates around a possible romance, her main focus is solving a mystery. My publisher’s main focus was on romance. So I got to wondering what it might be like if I’d had a publisher who focused on mysteries? Could I even change publishers when I had a series going?

“No way,” I was told by other authors.

Except that I discovered one mystery author who’d switched after Book Two in a series from one publisher to another. Don’t know why or how, but I knew it had been done.

Fast forward almost a year, and I’d completed writing Book Two (with fewer revisions, thankfully). I set it aside and submitted a short story (my first!) to a mystery anthology publisher. It just so happened my submission was accepted. And that same publisher just opened to publishing mystery novels. I sent a query for Book Two and voila! I signed up for my next in the series along with two more. Hooray!

The road to publication isn’t a straight one. It has many offshoots, which means many different possibilities.

Here we are, most of us filled with hope and possibilities at the start of a brand new year. The best way to start anything new (or old) is with enthusiasm and energy. A bright attitude always helps. But sometimes, things happen to drag us down. I’m a little late in writing this post because the area that I live in was beset with terrible disasters with terrible results. How can we keep up our hopes when things unravel around us? It’s a challenge writing my lightweight mysteries when my mind is troubled. How to overcome one’s circumstances when they’re not so pleasant?

I looked for role models. Examples of exemplary behavior and actions. Things to uplift my thoughts and mind. I thought of other writers. And one jumped out at me. A young one, whose short life impacted so many. Her inspirational writings shared hopes and dreams, memorialized in a little red and white checkered diary given to her as a gift on her thirteenth birthday by her parents.

Anne Frank spent much of her life hiding during Nazi Germany. She wrote while living in an environment where hopes and dreams had no right to exist. But her writings were mostly positive. Take a look at these quotes:

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”

“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”

These pearls of wisdom come to us from a youngster living in one of the most terrible times in history. Yet she was basically telling us to always look up. To seek out the positive. Can there be more inspiration than that?

So the next time you feel yourself sinking, think of these words from Anne Frank:

“Cheer up, keep your spirits high, things are bound to get better!”