"To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone — just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over." ~ John Hersey

Hi! Thanks for stopping by my Livejournal. I'm Kathleen Foucart (rhymes with Go-Kart), aspiring author and proud writer of YA fantasy & paranormal romance. Feel free to explore the tags and archives and to add me to your Friends list.

Who am I?

I'm a graduate of the MFA in Children's Literature program at Hollins University and a member of Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. I'm married to my wonderful Hubby, who apparently doesn't think I'm too crazy (or at least, too crazy to marry). We have a Great Dane named Emma Hermione; she has a big bark, but is really a cuddle-bug (just watch out for her talons).

You can find me on Twitter and Facebook. Aside from writing, I read, sometimes knit, watch too much TV (and Netflix-- Instant Watch is the devil and I love it) and drink too much coffee.

What do I write?

I write books about teenagers for teenagers (and adults) who like to read about wizards, magic, werewolves, vampires, shape-shifters, faeries, and a lot of other things that may or may not exist. ;-) And while I don't rule out writing non-fantasy stories or books for adults, YA fantasy is where my heart is.

I've got three completed manuscripts (not counting all the near-misses that were my tutorials in "how not to write" when I was younger), one in the querying stage and two in revision.

WINGS & FANGS: BEWITCHED is a paranormal romance about a sixteen-year-old immortal shape-shifter who rescues a classmate from a werewolf, only to find this classmate isn’t all he seems. It's got mystery, soul mates who don't always like each other, a six-year-old psychic and plenty of angst.

ACCURSED is about a girl who was kidnapped as a baby, at seventeen steals Cursed objects from haunted houses, and has just learned the one person she's trusted her whole life has lied to her. There's blackmail, lots of kissing, chatty ghosts and family secrets.

THE TIES OF BLOOD (formerly ARION) is an edgy/dark piece about eighteen-year-old Arion Rapson, who lives in a Regency-era world and discovers his father is a Big, Evil Wizard-- and Arion has to train to take over. It’s got magic, potion-abuse, romance and lots of family turmoil.



If you have questions I didn’t answer, feel free to check my user info, ask in the comments section of any of my entries, or to email me at kathleenfoucart at gmail dot com.

I swear, I didn't mean to disappear off the planet after my last post, but apparently that's what I did. Sorry!

I've been feeling "off" the last couple weeks-- that "not-quite-sick-but-not-OK" exhaustion/sore throat/headache ickness. Since my blood work came back normal, I'm treating it like an annoyingly long & mild cold. What does this have to do with my writing blog?

Well, mostly that I haven't had the energy to post anything, nor the brain power to say anything even remotely coherent, but I didn't want to keep ignoring the blog! So here's a list of things going on with me, each hopefully short enough to make sense:

1) Revision has seriously turned into REvisioning on TTOB. It's a fun challenge, taking these characters I know so well & dropping them in new situations. Or at least, I assume it will be more fun once I actually get more writing done-- I've been plotting lately.

2) Speaking of plotting, I've been reading my copies of the Save the Cat! books and using the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet for determining plotting/pacing issues. It's really helped me figure out where my story is bloated (*coff* second half of act 2 *coff*) & where I have more room to play than I thought. I've still got a very high aversion to pre-writing outlining (mostly because it gets me nowhere but frustrated), but for me, as a post-completed-draft tool, the beat sheet is wonderful.

3) My in-progress/TBR pile is very blue/black right now (meaning the cover colors). I'm re-reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and reading The Grimm Legacy by Polly Schulmann (love it!). On the TBR side there's Bitterblue, City of Lost Souls and Kiera Cass's The Selection. I got to meet Kiera a couple weeks ago & she's so super-sweet & nice! Also, apparently I've been living within like, 10 miles of another YA writer for years & didn't know it, since she lives in the town where I work! So I can't wait to dig into her book as soon as my brain stops being mush so I can read at a normal pace again! :)

4) I'm nearly at the end of the available episodes of both the original Law & Order and Midsomer Murders on Netflix instant watch. So sad! What other good detective/crime shows do y'all recommend? I already watch Bones, The Finder, Castle, Murder She Wrote, Psych, White Collar, Lie to Me, Monk & Sherlock. So... Let's just say I'm well-versed in TV crime shows, but I love recs from people! Bring 'em on!

5) I've found with the brain-mush lately that I need a better way of keeping my day organized. Random scrap-paper to-do lists aren't quite cutting it, so I was hoping someone might have a recommendation for me of some sort of daily scheduler? I'm not one who usually likes things like that, but I've found the older I get, the more I need something to keep me in line or I'll just play on Pinterest all day & forget what I meant to do! So, any thoughts?

How's Friday going for all of you???

I feel like in the last year or so I've really "gotten" revision. I knew, in theory, what revision was supposed to do, but even when I thought that was what I was doing, I wasn't entirely.

Now I know. And now it scares me.

I'm looking at TTOB with these new eyes and seeing... Issues. Ones I kinda-sorta knew were there, and other ones that were lurking behind the obvious. And they're big. And kinda scary. Cause they're going to involve ripping out a lot of things that have always been there (and when 'always' means nearly a decade, well... it's hard).

But the kind-of awesome part? Seeing what's there that does work. What is hitting the beats correctly, what's actually a good catalyst, what set-up works perfectly to break into the next act, I just never realized that was what it was before. So that's pretty darn cool.

And now that I've given myself permission to burn this draft to its core & start over... It's freeing. It's going to take at least another 2 drafts to get this to where I want to show M. (one to get it into dual-first narration/ new plot points & another draft of polish), but I'm excited to make this the book I always knew it could be.

I've thought about this post for a long time. Years, if I'm being honest. And now that I finally get to write it, all I can say is:

I have an agent!!!

I'm now represented by Miriam Miller of Irene Skolnick Literary Agency. She loves Gen & Wynne and ACCURSED is lucky to have her fighting for it :) (And me, for that matter!)


And if you're wondering, no, it still hasn't entirely sunk in!

The last few weeks my revision of DARLINGTON has been driving me crazy. I love Marna & Tennyson & Thacker & etc., but something just wasn't quite clicking. I wasn't still trying for perfection, at least, not in the same way. I'd started rewriting instead of tweaking an already-typed document: some things stayed, a lot of things changed or went away entirely. Honestly, I think this is The Best Second Draft Option, though I've only done it once before (when changing W&F from past-tense to present).

And yet... I kept getting bogged down in details. I've been working with these characters for over a year, but I still don't know them-- or their story-- as well as characters in some of my other works. Which is something that comes with time, yes, but it's definitely frustrating at this point when I want to work with them, but I'm having trouble getting motivations right.

My solution? Work on something else. Honestly, DARLINGTON doesn't have to be done immediately-- much as I'd like it to be-- and my heart-book has been begging for attention lately. So I've been working on rewrites on THE TIES OF BLOOD for the past couple days and oh, it's so frustrating in other ways! But wonderful.

Working with TTOB gives me an entirely different problem: knowing the characters and story too well. Some of the lines I re-read as I'm working are lines I wrote nearly ten years ago that have survived the various incarnations of this book. Many of them have to change now that I'm writing A. in first person for the first time since he showed up in my mind. And writing him in first person is difficult, too. I'm so used to having the step-back from his pain that is writing in third person. Not anymore. And it's not a fun place to be, despite his self-deprecating humor at times.

But it is helping me see DARLINGTON better, too. Realizing that ten years and four complete drafts haven't made TTOB the book it's meant to be (until now!) lets me realize that I can give myself some space with DARLINGTON, that I can re-plot scenes and fix things, because I've done it before. And I'll do it again-- both with TTOB and DARLINGTON and other stories.

I just have to give myself the space to see them for the stage they're in and not the stage I wish they were in.

The ever lovely Tiffany Schmidt has tagged me in the Lucky 7 game, and as I know how she feels about luck, I feel I should oblige her & participate :)

So here are the rules (copied from Tiffany):

Open your most recent novel or work-in-progress.

Turn to page 7 or page 77.

Count 7 lines down.

Copy (or read aloud in a vlog post) the next 7 sentences…in their entirety.
No cheating or editing!!!

Then tag 7 more authors!

And here's Pg. 7 of DARLINGTON:

A funny feeling crawled up my spine as I turned back to the door. No. He was foreign, and obviously an idiot, but he wouldn’t have gone back outside, near the forest, without a Night. Would he?

I pushed open the door, stepping into the night air in time to see his bright hair disappear behind a truck. I hurried after him, rain falling on me, water splashing from the puddles, until I reached the edge of the pavement.

The end of safety.


Now for the tagging! I will attempt to tag people that I don't think have been tagged previously or by others...

1) Robin Talley
2) Janelle Madigan
3) Amelia Ross (dust off that blog, Amelia!)
4) Amie Rose Rotruck (I know you're writing again, muahaha!)
5) Caroling Richmond (It's only 7 sentences, you can do it!)
6) Miranda Kenneally
7) Dhonielle Clayton

First off, thanks to everyone for the very kind comments on my last post. They meant a lot to me & I really appreciate how wonderful & supportive & understanding the writing community is.

Today I'm back at my revision, feeling all the twitchy, nervous irritation at imperfections. I look at all the post-its covering my manuscript, the notes scribbled in the margins and the foot-notes left in my documents and want to tear my hair out. How am I supposed to get all this done? It's too much, too big! Look at all these problems...

But while I was doing dishes I realized something... I'm being a perfectionist. Yes, I can see all these problems and I want to fix ALL THE THINGS. RIGHT NOW. Or better yet, YESTERDAY!

Um... Did I mention I'm only on my second draft of this piece?

I wanted this draft to be a better second draft than I usually write-- no, an awesome second draft! And without really admitting it to myself, what I was hoping to do was make it near-perfect.

Which is just silly. I was psyching myself out without knowing it, making it seem like I had to fix everything right off. I mean, if I could see the problems, why couldn't I just fix them?

Well, because writing doesn't quite work like that. Few things do, actually. Knowing what the problem is in the first place is a huge part of the battle, and the fact that I'd conquered that for a significant portion of the book should have been something I was celebrating. Instead, it just fueled my crazy need to make the second draft amazing.

What I actually need to do is let it go. Perfectionism doesn't get the book finished. Perfectionism doesn't even get a chapter finished. It makes me rewrite a sentence ten, fifteen times, taking a word out, putting it back in, moving a comma, then deleting the whole paragraph.

I'm an over-writer, so my second draft has to be a hack-and-slash or I'll waste time perfecting words that will just be cut. For some reason I thought I could tackle everything that needs fixing in this particular draft, and I can't. That's not how I write.

So instead of perfection, I'm going for professional-- realizing that I have do things the way I need to, in order to get a great finished product. And it might take me more drafts than I want it to (ACCURSED certainly did!), but I'm a better reviser (revisionist?) than I was this time last year, and I know what needs fixed.

So bring on draft two, draft three, draft four. I'm going to make DARLINGTON (title might be changing...) an awesome book, no matter how many times I have to go through it.

Last year on Glee there was an episode titled "Born This Way." During that episode, Miss Pillsbury (Emma) goes to see a therapist. The doctor wants her to begin sessions and take something for her OCD, and Emma resists. She says, "I don't know. I'm not sure I want to lay on a couch and tell some stranger all of my secrets. I don't want to start popping pills just so I can turn into someone that other people want me to be. This is how I am. This is who I'm supposed to be." And the therapist replies, "Your illness is not who you're supposed to be. It's keeping you from being who you're supposed to be."

I remember watching that exchange with tears in my eyes. It aired last spring. A few episodes before that I started crying as Rachel sang "How many times will it take to get it right?" I thought I was relating it to my writing. Listening to it now, I know it was more than that.

I've been depressed at least since high school. It got really bad my freshman year of college. That was when I knew I was depressed, that there was a problem. I didn't eat much, I stayed in my room, I didn't talk to people. That's what people think of when they think of depression, and when I went home for my second semester, I felt better. But that's not all it is.

It's two years later, realizing you don't feel quite right and going to a screening at your school's health center and being walked directly into the counseling office for an appointment (and only keeping a few before stopping).

It's staring into space when friends are having a conversation because you just can't follow it. It's being unable to get off the couch to do so much as call for pizza delivery, let alone go pick it up. It's letting the house get severely cluttered because it's just too much effort to put something away. It's chronically over-sleeping because, well, bed is better.

It's breaking down one night sobbing while your husband asks what's wrong and only being able to respond with "I don't know. Everything."

And it's fighting back enough to say "I need help. I need medicine."

This depression, it's not from one bad thing happening, or a few things. It's a constant feeling of being in a deep, dark pit. I could see people walking around above me, going along with their lives, and I just couldn't see how they did it. Things that might cause a person to be upset for a day would stay with me for weeks.

It's hard to understand from the outside. Hell, I don't even really understand it from the inside. I just know that for the last three weeks, I've realized what it's like to feel like a person. To not wake up every day with a sense of anxiety and dread. To be able to walk around my house and pick things up, throw things away. To not feel like I have to fight every single moment against this invisible barrier in my mind that's been keeping me from living.

I wasn't going to post this here. I have a private blog account with only a few close friends that have access to it and I was going to talk about this there. But I don't want to hide it anymore. That was what I did every day for over ten years: I hid behind a mask. I pretended to be okay. Even when it was super-obvious I wasn't, I only held that mask tighter.

But having depression is not shameful, so I'm not doing that anymore. I'm too tired. I am a person with depression. And yes, I hope to get off the medication at some point, but for now, I'm on it because it's helping me. And maybe I'll never be able to be off it for very long, but I'm not going to focus on that right now. Right now I'm going to focus on the fact that for the first time in my memory I know what it's like to feel like I'm actually living.

And... I think that's enough honesty for one day. I'll probably blog about how this is affecting me creatively (which was kind-of what I thought this would be, but apparently not!), but not today.

Thanks for listening.



These sites have helped me lately:
- Sara Zarr's amazing piece for Image Prozac vs. Jesus
- Help For Depression
- Alison Gresik's 10 Signs of Walking Depression

So apparently it's March already? When did that happen?

Since finishing my first draft of DARLINGTON last month I've been letting it sit, then re-reading it & working on my Shrunken Manuscript-- for my needs I've decided to mark it up according to beats, both where they are and where they should be. The difference between those two spaces shows me where I need to cut things down or elaborate.

Next up I'm putting my notes from my phone into my printed manuscript & making any other notes I feel are necessary before digging into the actual revising part. (Time for color-coded post-it flags! Yay!-- yes, this honestly excites me.)

Even with all this early prep work, there's going to be a lot to do once I dig into the active revising. I'm planning on tearing down a few chapters & completely rebuilding them, combining a few others & adding a few characters/scenes that my CPs have suggested along the way.

So if y'all don't see me around LJ in the coming weeks (or if you see me more often, hehe), blame revision brain.