2012 Author Wrap-Up with Elizabeth Wein

Today celebrated author of Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein, is wrapping-up the year with us!

GC: What is best book you read in 2012?

EW: The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman.  

GC: What was your favorite thing you wrote in 2012? 

EW: A poem that goes in my current WIP, called, ‘Playing Statues.’  It was mostly written in my head and is about how to combat fear and boredom combined.

GC: What was your biggest writing struggle in 2012, and how did you overcome it?

EW: I had a lot of deadlines and I missed some of them.  Just kept going, really.  Persistence is really the only way I overcame it.

The mantra ‘Don’t get it right, get it written’ (which I believe is a quotation from James Thurber) keeps me going.  I am a perfectionist and I really have to force myself to plough through an imperfect draft.  But it’s the only way to get the work done.

I would say that the Internet is, in general, my biggest writing struggle because it is so distracting.

GC: What can readers expect from you in the new year?

EW: I’ve just finished a so-called ‘companion novel’ to Code Name Verity which is expected to be published in Fall 2013.  (I think.)  Also, I’ve got a short story called ‘For the Briar Rose’ (about the Pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones’s daughter Margaret and the painting of the Briar Rose pictures) coming out in Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, to be published by Tor in March 2013.

GC: Write down your 'Writing Resolution of 2013!'

EW: Stop Googling Myself.