Keira asks: “Would it be possible for you to blog about your writing processes and your daily schedules? <snip> A few days ago, I finished reading "Write Away" by Elizabeth George. She is a proponent of detailed outlines. In her book, she describes in great depth how her process works for her.”
From Pat Rice: When creativity is draining rapidly into the current Work in Process, a question about process is the best way to go. Keira, start figuring which of my books you’d like to have for saving me from more brain drain!
Process, like most of life, is something that’s always in flux. It’s best to “go with the flow” as we said in the seventies. Fighting change stifles creativity, so what I call my process now has gradually mutated from my process when I first started out, and I’ll pray my process in the future will be a lot easier.
(Okay, so my flow is an ocean and not a river, you get the picture, right?)
Currently, I keep a file labeled simply “ideas.” All those weird questions that occur to me, usually beginning with “what if,” are typed into a document and labeled in my computer file. My head is always occupied with characters, but they need situations to put them into action. Often, one of these ideas will simmer in the back of my mind until characters start taking it over. Other times, I’ll have a character demanding a story and nothing in the file works. Or is marketable. 
Either way, once the characters make themselves known, I start brainstorming what I can do with them. Sometimes they’re a mere nugget in my mind when my fellow brainstormers are ready to hold a “cauldron.” (or a tomato, or a lettuce leaf, whatever. It's all goes into the stew) By the time we leave our retreat, I’ll always have a pot of goals and motivations and a plot for the characters. Other times, we can’t get together soon enough, and I play with brainstorming on my own. This isn’t always easy and often takes weeks, sometimes months, but I simply sit down and start writing everything I know about my characters and the situation they’re in. I’ll list what I think are their goals and motivations and conflicts. They may change over time as I put the characters through their paces, and even when I have a full summary of what I think happens, things change as I write. Obviously, outlining won't work for me!
Throughout the creative process, I’m researching. With my current historical series, I have stacks of books on the era I’m writing about. Since my books will follow the path of history in sequence, I concentrate on the exact events that occur in the year my characters are living. I’ll read biographies of people who affect these events. Most of this research is fairly general, trying to get a rough grasp of the society and what might be involved as my story progresses, but the events gradually weave their way into the summary I’m creating.
Detailed research waits until I finally sit down and start writing. I’ve learned there’s no point in researching all costumes in the year 1790 if my heroine is going to end up wearing sackcloth and ashes most of the time. Or in the case of my historical fantasy, the hero wears the Greco/Roman/tropical garb that suits my made-up island. So I have books on costume, and books on guns and ships to be consulted as needed, but not before.
The actual process of putting the story onto the page isn’t easily defined. Since I don’t do detailed outlines, there’s a lot of trial and error in the beginning. The first book in a series requires a lot more world building than the following books. But the following books are forced to fit into the parameters created in the first. All of this requires a lot of head banging. <G> I’ll think I know a character, but once I start applying words to a page, unexpected things fall from my fingers. My summary might say “Mariel has the ability to swim like a fish beneath the sea.” But when I start writing her story, I have to start answering questions like, how does she breathe there? Does she prefer the sea to land? What would it be like to have this ability in an age and time when they still burn witches? Would she go to church? What holds her to her home when she has the ability to swim anywhere? That’s when the magic happens.
It’s the magic that keeps me writing. Writing is a lonely, frustrating job, but the moment a character takes over on the page, comes to life and starts thinking on his or her own, that magic is worth every minute of headbanging. It’s no wonder we call our books our “children.” The process is often much the same—inspiration, gestation, the agony of squeezing the story into the world, and the joy of watching it grow and develop a personality of its own.
There’s not a lot of room in this blog to go into more detailed explanation, and every writer is different, but this is my basic process. If any of our readers have more specific questions, I’ll be happy to try to answer in comments, and if the answers are too long, we’ll add them to our master question list. If we choose to blog from a question you ask, you’re entitled to a free Wenchy book.