Author: lleachie

I am an associate professor of human services at a regional Midwestern university. I am also a writer of fantasy and romance, hoping to get traditionally published. I have one husband and am owned by four cats.

Day 1 Lenten Meditation: Prayer



I’ll be honest — I don’t understand prayer anymore.

By “anymore”, I mean “not since I got put on medication for bipolar disorder. I have bipolar II, and my prayer life spun between being elated and feeling like I had a pipeline to our perception of God, and being depressed and praying in vain. Things are evened out, and my logical mind has taken over and made me question praying.

Does God grant our prayers? I wonder what happens when two football teams pray for a victory. Does God pick his favorite team? Does God bribe the referees? Choose the team that prayed the best?

If God grants our prayers, we rejoice that our prayers are granted. If God does not, we don’t say a thing. 

I’m not completely skeptical about prayer, though. I think prayer helps us find something within ourselves, strength or comfort or acceptance. I think that prayer fortifies us to help us face an unfair and unfriendly world. 

And prayer helps me find my keys in the mornin.

Lent: 40-some days of reflection

I will once again be doing #UULent reflections, even though I am not Unitarian Universalist and I’m not even sure I’m Christian these days given the bad name Evangelism/Fundamentalism are giving Christianity. I do like the concept of Lent as a period not of giving up but of growing up, and I feel like these prompts will help me focus on that outside of myself.  

These reflections will be on my blog for the next 47 days (whatever happened to 40 days of Lent?). Please join me in reading and reflecting, whatever your religious preference is. 

Novel in need of resuscitation.




I’m contemplating scrapping a novel.

Gaia’s Hands, my first book, needs so much help. I can’t even explain why, except that it just isn’t up to my standards. The B story (Jeanne and Josh’s relationship) doesn’t feel quite right. The A story needs a few adjustments. The magic seems intermittent and just wedged in.

All in all, I am frustrated with this story, even though I’ve rewritten it so many times it’s ridiculous.

It’s down to a short novel. Maybe if I cut enough, it can be a novella. I don’t see it getting larger again. 

Wish me luck.

The Day I Became an Introvert. (Personal)

All my life I thought I was an extrovert. I loved hugging people, I loved being around big crowds of people, I loved to talk. But then, when I passed through one of my frequent depressions, I felt like crawling into a hole and not talking to anyone.

Fast forward over a diagnosis of bipolar II, and a life change with medication, sleep protocols, and other lifestyle changes (no alcohol), and my moods are stable. However, I’ve discovered what I thought was natural extroversion was actually my hypomanic moods, and my normal state was introversion.



Yesterday, my psychiatrist agreed that I am, indeed, an introvert.

This may be one of the hardest adjustments to make with my bipolar — that some of what I regarded as natural aspects of my personality were actually traits fueled by chemical imbalance. This adjustment is harder than it sounds — I find myself quoting a Myers-Briggs score from 20 years ago that is no longer valid, and it hits me with a small shock. 

What will it mean for me to be an introvert? 

Revisiting the Goals at the End of February (Goal-setting)

Here’s my writing goals list for the year as of today:

Goal Sheet:
Short-term:

  •  Develop a platform plan by March 1, 2020
  • Revise Whose Hearts are Mountains via developmental edit by March 1, 2020
  • Send 30 queries for Whose Hearts are Mountains by March 1, 2020
  •  Send 30 queries for Whose Hearts are Mountains by April 1, 2020
  • Send 30 queries for Whose Hearts are Mountains by May 1, 2020
  •  Send 50 queries for Gaia’s Hands by December 1, 2020
  • Write/submit 5 short stories/poems/flash fiction by December 31, 2020
    • Inner Child – January 30
    • Kel and Brother Coyote Make a Deal – February 15  

Long-Term:

  • Develop idea for next novel 
  • Get an agent 
  • Discuss with agent further books
  • Publish my first book 
  • Develop personal sales presence


I guess I’m not doing too badly. 

Short-term goals tend to build into longer-term goals, and long-term goals can build on each other. I’m currently working on the “getting an agent” part through queries, and if I get an agent to take me on, the queries section of the short-term goals will likely resolve itself. Publishing the book, on the other hand, will take years once I have a publisher, so it’s really long-term.
Personal sales presence is something I can’t really develop (other than developing a platform, which I am doing).

And I have ideas for a next novel. Almost too many, given that I’ve been advised to focus my efforts on shorter fiction. But I’ll pick one by NaNoWriMo (November), then start writing it.

I may have to come up with more goals at this rate. 







A Glimmer of Success

Yesterday, an agent asked to see my full manuscript for the first time. Mind you, I have sent out hundreds of queries for my five novels. 

Let me be honest — I have sent out queries for books that I hadn’t sent through developmental edit or beta reading. I have sent out queries not knowing how to write a query letter. I have, rightly, gotten rejections.

I have learned a lot from my failures. The visual above doesn’t really show the road to success because it doesn’t incorporate learning from failure. One can work hard but wrong, and all that effort means nothing. 

This is not to say that I will get an agent out of this. I could get rejected by the other 27 agents I have queries out to. The agent who has my manuscript might pass. Hard work and learning from failures may not be enough. The book might just be “not what we’re looking for”.

But it’s a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of success. I’ll take it.

Under the Weather — Time for a Free Write




Under the Weather
I’m feeling decidedly under the weather (literally — this weather is weighing on me) and uninspired. Not a good thing for a daily blog. I’m writing this because I know I have to write something or else I will fall away from writing the blog after 1000-some posts. And that will really depress me.

Free Writing
So I’m going to use this as a free writing exercise. In free writing exercises, you put your pen down on paper (or fingers on the keyboard) and you just write without editing. It’s a great way to come up with ideas.

Here goes:
Brother Coyote and Kel are returning the twins (Kira and Nala) to Ridgeway III, a restricted planet. Thus what Kel is doing is borderline illegal, just as Coyote’s leaving ridgeway III was illegal. Nonetheless, he’s going on a walkabout of sorts with Kel, offering his uncanny talent of opening wormholes to her shipping business. 

One of the interesting problems they will meet with arriving at Ridgeway III is Coyote’s mother, the Convener of the Moot (i.e. Prime Minister). Coyote’s mother is a charismatic, expansive person who thinks Coyote and Kel are a good match. Given that they’ve just met and they get along like cats and dogs, she’s sorely mistaken. Probably. 

Ridgeway III is a closed world through their own choice — they don’t want their beauty planet defiled by commerce, and they’re a bit edgy about how outsiders will take their occasional inborn talents — of which Coyote’s talents are an extreme example. But Coyote is their test case, and Kel and Coyote have to keep his talent under wraps out in space.

Reflection 
Note how the free writing isn’t that organized. That’s okay; it will still make a good start of a story. I hadn’t gotten these ideas hashed out on paper; now I feel more anchored to what this story will flow like. 

Mission and Vision Statements (Personal Development)



Mission and Vision

Mission statements for writers encapsulate who we are as writers. Vision statements propel us forward. It’s nice to have both, because writers have to deal with a lot of delayed gratification. Missions and visions motivate, much in the same way as 


Mission Statements
I found source material that describes how to write a mission statement better than I ever could. Here you go. If you are not a writer and you want a personal mission statement, go here. 

Here is my mission statement using their methodology:

My Mission Statement:
I am a chronicler of an earth filled with unusual talents, both inborn and gifted.  My readers delve into their reading and love exploring the unknown and preternatural in their own world. I ground my fantasy with sociology, psychology, and humor. I write to create modern mythologies that could be right before our eyes if we knew where to look. I plan to write short stories and novels, and to obtain a traditional publishing contract in the next five years.

Vision Statements: I didn’t learn them this way
Writing a vision statement seems a bit more difficult, especially as all the sources I read about writers’ vision statements seem to refer to mission statements, and mission and vision statements are not the same thing. Vision statements describe where we want to be five or ten years down the road. This one, however, gets close, if a little long. For non-authors, this worksheet may be helpful for both writers and non-authors, but it will yield a longer vision statement.

I learned vision statements as a very short blurb describing one’s future trajectory. Thus, my vision statement is shorter than those in the links.

My Vision Statement:
My vision is to be a published author of contemporary fantasy by a well-regarded publishing house. My works will introduce a modern mythology for the 21st century which detail the preternatural shoulder-to-shoulder with the mundane.

A Takeaway
Write a mission and a vision statement. Hang them on your wall or put them on the desktop of your computer. Use them to focus, use them to reassure yourself that the work is worth it. And tell me how it goes: lleachie@gmail.com