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.

Interview with Richard Leach-Steffens, writer (Interviews with Writers)

Tell me about yourself:
Growing up, back when I was in high school, I started writing short fiction at the urging of my Gifted Ed teacher, Linda Knoll. I actually submitted to a local community college’s creative arts contest. I actually got a couple of stories — I think I got a second and a first. I did okay, but I didn’t feel like my writing was good enough that I could become a writer for a living. Since then, my writing’s been mostly professional — I have a ten-year career as a technical writer. I haven’t really done much creative writing since becoming a technical writer, because it’s hard to get in front of a computer after you’ve been in front of a computer for eight hours at work.

More recently, at the encouragement of my spouse, who is also a writer, I have written one novella, one novel, and one short story. The novella is set in my spouse’s universe and shares some of the characters, while the novel, which I wrote for NaNoWriMo, is based on an idea I had back in high school. I would like to submit the novel for a developmental edit.

What do you like to write about?
Early on, I wrote apocalyptic fiction. I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s; one of my fears, of course, was nuclear war. What I’m finding is that I’ve moved past that, and my latest ideas tend to be creative with a twist. Think a “what if?” with a “where will it lead?”. 

What is your novel about?
The NaNo novel deals with the idea of musicians traveling from town to town for gigs. What happens if humanity gets into space and finds out we’re technologically behind other races in terms of trade? What would humanity have to offer? Humanity discovers that what it does have to offer is artistic culture — music, art, even classic tv shows. As part of that, it’s a way of introducing humanity into other cultures. My protagonists are a jazz combo, and what they find out is that, in the history of this one planet, there is a cultural taboo against sung music. The remainder of the novel deals with solving the mystery: Why did this happen?

What is your advice to writers?
Don’t stop and think that your writing is good enough in its rough form, because there’s always room for improvement.

Thank you for being my guinea pig, Richard.
Oink.

Update (personal)



My brain feels rusty.
These last couple days I’ve been trying to recover from a tooth pulling/the meds/getting off the meds (hydrocodone does a number on me, but so does pain). 

Best rejection ever.
I got a rejection on Prodigies from Stirling Publishing (UK) which sounded like an almost-acceptance. I don’t feel too bad about it. 

Glass half-full
Lately I’ve gotten second places and honorable mentions on my short story/poetry submissions, so I feel like maybe either my work is getting better or it’s finding its home. Or my luck is getting better. I’m still frustrated and still looking for an agent.

Time to go to bed.

Small Victories (Personal Goals)

I’m writing this on my iPad as an experiment using BlogTouch, so bear with me.

Random picture.

I don’t think I’d blog from here every day, but it might work on-the-go. Finding pictures is harder unless I take my own, and typing is slow, but there I go. 

And I can’t change the title without losing everything. Weird.

My 1000th Blog Post (Blogging)

Time to celebrate!
This blog has hit a milestone I didn’t ever think I would hit — my thousandth post! How does one celebrate 1000 blog posts? By writing a blog post!

Origins
I started the blog a little over three years ago with the aim of developing an author’s social media presence. Its secondary purpose was, however, to warm up my mind for a day of writing. Thus, writing in the blog became an almost daily event. 

Content
The content of the blog echoes the header above: “A blog about being a writer, believing it, honing it, living it.” As a theme, this has afforded me a bit of flexibility, and I have written about my writing, my struggles with writing, writing tools I’ve discovered, and occasionally examples of my writing. 

Most writers don’t write in their blogs daily. I’m pretty sure this makes me an overachiever. 

Changes in the Blog
The blog hasn’t changed much in the past 1000 posts. At first, I didn’t post every day. Occasionally, I whined about my lack of progress; those posts have been deleted. 

I recently began formatting posts with headers to make the blog more friendly to readers. I hope this has helped readers find meaning in the blog.

Beyond 1000
I’m not sure what’s in store for the blog over the next couple of years. I have thought of moving it to a weekly blog and focusing on writing tools and the like, but there are many blogs that already do this. I want this blog to be accessible to writers and people who like writing, so I will probably continue with the daily posting and the variety of posts I make. This has the added bonus of making the blog more fun to write.

Here’s to 1000 more blog posts!

Loving Criticism



We Want Our Work To Be Loved

We’re authors. Of course we want our work to be loved. Therefore, anything that seems like criticism shrinks our ego to the size of our withered thymus gland. We crumple into ourselves, hang the “Out to Lunch” sign on our front door, and mourn.

Criticism is the Most Loving Thing for Your Work
If we want our work to shine, we must accept and react to criticism. We can’t be expected to see everything that could be wrong with our writing; we’ve lived with it for so long it makes sense in our minds. We can’t be the reader who sees it for the first time.

Criticism has a bad name, because we think of it only in its most negative sense: the harmful, useless “This book sucks”. But we should make room in our lives for the more constructive “This doesn’t work”, “I don’t understand,” and “This frustrates me” as well as the “This works great”, “This makes me laugh”, and “I really enjoyed this”.

Different Levels of Critique
In writing, we can get critiques at several levels. We may not need all these levels for smaller works, but novels and novellas would benefit from all these levels. These are the most usual levels:
Developmental edit: Exploring shape and meaning
The developmental editor deals with the readability and strength of the work. Character development, theme, and plot fall into the dev editor’s responsibility.
Line edit/Copy edit: Ensuring readability and accuracy
The titles “copy edit” and “line edit” are used interchangeably. Their function is to make sure sentences are grammatically correct and words spelled right. They also look at whether the individual sentences make sense.
Beta readers: Conveying the reader’s experience
Beta readers are casual readers who read and comment on the book that has gone through developmental and line edits. They convey the reader’s experience of the book. In a way, they are the freshest set of eyes because they don’t have the expertise one expects from editors. 

Takeaway
If we invite critique into our writing process, then the criticism happens in a way that we can respond to it. Then, when the random critic decides they don’t like the book, we know we’ve done our best. We may not love criticism, but we can at least value it. 

If you have any favorite “oopsies” in your works, found by an editor, please let me know in the comments here.

Short note

I’m not feeling particularly articulate after five hours sleep and a Lord of the Rings extended cut marathon movie viewing. Fourteen hours of sitting in a comfy chair with a theater screen, I’ve always wanted to do that — think of it as a bucket list item.


I’m going to end here by saying this is my 998th post. 

Have fun!




Interrogating a dream and finding a poem (Literary Work)




Ethereal boy,
you would kill me with a feather
fine-sharpened to a point,
intended for my heart,
and you would call it art.

Dreams as Fertile Fields of Meaning
This poem, like many of my writings, came from a dream. In the dream, an artist acquaintance from overseas comes to visit me, spending only a brief time with me in O’Hare airport. Then he wanders off. I later read an interview with him in a snippet of newspaper that says that he planned to approach me for a film, which explained the brief interlude. It also said he considered, for the same movie, throwing a feather, quill sharpened into a dart, at my back, and if it killed me, it would be art.

Dreams are symbolic, so I woke up doubting that said acquaintance had any desire to kill me, nor could he kill me with a quill pen. As that was what he described the murder weapon as.

Gestalt Dream Analysis
Because I found the dream poetically compelling, I interrogated it using Gestalt methods, which basically instruct the dreamer to tell the story from the viewpoint of all the major people and objects: 

  • Me: You know my part.
  • The artist: I play with images, I play with image. I play this scene with you, and I will not tell you why. I could stab you with this feather; fear not, it’s all illusion.
  • The feather: I am a pen; from me ideas flow. I am an arrow; Cupid does not miss. 
  • The paper: There are no secrets. I announce success
  • The airport: I am the place where people cross, where people greet and part, the resting place between journeys.
What Does It Mean?
This dream is too complex to define linearly, so maybe I can put in place themes that don’t necessarily contradict each other:
  • The journey: my journey of being a writer
  • The artist: my inspiration/an established artist/personification of mischief/Cupid
  • Cupid: ludus (crush energy) as vehicle for inspiration
  • Brief interlude: a surprise
  • The newspaper: He’s arrived; I have not. Also, an implication that I have importance, but as a abstract concept
  • Feather pen as weapon: Cupid’s arrow, creativity, ludicrousness (see ludus); vague sexual reference but lazily so
In conclusion:
That was fun! If I had to guess, I’d say this poem is about the nature of inspiration and our muses. Ludus, sex, death are all tools of the writer, and of the artist. 

Have you ever used a dream as inspiration for one of your works? Let me know in the comments or at lleachie@gmail.com

An excerpt from Whose Hearts are Mountains (Literary work)

I decided to sleep for the night in a rest stop just outside of Adair, in the former state of Iowa; a place where a giant white monolith stood outside the entrance to an old rest stop. I could see very little; my headlights didn’t cut through the deep night enough.  

I should have known someone else would find the rest stop as a shelter. I spied two such individuals at the Adair rest stop, revealed by the flicker of my headlights — a dark man with long greying hair and a wizard’s beard, and a paler man with hair tucked back in a rasta cap. The two sat on the ground in front of the door. Behind them, I noted the expansive blond brick building with its glass panels in the front, and a dull glow in a back room. I didn’t doubt that the windows would be revealed to be damaged and dusty in the morning.

I considered that, in the post-wars era, the men sitting by the entrance were not truly homeless. They landed on their feet, founded a camp, and called it home.

I pulled up to where they sat and rolled down the window. “May I stay here for the night? I can sleep in my truck.”

“Sure, ma’am. Martha should be back shortly, so you don’t feel scared with just us two men.” I didn’t expect such a considerate offer on the road.

“No, that’s okay, I’ll pull my truck over here — “

“You ain’t sleeping in that truck, are you?” The unkempt white man, who wore socks as gloves on his hands, shook his fist at me. He spoke in an oddly flat voice, and he struggled with eye contact.

“Well, actually, yes, I was going to.” I could recline the seat back and stretch out a little — 

“No, we got a nice warm building. You’re staying,” the black man decided. “Martha will be back soon to be your chaperone. Would be nice if you gave us something to help with supper. ”

I didn’t trust him. I couldn’t. Was this another trap? I searched my mind for something to forestall my spending the night with them. Would they rob me? Assault me? “I have nothing to trade — “

The black man chuckled. “You got stories. Might as well get to know you better,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m George.”

“And I’m Pagan,” the other man said, not offering his hand.

I looked them over in the headlights’ glow. They looked harmless. Famous last words, I realized. On the other hand, I would probably have a good chance against them with my gold-filled backpack, which probably weighed 20 or 30 pounds.  And I was very hungry.


Rejections and Cognitive Distortions

This is probably a rerun from way back when, but:

Sometimes I wonder why I put my books out there.


Ask any writer after a rejection, and you’ll probably hear the same misgivings. I myself been rejected by so many agents that I thought I’d get over this. I haven’t. 

I think the two things that keep me from quitting are: 1) my short memory, and 2) noting the negatives — cognitive distortions — are not real.


Cognitive distortions
Cognitive distortions are statements we make to ourselves to define our reality — but in actuality just make us miserable. (Positive Psychology.com. 2019)

For example, I just went through an online pitch contest where writers try to get attention from agents about their books. I did not succeed. So I combined this with all the rejections I’ve gotten and started talking to myself like this:
“I’m a bad writer.”
“Nobody likes my writing.”
“I’ll never get published.”

These are all examples of cognitive distortions. 
“I’m a bad writer.” — All or nothing thinking. “I’m either perfect or bad.” Also labeling.
“Nobody likes my writing.” — Mind reading. How do I know this?
“I’ll never get published.” — Fortune-telling. If I can predict the future, can’t I win the lottery? 

In reality, I can’t predict the future, Nor can I be the worst writer ever if I got through college. I can name people who have liked my writing. These realizations are known as contradictions.

How to start:
It helps to write this down on paper. Here are the steps:
1) Write down the thoughts that are bothering you
2) Identify the cognitive distortions. If  you look for “cognitive distortions” on Google, you will find many sources. My favorite resource is here.
3) Come up with an alternative thought: 
“I’m a bad writer.” — “There are people better and worse than me”
“Nobody likes my writing.” — “I have had short fiction and poetry published”
“I’ll never get published.” — “Never is a long time; and if you never get published, it might have nothing to do with you”
4) The important question: what is my next action?
When your mind is clear, you can determine your next move to live your life most authentically.

What now?
Get the list of cognitive resources and the PDF journaling sheets at the site below. Do this when you’re feeling negative about life. Keep it up. After a while, you’ll only need to do this as a reminder.


Positive Psychology.com.(2019). Cognitive distortions: When your brain lies to you (+ PDF Worksheets). Available:

Tweetdeck vs Hootsuite — a writing blogger’s take (Social Media)

Social Content Managers
I don’t have the money to have an assistant handling my social media. (And, unless I become the next JK Rowling, I won’t). So I have to depend on social content manager web pages. I use two social content managers — Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. Here’s what you can expect for each and why both can be useful:

Hootsuite: My everyday workhorse
I will be talking about the free version of Hootsuite, as I can’t afford (nor do I need) the full versions, which runs $29/month for the professional (individual) account. The free version does enough for most uses. You can follow your feeds on three different social media sites at once. More importantly, it functions as a launcher for multiple social media sites — three different social media for the free version. I have my Hootsuite working with my Facebook Pages, Twitter, and Instagram, and can send the same post through one, two, or all three sites at once.  Free Hootsuite can be found here.

However, Hootsuite allows for a limited number of scheduled tweets, four in total, in their free version. Sometimes, if there’s a #PitMad or a  #IWSGPit (sessions for pitching a novel on Twitter), I need 12 pitches, one for each hour the contest runs. This is why I turn to Tweetdeck.

TweetDeck: For Targeted Twitter Time
Tweetdeck does more functions than free Hootsuite, but only for Twitter. TweetDeck is free, which makes it tempting if you’re a Twitter-only social media user. 

TweetDeck can follow multiple functions of Twitter at once — home, notifications, messages, trending, and submitted tweets. I think the beauty in TweetDeck is scheduled tweets. As I said above, in the case of a pitch contest, one needs to be posting once an hour. That’s twelve hours with two books I’m pitching, which is 24 posts. Although one has to prepare each post seperately, TweetDeck handled all of them without balking. Free TweetDeck can be found here.

In Conclusion,
Hootsuite is my everyday social media companion. Its free version does everything I need on a given day. But on those special days where I need to tweet a lot throughout the day, there’s TweetDeck. Does anyone use either or both of these? Tell me why at lleachie@gmail.com.