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.

Editing, as much as I dislike it, may be where the magic happens.

Writing is delightful, full of beginnings — meeting the characters, exploring their world, setting them on an adventure. Writing feels like the first of May — trees in bloom, journeys started.

Editing feels like carving into a knotty tree with a chainsaw. Every spare subplot, every awkward sentence, every cliche causes the saw to buck. And then, when all the negative space is trimmed out, the question becomes whether or not what’s left is the true seeming of the story.

I had a revelation about where a couple of my stories  (novella? novel?) should go, and I’ve been wielding the chainsaw lately. I think they’re getting better. I think. It’s sometimes hard for the one with the chainsaw to judge.

Failure as an opportunity for change

What should you do when someone reviews something of yours badly?

Find the truth in their comments.

It’s the hardest thing to do, to accept that the quality of your output is low, that you haven’t accomplished what you set out to accomplish, that you’re not as shiny as you thought you were. It is easier to excoriate the messenger, to discount their observations, to explain away all your responsibility for your poor performance. It’s easy, as well, to indulge in self-pity, becoming the misunderstood one.

But none of that will kick you out of your complacency. None of that will help you grow.

The rhetorical “you” is not fair to you, the reader, because I’m speaking from my own experience. This week I got what could be called a bad review, where I performed below the evaluator’s expectations. This forced me to look at my performance and say, “Yes, I performed below my expectations.”

I had reasons, mind you — I had been depressed and foggy from medications, but my work still wasn’t what it could be. And I had to admit that.

But it was liberating.

I gained a sense that my evaluator cared.

I gained a sense that I could bounce ideas off someone.

I gained the belief that I could improve.

I started to develop a plan.

I need to find a way to do this as a writer. I have had horrible trouble finding beta-readers, because novels are long and everyone is busy. I don’t have the money to hire a developmental editor. But I’ve faced the truth in one area of my life, and I survived. Time to face the possibility of negative criticism in another.

Another detour

Note — this is finals week at Northwest Missouri State University, where I finish out the school year by giving final exams and hearing last-minute entreaties from students who forgot to turn in 50% of the assignments.  I feel for the students — there were classes I missed 40% of when I was a student, but I didn’t ignore due dates in a class and ask for mercy on the last day of class.

Poor Prodigies — it may be the novel that never gets written at this rate. After editing Gaia’s Hands into a novella — the best decision I’ve made thus far — I’m doing what needs to be done with Mythos and Apocalypse given the time frames and moods — splitting them up into a novella and one novel.  I think my instincts are right here.

I’ll get back to Prodigies. And Whose Hearts are Mountains.  Sometime this summer.  In-between intern visits, writing on one of two non-fiction books, working in the garden, and maybe some sleep somewhere. Oh, and exercise. I promised myself some exercise.

Excerpt from Gaia’s Hands (the novella).

An excerpt from Gaia’s Hands. Warning: Very indirect references to sex — less so than in a romance novel.


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Josh couldn’t sleep. Images of the last several hours swirled in his head: the fruit trees in the forest, Jeanne’s face at a particularly unguarded moment, the blues band at the café, Jeanne’s body, all curves and sags and comfort like a favorite easy chair. He could smell lovemaking, had never been aware before that it had a smell. 
The vision — the garden; Jeanne standing in the garden, tending it. Jeanne — the garden and the gardener, the secret and yet not the whole of the secret. He chased the thoughts around until they became the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, the infinite. The lovemaking — she had been Eve to his Adam — did I just go there? he groaned. He would not put that phrase into his next poem. Something, everything — Josh did not act on impulse, yet he had. 
Josh threw on dry jeans and shirt, and dragged his bike back down the stairs and out under a clearing sky. “Who am I?” he queried himself as he rode toward Eric’s apartment. An introvert, an observer of human nature, a practitioner of aikido, an aspiring writer, only son, half-Asian. He dug deeper: a dabbler in Shinto, a pacifist, a former problem child. He felt heart and gut, ai and ki. And now, something bigger than himself — not just a lover, but a holder of a vision, a mystery. He would not tell that last part to his best friend Eric.

The Inertia Paradox

I am into Finals Week in my day job here at Northwest Missouri State University. My schedule has already relaxed as I make it a point to get all my grading done before finals week, and my exams are multiple choice. For all intents and purposes, then, I’m done with the semester except for paperwork.

My summer will be much more flexible — I will supervise 20 interns, which will require visiting them, calling their supervisors at the beginning of the semester, and some grading, all of which can be scheduled at my discretion within reason.

I will have more time this summer. And it will make it harder to write. Does this seem like a paradox? Wouldn’t having more time make it easier to write?

As it turns out, having more time — or more specifically, less to do — makes it harder to write. We are all victims of inertia — a body at rest stays at rest. But inertia works both ways — a body in motion stays in motion.

During the school year, I am a body in motion — four classes, half a dozen interns, meetings, other committments. On a summer schedule, I have plenty of time to be at rest, with no timetable set for me. I can spend all day checking for readers on Blogger if I want. Therefore, I’m a body at rest, and without solid goals — more solid than I have in the school year — I will become a body at rest.

After this school year, which was one of the hardest I’ve had in a while, it would be welcome to rest. But not long enough that I become a body at rest.

Potentiality, optimism and cognitive journaling

As I think I’ve said before, I’m in love with potentiality. Potentiality is the possibility — not the probability — that something will blossom. (I’m all about the blossom motif today, even though it’s too cold for anything to bloom still.)

I think that the love for potentiality is what sorts those who seek change and those who hide from change. Change is scary, rejection hurts, but those who seek change recognize the potential pitfalls. There is a term for those who seek change — those people are morphogenic.

What morphogenic people don’t always do a good job of is deal with disappointment when the desired goal fizzles. No amount of effort, good planning, or knowledge will guarantee success; there are so many other factors. I have an optimistic friend who takes rejections very well — in public, at least. I don’t know how he takes them in private. He seems to be an optimist anyhow.

I don’t deal with rejection well. I tend to prognosticate more rejection and failure when I’ve failed, as I have with not getting published over and over. Honestly, getting rejected has improved me as a writer, but that’s not what I see when I don’t get published. I tend to beat myself up, saying I’m not a good writer, I’ll never get published, etc.

This is where cognitive journaling comes in.

The theory behind cognitive journaling is that, when something bad happens, our brain reacts in automatic ways — maybe from parental or cultural conditioning — that causes an even more bad mood than previously, and that path in your brain from happening to feeling becomes (figuratively) a groove your mood gets stuck in. These bad ways are usually encapsulated in what are known as cognitive distortions — such as “I’ll never get published,” above.

Cognitive journaling seeks to replace the cognitive distortion with more balanced thoughts. For example, let’s tackle my cognitive distortion:

CD: I’ll never get published. I’m a bad writer.
What are some ways we can identify these as cognitive distortions?

  • I can’t predict the future
  • I’ve already been published — several academic articles, one essay in a progressive religious journal, and a couple poems in Lindsey-Woolsley (the Allen Hall literary magazine at University of Illinois
These become the basis for contradictions to the cognitive distortions:
  • If I quit trying, I’ll never find out if I can get published
  • I really can’t predict the future (otherwise, how come I can only predict bad things and not the latest lottery winners?)
  • People liked my writing before, it can happen again.
  • This rejection may have nothing to do with my writing.
If I write these down and look at them occasionally, I can (the theory holds) program my brain into thinking more positively.
*****
If I knew about this already, why did I not use it earlier? Because I was depressed, and deep depression tends to believe that everything negative is true. I couldn’t get myself to use cognitive journaling because I really wasn’t a good writer and I wouldn’t get published. 
The irony was, in not doing my cognitive exercises, I was pushing my depression further by getting stuck in my negative rut. I’m not saying my depression was my fault because I didn’t do my cognitives, but my refusal was a factor in how deep the depression got. 
So I’m journaling again, and hoping that it returns me to my optimistic self.

Alpha males.

I’m beginning to hate the phrase.
This morning I got a friend request on Facebook from someone who is most certainly an Internet scammer. Tipoffs: He’s pictured in military uniform with a military background. He lists his home as three different places in Africa so he’s apparently doing something dangerous, and to sweeten the deal, he’s widowed.
In other words, he’s the perfect romance novel hero.
I once got rejected by Harlequin because my story needed a hero who was 
  1. older than the heroine; 
  2. richer than the heroine and 
  3. more powerful than the heroine.
In other words, an alpha male, and the female protagonist is his dazzled (and subservient) woman.
Is this what I, a female, am supposed to fall for? If this supposed to be my fantasy? As a highly educated female, and one who lives in voluntary simplicity, my male won’t be alpha, but egalitarian. He might be dark and brooding, but smart enough to learn how to manage his own feelings. He might be an entrepreneur or a college professor or a social worker, but what he contributes is complementary skills.
It’s not sexy enough, where sexy is defined as a female so desirable the lone wolf tears off her clothes and pledges to change (but not enough to get a social work job). The female is thrilled to find her needs will be taken care of and she won’t have to be challenged at work anymore.
I probably will never write a romance novel again.
And I rejected Alpha Military Man for the third time. Who falls for these guys anyhow?

Wrestling with my Problem Child, part 2

Through a series of edits and rewrites, the novel Gaia’s Hands (about 90,000 words) has been reduced to a tight novella with a feeling of impending doom — and impending resurrection.

I do not know where that novella came from, except that I think it was lurking at the edges of the novel I wrote, with the symbolism pointing in that direction, but my not having the guts to go there. I think there’s a tinge of my mood in the middle of Trump’s presidency and its unrestrained pro-business stance. My story has become in many ways dystopian, where fear and threats rule the day for those who are different.

The source material is almost five years old. I’ve been struggling with it for years — as my first novel, it probably lacked  voice. After some serious, intense editing and a painful and beautiful ending, I don’t know if it has its own identity yet. But it’s a lot tighter, a lot more poignant, and I hope it’s a good story.