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.

Keeping the Dream, Fortifying the Dreamer

I am in love with the world “potentiality”. According to Merriam-Webster (2017), the word means “a chance or possibility that something will happen or exist in the future.” When a writer puts something out there, whether it be sending a manuscript to an agent or posting on Wattpad (shameless plug: I have a short story collection developing at https://www.wattpad.com/user/lleachie), they are activating potentiality. The possibilities for getting noticed or getting published in a crowded field of manuscripts are small, but the dream is great. 
And then the agent rejects the piece with the common “It’s not you, it’s me. Keep writing”, or the story moulders on Wattpad …
It’s easy to become dejected, call yourself a failure, believe you’ll never be published, want to give up. But if you’re a writer, you can’t. You just can’t.
Writer, do not give up the dream. Do not buy into the belief that your only hope to be noticed is wishful thinking and a SEO guru. Don’t focus on fame (although wouldn’t that be nice?), but focus on the experience of getting further than you have before and having new experiences and learning. Create your own goals and stretch yourself to make them. Fortify yourself with what your writing means, that it’s important, and that the world doesn’t always honor what’s important, focusing instead on what is loud and flashy.
Maybe the goal in letting your writing out into the world is to release it and see what happens. Does it change a person’s mind? Does it get you on the stage at an open mic? Does it turn you into a blogger? Where does it lead you? 

Words in Crisis


There are too many words.

 
This is the era of information overload, a time when the marketplace of ideas is so crowded only certain ideas manage to be heard: The most outrageous, the most offensive, the most affirming of one’s world view, whether that world view is accurate or not.

Words seduce us into buying products to fix imaginary problems of being human. Words pummel us into submission. Words separate us into “us” and “them” so thoroughly, wordsmiths from Russia affected the 2016 US presidential campaign through social media, something we had never thought possible.

But words may be the only things we have. What else will contradict the messages that the beauty industry feeds us to shrink, de-wrinkle, and beef up? What else will convey the feelings we have about our friends, who are beleagured by the negative of social media? 

Love will not trump hate without words, because we can’t hug our friend halfway across the country. Humanitarian progress will not be made without words, because words communicate actions  Words create a culture; words create a bridge between culture.

Words are important. We must fight to be heard

 
 

 

 

More about the move.

I want to attract attention. Not because I’m an attention hog, although I love it when people pay attention to me, but because I want people to read my works. Why else would I post them on my writing blog or on Wattpad? (Note: I am currently hosting a selection of short stories from the Archetype universe at Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/user/lleachie is the address.)
In the marketplace of ideas, I’m told, things have to look pretty. It’s a long way from the days when I wrote poetry in my notebook in pencil and tore out the pages to show my eighth grade teacher. (I still have those pages. They’re barely readable.) 
Toward that end, I made this much prettier and more readable blog. I will be doing the same thing here, and there is also a link to the old Blogger file above (At the top, under the header, labeled “Blogger” in case there are old favorites you want to read.
So, I hope this entry is seeing you all well and happy, and I really want you to become a frequent visitor to this site, and to have others join you. And please talk back! I really want to hear from you.


 Again, you can now find me on https://lleachie.wixsite.com/website, and I hope you will follow me there and make me a happy writer!

The World Needs

The motto of NaNoWriMo is, as I have shared before, “The world needs your novel”.

I have doubted that, since the world hasn’t yet published my novel. There’s so many novels out there, however, that the world can’t see my novel.  Too many people write, too many people get rejected because they’re not guaranteed in the current fashion — I may not be good at writing, but being rejected by the current agent process won’t tell me if I’m good.

I have an acquaintance who’s my role model — when a project doesn’t catch fire, he tries something else. He doesn’t have to deal with the huge time commitment of novel-writing, so it’s not quite the same. But I watch him keep trying and learning, and the story it makes is totally fascinating.

I am working to model his persistence. Nobody’s representing me? I seek out small press and publish my least sellable works on Wattpad. These aren’t likely to make me the “It” person at writers’ conventions, but I find hierarchies of fame tiring.

The world needs my perseverance.
The world needs my compassion.
The world needs my struggle.
The world needs my love.
The world needs my optimisn.


If you want to help — WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE A BETA READER?
This means you take on a manuscript and read it, making notes on parts you liked or didn’t like about it, places that you felt needed more description, more action, etc. I would like us to work through Mythos, which has been rejected once but is the first of a series I’d like to publish.

If you want to be a Beta reader (I need at least 3) please email me (soon!) at:

My email address

Potential

More than anything, I think the thing that inspires me when it comes to writing is the potential a story has. The potential to be read or heard, the potential to speak to someone’s condition, the potential to make someone laugh.

This is more important to me that simply writing for the joy of it. For me, the joy is from a human interacting with the humanity of my stories. My love of stories predates my love of writing, coming from a family where both sides excelled in their kind of stories. My dad’s family told hunting stories with a sense of slapstick and absurdity, except for the Native American tale about sacred white deer disguised as something my Grandfather had witnessed. My mother’s family loved wordplay, and very often my grandmother served as the “straight guy” a la vaudeville who would set up the play on words.

When I write characters, I want to bring them home for dinner and have a dinner party. When I write themes, I ask myself if they will entwine into my readers’ lives and change them. When I write plots, I think of my family stories and how they walked me into surprising places.

It’s good for me to think about why I write.

The situation is that I don’t have much patience. Much perseverance, but not much patience. Oh, well, I forgot to get that when I grew up. I’m trying new things now, like maybe small press even though I will be lucky to get 100 readers, and Wattpad, which is the massive marketplace of ideas with no curator.

Find me on Wattpad — you have to subscribe, but it’s free. Read my story collection as it develops. Say hi. Feel moved to interact with me.

Wattpad

And if you want to write me? lleachie AT gmail.com

Discovery

Why am I writing?

The first and most important reason is that when I quit, my characters call me back until it becomes an obsession. The less I write, the more ideas pop in my head. Or ideas on how to edit an old story to make it better haunt me (I’m probably ready to embark on the sixth iteration of editing Gaia’s Hands.)

The second reason I write is because I want to be read. I want people to see my characters and what they go through. I want them to fall as much in love with my characters as I do. I may never get read. Currently I’m putting some of my short stories on Wattpad, because I want to attract readers. I don’t know if I will, honestly. I don’t know how to attract people to my stuff, and both agents’ slush lists and Wattpad are stuffed with hundreds of books from people who were told “the world needs your books”.

The third reason? Maybe I need more friends. I am currently in the large group of people for whom social media is an attempt at social contact. We count likes on Facebook, votes on Kindle Scout, comments on Wattpad, and followers on Twitter as if these likes translate into a real sense of belongingness, safety, esteem, and love — all of which live on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

I am one of the many people out there for which friendship is a problematic construct. It may be because I’m neurodivergent; others I know who are neurologically different report the same things: the difficulty in doing small talk (such as remembering to ask after someone’s kids), the feeling like one’s breaking unwritten rules; the general sense of the moment when ‘keeping it real’ silences a room; overhearing the word “weird”, “crazy”, or “different” when referring to you. (I didn’t overhear these; I’ve seen them on my course evaluations as well as “all over the place”).
I have a few close friends who also hate small talk, and after the “how are you doing?” question, we talk about politics, explore our similarities and differences, laugh, drink coffee, and shine. I have friends on Facebook, with some friendships spanning thirty years, but I can’t feel the glow of those conversations. I love them anyhow.
I’ve tried to meet these needs (especially esteem — notice that’s not just self-esteem) through trying to get published, envying the kinship popular writers have enjoyed with their fans. For whatever reason, this is not in the cards for me. So now what I need is to find other ways to get those needs met.