Out the window of the cabin, I watch the barn swallows preen themselves. Blue-black shoulders and rusty chests. They soar and flutter to catch their daily quota of bugs, and then they preen.
A big guy has arrived to weed whack in the backyard, startling the swallows. He’s wearing a Bearcats Football t-shirt. He’s probably a football player. Football players don’t get cushy jobs here in Bearcat Nation. That’s part of why we have the best Division II football program in the US —
Richard is not here — he’s at work. I’m at work, too, if you count the emails I have been answering. It’s hardly a job; I’m down to about 3-5 per day from the 40-some during the school year. Hence the mini-vacation.
Hence the writing retreat.
I will only be here a day or so; I relish a mini-vacation, a writing retreat, a hope that I will reclaim myself as a writer. Small steps, this blog first. A cognitive exercise if I need to dissipate my feelings of mediocrity. And at least a few words of writing.
Inertia is the supreme force of human nature. Remain still, and one will find the couch incredibly tempting. Force oneself off the couch, and movement and industry flow. I am not a vegetative sort; I enjoy making things happen.
Right now, I am facing my nightmare of inertia: I am away from my other time demanding activities, the gardening and the researching thereof, and I don’t know if I want to get off the couch. It’s like being tired of the thing that gives one identity.
One of those procrastination tricks.
I will now trick myself into writing. Richard says I only need to write a little, so I will promise myself 15 minutes. If I can’t write more than that, I’ve done my bit of writing. If I can write longer than that, then I’m breaking the barrier of inertia.
(Bonus: What does the above line come from and what does it mean?)
My plan is not working
I put prompts in my calendar to remind me to write in this blog every other day and post a TikTok every other day. So far, I’m three blogging days behind, although I did my TikTok this morning, after a fashion. This self-promotion thing is not going very well.
Next to tackle — my fears
I know what’s impeding my writing — any of my writing. All of my writing, from books to blogs to Facebook posts — the fear that I’m not good enough at writing. The fear that I am, in fact, boring.
Therefore, the block to my writing is psychological, and since I teach in a behavioral science department at the local college, this should be easy. Except that my discipline is not psychology. And I don’t do well psychoanalyzing myself. Oh, and things that hinder me erect roadblocks that make it harder to resolve them.
For example, I think I don’t write interestingly enough. In my heart, I feel it. The lack of sales/readership seems to support my feelings. I know I don’t promote enough, and I know that focusing on the bad is confirmation bias, but my mind still fixates on the failure and my suspected reasons for it.
What my psychology friends would tell me to do
I don’t consult my psychology friends at work, because 1) Most of them aren’t clinical psychologists, or psychologists who see patients; 2) It’s not cool to ask psychologists for therapy for free; and 3) I would end up with messy dual relationships — therapist AND friend? Ugly. So, truly, they would tell me to F* off if I asked. (You didn’t expect this paragraph to go like this, did you?)
But I know better, because I’ve had Therapy with a capital T, owing to the lifespan of baggage that comes from childhood trauma and bipolar disorder. And, as therapy at its best provides a set of tools one can use to manage themselves, I can go back to the learning experiences of therapy and find a tool to use with myself.
Today’s tool is called cognitive-behavioral therapy, specifically the journaling piece. The aim of the journaling is to contradict what are called cognitive distortions, which are thought processes that do not make logical sense. I will illustrate below:
Thought: “I must be a boring writer.”
What I would have said before: “You’re not a boring writer. Some people have read you. It’s just a matter of marketing. You’re really not a terrible writer.” I can counter-argue everything I just said because it’s a combination of opinion and not-very-comforting facts.
Placation doesn’t work. Try demolishing the illogical:
“I must be a boring writer.”
This is an all-or-nothing statement: There’s a lot between boring and best-seller. Are you saying everyone thinks you’re boring?
This is a mind-reading statement. How do you know how people think about your writing?
This statement is “awfulizing”. Is “boring” a realistic assumption regarding your writing?
Note that I’ve argued the merits of the statement this time, not perceptions of reality.
Now, I replace these thoughts with new thinking:
I have come a long way since I started writing and have clearly gotten better.
The people who haven’t read my book can’t call it boring.
And finally, a call to action:
I will make a promotion/marketing plan and stick to it.
I will continue to write.
It’s been pretty therapeutic to type this out, suggesting that I could use this more often. Maybe I’m ready to write today.
This past week was everything a finals week could be: Students missing finals because I told them the wrong time, students sleeping in, potential academic dishonesty (it wasn’t), a good annual review, a lovely lunch with my colleagues, plants coming into the mail to remind me that there will be gardens … a great finals week.
Now for the existential crisis
I can’t postpone my confrontation with my writing any longer. I make excuses: I have to make a batch of bokashi to raise my compost game. After the semester, I should take a break.
No, it’s going to happen now. I’m going to confront my feelings about writing right here and now.
This is the first issue for me as a writer: who I am. I write fantasy with some relationship elements. I write fantasy romance.
Most of what I have let out to the public, however (as opposed to most of what I’ve written) is the fantasy romance Kringle Chronicles. Those books are fun, relaxing, and put me in the holiday mood.
The problem is that I am not a romance writer. I have hung out with romance writers, and they talk about (in harmony) things I do not at all want to read or write: alpha males, shape-shifters, explicit sex scenes (I’m not anti-sex, I’m anti-unrealistic-sex), BDSM, and just everything over the top.
It’s about fantasies. And I can fantasize a lot about things, to where I’ve had my writing considered very original, but I want my relationships to be reasonably, well, healthy. I want my readers to think about the possible.
And this is where the crisis starts
We writers are told to write from the heart. My heart, whether in fantasy or romance, wants the people to be real and complex. In my fantasies, we have realistic characters thrown into fantastic situations. In my romance, same thing, except that the developing relationship is the primary plot point.
And I’m not sure what I’m doing sells. People apparently want alpha werewolves who are deadly but just and protective toward their mate, who until they showed up was the bullied and rejected waif (this is the synopsis of about 14 novels advertised to me on Facebook).
The crisis is that I can’t write this.
I write with the attitude that the alpha werewolf and the beleaguered waif don’t need a story. They’ve had a story for millennia. If I’m going to write Cinderella, I’m going to write it in a way that someone hasn’t done before — Cinderella is a librarian who has nothing but hard work and her garden, until a mysterious neighbor named Dane Prince sweeps her off her feet — but then she has to save him from the land of Faerie. (Actually, I am writing that story — it’s one story I’ve taken a break from).
But that’s the lingering feeling. I don’t know if the world needs my stories. I don’t know if I care about that, if my stories are good. If I found out that my stories nourished people, but the stories that sold were popcorn stories, I would want to keep writing nourishing stories.
But I don’t even know if my stories are nourishing, because I’ve had trouble selling them.
Which brings me to the other thing: marketing
I don’t sell books because I am terrible at marketing. I am terrible at bringing myself to carry out the strategies of marketing and pretty bad at the strategies themselves. Post on Twitter 12x/day? Write an interesting newsletter? An eye-catching visual on Instagram? Heaven forbid, a video on Tik tok?
Again, I write what my heart tells me to, and I’m afraid it’s boring.
What it boils down to
I know what this boils down to: I think too much, and more than anything, I think I’m boring. If anyone has a solution to that, let me know.
I’ve just been very busy. That’s something built in to the month of April at a university — finishing class instruction, grading end-of-semester assignments, shepherding interns through the search and sign-up processes. And then there are the plants and the gardens. I think I have over-committed, but as always, it’s how I roll.
Feeling the breezes of Spring
This is the first Spring semester I can say has flown by quickly, even though we had inconvenient snowfall through March and even into April. Today the apple blossoms sway outside my office window and my youngest cat, Chloe, stares out.
Chloe turns 1 today, so perhaps she’s celebrating.
I’ll be celebrating soon. By the end of the week, I will be in full summer mode, where I have about 1/4 of the work I normally have, with a largely open schedule for three months. This means time to blog, to organize my thoughts, and to get past thinking about writing into actually writing.
I have progressed as far as looking at my outline and making minor notes — mostly wrong names. I’m trying to figure out when Leah gets pregnant, because that’s a dramatic beat. Leah should get pregnant at a place where tension increases, because that’s how this is done.
I need to decide to build this story into a Save the Cat framework and move things as needed. By a Save the Cat format, I mean a story structure that walks the writer through a build-up, a tension state, the climax, and the aftermath. But I feel so much torpor, much dragging of feet. I need a good session with my husband and plenty of coffee or tea (or coffee and tea).
I hope to motivate myself to write through Camp NaNoWriMo in April. I won’t get the story done, but I will get it started. Maybe I’ll fall in love with my characters and find the energy to write the story. I hope.
For writers, the opportunity to pitch their novel induces a certain amount of trepidation. Sending one’s baby, the result of months (or years, unlike a human baby), to an agent, brings the fear that the agent will not love the baby as much as its parent does.
So the opportunity for a pitching activity over Twitter is a blessing. It’s like one of those photo contest people enter their baby’s picture into, hoping for votes. With a Twitter pitch session, the worst that can happen is that no agent asks for a partial or full manuscript, just as if nobody voted for the baby picture. It doesn’t feel as much like a rejection.
I am taking part in a pitching opportunity, #sffPIT. This is a pitching opportunity for unpublished manuscripts in science fiction and fantasy, which is where I do most of my writing. I have three novels that fit this category (actually four or five, but one is not a standalone in a series, and another is a fragment which may never get finished).
To take part in a pitching opportunity, I must write twitter-sized blurbs for each of my novels and post them at intervals during the day of pitching. I have done this, setting them up using TweetDeck, so that they pop up at various times.
It’s no excuse, as I’ve said before, but my writing seems to be placed on the back burner with teaching classes, taking care of my seedlings downstairs, and trying to talk myself into writing books. Early morning used to be my usual time, and I have been doing flighty, wasteful things in those hours like surfing social media that seems forever the same. Even now, I’m surfing instead of writing this, and the internet has gained few charms.
A time and a place
I need to find a time and a place to write, one which allows me routine. Perhaps I need to promise myself half an hour every day after tea and before I go to work. (Yes, I have daily tea, usually pu-erh, which is Chinese health tea, and an acquired taste).
I’ll be honest with you; I don’t have too many readers to serve as an incentive, and I don’t know how to get more readers. So I need another incentive. I write a newsletter that has about 2400 readers, so I could let them know there’s a blog. But then there’s another consideration —
I need to agree on content
Is this a personal blog? If so, should anyone want to read it? Is it a current events blog? If so, can I do as well as others who are in that line of work? Is it a writing blog? I’m certainly up to that, but there are better and well-read clients.
I’m looking for an identity for this blog because I need one to — *gasp* — market it.
I hate marketing
This is my weakest link. I don’t enjoy bragging about my work. I don’t enjoy getting in people’s faces with a project I love. I don’t even know how to do it well, but I know that without it, nobody knows what I’m doing. Who am I? What is this blog? Nothing special. You can see why I don’t do well with marketing.
Seeking help
If you have any perspective to offer (do not offer services to me because I cannot afford them) please let me know!
According to my log of posts, I have been gone exactly a month from writing. It feels like longer. I need to write again.
Why have I been gone so long?
I could say “things got busy”, but that’s not the whole truth. I had free time, but I slept much of it. Writing my novels fell by the wayside, although I proofed a couple novels using ProWritingAid, because it was easy and didn’t take too much thought on my part. I dealt okay with routine things, but did nothing truly creative.
I have to break out of the cocoon that depression wraps around a person, the lassitude, the negativity, the self-loathing. I’m working with my doc to remedy the depression on the medication front. The rest is up to me.
I was depressed.
I’m still depressed, but I realize that I have to reach out again to break out of my solitude, just in case someone responds. I have to put myself in the stream of humanity, so it reminds me I am part of it.
I have to go back to writing, to find my soul within the flow of words.
There’s nothing like feeling inspired just as the semester is about to get busy. Tomorrow is the first day of the semester, where I have two classes to teach and office hours and all the little things to take care of, and I want to play with the next book. I hope this goes away, at least for a week, so I feel like I’m beginning work instead of devoting myself to my sideline.
What’s the book about?
The name of the book is Maker’s Seeds, and it concerns the Archetypes that show up in Apocalypse and Whose Hearts are Mountains. The Archetypes are, for intents and purposes, humanoid immortals, and they exist to hold humans’ cultural memories. If the Archetype dies through violence to their hearts or heads, their people will die because of the death of cultural memory.
The above books (none of which I have published) focus more on the human (or half-human) point of view. Maker’s Seeds looks at the Archetype point of view, concerning their Maker’s decision to slowly remove the responsibilities of holding humans’ cultural memories from the Archetypes. The result is a race of powerful immortals choosing sides in a schism, fighting in battle to the death — before the Maker has divested most of their cultural memories, thus endangering much of humanity.
The two central figures of the story are Luke Dunstan, an Archetype and Leah Inhofer, a seventeen-year-old human. The opposing viewpoints between the two — old vs young, Archetype vs human — make for drama as they try to prevent the Battle between Archetypes and the potential annihilation of millions of humans.
That being said …
I’m not ready to write it yet. I’m not willing to let loose my creative mind before the semester starts. Maybe I will this weekend, although I have lost my coffeehouse home because of closure (RIP Board Game Cafe). I hope to reconnect with writing soon.
I don’t do well with nothing to do. Yes, over these last few weeks of break (about three weeks of break) I’ve spent a lot of time just recovering from the semester, but I don’t do relaxation well. I think I’ve said this before; I get frustrated with sitting down and not accomplishing anything. With 1.5 days till the beginning of classes, I’ve had enough of relaxation.
You’d think I could have spent that time doing the projects I don’t have time for during the Spring and Fall Semester. (And, to be fair, I did some of those projects, particularly editing Gaia’s Hands, which went live on Amazon on January 1.) I could have done class prep (I did this, weeks ahead of time.) But I didn’t start a new novel or anything like that because, I admit, I needed the rest.
So over break, I got little work done, and I feel guilty for not taking time to do the work. So if someone asks me what I did over break, I’ll answer, “I didn’t do a lot of anything.” And I will feel guilty because I could have practically finished a novel by then. Or edited more work on ProWritingAid. Or something madly ambitious.
Perhaps I needed to do nothing so I could charge myself for the semester, which I think promises to be stressful: students tired of COVID restrictions in the face of even more illnesses under Omicron, the dreariness of winter and the lack of sunlight, all the minor irritations accumulating by midterms. I, as the professor, need to be the sane one (and as you might recall, I have bipolar disorder, so sanity has some challenges.) So, if it’s possible to soak up relaxation, I have been doing so. And I shouldn’t be ashamed of it.
But it’s time to get back into the work world. I can feel it.
Words Like Me 