I am a writer of fantasy and romance novels, which I’ve talked about in these pages. As a way of developing my marketing presence, I have developed a newsletter for my once and future readers, called Hidden in Plain Sight. It can be found here.
Also, for all of my social media collections, I can be found at: Beacons
Happy Connecting!
Lauren
I’m struggling with inertia when it comes to writing the blog today. Inertia is, so far, winning. To the point that I stare at this vista of screen space and … blank.
I try to write this blog as a show and tell — I show you what I do today and tell you the practical underpinnings. Not “You should do this” as much as “I’m trying this and this is how it’s working for me.”
At this point, I can abandon the blog till later — a practice we call procrastination.
I’m going to address this in terms of procrastination advice, which goes beyond “just do it” (thank you, Nike) and into practical advice. Procrastination breakers I’ve learned are as follows:
You might notice I have headers. Not just because it makes it easier for you to read, but because it makes it easier for me to write. This is my breaking up the job into the smaller parts. (Yay, I’m done with two parts so far!)
My reward at the end of the blog? Another cup of coffee, because I can be motivated by caffeine, always. Coffee, tea, it doesn’t matter.
Doing five to ten minutes of the task — I always work like this, and for some reason I never quit tasks after that 10 minutes. Why? Because once I’m into the task, my brain wakes up and I end up finishing the task.
I’m almost done with this blog, and I didn’t know if I would abandon it at the beginning of the writing. Now time for coffee!
Tell me what your go-to procrastination!
I finally have my professional website updated for the spring and highlighting the Christmas in July deal I have for The Kringle Conspiracy. There are blog entries there too, but they’re more professional writer type things — book plugs, cover reveals, logos, that sort of thing. You can find my professional blog here.
Stop by and say hi!
I spent much of yesterday sitting around waiting for final exams in my Happiness class. (Yes, I teach a Happiness class). But I didn’t wait idly (or watch House reruns).
I instead worked on some Canva products branding my contemporary/fantasy romance side. (I still need some logo for my contemporary fantasy line)
Here’s the logo:
I chose this logo because:
Here’s an advertisement:
I’ve been doing all this work on a web-based design program called Canva. I have exactly one course in design under my belt, and that was 37 years ago. (I didn’t go further in design because of my profound hand-eye coordination problems).
Urgk — I don’t mean my persona as a karate-wielding grandma. I mean my professional logo, etc for my fantasy books. I’d like to use the initials again, but what do I dot the j with? Let me know what you think.
I’ve been pushing myself to do one writing-related thing per day (this blog doesn’t count). I’m pushing myself because I am not currently enamored with an idea; no project obsessions here.
I thrive on project obsessions, so when they’re not there, I tend to panic. Which is why I’m doing the daily writing gig — to jog me into that state of flow where there’s nothing except the writing and me.
I wrote and edited a poem, so that counts for something. I’ve revised two cover letters and sent in queries of two books (one small press, one large). I haven’t come up with any big ideas yet, but there’s a whole summer to work on things. I have an idea for this fall’s Kringle story, but I won’t work on that till NaNoWriMo in November.
I really need to write some short stories, flash, and poetry. Those will give me submittables for Submittable. As I’ve said before, I’ve been advised to stop writing novels for a while and start with smaller story submissions.
That should keep me busy.
Getting (traditionally) published seems like an endless bout of submit, rejection, revise, repeat. Like Sisyphus with that rock he kept pushing up that hill. I admit that, when I get a rejection, I feel like that boulder has rumbled over me. But then, after a few minutes mourning, I appreciate the opportunity to try again.
I can’t stay sad for too long when there are revisions that can be made (to my document or to my query materials), submissions to make, and new possibilities that I have to check out. What pushes me forward is hope — hope that I have a better product, that someone sees promise in it, and that I will finally get the chance to show my stories to other people.
Hope carries me past the rejections, past the self-flagellation, past the desire to give up. With hope, each round of submissions is new as I try something else. Perhaps I will give up and self-publish, but self-publishing doesn’t push me toward excellence as much as trying to get traditionally published does. Hope is a heady sensation, like the sunlight on a June day, whispering “Maybe this time … “
Today I was supposed to do nothing. Instead, I revised two query cover letters and submitted two novels and two stories on Submittable.
So it’s okay; I got some rest.
My mind is simultaneously antsy and lazy — I should be DOING something! I have an exam to grade! I could be creating advertising materials for my book! I should be — my brain can’t focus. I feel like laying in my bed all day watching House episodes on my phone.
I understand the tired part — I just got off a full semester without any Spring Break, after a year of severely restricted activity due to COVID. I made it without more than one or two sick or mental health days all year (due to the ability to teach over Zoom). With finals all that are left, I find myself slumping my shoulders and relaxing.
It occurs to me that the antsy part is the craving for flow. Flow is a psychological concept that refers to the state of being completely captivated in an activity that uses your abilities at an optimal level. Writing is a flow activity for me, as is editing. Designing (with my limited abilities) is another. Most of my flow activities happen at a computer and fit in with my writing, which is probably why I write.
No challenge is optimal when I’m just coming off a brain-numbing school year. I’ve been challenged out. I’m still dealing with three exams to grade this week and unhappy students.
Another part of my always needing to do something is the feeling of satisfaction I get from accomplishment. I delight in making things happen. I love finishing a chapter, a novel, a cover letter. I get motivated by the finished product as well as the process (the flow). Again, my mind is having none of that.
This is a time where perhaps doing nothing (or next to nothing) would be the best thing to do. It’s hard for me to do, because I’m always trying to wrap myself in flow activities and completing projects when I’m not working. Although I’m addicted to flow and accomplishment, maybe I could use something more relaxing but inspiring like daydreaming or meditating. Or maybe I should just read reruns of House and see if I can diagnose those disorders.
When I was a child, I was an imaginative sort, and my imagination lived beside reality. I knew the tree wasn’t sentient when I spoke to it, but at the same time I had an attachment to it as if we had a relationship. The tree wasn’t and was sentient. I was and wasn’t a human.
As I grew older, I discovered creative writing and received lots of encouragement from my English teachers. I mostly wrote poetry back then, prosy poems that tried to communicate emotions, and to this day I’m not enamored of my poetry.
But I wrote stories. My stories tended to involve imagination living beside reality — Santa Claus as a young toymaker in a small town (see my romance novel for how that worked out),an anthropologist who discovers a collective of otherworldly beings (which has been written and now needs a home), an unstable woman who meets the ghost of the boy she killed in a car wreck — or did she?
What I developed in college and later was the concept of world-building. I had to show people that there was a reason why the trees were talking telepathically, why the titans struggled with their too-human longings and why the humans struggled with their sudden preternatural gifts. The basis of my writing is the tension between the hidden and ordinary worlds, the stories hidden in plain sight.
My world is one where I keep my foot planted in both worlds. No matter what genre I start in, two things will show up: 1) that other world hidden in plain sight; 2) relationships between people who are coping with that “other” world, whether they be from the hidden or ordinary worlds.
Please let me know in the comments if you would like to know more about my writing!
I am writing a serialized novel called Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Universe and I now have the general shape of the two arcs — one being Kel and Brother Coyote’s chemistry, another being growth arcs for the main characters, and the plot arc that deals with the link between the restricted class-planet Ridgeway III and the exploitative colonial corporation InterGal. I think I will have at least 9 more stories, which should put me at 35-40K words, or a novella length.
In a strange room, on a strange planet, Kel lay on a strange bed on the floor, wrapped in tight bandages across her ribs. She glanced up at the glittering suncatcher that her shipping partner, Brother Coyote, called a Sun Mandala. Kel, hopped up on painkillers after a spectacular rescue of the leader of Ridgeway III, dared not look at the wall where the reflection of the mandala shimmered. If she did, she might see something again, and she didn’t want to deal with that just then. The prisms sparkled and made her sleepy. She closed her eyes …
She heard the doorknob open and opened her eyes to Brother Coyote and a floating carry unit. He shut the door and sat down next to Kel, folding his lanky legs up beneath him. The gravitation unit sank gracefully to the ground. “Mom sent me up with dinner from the buffet line. She’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“The party’s still on? After an attempt on her life? That’s a pretty gutsy broad — Oops,” Kel giggled. “I suppose I shouldn’t call the Convener of the — the Moot — a gutsy broad.”
“Mom would have no trouble with that,” Coyote chuckled, pushing back his blond hair. “As for the party continuing, that’s a Ridgewayan cultural tenet. The celebration must go on. We remember too many times we’d quarantined ourselves from various fevers on the planet, so we celebrate any time we can.” Coyote lifted the lid of the carry unit; savory smells enveloped her.
“How do you get carry units on this planet if you’re a restricted trading planet?” Kel wondered aloud. “I can’t make that make sense.” Kel found herself wishing her tongue weren’t quite so loose.
“It doesn’t have an internal grav source, of course. I’m levitating it. Luckily it doesn’t take too much energy.” Kel sat up and Coyote transfered the tray to her lap.
“Ok,” she said. “What’s this?” Whatever it was, it smelled much better than meal bars.
“The stew there is made with native mushrooms and a legume that developed into a landrace here.” The stew, she noted, was an intense golden color, and from the smell, she suspected that Ridgeway III had a local equivalent of curry powder. “Then, with that, is a mess of greens that combines diaspora culture DNA tailored for this planet and some local weeds we’ve cultivated into crops. The two grow together symbiotically, which is a bonus.”
Kel took a small spoonful of the stew. “Take a bit of both individually. Then take a bite of them together. Then try a little of that paste on the edge of your plate with them. It’s important to be creative with your food,” Coyote instructed.
“Tell me, how does one get creative with meal bars?” Kel smirked, but she tried the food anyhow. “Wow,” she said after a few minutes absorbed in her food, which smelled warm and mellow, contrasting tartness and a deep mellowness. “This is amazing. What do you use for spices?”
“A lot of things, largely local. We have a tropical belt which accepted diaspora spices, and we have many native herbs. This planet has immense agricultural potential, but only if it’s cultivated carefully. And by carefully, I mean as close to wild as possible.”
“So you’re hunter-gatherers instead of farmers.” Kel finished her meal and considered the pastry on the tray.
“Well, not hunters, unless you count mushrooms. We’re wildcrafters, we’re permaculturalists, we’re companion planters. We’re tree climbers, plant researchers — did you know there’s a plant here only pollinated by one particular miniature fruit bat? The guy’s not much bigger than a bumblebee and climbs into the fruit’s flowers and gets drunk, then visits other flowers on a bender. He finally passes out in a flower and sleeps until the petals drop out from under him.”
“You must have a lot of farmers if you can’t factory farm.”
“Yeah, but we don’t have a lot of factories. We have them for the technologies we’ve chosen, but we also have artisans and craftsmen. You might notice this tray is wooden.” Indeed it was, Kel noted. “We have a stepped-down economy, and not a lot of us go off-planet, as you might guess.”
Kel found herself looking at the reflections of the sun mandala, which were mere shadows on the wall as twilight fell. Her sight blurred as she found herself sucked into a vision — Keyli, the Convener of the Moot for Ridgeway III and Coyote’s mother, strolling down the hall with a feline creature that came up to above her knee, trotting beside her on a leash.
“Coyote,” she said, instantly regretting the words when they fled her mouth, “Does Ridgeway have felinoids the size of Terran Shepherd Dogs?”
Words Like Me 