My husband and I are driving to Kansas City to visit an intern. He has to take me there because my vision is getting increasingly worse in my right eye due to a cataract (I’m too young for those, so go figure). But first, a trip to the Public Health Department with a dead bat.
Why a dead bat? Because Richard accidentally handled it, which is a bad thing if, say, the bat had rabies. We’ll play it on the safe side, but it’s time to bring the bat in for testing. Poor bat.
Yesterday was Summer Solstice, and I didn’t celebrate it because I thought it would be on Tuesday. I should have checked the Internet.
I sometimes miss being a pagan, because I always knew when the turns of the year (the solstices and equinoxes) were, and pagans throw a great party. I had a friend who wanted to have an all-night drumming session around a bonfire, and me and my bodhran (Irish frame drum) would have had a lovely time with that. Except for the fact that lack of sleep tended to (and still does) make me a bit unmanageable — weepy and moody. And drumming all night is more suitable for the Winter Solstice, where one would drum to make the sun come back after the longest night.
I gave up being a pagan because I always felt like an impostor — I didn’t believe we were doing any magic, and I felt the symbolism was borrowed from cultures not my own. I am very personal in my mysticism, so I want the symbolism to speak to me. Nothing, alas, has spoken to me in a while.
I wish I would have pitched a tent in my yard, and stayed awake till sunset and then slept in the tent with plenty of mosquito repellent and on a camp cot, because I’m well over 40. I would have kept the lonely night company. (In actuality, I would have climbed out about 10:30 and gone inside because of lack of sleep. I know myself by now.)
I celebrate by what speaks to me, what makes for the best poetry. Maybe I have lost my poetry, maybe it was all invested in the crushes I had before my age finally caught up with me.
Maybe I need to celebrate the turns of the year again.
The weather outside is hot. By hot, I mean 105 degree heat index, 100 degrees actual. A July sort of thing, not a June thing. I get sick from the heat easily, so my strategy has been to stay in the air conditioner and NOT. GO. OUTSIDE.
I wonder if we’re past the point of no return when it comes to climate change. If these patches of extreme heat are our “new normal”. Gardens will wither and winters will be frigid and snowy.
My psychiatrist is a bit more sanguine about climate change. He’s a libertarian and a fervent believer is progress, and he believes that scientists will find a solution, just as they did (partially) with the ozone hole. I hope he’s right — I think the wind farms that surround us may be part of the answer.
The weather is supposed to clear by tomorrow, greeting us with temperatures in the 60s and 70s. I will celebrate by going to the cafe and visiting an intern on Wednesday in Kansas City.
Let me know!
Every morning I write this blog. There are many reasons I do this, not the least because I want that little message from WordPress that I have written the blog X days in a row (yay gamification!) I’ll explore some of the other reasons below.
I consider writing this blog my morning ritual, along with coffee, music, and getting my hair to behave. The ritual starts with racking my brain with finding a topic to write on. Then I start typing and thinking and typing. And editing as I go.
I find the practice of journaling warms me up for writing. Not just the fingers, although by the number of typos I make while typing the blog I guess my fingers need warming up.
Writing the blog warms up my mind. It trains it to write as a flow exercise, a task where time flies past me and I’m in the moment. Admittedly, blogging itself is not a flow experience because it doesn’t go on for long enough. but blogging limbers up my mind so that flow is possible.
One of my attractions to my daily ritual of blogging is that it’s a challenge. What am I going to write today? Have I written about that lately? Will anyone care about my blog? I don’t know about the latter, as I have between 11-20 readers on a regular basis and 57 followers, which suggests most of my followers aren’t reading the blog. That’s okay; I still face the challenge every morning.
How often do you blog? Daily? More than daily? Weekly? Let me know!
I notice that the sunrise this morning is not really pink — maybe more of a salmon color, but that’s not poetic, is it? “The salmon-colored dawn.” No. Just no.
“Rosy”, on the other hand, is poetic. And everyone who reads the poem or prose takes the same poetic leap and accepts the dawn as rosy.
I’m in a writer’s group on Discord, and the caffeine addiction there is real. To the point where we talk about how we make coffee and what blend we use. And heaven forbid we skip our coffee in the morning.
I haven’t met any tea drinkers, but it could be a small sample size. Do you drink tea?
The same group of writers admitted that they too have self-doubt.
There are many, many romance categories. Superhero, bad boy, playboy, alien. Sweet, steamy, hot, erotica. Friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, boy next door, strangers to lovers. Science fiction, fantasy, contemporary, historical.
And because of my self-doubt, I don’t know if I belong to any of these.
Right now, I feel like most of my writing time is spent in marketing, and I don’t even have anything on imminent publication. I’m using The Kringle Conspiracy as my hook for newsletter subscribers, so that’s out. This is all a very strange journey and I don’t know how things are going to work this fall when I’m back to work.
Do you have any observations about yourself as a writer, or if you aren’t a writer, other writers? I’d love to see you drop these in the comments!
To be a writer is to be afflicted by crippling self-doubt. It takes only a Google search of “crippling self-doubt” to confirm this. It’s not surprising. If a writer writes for an audience, they bring their works out into the daylight.
If they’re showing their friends what they’ve written, they’re afraid of being judged. Because friends often skip over the Facebook post, they’re never quite sure if they’ve been read. Because friends are often afraid to hurt someone’s feelings, they will be wary of compliments.
If the writer submits for publication, they’re afraid of being rejected — and they will often be rejected, because their work is competing against others’ writing.
There are several articles on the Internet about how to deal with self-doubt. See here and here for examples. I don’t want to hash over these excellent articles, so I’ll write from my experiences and hope the advice is helpful.
Writers aren’t the only ones with self-doubt; it crops up when we have to speak publicly, at our jobs, and any place where we step outside our comfort zones. What are your solutions for self-doubt?
Yesterday I got into a conversation with my husband where I said I wished I would get sick because then I would be able to take a break. And then I realized how wrong that sounded. Just plain wrong.
As I think I have said in these pages before, I hate doing nothing. I thrive on making things happen (as long as those things aren’t housework as much as possible.) As it’s summer, making things happen usually means working on writing, although I haven’t been feeling it lately.
So after a weekend of 90+ degree temperatures I wake up vague and weepy and I don’t think I should take a break.
If this isn’t the time to take a break, I don’t know what is.
Seriously. How do you all know when you need to take a break?
I always feel like summer is the time for waiting. Ordinary time in the church calendar, the hot days fading into each other under the relentless sun, the school year in the distance and nothing at the moment needing done. Time to relax and wait.
I an very poor at waiting.
This is the current season of my life, where I am waiting for many things — my beta readers to get back to me, answers to queries and submissions. I’m waiting for some feedback. Where to go from here. How to go forward. I want to go forward, not just sit here and wait. What am I called to do? Nothing, at the moment, and I hate it.
At this moment, I am waiting in the Westport Coffee House in Kansas City. I am supposed to be writing, and I am writing this but getting very agitated with the notion of waiting.
I need to find a way to be comfortable with waiting.
After yesterday’s revelations, I’m still writing.
I will not be able to quit my day job, and at best I might enhance our income by $6 to $20k. But there’s value in writing, whether it is to express my thoughts and emotions, to explore skill-building, or to fantasize about making it big.
I need to get value from my writing equivalent to the time (lots) and the money (considerably less) that I have put into my writing.
However, whenever we fulfill a goal, value comes from two outcomes: changes (usually gains) in resources and satisfaction. Gains in resources don’t have to be monetary — they can be in terms of knowledge and experience. Satisfaction comes from completing goals, and the feeling of that satisfaction differs by where it comes from. The deepest satisfaction comes from satisfying higher-order goals, goals that come from higher values like beauty, truth, and accomplishment.
Looking at my time and money spent writing, I see that I have increased greatly in both experience and knowledge about writing. I have written several pieces, both short and long, and that represents another gain in resources. And, having satisfied the higher-level goals of accomplishment and knowledge, I feel this satisfaction very deeply.
(Note: The discussion on the outputs from fulfilling goals, or the value-creating activities, comes from family resource management theory, which I taught for close to 20 years. For a summary of resource management theories, read here.)
I, of course, have been analyzing this question of what I want out of writing to make sure I’m getting my money’s worth, as it were. This is the list I came up with:
I think there are good enough reasons here to keep me writing.
What is a goal of yours and what does it give you?
I went into this thought of being an author figuring I would find an agent, then a publisher, and get a five-figure advance and royalties. My ex-boyfriends (all geeks) would see my name in the science fiction section of the bookstore and be forced to have some respect for me. I could quit my day job.
The truth of the matter is that the scenario for writers is far less rosy. According to the Authors Guild 2018 poll:
And then there’s the part where Amazon has pretty much taken over the bookselling and publishing market, likely pushing all these trends. And the fact that the typical self-publisher will sell only 250 books.
This is a lot to absorb. If I’m going to be an author (I already am), I have to have honest and good reasons to do so. The biggest thing I need to do is dispel my illusions:
This is all sobering information. If I write, I have to write for a reason other than external validation of sales and recognition, because I may not get those no matter how well I write. I will never be able to support myself this way, although it might be a nice addition to retirement income.
I have to write for myself. I have to write for the love of it. I have to write for the desire to improve my art, because I can’t count on being the shining exception to the rule.
Words Like Me 