Category: Uncategorized

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.

Wrestling with my Problem Child

I have always struggled with Gaia’s Hands as a story.  If you’re having trouble keeping track, that was my first novel that emerged from a series of short stories which arose from a very strange dream that had nothing to do with the story. That’s the way dreams work — you dream of (*censored*) and all of a sudden you’re writing a book about environmentalism and plant diversity and love and sentient beanstalks.

Being my first novel, it has its flaws, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix them. Did it want to be a mystical story? A grounded story? I was trying for magical realism, but I ended up with a book at odds with itself. It had plenty of themes, but what was the plot, anyhow? Which plot was the plot?  Did the plot need to be longer? Did I need to talk out the segments I added in? What could I fill in that actually assisted the plot?

Then yesterday, I heard that Tor/Forge (a major science fiction publisher), is looking for novellas to publish. A novella is between 7500 and 40,000 words according to Wikipedia and between 20,000 and 40,000 words according to Tor. It is, as the name implies, a short novel.

Given that I had just edited out all the parts of the novel that weren’t bare bones plot, the tug was clear — Make Gaia’s Hands into a novella. I’ve cut more out of the plot (there are a lot of subplots) and completely changed the ending — and now I have to add some more flow and description and cranking up of the plot (and get back to 20,000 words).

I don’t expect to get published. As I said, this manuscript is like the kid with the runny noise who you wish would quit crying. His own mum thinks he’s precious; everyone else wishes the kid would quit whining. Time for me to take care of the kid.

Love, Lauren

What Happened with the Blog

Remember when I said I was moving this blog over to Wix?

Wondering why I’m still here?
Don’t get me wrong — Wix is a beautiful blog, glossy and important looking. But it’s not a blog for words as much as for pictures. Wix optimizes for the quick attention span — big pictures that dominate the scene — and for search engine optimization. That’s fixed by this Blogger template — a front page that lists Every. Single. Hashtag. on it.
I think the biggest reason for my disillusionment with Wix is that you weren’t there. According to the high-tech statistical analytics, none of you were there except one person in El Macaro California, one person in Fort Worth Texas, One in Minooka IL, one from Gilbert Arizona, one from Toronto Canada , one from the middle of nowhere Indiana (not sure who that person is), and multiple hits from bots — Wix in Ashford Virginia, Google in Mountain View California, and Suddenlink (my internet provider) in Tyler, TX.
I know more of you read this blog. I know not all of you are bots, even if you never say anything. I can’t zero you down to city, but I know you by country. There are not many of you, but you are precious.
And I will remind you of my Wattpad serials:

PS: To My Friends

If I base a character on you, it is not you. Seriously, if that were the case, I wouldn’t be able to kill off any of my characters.

More specifically:

  • Some characters only look like you. 
  • Some characters have some of your basic characteristics (personality, looks, likes), but not your stories.
  • Some characters have your stories, but don’t share your basic characteristics.
  • Some characters are you from the Mirror Universe. 
Why do I base my characters on people I know?
  • I can’t visualize people. Honestly, if I try to call up your face in my mind, your nose floats off somewhere and I can’t see your eyes. So, yeah, you have hair.
  • Apparently, from what I can see in Wattpad, everyone does this, except they base their characters on movie and TV stars. My characters are quirkier than that, so they look like you.
  • My friends (including you, reader, a friend I haven’t met) have cool stories.
  • My friends (including you, reader, etc), have rich personalities.
On the other hand, I once killed off my ex-husband in a novel after establishing him as a pathetic womanizer. I have a t-shirt that says “You are dangerously close to being killed off in my novel.”  So I suppose there is some danger of being killed off by me. Sorry.

Clawing My Way Out

A friend of mine, upon reading my missives of the past few days, declared, “It’s worse than I thought.”

He’s right. I stepped into a maelstrom of selling myself, and it drowned me. And I’m practically dead, washed up on shore, and I’m the only one there to resuscitate me. 
Ok, the first thing is to claw my way back up the beach before the next wave takes me back out. One dragging crawl at a time. 
Once I’m far enough from the waves, I flop on my back and think: What do I want out of writing?
I want to write well and improve.
I want to be read by more than just my husband.
I want people to enjoy my work.
I don’t want to be big; I just want to be read and enjoyed.
I don’t know how to do this, which is why I waded into what ended up being the SEO maelstrom, the belief that selling one’s work is more important than writing and that quality is defined by how many page hits one gets.
There was a saying once upon a time: “Do what you love and the rest will follow.” I don’t know if I believe this; it assumes that there is a force in the universe that will promote my project over someone else’s.  I don’t want a God who will prioritize my dreams over Flint’s water problem or Puerto Rico’s ravaged infrastructure. I’ll do what I love, but I don’t have faith that the rest will follow. Which is why, I suspect, I walked into the shrieking maelstrom in the first place.