Category: Uncategorized

An Old-Fashioned Girl in an SEO World

​I’m getting bewildered by these newfangled ways of finding readers.

I always thought the situation was “get in contact with agents; if you’re any good, you’ll land an agent.” That doesn’t seem to work for me. It doesn’t seem to wok for a lot of people, given the number of listings on Amazon Kindle that are self-published,  the huge number of volumes on WattPad, the burgeoning indie press movement, a few of which seem little different than the vanity press … 
A friend suggested I try WattPad. I’m building two works through installments, the suggested WattPad way. One of them is a set of short stories about my alternative world where demi-humans with great power live among humans; the other is a romance centering on good Santas, bad Santas, and the secret Santas out there. 
As far as I know, I’m the only one who has looked at them, and I’ve looked at them a number of times because I love to see my words in print. Given the lack of *ahem* acclaim, I decided to look at the advice they give their users:
1. “Find famous people who look like your characters and post their pictures here.” It might just be me, but I wouldn’t post someone’s picture for potentially thousands to see (there are books on WattPad with thousands of hits)  without their permission, no matter how famous they were. (David Chiang, if you are reading this, one of my characters looks like you and I have not posted your picture on WattPad.)
2. “Invite friends.” How many times can you invite friends before they get horribly upset at you? I post on Facebook, and people are free to read or not read — usually, not read, I guess. 
3. An entire section on “How To Get Reads, Votes, and Comments – A Guide.” I can’t wrap my mind around this — this would take up enough time that I would never get to write again.
I grew up in a meritocracy: if you were good, you would get noticed. And, frankly, I was good — I was the first National Merit Scholarship winner from my high school. Things have changed, and for the first time in my life, I’m having trouble embracing change. 

The World Needs Your Novel

Are you familiar with NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) is an annual writing contest where there are no prizes but a certificate and the only one you’re competing against is yourself. The name comes from a contraction of “National Novel Writing Month” but has grown far beyond its bounds, with international reach.
Every November, thousands of writers and aspiring writers unite over the Web for NaNo.  Each will write toward a goal of a written work of 50,000 words.  In October 2016 (the last year for which data is available), almost 400,000 participants worldwide participated, with 34,000 people finishing the 50,000 word goal (Office of Letters and Light, 2016). The NaNo website provides blurbs of advice from writers, encouragement emails, and forums where people can ask for advice, seek information, and at times lament lack of progress.

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The motto of NaNo is “The World Needs Your Novel”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the world needs your novel to be published. With Google making research easy and the boom in potential writers, those who seek an agent may never get one and those who self-publish may find their works mouldering in a corner of the Internet. Nowadays, having your work read may be more a matter of search engine optimization than the quality of your writing.
I struggle with this all the time. I do not write for the market; I write from my heart, which is deep and quirky. My heroes are pacifists and horticulturists. Nobody has rippling muscles; my sexiest hero is androgynous. I persist, however, in writing and posting some of my works on Wattpad and sending manuscripts to agents who tell me “It’s not you, it’s me”. 
I persevere because, deep down, I believe the world needs my novel. Not in a way that makes me famous (Fame actually makes me nervous). But in a way that makes people take a deep breath and think. And feel. And look at things like pacifism, environmentalism. and love differently than before. All I need to do is get my writing into their hands.
And there we are — back to the hard part.

Office of Letters and Light (2017). Press release 2017. Available: https://nanowrimo.org/press. [April 14, 2018].

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