Category: Uncategorized

Today is my 57th birthday.

 


Today is my 57th birthday. I tend to celebrate birthdays by making observations of the previous year, and this time is no different:

  • I don’t feel 57. I have the heart of a thirty-year-old. Unfortunately, I have the face and body of a 57-year-old.
  • Writing-wise:
    • I still have room to improve especially cover letters.
    • I have options: I can self-publish if I want.
  • World events:
    • I knew we were going to have a pandemic; I didn’t count on being this emotionally settled with it.
    • It truly seems as if the world I had grown up with: women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights — in other words, true equality — is crumbling. I need to find the right way to fight.
  • Personal life
    • I broke a curse that I had lived with all my life. I can’t explain it all here, but the situation had all of the hallmarks of a curse. End result: I accept that I am loveable as I am.
    • It’s really not bad being in one’s fifties — It makes me nervous that I’m closer to 60 than 50, and I can’t believe my high school graduation was almost 40 years ago. 
    • I’m on a pretty even keel emotions wise, for which I am grateful.
In-between the disruption of COVID and the crimes of this political administration, beyond feeling overwhelmed by the changes in the world, the little crumbs of life are good — laughing with my husband, playing with Chloe the kitten, watching Poirot, interacting with students (as strange as it is with small classrooms and Zoom meetings).

Tonight I will go to dinner at William Coy’s with my husband and contemplate how I can make next year a better one.

A lull — and jitters

 


I’m waiting for my favorite beta reader to react to my book. What she says will determine my final actions — do I put the book out this November or do I hold it back to show to a dev editor?

I’m pretty confident about the book not needing a dev editor, because I read through a number of times for flow, for sense, for proofreading. 

No, I’m not confident, but I can’t afford a dev editor right now. I’m excited about putting it out. I haven’t had momentum like this in ages. In a perfect world, I’d have a quick and inexpensive dev editor. Maybe if I go through it one more time …

How do people go through all this publishing a book? 

In the Flow

 I’m happiest when I have something to work on, something that catches my fancy. When that happens, I can give it intense focus such that I float within the bubble of my attention and time flies by without me.

This, in the psychological literature, is called flow. Flow takes a person out of time and place, and becomes almost a type of meditation. It requires tasks that one is competent yet challenged in. Flow is good for creating happiness. 

I’ve been creating book covers (both e-book and traditional) for The Kringle Conspiracy, which (depending on whether I feel it needs a dev edit) will be coming out in time for Santa. My favorite beta reader (Hi Sheri!) is on it, and my husband has already given it a good look through. Because it’s so short and so simple for something I write, it may be ready. In the meantime, the cover is ready.

So designing that cover gave me flow. What else gives me flow? Writing, at least in the drafting stage. Reading. Sometimes teaching, but not lately with all the equipment I have to sling around. 

It’s important to have flow, to take one away from worries and stress (like COVID) and the like.

What are your flow activities?

Maybe not a Christmas Present

 


 

 

So I’m editing Kringle Conspiracy, a book I’d put in a drawer for two or three years. My natural pessimism is setting in, and I stew about whether it will be good enough to publish. On the schedule I’m on, I’m going to have to do without a dev edit, and I’m rather uneasy about that. On the other hand, it’s a pretty simple book.

The thing is, I want to get it online in time for the Christmas season, which means October. I don’t think anyone can dev edit in a week, giving me two weeks to fix. I could save it for next Christmas and get a dev edit, which would be the great thing to do if I were patient. I’m working on being patient.

I’ll let you know. I’ll do this rewrite and let it sit for a bit, then decide if I need to hold back for a dev editor. So maybe you won’t see this by Christmas.

Look! I might be self-publishing something!

 

 


Yesterday, I was trying to figure out what I would write for NaNoWriMo, which is in November, but it’s never too early. Richard, my husband and partner in crime, suggested rewriting a Christmas Romance novel I put aside in despair thinking it wasn’t romancy enough. 

I thought about that, and then looked for a tool to help it be more romancy (it’s now a word, deal with it) and found Jami Gold’s romance beat sheet. Walking through the beat sheet, it seems that there’s not a huge amount of work I need to do — emphasize some points, make sure the timing is right, fix a subplot. This can be done.

Then I stepped into Facebook and asked my friends if I should be fixing a novel that read a bit like a Hallmark Christmas movie. I got a resounding “Yes” with one of my friends, Heather, suggesting I self-publish it. 

And the bubble up giggle of delight broke out. Maybe this, a low-stakes publication, would be my entry into self-publishing! I don’t think of myself as a romance writer, so I don’t have much ego invested in this if it doesn’t do well.

 So guess what I’ll be doing today? Rewriting, daydreaming, and shooting for a mid-October publication date. 

 

Any of my self-publishing friends out there, please check in with me!

You are a writer

 

 


I believe I’m back from my writers’ block. I don’t know if I’m ready to edit/rewrite Gaia’s Hands yet, and I certainly don’t feel like writing one of those two books I have on debt (Hands and Gods’ Seeds). The former would require me to go to Poland for a few months, and I don’t have the time or the translator. 

But I’m a writer, and I can’t escape this, even if I don’t get published. Even if I feel bad about the fact that I don’t get published.

I hope there are other writers out there who need to hear this: If you set paper to pen regularly, if you see stories out the window of the cafe or in a crowded cafeteria or on the street, or even in a collection of ants on the sidewalk, you are a writer. The world is yours to create with, and even if nobody else has seen your work, you are indeed a writer.


Not getting picked for a team

 

 

 Getting no likes at PitMad feels like not being chosen for the kickball teams in grade school. It’s not current trauma, it’s past trauma that complicates the feeling. I tell myself that PitMad doesn’t determine my worth or the worth of my books.

It is a setback, sure, just as it has been with other #PitMads and #SFFPits. But it’s more a testimony on my ability to write pitches, the matter of thousands of pitches flowing across Twitter at the same time, the glut of submissions in fantasy writing. 

I need to find a way around this. Maybe improving my pitches will help. Maybe I should work on making my query letters better (which I am doing). 

I can just quit or I can beat my head against the wall — or I can improve. And, I guess, pray.

Redoing the Query Letter


One of the most important aspects of a query, or the way you introduce a novel or other book to an agent, is the query letter.

Yesterday, I learned that my query letter sucked.

I sent it to The Query Shark, where an agent looked through it and critiqued it thoroughly. So I have an expert opinion that it sucked.

This is good news, actually, because it may be the reason that my queries are bearing no fruit. It’s not an easy fix, but an important one. The query is the introduction to the book, after which the agent will either request more pages or pass. The query letter is the first thing they will read in the query.

In a query letter, you have to accomplish several things: you have to introduce the agent to your book using a synopsis in a couple paragraphs. You must give specifics about the book such as genre and number of pages. You must provide a brief bio.

The problem with my query letter is that my synopsis wasn’t capturing the spirit of the books, nor were they involving the reader personally with the characters’ development. They were bare recitations of the plot, and they lacked the fantasy element. In a way, my query letter didn’t sell my book at all.

I am working on that blurb, and it’s completely different. I think I have the right idea this time. 

Fog


 

I wish I had seen the fog before it rose.

Fog smooths out all the edges of everyday life, softens the corners of the houses, tangles in the branches of trees, muffles the sounds of automobiles.

Fog obscures the view in front of us, defying even the illumination of headlights, and forces us to proceed cautiously.

Fog whispers secrets, like the witch in a fairy tale, and like the fairy tale, we can walk through the fog and never find the truth.

Fog reminds us that we can’t see everything. We can’t know everything.