The feeling when you’re half-asleep and you can hear things around you move and stir; you let the sounds wash over you as you lay still, hanging onto the lassitude of your muscles and the fuzziness of your mind. You could move, break the film that separates you from the awake state; instead you lay suspended between the two states as long as possible. Outside is cold and things are expected of you; under the covers holds you in the arms of your childhood for just a few more moments.
Struggling to write (Warning: rambling a bit)
Ok, folks, I’m struggling to write lately.
In the last week, I’ve only met my 1-hour writing goal once, for outlining my NaNo book. I wonder if I’m going to have the ideas and the fortitude to write it.
I don’t think I’m depressed, just a bit listless and pretty tired. And clumsy. I’m really clumsy. I banged my nose on my car while putting my computer inside. Word for today: proprioception. As in I have none. But that doesn’t have to do with my struggle to write unless I inadvertently gave myself a concussion (no evidence that I did).
I think I’m also having an identity crisis — I am trialing two developmental editors with two different books (as I mentioned earlier, Prodigies and Voyageurs), and I’m scared that they’re going to say that my queries are great, but my books are not going to sell. At least I will know if that’s the case. I tend to think if things come to that, I will go back to poetry and short stories that I don’t feel people have to read.
I don’t feel like a writer right now. That’s the problem.
I don’t know how to feel like a writer. A writing retreat would be good, but there’s no place locally to retreat (except a cabin at Mozingo, but they’re all occupied). I have to figure out how I can boost my feeling like a writer in lieu of an acceptance.
Any help you can give me would be appreciated.
Autumn is a great time to find oneself.
Autumn is a great time to find oneself.
Autumns force one into introspection, during those chill October drizzles that remind us that we have a home to go to, whether physical or spiritual or familial. Fog obscures the familiar and forces us to face the feelings of navigating in a strange world. Thunderstorms — the glory of October thunderstorms! — inform us that sometimes anger clears the air.
The indolent fantasies of summer — the beach books, the margaritas, the vacations where we swear we’ll move to San Francisco to start a coffeehouse or Florida to retire — fade in the wild emotions of autumn, where idyllic sunlight through golden leaves becomes the crystalline silence of frost or the bluster of a wind that knocks down piles of the golden leaves now fallen.
Autumn is my season. I want to be the blustering wind, the crystalline silence, the fierce storm. I want to broadcast my emotions and make others feel, flush them out of the hiding places of their summer, make them see the richness of the fiery leaves even as they spiral around us in the gust.
I want to be autumn, for it’s a great time to find oneself.
Publishing coaches
Because I don’t know when to quit, I’ve pooled some money into working with publishing coaches. I have the query materials for two different books (Voyagers and Prodigies) out to two different publishing coaches.
To give you the idea of how publishing coaches work, I have to explain what query materials are. Think of them as a promotional/sales packet for the book. This packet — a cover letter, a professional bio of one paragraph, a two-page (usually) synopsis, and the first so many pages of the novel, provides the agent enough information to ask for the whole novel to read or reject it. (I am not convinced that it really provides the agent enough information, but I’m not an agent).
So the agents are going to start by helping me revise the query materials. I don’t know if it’s the query materials, to be honest. I’m a pretty good writer. On the other hand, I am really bad at self-promotion. Ok, I’ll qualify this — I have done well promoting my work in my career as a professor. When it comes to creative writing, I’m more like “oh hai, could you read my stuff and tell me I’m a writer?”
I don’t know what happens afterward. If it’s self-publishing, I’m missing some of the things that make for self-made success: A published author who will vouch for me, previous published books, a lot of friends who will read my book and like it … I hope there are alternatives for me because realistically, I don’t have these. Maybe I should just put my book on Amazon and let it languish, because at least I’ll have closure. (That sounded bitter. I didn’t mean to sound bitter, whoever’s reading this.)
Of course, I don’t know what the publishing agents have to tell me. I need to stay optimistic.
I’ll let you know.
The Problem with Illusions — my confessional
This is a companion piece to the blog post I wrote on disillusionment. I believe we weave illusions to try to fulfill needs that our hungry inner children need to believe in.
I suppose I could start with Santa Claus. Children need to be loved and cherished and to have their hungry tummies fed. Santa Claus reads children’s lists and metes out justice and fairness to the deserving and undeserving, answering for all the childish fears of abandonment, hunger, inadequacy. And adults have created a narrative about Santa and, deep down, believe the illusion is precious enough that they lament when their children are too old to believe. If their children are too old to believe, so are they themselves.
The illusions I have clung to have a lot to do with having meaning to someone, especially a male, for symbolic reasons I will explain. I was let down by the men around me growing up. I was sexually abused by a few people, not believed, not protected. My illusion grew — that if I were important to someone, the abuse would never have happened. I would have been protected. Someone would have believed me. If I was important to someone now, it would be a magic spell that would make the damage in my past heal into inconsequentiality.
The problem with illusions is that they don’t feed the hungry parts of our souls. They carry the seeds for their own destruction by our doubts and feelings of unworthiness. They wither when held up against the light of reality.
I have a friend out there that I owe an apology to — friend, I wanted to be important to you because in the belief that it would heal something in me.
Disillusionment
Disillusionment, in a way, is a positive thing.
Yes, it’s rough to believe in a thing or a person only to find out that what you believed to be real was mere illusion. We build all sorts of fantasies in our everyday life around things, and when we’re disillusioned, those fantasies fall like building blocks.
Disillusionment feels like a chill wind to our face. We can perceive that wind as bitterly cold, or we can perceive it as bracing. Disillusionment brings clarity, the sharpness of a winter day with the greys of tree trunks and the white of the snow.
With the death of illusion comes the birth of possibility. The future hinted at by the illusion crumbles, leaving everything, every path, every direction. It can be overwhelming, because we like the predictability of our illusory future, but it’s possible that there’s a direction even better than the one freshly closed to us.
Seeking clearness
I want to hear your thoughts. I’m thinking about where to go with my writing.
I have come to the point where I need to think seriously about whether to continue writing and whether to continue my quest to be published, which are related but seperate things.
Thoughts:
1) One doesn’t write novels “for oneself”. The rough draft of a novel is about 80,000 to 100,000 words. I write about 1000 words in an hour when I’m in the groove; much fewer when I’m not. This doesn’t count the number of hours editing and re-editing, which I would estimate at least another 60 hours.
2) If I could share with people for free, I might be inclined to keep writing. I have trouble getting my friends (that’s you!) to beta-read or read for the heck of it. The time I tried serializing on WattPad or that other platform way back when, nobody read. People don’t read much anymore, I’m told.
3) It’s easy to say “If I get an agent/get published/get readers then that’s a sign from God that I’m supposed to keep writing.” What if I don’t get these? Is it a sign that I’m not supposed to work toward getting published anymore?
4) I will be working with a publishing coach, probably to pursue the self-publishing route. But the recommendations are likely to be “find some friends to read it, and have them write reviews”. This bothers me because a) it seems like gaming the system and b) #2 above.
5) Without people to share my stories with, I’m losing the thrill. I want you to know my characters. They’re like family to me — the immortal lawyer Luke and his Denisovan consort Su, the dark Grzegorz, the droll Weissrogue, edgy Kat, and others.
I need your thoughts and your help.
The Romance of the Storm
It’s a grey day outside == the temperature is dropping into the high thirties, and the leaves blow off the trees to make sodden yellow piles in my backyard. Any beauty autumn normally has seems lost in the grey sky, in the mist, in the cold.
It is because of this that autumn is the most romantic time in the world. Not so much because it’s tempting to go inside and cuddle with someone over jazz and hot chocolate, but because fall is tempestuous, and asks us to meet it wearing nothing but our starkest selves.
In spring, we hide behind our bright faces, wearing our delight like lambskin, meeting cute and gamboling through light conversations. In summer we discover the needs of our bodies and souls, and we don’t know how to articulate them.
In fall, we are scraped raw by the freshly sharp, cold wind. We are stripped from artifice like the denuded trees outdoors. We have nothing but ourselves to offer. We are cold and hungry, shivering and in need.
There is nothing more romantic than the meeting of self to self without the trappings of status, prejudice, and superficial rules.
Homecoming Day
These lyrics tell about the ritual that happens across the US this time of year in high schools and colleges to commemorate football and community. They also hint at the dark side of community. I wrote this years ago, but in this #MeToo climate, others might find themselves in this song:
1. Chicken wire and crepe paper
wrapped around a hayrack
towed behind a pickup
in the Homecoming parade
In a town as small as this one
maybe smaller but that was
too long ago
my distant past
my childhood a charade
Chorus (2x):
I had a dream last night
you turned around and asked me why
I wasn’t coming home again
I couldn’t tell you
2. Traps set in the corners
of the hallways of the high school
memories like serpents
poised and ready there to spring
tried to do my best to be invisible
but that was impossible
a waste of time
a waste of everything
Chorus (2x)
3. Tried to tell the people
with their eyes glued to the TV sets
to look at something else
outside the color of their hate
I was just a child then but I wasn’t
but that was ’cause
I couldn’t be
it wasn’t fair
you can’t go back and change my fate
Chorus 2x
I couldn’t tell you
Dear Universe (warning: frustrated writer)
Dear Universe:
I don’t know how I feel about my writing right now. When I started writing, I felt I had things to say, things about true heroes meeting the world with kindness, peacefulness, and acceptance of others. I wrote about these things, edited my stories, and eventually submitted them to agents. And I got hundreds of rejections for them.
I realized I needed help making my works better, and I submitted my work to beta readers and a developmental editor to polish the stories, Then I submitted a few of them again to agents. And got many, many more rejections.
There is a Quaker concept (yes, I’m a Quaker) called “praying for a way to open.” I have been doing that for a long time, even though I wonder if I have a right for the way to open given how much more privileged I am than too many people out there. I have not seen a way opening; in fact, every time I feel a glimmer of hope, another door closes. I pursue ideas for publication — the Kindle Scout program, which shut down just as my book was submitted; asking a successful author to put in a word for me; submitting directly to presses that take direct submissions. None of these have succeeded for me.
It is not that I am not trying, Universe; I have tried harder than (I believe) most. I do not say this because I want to guilt you into opening a door to me. I say this merely to point out that I need some guidance so I know whether to keep trying or not. I need to know whether I really have something important to say or if this is just a matter of my own self-importance. It seems to me that kindness and peacefulness, not to mention acceptance of others is even more needed now than it was when I started writing.
So here I am, asking for a way to open — or for a clear indication that I shouldn’t seek out publication anymore.
Love, Lauren
Words Like Me 