An excerpt from Whose Hearts are Mountains (Literary work)

I decided to sleep for the night in a rest stop just outside of Adair, in the former state of Iowa; a place where a giant white monolith stood outside the entrance to an old rest stop. I could see very little; my headlights didn’t cut through the deep night enough.

I should have known someone else would find the rest stop as a shelter. I spied two such individuals at the Adair rest stop, revealed by the flicker of my headlights — a dark man with long greying hair and a wizard’s beard, and a paler man with hair tucked back in a rasta cap. The two sat on the ground in front of the door. Behind them, I noted the expansive blond brick building with its glass panels in the front, and a dull glow in a back room. I didn’t doubt that the windows would be revealed to be damaged and dusty in the morning.

I considered that, in the post-wars era, the men sitting by the entrance were not truly homeless. They landed on their feet, founded a camp, and called it home.

I pulled up to where they sat and rolled down the window. “May I stay here for the night? I can sleep in my truck.”

“Sure, ma’am. Martha should be back shortly, so you don’t feel scared with just us two men.” I didn’t expect such a considerate offer on the road.

“No, that’s okay, I’ll pull my truck over here — “

“You ain’t sleeping in that truck, are you?” The unkempt white man, who wore socks as gloves on his hands, shook his fist at me. He spoke in an oddly flat voice, and he struggled with eye contact.

“Well, actually, yes, I was going to.” I could recline the seat back and stretch out a little —

“No, we got a nice warm building. You’re staying,” the black man decided. “Martha will be back soon to be your chaperone. Would be nice if you gave us something to help with supper. ”

I didn’t trust him. I couldn’t. Was this another trap? I searched my mind for something to forestall my spending the night with them. Would they rob me? Assault me? “I have nothing to trade — “

The black man chuckled. “You got stories. Might as well get to know you better,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m George.”

“And I’m Pagan,” the other man said, not offering his hand.

I looked them over in the headlights’ glow. They looked harmless. Famous last words, I realized. On the other hand, I would probably have a good chance against them with my gold-filled backpack, which probably weighed 20 or 30 pounds. And I was very hungry.

Rejections and Cognitive Distortions

This is probably a rerun from way back when, but:

Sometimes I wonder why I put my books out there.

Ask any writer after a rejection, and you’ll probably hear the same misgivings. I myself been rejected by so many agents that I thought I’d get over this. I haven’t.

I think the two things that keep me from quitting are: 1) my short memory, and 2) noting the negatives — cognitive distortions — are not real.

Cognitive distortions

Cognitive distortions are statements we make to ourselves to define our reality — but in actuality just make us miserable. (Positive Psychology.com. 2019)

For example, I just went through an online pitch contest where writers try to get attention from agents about their books. I did not succeed. So I combined this with all the rejections I’ve gotten and started talking to myself like this:

“I’m a bad writer.”

“Nobody likes my writing.”

“I’ll never get published.”

These are all examples of cognitive distortions.

“I’m a bad writer.” — All or nothing thinking. “I’m either perfect or bad.” Also labeling.

“Nobody likes my writing.” — Mind reading. How do I know this?

“I’ll never get published.” — Fortune-telling. If I can predict the future, can’t I win the lottery?

In reality, I can’t predict the future, Nor can I be the worst writer ever if I got through college. I can name people who have liked my writing. These realizations are known as contradictions.

How to start:

It helps to write this down on paper. Here are the steps:

1) Write down the thoughts that are bothering you

2) Identify the cognitive distortions. If you look for “cognitive distortions” on Google, you will find many sources. My favorite resource is here.

3) Come up with an alternative thought:

“I’m a bad writer.” — “There are people better and worse than me”

“Nobody likes my writing.” — “I have had short fiction and poetry published”

“I’ll never get published.” — “Never is a long time; and if you never get published, it might have nothing to do with you”

4) The important question: what is my next action?

When your mind is clear, you can determine your next move to live your life most authentically.

What now?

Get the list of cognitive resources and the PDF journaling sheets at the site below. Do this when you’re feeling negative about life. Keep it up. After a while, you’ll only need to do this as a reminder.

Positive Psychology.com.(2019). Cognitive distortions: When your brain lies to you (+ PDF Worksheets). Available:

https://positivepsychology.com/cognitive-distortions/ [January 14, 2020]

Tweetdeck vs Hootsuite — a writing blogger’s take (Social Media)

Social Content Managers
I don’t have the money to have an assistant handling my social media. (And, unless I become the next JK Rowling, I won’t). So I have to depend on social content manager web pages. I use two social content managers — Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. Here’s what you can expect for each and why both can be useful:

Hootsuite: My everyday workhorse
I will be talking about the free version of Hootsuite, as I can’t afford (nor do I need) the full versions, which runs $29/month for the professional (individual) account. The free version does enough for most uses. You can follow your feeds on three different social media sites at once. More importantly, it functions as a launcher for multiple social media sites — three different social media for the free version. I have my Hootsuite working with my Facebook Pages, Twitter, and Instagram, and can send the same post through one, two, or all three sites at once. Free Hootsuite can be found here.

However, Hootsuite allows for a limited number of scheduled tweets, four in total, in their free version. Sometimes, if there’s a #PitMad or a #IWSGPit (sessions for pitching a novel on Twitter), I need 12 pitches, one for each hour the contest runs. This is why I turn to Tweetdeck.

TweetDeck: For Targeted Twitter Time
Tweetdeck does more functions than free Hootsuite, but only for Twitter. TweetDeck is free, which makes it tempting if you’re a Twitter-only social media user.

TweetDeck can follow multiple functions of Twitter at once — home, notifications, messages, trending, and submitted tweets. I think the beauty in TweetDeck is scheduled tweets. As I said above, in the case of a pitch contest, one needs to be posting once an hour. That’s twelve hours with two books I’m pitching, which is 24 posts. Although one has to prepare each post seperately, TweetDeck handled all of them without balking. Free TweetDeck can be found here.

In Conclusion,
Hootsuite is my everyday social media companion. Its free version does everything I need on a given day. But on those special days where I need to tweet a lot throughout the day, there’s TweetDeck. Does anyone use either or both of these? Tell me why at lleachie@gmail.com.

A Moment of Gratitude (Personal Development)

This is a picture of my husband.

Something happened to me yesterday that I couldn’t imagine ever happening — a couple of friends offered to beta-read my latest novel!

This is big, for reasons most writers will recognize. Our own families generally don’t read our books, much less our friends. The fact that my friends are actually beta-reading my works amazes me,

I don’t worry about these friends being unable to critique fairly, because they know I need this to grow in my writing. And one’s a Creative Writing grad, one a professor, another a grad in (I believe) psychology. A good mix.

So pardon me if my feet don’t touch the ground today!

Twitter as #writingcommunity (Personal development, Social Media for Writers)

Oh, that’s how you do Twitter!
I just wanted to announce that I’ve figured out Twitter. I even pinned a tweet!

#writingcommunity is my Favorite Place
I have fallen in love with Twitter, especially the #writingcommunity.

Why have I fallen in love with #writingcommunity?
#writingcommunity Twitter is different than mainstream Twitter (although I don’t have much knowledge of other specialty Twitters). It’s surprisingly social. Some of the discussion is about writing, but some of it is simply “tell me how your day went.” It uplifts, commiserates, and makes people laugh.

One of the activities in #writingcommunity is following each other.There are two reasons: one of the purposes of Twitter for writers is to add to one’s “writer’s platform” or media presence. One of the things many publishers and agents ask is about your writing platform, because that means potential buyers for your book. The more important part, though, is the interaction I mentioned above.

Is #writingcommunity for you?
If you’re a writer or an aspiring writer, a thousand times yes! Think about it — you have thousands of people who are good with words. Playing with words is a natural consequence. You have people with writing as a commonality; they’ll talk about writer’s block and rejection.

Wishes are the first step

I’ve been thinking about wishes, largely because I tend to look down on them as impractical. The truth of the matter is, the impetus for goals comes from wishes.

What are wishes?
This is easy. Wishes are thoughts about what we want to happen. They are the expression of fantasy. Fantasy is a video clip of our desires, wishes are the sound bite.

Fantasy, as well as the resulting wishes, come from our values, which in turn come from our emotional and cognitive responses to formative experiences, some of which are transmitted to us by our childhood interactions with caretakers.

I grew up in a creative family — my mother took photographs and designed multimedia projects and my dad did woodworking. Thus I learned that creativity was valued in my family, I learned from my teachers that I had a skill for writing. These developed my value that getting recognition for creativity was important.

I fantasize about getting a book contract. It’s a movie in my head. From it I extrapolate the wish to get published.

Wishes are translated into goals
We have limited resources and abundant wishes, so we have to prioritize which ones we act upon. When we decide to process a wish into steps we can act upon, it becomes a goal. So my raw goal is to get published.

Goals are then clarified
We can’t act upon goals until we’ve clarified two things:

what resources (time, money, etc.) we can allocate to fulfill the goal
actions to take to fulfill the goal

To make strong goals, we need to answer the queries “who, what, where, when, why, how many, how much”. So I come up with “I will have my first book traditionally within the next five years.”

Goals that go through the SMART philosophy (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) become even stronger. When I do this to my goal, it falls apart somewhat when examined:

Specific: Yes, I covered the query questions above
Measurable: “book traditionally published” is measurable
Relevant: I think so
Time-bound: Yes
Achievable: here’s the big problem. This goal has nothing to do with what I can do, but a result that’s out of my control. I need to rewrite this goal into one or more goals that will be things I can take action on, which I have articulated here.

The goal becomes the plan
Because I have done the prior steps, I can act upon those specific goals. The goals inform the plan, which is the series of actions that it will take to fulfill the plan.

Then it’s time to act.
You have a trajectory, a time limit, and the steps toward winning. Now it’s up to you.

Without goals, our wishes flounder. But without wishes, we have nothing to make goals from.

My semester is over! Now what to do?

I’m on break and I already don’t know what to do with myself.

I’m too bored to surf and not motivated enough to write. Or do anything that uses my brain.

This will definitely not do.

What I’d really like to do is spend a day or two at a spa. As I’m 120 miles from a spa, that is not happening.

So I’m probably going to go to the cafe and see how much I can get written on Kami today.

Counting the words

I am trying to extend a 1200 word story into a 7000 word story for a writing contest. I’ve written 300 words so far; so I only have to do this 22 more times.

I tend to like short, concise writing, even in novels. I wonder if it’s because I’m relatively impatient, or whether I have a short attention span, or whether I really really can get everything I want done in fewer words. I’ve been told the latter by my dev editor, who doesn’t want me to lengthen things. On the other hand, I have a short story that an editor would like to see as a novel. He’s absolutely right, and it would make a great prequel to Prodigies, but I would have to immerse myself in Poland for a couple weeks to get the feel for it.

So, back to the story. The story is Kami, and it’s about death and afterlife. It also features Jeanne and Josh Beaumont-Young, one of my favorite couples. Jeanne at this point is 80 and has just lost her 55-year-old husband of 27 years. I like the couple because they defyour common notions of love and attraction, and because they have a chemistry despite their bookishness.

I need to take a deep breath and set myself a writing goal, and just write, then edit. Luckily I have a vacation to do it.

Keep Writing

Keep writing.

That’s my advice through the times of rejections, the times spent wondering whether we will ever get published.

Keep taking those ideas and putting them into words, and then hone those words so that they spin the scene, the emotions, the characters, the plot.

Keep writing, keep editing, keep improving. Realize that we shouldn’t write for the glory of being recognized; most of us, even traditionally published, will not see a huge number of readers. Give those words life, and they may change the world even if nobody else ever reads them, because they have changed us.

The Conference

Sorry I haven’t written for a couple of days, but I’ve been busy busy at the conference. It’s been a very positive experience, and here are some of the things I’ve learned:

A lot of the people here write science fiction and fantasy. And the stories are all very different from each other.
Character may be more important than plot in hooking an agent in.
My work is good — I was told by one editor that my work was “going places.” I hope so.
The same editor told me I need to back off on the novels (high effort) and start writing some short stories to submit to journals. I have 5-6 novels, none sold yet. He is probably right.
The same editor teased me about my character padding her calves to look like a man, saying that several females he knew had more muscular calves than he did. Well, shit.
Comp titles (“Twilight meets Hunger Games”) really exist for a reason.
I made a friend who’s about my age who introduced me to Broad Universe, a writing space for women (love the pun) and might get me into a critique group if there’s a space.
I made another friend in Kansas City (about my age) who writes stuff with similar worldview quirk (turning mythologies on their head).
I need to put the fact that I was a runner-up in Cook Publishing’s Short Story contest in my query letter.
I need a business plan
I need a marketing plan (this blog is part of it)
I need to quit using so many dashes — and ellipses …
The conference has coffee service ALL DAY.

That’s probably not everything, but the experience has been affirming and I’m a little giddy thinking about it. I’m sure the impostor syndrome will take hold tomorrow, but for now, I feel like a writer.