Tag: enthusiasm

The Plan

I have a plan for how I’m going to handle the whole querying thing. Bear with me:

  1. I will continue dev editing and re-editing my existent books one at a time because that’s just good practice wherever I’m published.
  2. I will wait for six months for this querying cycle on Prodigies to complete, researching self-publishing and self-marketing as I go.
  3. If at the end of those six months I don’t have any takers, I will self-publish Prodigies. You will hear a lot about this and hopefully you will read it. 🙂
  4. I will query other books as they get edited — Voyageurs will probably be the second book in the pipeline, followed by Apocalypse. And so on.

This plan doesn’t include writing. I have not written since I finished Whose Hearts are Mountains, which I am sure needs serious dev editing as do the others.  That’s only been a month and a half. I haven’t been inspired to write lately, but there are various directions I could go — a sequel to Prodigies, a sequel to Voyageurs, another book in the Archetype series, a faerie adventure/romance novel … I have enough books that need to go through the dev cycle, though, that I wouldn’t have to write for a while. But I don’t want to get rusty.

I am hoping, of course, that this hard work pays off. I don’t know why I’m getting rejections from agents except for the usual “…I’m very selective … I don’t know if I can represent this novel with the enthusiasm it deserves.” (Question: If it deserves enthusiasm, why aren’t you — oh, never mind.) But at least I have a plan so that I’m not at the mercy of judgments about “what sells”. I just know that I write for a reason, and I want to see what that reason is.

Tarot, Choices, and Motivation

I’ve just gotten back to reading tarot cards, having gotten a new deck for Christmas. I’m not great with it — in fact, I still have to read the little guidebook to see what the cards are telling me, mostly because I’m not a visual person.

I don’t read tarot to predict my future or anyone else’s. None of this “slap, slap, slap, your dog’s gonna die” card reading.  I read Tarot as a way of understanding what’s going on in someone’s psyche. I pick decks and methods that are suited for interrogating undercurrents and suggesting right action. The Good Tarot, my Christmas present, functions well in this way.

I don’t see my tarot-reading ability as having great favor from the spirits or anything dramatic like that. Tarot, to me, is a way of unlocking intuition and perhaps giving life-affirming instruction. Frankly, my readings are closer to positive psychology than woo-woo. Given that I teach positive psychology, that’s not surprising.

This morning I gave myself a very short reading. The way I do this is ask a question — the question was “what’s in store for me today?” I had already decided I would take some time putting more description in Voyageurs to make up for the material I cut by advice of my dev editor. So that was very much a part of “today”, but so was going to the weight clinic to try to find out why I haven’t lost this last 20 pounds. (I’ve lost 65 and have been on a plateau for a year).

I laid down one card — the two of fire. Its basic meaning — “creative planning for the future, mapping progress, trusting in the unknown. Spirit-led ambition.” (Baron-Reid, 2017). I laughed, because I sensed that one card told me everything I needed to know. But when I shuffled the cards again, two cards fell out — the aforementioned two of fire and The Fool, the card that symbolizes the beginning of a journey, a child’s enthusiasm.

The way those two cards go together tells more of a story: I am at the beginning of a journey, planning the journey with enthusiasm, trusting in the unknown rather than assuming that news will always be bad. It’s entirely possible I’m misinterpreting this and it’s about my class planning for the semester, although that’s less like a journey and more like a walk around the block. I suppose it could be about a journey I don’t know about yet. It doesn’t matter, because what matters is that I take that attitude to all my journeys.

Baron-Reid, C. (2017). The Good Tarot Guidebook. Hay House Publishing.