About Waiting

Sometimes, all you can do is wait for something to happen.

You’ve put out resumes, or queries, or submissions to a literary magazine. You put yourself out there, and then you wait.

While waiting the interminable wait, how do you look at your venture? Do you assume the worst hoping that you’ll be pleasantly surprised? Do you bask in a glow of possibility, entertaining the fantasy of success? Are you one of the few who can go on as if you haven’t handed your heart and soul out to strangers?

I myself wait impatiently to hear results, giddily checking Submittable and Query Tracker and email too many times. This is how I know that it was exactly 113 days (or 9763200 seconds) since I submitted Prodigies to DAW.

I have three other submissions out (two short stories and a poem) and one query out (Prodigies again). I know from the conference that rejections may not mean one’s work is not good, but that it doesn’t match current consumer demands. The odds are high given the number of competitors that I will get rejected all the way around. But I remain optimistic, because I need that vision of a change, of the possibility of bursting out of a cocoon having remade myself into an author, to season my days with sweet cinnamon and success.

Pessimistically optimistic

I miss the boundless optimism of hypomania, that magic feeling when I step out of the house in the morning, and the sun shines just so, and I just know something magic will happen, because I’m blessed that way.

I don’t miss it enough to go off my meds, because without the meds my moods shift from elation to irritability to despair within a few hours. I have rapid cycling bipolar 2, so moods develop fast, like a volatile weather pattern. And that optimism could crash into suicidal ideations with the smallest speed bump in my life. The meds help, but anything from lack of sleep to a major stressor could derail my balance.

As a counter to my hypomanic pixie dream girl optimism, I have how I was brought up in a repressively Germanic family. The motto of my family was “Don’t look forward to anything, or you might get disappointed.” So normal me without the buoyant giddiness or the crushing despair hides in a coccoon of “This enterprise is doomed.”

I have to learn how ordinary people experience optimism. I have a manuscript out to a major science fiction publisher. It’s been there for three months. I expect to hear about it any day now. Because I’ve put so much work into the book I think it has a chance, I feel optimistic — but I don’t trust it because it looks like mania. Because I’ve gotten a number of rejections from this iteration of the novel from agents, I feel I should be pessimistic, but pessimism takes a lot of energy to maintain and optimism feels better.

So I’m waiting for a report on Prodigies, trying to tell myself that I’m going to get rejected and being answered by a bubble of optimism that I don’t trust. My only answer is to hold onto hope and keep trying.

Day 27 Reflection: Gratitude

Everyone knows that gratitude makes people happier.

Maybe not everyone, but popular psychology instructs us to write gratitude journals, naming a magic three things per day that we feel grateful for. One can find gratitude journals in hard-bound form, in smartphone apps, and in Facebook memes. That’s because gratitude journaling works, according to research in positive psychology (Emmons and McCullough, 2003).

Some days it’s hard to write anything in the gratitude journal. Days when little things go wrong one after another, we hug those hurts to ourselves as if to use them as currency to bargain with our Maker for better luck. When we fall into negative self-talk, learned patterns of pessimism, we can’t find a thing to be grateful for. Gratitude doesn’t come to mind when we suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

I have those days of suffering, given that I live with Bipolar 2, which I’ve been open about in these pages. I also wrestle with negative self-talk. I’ve wrangled these two into submission for the most part, but still depression and darkness pop out at times.

I challenge the darkness with gratitude:

I am grateful for my bipolar disorder, because it has made me take care of myself. I am grateful because it has given me insight into suffering.

I am grateful for getting my manuscripts rejected because it has forced me to work harder and improve my writing.

I am grateful for my struggles because they remind me that nothing is simple in life.

Struggling

I got three rejections yesterday.

I don’t know how much more of this I can take, though. It’s very disturbing to write something, work through multiple edits and editors only to find that it doesn’t connect with the agents.

I still have about 19 queries out, and I could (and probably will) write a few more. But since this is the last substantive edit I can make on the document, this will be the last time I can send it out. And Prodigies is what I consider my best marketability wise.

I go through waves of pessimism (“I’m never going to get published, why try?”) and optimism (“I still have queries out”) When I think of what I will do once I get this book and Voyageurs queried (It’s still in edit) if no queries pan out, when I think of how much time and effort and money I’ve put into what I hoped would be a second career at retirement (I’ve got a while, but …) it’s heartbreaking.

That’s how I feel right now — heartbroken.

But then I get waves of optimism, and I don’t know whether to trust them. Should I pay attention to optimism, or is it just stringing out the inevitable moment where I find I can’t go any farther? I don’t know.

I will keep trying for a while. I will probably quit if I query the new improved Voyageurs and it doesn’t succeed. I’ll send the rest of my queries for Prodigies. Then I’ll reassess.

I don’t know if the problem is my pessimism or my optimism.

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 Optimist vs the Pessimist

I’m discovering that I am an optimist.

I’m waiting for a few things in the pipeline as I explained yesterday, and I feel good about my possibilities, despite all the times I got rejected before on these very same writings. This is why I keep submitting to agents and publishers. I fantasize about getting published. Again and again, I’m drunk on possibility, captured by potentiality, suspended in rosebuds, surrounded by perpetual spring.

The pessimist in me tries to shut down the optimist to no avail. Optimism provides a kind of high that pessimism can’t compete with. The pessimist in me is in its full glory when I get rejected, and feels no obligation to commiserate with me, preferring to kick me while I’m down.

I’m trying to find a way around the Pessimist’s great timing when I get rejected again, which I suspect will happen (despite the optimism), because realistically, there are a lot more of us writers than there are agents and publishers.

Potentiality, optimism and cognitive journaling

As I think I’ve said before, I’m in love with potentiality. Potentiality is the possibility — not the probability — that something will blossom. (I’m all about the blossom motif today, even though it’s too cold for anything to bloom still.)

I think that the love for potentiality is what sorts those who seek change and those who hide from change. Change is scary, rejection hurts, but those who seek change recognize the potential pitfalls. There is a term for those who seek change — those people are morphogenic.

What morphogenic people don’t always do a good job of is deal with disappointment when the desired goal fizzles. No amount of effort, good planning, or knowledge will guarantee success; there are so many other factors. I have an optimistic friend who takes rejections very well — in public, at least. I don’t know how he takes them in private. He seems to be an optimist anyhow.

I don’t deal with rejection well. I tend to prognosticate more rejection and failure when I’ve failed, as I have with not getting published over and over. Honestly, getting rejected has improved me as a writer, but that’s not what I see when I don’t get published. I tend to beat myself up, saying I’m not a good writer, I’ll never get published, etc.

This is where cognitive journaling comes in.

The theory behind cognitive journaling is that, when something bad happens, our brain reacts in automatic ways — maybe from parental or cultural conditioning — that causes an even more bad mood than previously, and that path in your brain from happening to feeling becomes (figuratively) a groove your mood gets stuck in. These bad ways are usually encapsulated in what are known as cognitive distortions — such as “I’ll never get published,” above.

Cognitive journaling seeks to replace the cognitive distortion with more balanced thoughts. For example, let’s tackle my cognitive distortion:

CD: I’ll never get published. I’m a bad writer.
What are some ways we can identify these as cognitive distortions?

I can’t predict the future
I’ve already been published — several academic articles, one essay in a progressive religious journal, and a couple poems in Lindsey-Woolsley (the Allen Hall literary magazine at University of Illinois

These become the basis for contradictions to the cognitive distortions:

If I quit trying, I’ll never find out if I can get published
I really can’t predict the future (otherwise, how come I can only predict bad things and not the latest lottery winners?)
People liked my writing before, it can happen again.
This rejection may have nothing to do with my writing.

If I write these down and look at them occasionally, I can (the theory holds) program my brain into thinking more positively.

*****

If I knew about this already, why did I not use it earlier? Because I was depressed, and deep depression tends to believe that everything negative is true. I couldn’t get myself to use cognitive journaling because I really wasn’t a good writer and I wouldn’t get published.

The irony was, in not doing my cognitive exercises, I was pushing my depression further by getting stuck in my negative rut. I’m not saying my depression was my fault because I didn’t do my cognitives, but my refusal was a factor in how deep the depression got.

So I’m journaling again, and hoping that it returns me to my optimistic self.

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

The conclusion — for now.

It can’t be helped.

As I crawl out of the other side of my depression, I find that writing is too much a part of my life to quit it.

My characters are almost family members, their stories important to tell. My husband and I talk about them:
“Do you think Grace’s parents had talents?”
“No, but I think they figured Grace had a latent music talent, and that’s why they hid her in the Renaissance Children school.”
I sometimes wish I could have coffee with one of them — the fey Josh; the acerbic Lilith; androgynous, impish Amarel; intense and troubled Greg.

Their worlds are hidden in plain sight from mine, and if I turn around just right, I’ll be at Barn Swallows’ Dance or the coffeehouse where Jeanne and Josh met or the Ancestors’ Room in the Chinese restaurant in McKinley Park neighborhood or the meeting room in the main Kansas City library, sitting in while Future Past meets. I have not managed to find these places in real life, so I write to create them.

About publishing — I’ve decided I will try Gaia’s Hands, the one that’s currently not winning the Kindle Scout process, with a Quaker press. My only sadness about this is, if it’s published, it will be preaching to the choir. I’ll turn Voyagers in to Kindle Scout somewhere around then. If those don’t sell, at least I’ve published and can kick that off the bucket list.

I will always be looking for leads. If you have a friend of a friend who knows of an unusual publishing house, please let me know.