Growth Mindset in Our Endeavors

Today I’m just waiting for straggling exams to come in. This means it’s time for some creativity.

My first reader (aka my husband) says the second half of my latest book goes too fast. He’s right, of course. So the task du jour is to work on adding a little more substance into the second half. This is not, I repeat not, an easy thing to do without disrupting flow. So my work is cut out for me.

This is a reminder of what I learned a long time ago in writing books, but it may be a good piece of advice in general: Never fall in love with your results so much that you can’t hear constructive criticism.

I believe so many things are a process — writing, teaching, any skilled labor or hobby. We can take them just for fun, but those with a growth mindset will always push themselves to improve.

It took a lot for me to get there, in part because I think writers’ immediate response to writing a book is “This is my brainchild! My masterpiece!” Our second response is “This is horrible! I can’t bear to edit it!” Somewhere in-between that is the desire to write the best book possible. That’s where the growth is.

Something to learn

Sometime around the 2nd of February, I will have put in 1000 entries into this blog. A couple-three years or so worth of entries. This boggles my mind, because I didn’t think I could stick to something for that long.

To be honest, I’ve never been good at sticking to things. I plant a garden and the weeds take over. I start a hobby and I abandon with a room full of supplies. A good amount of this is from the bipolar, when one gets a boost of enthusiasm and energy in mania and then heads down a spiral of depression. Some of this has to do with my ability to over-focus at times, and the subsequent burnout. Some of it has to do with my somewhat lacking planning skills. In other words, I’m a mess who can concentrate on two things well: My job and my writing.

Maybe I have something to learn from this — what keeps me on track on these two areas? Influence on the outside.

How can I use this? Provide myself with external contact points, such as this blog does. There aren’t many of you, but I don’t want to let you down, so I keep writing. I keep trying to publish. I keep asking for feedback.

So, if you’re stuck anywhere in life, what motivates you? What is your workaround?

Ready to Quit?

My tarot reading for today (Deck: The Good Tarot, a positive psychology/affirmations deck) says it’s time to decide whether I want to continue writing or not.

For all my threats of giving up, I’m not sure I’m ready. The problem is that when I want to quit, I’m running on feelings and moods, which in my case can run rather intense. What’s worse, I’m running on that primordial soup of past hurts that it’s easy to fixate on:

I thrive on recognition.Recognition is the positive attention that kept me going through a rather negative childhood.

I don’t deal well with rejection. (Who does?) As an overweight, highly intelligent, awkward child, I received a lot of rejection so I tend to overreact to it.

I don’t like being made a fool of, having been the butt of jokes much of my life. I’m afraid I’m being a fool by continuing to hope.

On the other hand:

I see myself as a hopeful person

I highly admire perseverance

I like the image of being a writer (although I wrestle with whether I need traditional publishing to feel like a writer)

I like writing. A lot. Editing, not so much. Querying — I love the optimism I feel when I send out a new query. I hate rejections.

I love to have people discover my writing.

The key, though, is that if I quit only to find that someone picks up Prodigies, I would un-quit in a second. If I had readers, especially ones I could communicate with, I would write with and for a community.

Quitting won’t get me what I need. So, how do I get what I need out of writing?

what I needed to believe

So I thought I was going to quit writing for a little while. Too many rejections. Too much hard work with no payoff. Too much frustration about the process.

But yesterday in class, I was teaching my students a technique of getting clients to set goals. The method uses a simple question: “Tell me what you want your life to be like five years from now.” I had the students try the question on themselves.

So, naturally, I turned the question on myself. And do you know what?

I still want to become a published author, even though I have been working on that goal for five years and it hasn’t happened yet.

I also finally figured out what I’m writing for NaNo.

A romance novel featuring the Secret Society of Santas. Novel #2 in that series. (Novel 1 needs a dev edit, but it’s somewhere down the line).

I’m not giving up yet.

Perseverance

I’m re-editing Mythos (how many times has this been now?) on the advice of my current beta-reader (beta-reader #2 has gotten very busy and hasn’t gotten back to it). Most of what we’ve found are little mistakes I should have caught myself, contradictions (oops!) and awkward and vague sentences. I’m halfway through the book correcting these.

I’ve also rewritten a couple scenes to be more suspenseful, but as always, the big question comes:

Will agents like it as much as I like it?
Yes, I’m about to go through the rejection cycle again.

I know we’ve been through this before. I get excited, I send queries, and I get rejections. Why do I keep trying?

I guess I have perseverance. It might be one of my best qualities — not giving up. It may be one of my worst, as shown by the time I let a Siamese cat scratch me 28 times until I finally petted it.

So I’m probably going to resubmit Mythos soon, as well as the freshly renovated Voyageurs. Both have been rejected. I don’t know if I’ll have luck this time, either.

Richard has instructed me not to submit any queries until I’m over this dysthymic (low-level depressive) episode. I’m working on it.

What am I going to do with Voyageurs after the beta-reader revision?

Probably go through the cycle of submitting again. If I don’t get an agent, I can at least say I tried. And if I get rejected, I know I gave them the best product I could.

Now for finding beta readers for Mythos, the first book in the Barn Swallows’ Dance cycle (Duology plus one related book)… anyone want to volunteer? Please let me know at lleachie.

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But for now, I’m going on vacation! It starts with a seven-hour drive to the hinterlands of Wisconsin, where I will stay in a cheap hotel with my husband so that we can spend the last night in a spendy boutique hotel. I will fish, eat bratwurst and brick cheese (think limburger without the stink and strong flavor, although I like limburger too) and visit my dad, and collect more stories. My sister and possibly her husband and possibly my niece will be there, and dad will cook a crockpot dinner and mix drinks for us and all his friends. My father is very introverted, maybe even shy, but he finds his human contact through sharing. And he is an incredible cook, even now.

I hope this recharges my batteries toward writing. My computer will be going with me, so expect some missives from the road.

Love you all.

Pushing toward growth.

I have one condition I need to fulfill before I keep writing — well, maybe 2 — a developmental editor and beta-readers for my finished books.

I need to find beta-readers. This is a difficult task, although my beta-reader for Voyageurs, Sheri Roush, is doing a wonderful job of pointing out where my book gets confusing and where it’s really working.

I need to find money in the budget for developmental editing.

I need to find beta readers.

Would you like to be a beta reader? Let me know!

The World Needs Your Novel

Are you familiar with NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) is an annual writing contest where there are no prizes but a certificate and the only one you’re competing against is yourself. The name comes from a contraction of “National Novel Writing Month” but has grown far beyond its bounds, with international reach.

Every November, thousands of writers and aspiring writers unite over the Web for NaNo. Each will write toward a goal of a written work of 50,000 words. In October 2016 (the last year for which data is available), almost 400,000 participants worldwide participated, with 34,000 people finishing the 50,000 word goal (Office of Letters and Light, 2016). The NaNo website provides blurbs of advice from writers, encouragement emails, and forums where people can ask for advice, seek information, and at times lament lack of progress.

The motto of NaNo is “The World Needs Your Novel”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the world needs your novel to be published. With Google making research easy and the boom in potential writers, those who seek an agent may never get one and those who self-publish may find their works mouldering in a corner of the Internet. Nowadays, having your work read may be more a matter of search engine optimization than the quality of your writing.

I struggle with this all the time. I do not write for the market; I write from my heart, which is deep and quirky. My heroes are pacifists and horticulturists. Nobody has rippling muscles; my sexiest hero is androgynous. I persist, however, in writing and posting some of my works on Wattpad and sending manuscripts to agents who tell me “It’s not you, it’s me”.

I persevere because, deep down, I believe the world needs my novel. Not in a way that makes me famous (Fame actually makes me nervous). But in a way that makes people take a deep breath and think. And feel. And look at things like pacifism, environmentalism. and love differently than before. All I need to do is get my writing into their hands.

And there we are — back to the hard part.

Office of Letters and Light (2017). Press release 2017. Available: https://nanowrimo.org/press. [April 14, 2018].

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