What am I waiting for?

I’m waiting.

The first thing I’m waiting for is 8:00 AM Central (US) Standard time, which is the point at which I can submit the novella of Gaia’s Hands to the Tor Novella program. Remember that Gaia’s Hands is the first book I wrote, the “problem child”, and I took a metaphorical chainsaw to it and reduced it to a little over 20,000 words. I will submit it and then wait some more.

The second thing is the outcome of my latest (and last) Kindle Scout campaign for Voyageurs. I don’t have much faith in this, as Kindle unceremoniously dumped the program on April 3, two days after I got in. They immediately dismantled much of the infrastructure, quit collecting votes, and belatedly let us know that they would choose the winners themselves. Nothing I’ve seen assures me that they’ll choose any of the books, much less mine.

The third thing is results for a blood test. Nothing scary, I assure you. The test is the HLA antigen test, and if it’s negative, I can become a platelet donor for my local blood bank (apparently I have a dreamy platelet count.) If it’s positive, then I was definitely pregnant at one point in my life. The time I could have been pregnant was 40 years ago, when I was 13, as a result of a rape. (If it’s negative, it doesn’t mean I was never pregnant.) So the blood test has the potential of solving a mystery, one that I’m not sure I want to know the answer to.

Waiting has its advantages. It is ripe with potentiality, a period of time where the optimist can imagine big things to happen. However, I prefer knowing so I can know where to go from here.

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.

Keeping the Dream, Fortifying the Dreamer

I am in love with the world “potentiality”. According to Merriam-Webster (2017), the word means “a chance or possibility that something will happen or exist in the future.” When a writer puts something out there, whether it be sending a manuscript to an agent or posting on Wattpad (shameless plug: I have a short story collection developing at https://www.wattpad.com/user/lleachie), they are activating potentiality. The possibilities for getting noticed or getting published in a crowded field of manuscripts are small, but the dream is great.

And then the agent rejects the piece with the common “It’s not you, it’s me. Keep writing”, or the story moulders on Wattpad …

It’s easy to become dejected, call yourself a failure, believe you’ll never be published, want to give up. But if you’re a writer, you can’t. You just can’t.

Writer, do not give up the dream. Do not buy into the belief that your only hope to be noticed is wishful thinking and a SEO guru. Don’t focus on fame (although wouldn’t that be nice?), but focus on the experience of getting further than you have before and having new experiences and learning. Create your own goals and stretch yourself to make them. Fortify yourself with what your writing means, that it’s important, and that the world doesn’t always honor what’s important, focusing instead on what is loud and flashy.

Maybe the goal in letting your writing out into the world is to release it and see what happens. Does it change a person’s mind? Does it get you on the stage at an open mic? Does it turn you into a blogger? Where does it lead you?