What’s Up

What’s on my stereo

I’m playing Rock Lobster by the B-52s, which isn’t conducive to writing but is conducive to bewildering my husband at this time of the morning. I’m using it to wake up.

What’s on my mind

I feel like the summer is slipping away from me. I have a month before fall meetings start, and I pretty much have my course sites (the difficult part for me) set up for the Fall. I assume the university will be de-masked, with those students without vaccinations at risk for getting sick, unless we get a variant more daunting than the delta version.

Photo by Karina Zhukovskaya on Pexels.com

I’m going to have to get used to not having to set up a camera and microphone, not having to stand glued in one specific place, and not having to spray the chairs and tables with disinfectant (called “Bearcat Thunder”) between classes. Thank goodness.

What’s in my heart

I’m struggling in my heart. I haven’t fallen in love with anything lately, and love is what fuels me to write. I wrote a poem the other day, though, about one of the things I hate the most: proselytizing. Specifically, the hand extended when someone says “Jesus loves you” only to pull you into a place where Jesus purportedly hates everything you are. (I believe that Jesus loves who we are regardless.) There might have been a crush involved, and an intense disappointment.

My emotions are not strong lately, and I’ve always written out of a place of strong emotions. This is not entirely true — Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Planet was written out of a sense of fun, and I’ve made it to the first edit stage.

What’s on my plate

As I mentioned above, I’m editing Kel and Brother Coyote, which if I haven’t mentioned it, is a serial novella in the space opera genre. I’m hoping to get it on Vella just to see how well Vella works. It will, of course, need edits.

I’m waiting for beta reader responses on both Gaia‘s Hands and Kringle in the Night. These will be self-published on Amazon. Gaia’s Hands is a contemporary fantasy romance, and the first book I wrote, and thus has gone through many, many rewrites. It asks the question: what is hidden from plain sight? Kringle in the Night is the second in the Kringle Chronicles series to come out at Christmas time. Both of them have atypical protagonists — imperfect, ordinary, made extraordinary by what might be called magic.

So I have things to edit, things to re-edit, and hopefully things to publish (self-) various places. I will also keep submitting to agents, but I keep that to every six months or so.

So it’s not like I’m not busy. I’m just not creating right now, and it makes me itchy. I need to submerge me into the editing.

Hello

So jump into my comments and tell me how you’re doing!

This Summer

I’m going to need to find something to do soon.

This summer has been a strange one. I’m largely staying at home as I did during pandemic times, and I’ve spent a lot of time working on projects.

I’m running out of projects.

I’ve prepped my classes for Fall semester, that time of year that comes in a month and a half. I’ll win NaNo today and finish Kel and Brother Coyote in 3 days. Proofing it will take a few more days and then I’ve run out of things to do.

This is even with afternoon naps every day.

Things I could do

I could, I suppose, finish Voyageurs, which is the thing I least want to do. I feel like I’ve lost the plot on that one. Literally lost. the. plot. I don’t feel like the second half goes with the first half. I don’t want the second half to go that long. I don’t — I’m whining.

I could start a new novel. It’s not that I don’t have ideas sitting on the drawing board.

I could concentrate on short stories and poems — I wrote what I think is a solid poem the other day. I might have gotten the knack back.

I could, I suppose, just nap some more.

I do, it turns out, have about three doctors’ appointments in the next two weeks, so maybe I’ll just get the stress cardiogram, the psychiatrist visit, and the setup for my cataract surgeries dealt with.

Or have fun and talk my husband into another writers’ retreat.

The luxury of choice

I’ve come off as very privileged right now. Think about it — most people have 9-5 jobs and maybe two weeks vacation. My husband works part time and has, at best, four-day weekends. No paid vacation. I have, more or less, a whole summer to do my internship supervision and, it turns out, enjoy free time.

This fall, I won’t have choices. I will have a solid semester with no vacation (except a couple three-day weekends and a week at Thanksgiving, so I shouldn’t complain). Semesters are pretty intense, so I will welcome the breaks. But I don’t have the flexibility I have in summer.

Still I have more freedom than most people do, and it makes up for the pretty slim pay. (Almost).

I guess today I will be grateful for my summer schedule and find a time to enjoy just being off work.

Saturday Morning

As opposed to any other day of the week

Working at home in the summer (which consists of a lot of waiting around for things to happen and writing) makes every day blur into another. The only thing making sense of my days is my husband’s work schedule. He’s off on Mondays, works Tuesday-Thursday, off on Friday, at work every other Saturday.

Today is a Saturday when he works. Ideally, on a Saturday, I’d get rest. But I’ve been napping nearly every day, so I don’t need a restful Saturday. And I need to write 2k words for NaNo.

Today’s coffee

Today’s coffee is Wet Hull Java, roasted medium roast. We’ve been struggling to get the right grind for this bean — too fine and the extraction is sour; too coarse and it’s bitter. Today, we have it perfect.

There was another bat in the house

My husband can hear bats. This is handy for when we have bats, which is often in the summer. This one was down and behind the fake fireplace in the living room, and the little girl (Chloe, our youngest cat) was trying to smack the living daylights out of it. I’d say she was successful, because the bat crawled out of her reach like a half-drowned wreck survivor. Because Chloe had had extensive contact with a little creature that can bite you without you knowing and carry rabies, the bat will be going to Public Health to be tested for rabies.

I have a phobia of bats, but we’ve had so damned many in here that I only get them tested for rabies if they could reasonably had human or cat contact. And if I have to get rabies shots (something I think is inevitable someday given the number of bats we shepherd outside every summer), so be it.

What to do today

I have to do my NaNo writing today — so far I have written 4000 words or so toward Kel and Brother Coyote Save the World, and I estimate I have 14k or so left to write. I’m writing NaNo style, which is fast and fearlessly, and I dread the amount of editing I am going to have to do on this document. Outside of NaNo events, I write a little more slowly and thoughtfully. But this is Camp NaNo, and the mode is fast.

What are you doing this weekend?

Drop me a comment!

Getting Back Into Writing

I haven’t done a lot of writing lately

I really haven’t done a lot of writing lately. I’ve been tired and dragging, taking lots of naps, doing a lot of editing of prior works. This means I have about 5 novels that I could submit today if I were in a submission cycle, two needing beta readers, and one that I will finish at Camp NaNo this year. Hopefully.

I feel like I’m losing the knack

It’s been so long since I’ve written a novel start to finish that I don’t know if I can do it again. Of course I can; it’s only been six months. But when I write that down, six months seems like such a stretch. I’ve been editing things for that long, which uses a different set of muscles, as it were.

To be fair, I have almost completed a serial space opera of novella size, so it’s not like I’m not writing. In fact, that whole last paragraph sounds stupid if I take that into account, doesn’t it? It’s not like novels are a whole different beast than novellas, is it?

Ok, never mind

There is a tend to aggrandize novel writing over other forms of writing. I’ve never had anyone ooh and ahh over short stories. Novelists are a rare breed (hint: No, they’re not) and what they do is mysterious. So non-novel writing is, indeed, writing.

I must go write. Bye!

My Everyday Habit

My morning practice

Every morning I write this blog. There are many reasons I do this, not the least because I want that little message from WordPress that I have written the blog X days in a row (yay gamification!) I’ll explore some of the other reasons below.

A morning ritual

I consider writing this blog my morning ritual, along with coffee, music, and getting my hair to behave. The ritual starts with racking my brain with finding a topic to write on. Then I start typing and thinking and typing. And editing as I go.

Warming up for writing

I find the practice of journaling warms me up for writing. Not just the fingers, although by the number of typos I make while typing the blog I guess my fingers need warming up.

Writing the blog warms up my mind. It trains it to write as a flow exercise, a task where time flies past me and I’m in the moment. Admittedly, blogging itself is not a flow experience because it doesn’t go on for long enough. but blogging limbers up my mind so that flow is possible.

A challenge

One of my attractions to my daily ritual of blogging is that it’s a challenge. What am I going to write today? Have I written about that lately? Will anyone care about my blog? I don’t know about the latter, as I have between 11-20 readers on a regular basis and 57 followers, which suggests most of my followers aren’t reading the blog. That’s okay; I still face the challenge every morning.

To my fellow bloggers

How often do you blog? Daily? More than daily? Weekly? Let me know!

Random Observations About Writing

About poetic language vs realism

I notice that the sunrise this morning is not really pink — maybe more of a salmon color, but that’s not poetic, is it? “The salmon-colored dawn.” No. Just no.

“Rosy”, on the other hand, is poetic. And everyone who reads the poem or prose takes the same poetic leap and accepts the dawn as rosy.

Photo by Sebastian Voortman on Pexels.com

About writers and coffee

I’m in a writer’s group on Discord, and the caffeine addiction there is real. To the point where we talk about how we make coffee and what blend we use. And heaven forbid we skip our coffee in the morning.

I haven’t met any tea drinkers, but it could be a small sample size. Do you drink tea?

About that self-doubt

The same group of writers admitted that they too have self-doubt.

About romance categories

There are many, many romance categories. Superhero, bad boy, playboy, alien. Sweet, steamy, hot, erotica. Friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, boy next door, strangers to lovers. Science fiction, fantasy, contemporary, historical.

And because of my self-doubt, I don’t know if I belong to any of these.

Marketing

Right now, I feel like most of my writing time is spent in marketing, and I don’t even have anything on imminent publication. I’m using The Kringle Conspiracy as my hook for newsletter subscribers, so that’s out. This is all a very strange journey and I don’t know how things are going to work this fall when I’m back to work.

What about you?

Do you have any observations about yourself as a writer, or if you aren’t a writer, other writers? I’d love to see you drop these in the comments!

The Beginning of a Writing Journey

Seven years ago today

Seven years ago yesterday, I finished my first novel. To be exact, I finished the first draft of my first novel, which was then revised so many times over the years that it’s not the book I originally wrote. Coincidentally, it’s the book I hope to self-publish by the end of the summer, Gaia’s Hands.

After that first novel

I thought I’d quit writing after I wrote that novel, because I had fulfilled one of those Big Audacious Goals that I thought I’d never fulfill, being a short-story person by nature. But I wrote six and a half more novels — the half novel being 50k of a book that needs another half.

So far, only one book, The Kringle Conspiracy, has been published. My family likes it and it’s helped me get quite a few newsletter readers in the past few weeks. That book was almost 40 years in the making, coming from a vignette I wrote in a high school creative writing class.

There will be (hopefully) two other books to be (self-) published soon: the aforementioned Gaia’s Hands and the second Kringle book, Kringle in the Night.

Where to from here?

Obviously, I’m probably going to keep writing, although I haven’t written a novel since — checks watch — last November. I’d like to start writing a new novel soon, even though I’ve been advised to stick with short stories for a while. Getting things published is also important to me right now.

For you

Do you have ideas for a novel? Dreams of writing a novel? Write them here!

What I Want Out of Writing

I’m still writing

After yesterday’s revelations, I’m still writing.

I will not be able to quit my day job, and at best I might enhance our income by $6 to $20k. But there’s value in writing, whether it is to express my thoughts and emotions, to explore skill-building, or to fantasize about making it big.

Time plus money = ?

I need to get value from my writing equivalent to the time (lots) and the money (considerably less) that I have put into my writing.

However, whenever we fulfill a goal, value comes from two outcomes: changes (usually gains) in resources and satisfaction. Gains in resources don’t have to be monetary — they can be in terms of knowledge and experience. Satisfaction comes from completing goals, and the feeling of that satisfaction differs by where it comes from. The deepest satisfaction comes from satisfying higher-order goals, goals that come from higher values like beauty, truth, and accomplishment.

Looking at my time and money spent writing, I see that I have increased greatly in both experience and knowledge about writing. I have written several pieces, both short and long, and that represents another gain in resources. And, having satisfied the higher-level goals of accomplishment and knowledge, I feel this satisfaction very deeply.

(Note: The discussion on the outputs from fulfilling goals, or the value-creating activities, comes from family resource management theory, which I taught for close to 20 years. For a summary of resource management theories, read here.)

What I want out of writing

I, of course, have been analyzing this question of what I want out of writing to make sure I’m getting my money’s worth, as it were. This is the list I came up with:

To learn about writing
To get people to read my work
To enjoy my time writing
To be able to call myself an author
To improve in my writing
To enjoy a hobby

I think there are good enough reasons here to keep me writing.

How about you?

What is a goal of yours and what does it give you?

Giving Up Cherished Dreams

Dreams of being an author

I went into this thought of being an author figuring I would find an agent, then a publisher, and get a five-figure advance and royalties. My ex-boyfriends (all geeks) would see my name in the science fiction section of the bookstore and be forced to have some respect for me. I could quit my day job.

The sobering reality

The truth of the matter is that the scenario for writers is far less rosy. According to the Authors Guild 2018 poll:

Median income for all authors (full vs part, traditional vs self-published) was $6080 in 2017
Median income for full-time authors for all writing-related activities, however, was $20,300
Self-published authors earned less than traditionally published authors
Publishers are paying lower advances to authors who are not celebrity or leading authors

And then there’s the part where Amazon has pretty much taken over the bookselling and publishing market, likely pushing all these trends. And the fact that the typical self-publisher will sell only 250 books.

This is a lot to absorb. If I’m going to be an author (I already am), I have to have honest and good reasons to do so. The biggest thing I need to do is dispel my illusions:

I will not make a lot of money doing this.
Most of my friends will not have read my work.
My work will likely not sit on a bookshelf.
I may never get picked up by an agent or be traditionally published.
No matter how much effort I put into being a published author, I may never sell more than 250 books.

This is all sobering information. If I write, I have to write for a reason other than external validation of sales and recognition, because I may not get those no matter how well I write. I will never be able to support myself this way, although it might be a nice addition to retirement income.

I have to write for myself. I have to write for the love of it. I have to write for the desire to improve my art, because I can’t count on being the shining exception to the rule.

Some of My Other Hobbies

What is there besides cats, coffee, and writing?

That’s a good question, because I write about these all the time. But there are other things that interest me, sometimes to the point of fascination.

Plants

I have a fascination with plants, especially edible ones. And poisonous ones. I can now determine between Queen Anne’s Lace (not deadly) and poison hemlock (deadly). Not that I’ll be eating either, but Queen Anne’s Lace is, in effect, a wild carrot. I don’t try to identify mushrooms, because they all look the same to me.

I like to know plant names, because to just dismiss weeds as “weeds” eliminates a world of useful plants. Everything from lamb’s quarters (as good as spinach) to jewelweed (soothes the sting of nettles). For that matter, nettles (once cooked, a nutritious soup green.

This knowledge of plants helps me write. For example, I almost killed off a character with ricin from the castor bean plant. Writers often joke about their search histories; I am no exception.

Bread baking

I guess this goes along with plants, because yeast is a plant. I was never more aware of this as when I created my own starter by capture. This method depends on wild yeasts in one’s environment and making a hospitable medium to make them flourish. I kept these going for three months last year during the lockdown, until I realized we would never make enough bread. There is no true sourdough bread recipe for the bread machine. I have my cultures dried and frozen, however, to be started back up soon.

Cooking

I don’t cook often these days, but I am an accomplished cook with some training in food science, menu planning, and nutrition. I also cooked for two years in a Thai cafeteria, and we cooked more traditional recipes for ourselves, so I learned the basics of Thai food and now can navigate around a Thai recipe with ease. I make a mean Kung Pao chicken and Thousand-Year (master) sauce. I’m teaching my half-Chinese husband how to make Asian food.

Reading

Of course, reading. My favorites are fantasy and science fiction, but occasionally I’ll read Regency romance and the JD Robb series in crime romance. I should read more, but writing and my day job keep me busy.

Bird-watching

I haven’t gotten out to a good natural setting for a while, so I haven’t seen any new birds lately. I think it was two years ago I saw one of the birds unexpectedly on my life list: A painted bunting in southeast Kansas. I’m too lackadaisical to be a great birder; I’m just excited when I see a bird I haven’t seen before.

For you

What are your favorite hobbies? Tell me about them!