Tag: writing

If I get published

If I ever get a book published traditionally (my optimistic friends say “when”, not “if”), it will change my life in many ways. 

The money won’t be a big change — according to Derek Murphy, the average amount an author earns is the advance, which is $10k, or $8k after the agent gets their cut.  

I will have to hire an entertainment lawyer to look over the contract and see if there are any potential hitches. 

I will have to sign a contract, after which my rights to my book will be curtailed for a period of time.

I will have to consider promoting my book, which will include travel. I would likely do this in the summer, which means I will have to schedule around internship visits.

I will have to step up my social media game. I haven’t done that yet because I have nothing really to promote except this blog. 

I’ve probably forgotten something.

Sometimes it seems more work than it’s worth, but it’s worth it to me. So I keep trying, keep improving, keep pushing myself.

It’s November First?!?

I’m sorry for not writing yesterday — I was pretty sick.

I’ve been fighting a cold or something over the past two weeks, but yesterday morning it went supernova — I ached so badly I couldn’t move, I coughed constantly, had a sore throat — so I stayed home and slept for 20 hours. 

Only to wake up on November 1st and realize — OMG, it’s NANO TIME!

So today, as promised, I have to spend at least two hours today editing*, something I have been avoiding up till now. Two hours. When am I going to do this? When?

Deep breath. I have time after 2 PM today, being that it’s a Friday and all and there won’t be any meetings today. And I have a place — the Board Game Cafe.

All I need now is the initiative.

Oh, by the way, I had a poem make Submittable’s Rejection Horror Stories 2019. (Mine is the poem).


***

* I’m a rebel this year, doing some much needed editing instead of writing something new. On NaNoWriMo, I’m lleachie.

Sorry for the Debbie Downer

I got a big rejection last night — CRAFT’s first chapter contest. It would have provided lots of opportunity and support toward publication of a book. It was a long shot submitting, because I think they favor literary fiction and I write genre/literary crossover. 

It was worth a try. I’m trying to analyze whether the effort I spend writing and improving is worth the results. Whether the money I invest (in dev editing, in reader’s fees for short fiction, for writers conferences) is yielding enough return on investment. Whether staying in writing because I’ve invested so much is just the sunk cost fallacy in action. 

I keep going back to writing, fancying that it will be my retirement career. But for it to be a career, I have to go someplace with it. I need to be published; otherwise it’s just a hobby.

I really have to figure this out.

Feeling the need for inspiration.

I’m wrestling with the whole writing thing again, which I understand is part of writing.

In my mind, the struggle manifests itself as a lack of inspiration, a general blah. I’ve written five novels (and need to edit two but have lost my dev editor), which is a big accomplishment. 

I think what bothers me most about not getting published — when I accomplish something (a novel), I want a stretch goal, and getting it published is a stretch goal. Otherwise, once one has written one (or five) novels, what else is there?  I’d like to be published so that I feel that the goal isn’t totally unattainable.

Lately I’ve written some short fiction, which gives me something to enter on Submittable for a feeling of accomplishment, and hopefully publication. I have nine items in review, another nine waiting (I think I’ve said this before). I still wish I felt motivated toward editing/writing the longer stuff.

 Oh, yes, my flash fiction, Becky Home-ecky, now can be found in the A3 Review Volume 11, found in finer bookstores somewhere in the UK. 

I just hope I get out of this slump soon.

On Second-Guessing My Ability

This picture has nothing to do with today’s topic.



I second-guess my writing talent all the time. I live with a constant critic who has no trouble getting into my head (as it is already in my head) to tell me that my writing isn’t enough — not interesting enough, not good enough, not publishable enough. The voice insists that I am writing the same stuff I wrote back in sixth grade.

Despite this, I’m not adverse to critiques. In fact, I relish getting better. But I’m still afraid I’m not good enough.

I hear this is not uncommon to writers, that most writers feel a constant sense of doubt, and that we wouldn’t want to meet one who doesn’t. But I need to shake this sense of self-censure (and self-censorship) for my long-overdue re-editing of Gaia’s Hands. I have to believe in the book to make it better.  

So, how to believe? Cognitive journaling might help — counteract all the mind-reading (“the critics hate it”) and fortune-telling (“I’ll never get published”) and name-calling (“I’m so talentless!”) and awfulizing (“my stuff sucks”). 

I joke about a magic spell, because I feel like my writing career is cursed. Of all the things I pooh-pooh in my life, curses are not one of them. I half-way believe in curses, even as I suspect they’re an externalization of one’s failure scripts. I’m looking at how to break the curse.

I suspect, though, I will have to live with it and create despite it. And someday, when/if I get published, I will celebrate all the harder.


About exorcism

I think my writing career needs an exorcism.

I’m mostly joking.

But something seems to have infested it, giving me rejection after rejection and making me feel like I’m never going to make it.

When I read the above paragraph, I get a little disgusted with myself, because I don’t really believe a demon could prevent good things from happening in my career. It sounds like an externalization of something that could very well be a matter of me not writing well. 

I doubt my career needs an exorcism, but maybe my attitude does. I’m convinced I’m not a good enough writer to be published. Every time I get a rejection, I think “Yeah, I would have rejected that too.” And then I feel down.

I’m told that negative attitudes affect reality. I don’t know if I believe that, because it sounds uncomfortably like blaming the victim — “Oh, you lost your job? It must be because you were thinking negative thoughts.” There’s also too many charlatans (I’m looking at you, Oprah) that have put forth the belief that you can attract love, success and riches from just thinking positive. 

Yet I wonder if my negativity about my writing affects something — maybe the writing of my cover letters, maybe even how my work resounds in the universe. I don’t know.

How does one exorcise an attitude?


Cooling down

Hello cold snap.


It’s 36 degrees out and I’m wearing my Chicago Bubs sweater (see below):


which commemorates my favorite Internet-famous cat, Lil Bub. 

I want to stay in all day basking by my fake woodstove and writing. But it’s a school day, and I have to teach. 

Oh well.

Writing from the Dark Side, Part 2

Yesterday, I interrogated the scenario my dark side put forth (which involved moonlight and walking in on someone disrobing) and found out it was not about me at all, but was inside the psyche of Jeanne Beaumont, the heroine of Gaia’s Hands.  Jeanne felt disturbed by the dream because — oh, hell, let me just show you the passage: 

A silver beam from the moonrise sliced through the darkness of her room. In shadows bled of color, Josh stood, the light falling across his face. He tugged his t-shirt off, the beam illuminating a slender chest and burying itself in his dark hair.
“Why are you here?” Jeanne asked, feeling her voice shake.
He met her gaze, his youthful face serious. “For you.”
Jeanne muttered. “I don’t need you,” and turned toward the door to flee.
“You misunderstand.” A smile flitted across his face; the light showing a dimple incongruous to the moment. “It’s my need.”
“No,” Jeanne shook her head, grasping for the door frame to steady herself. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m old enough to be your mother. If I’d started late. This is impossible.”
“If it’s happening, it’s not impossible.” Josh held a hand out —
Jeanne bolted upright from her bed, squinting at her clock’s luminous numbers in the dark. 3:00 AM, the perfect time to have a haunting dream. Josh? She took a panicked breath. And her?
If it’s happening, it’s not impossible, she recalled from the dream.
If it’s happening …
What the hell was happening to her that she began to dream about Josh, that quirky young man she had become friends with?
She knew. He had become more than that quirky young man to her.
He had become compelling to her, and she tried to deny it. “I don’t need you,” she had told him.
But perhaps she did, and he would reject her instead.
********
My subconscious informed me that, in editing Gaia’s hands, I had lost an important aspect of it, the tension (in part sexual, in part fear of rejection) between Jeanne and Josh. 

Let’s see Josh’s point of view:

Josh wanted. It seemed a perpetual state for him, so much so that he wondered whether he wanted to be Jeanne’s friend or to bed her. Or both. Or everything. He leaned close to his notepad and wrote automatically, ignoring the lock of hair that habitually fell out of place.

I want to be reckless; he wrote. I want to kiss her with everybody watching in the middle of the cafe. I want to take her clothes off in a room where there are thoughts of only us. I want to know her twenty-five years down the road, even though she’ll be seventy-five to my 47 years.
I should care about the age difference, but it doesn’t bother me. It probably bothers her. I would be her child’s age, if she’d chosen to have children. She’s never married. Maybe she didn’t want to get married.
In my most intimate fantasies, she waits for me. In reality, she holds me at arm’s length, and I don’t know if it’s for now or forever.
I want a guarantee where there are no guarantees.
The vision came to him, the garden in its fullness, and Jeanne standing within, naked. All bountiful curves and sags like an ancient goddess. Does one dare to approach a goddess? He walked toward Jeanne in the garden, slowly and deliberately, each footstep pounding in his ears. He reached out –
The vision drifted out of his grasp.

*****
Why does this come from my dark side? It’s a reflection of how I struggle with my age and face the invisibility that women “of a certain age” (I hate that phrase!) experience. The book is, in part, a biological fantasy about outliers — Jeanne, despite her age, represents a fertility goddess with her preternaturally prolific gardens, and Josh, despite his youth, makes a convincing god of the hunt with the inevitability of his pursuit. That’s in addition to the fantasy elements of Josh’s visions and Jeanne’s preternaturally prolific gardens.
I have to edit this book, bring back to it the tension between the two protagonists, add it to the other tensions and menaces. This is my job, to make these fantasies real and complex.

Writing from the Dark Side

I stood face to face with my dark side last night. I felt a sense of panic, as I always do when facing that mirror, clutching my hair and chanting “this is not me”.

My dark side deals in visions of obsessive seduction, sticky strands of need and betrayal in silent midnight rooms bled of color. It revels in its story: my inevitable fall, my contemplation of suicide. 

All of us have a dark side which stands counter to who we believe we are. If we deny it, if we romanticize it, we may fall to it because it demands that we pay attention to it. What we need to do is to accept our dark side because it’s part of us. 

I accept my dark side, the sulky drama queen in the mirror, but I do not let it run my life. I have built a satisfying life in the golden light of autumn, with a humorous husband and five cats. 

Me, coffee, and cat. This is a good life.

Sometimes I write from my dark side — half-elven children who want to kill their elven fathers, succubi with a pang of conscience, a young man who can kill by touch. I write these with my light side, though, framing these characters in dilemma, in conflict. 

Darkness must contrast with light to be appreciated. If the writing contains nothing but darkness, it ceases to be dark and is merely mechanical, a factory of death and gore. The light must be there to be taken away, so that we grieve for the individual trapped in their circumstances. 

I look at my dark reflection, the person I most fear, because she has the capacity to ruin my life. I nod, knowing that if I try to annihilate her, I become her. She leans over my shoulder as I write, helping me to add her darkness to my bright words.