Category Archives: writing

Do more of what makes you happy

2 Comments

The weekend had arrived and I had my to-do list all mapped out.  Friday would be the day of chores since Saturday was going to be our first big check-in and the start of family season at the lodge.

As luck would have it, Friday turned into a spectacular day of weather.  In the cooler hours of the morning, I took my garbage to the dump and ran my errands in town.   I arrived home knowing that my list of chores had not been completed but when I saw the sun shining on my deck, my list of chores suddenly changed, as did my outfit.  I opened all my windows, donned some shorts and a t-shirt and went outside to bask in the sun for as long as I could.  As fate would have it, my neighbors chose to embrace the day as well and burn everything they wanted to dispose of and the smoke penetrated every ounce of air I was trying to breathe.  My dog and I quickly made our way indoors and wistfully closed the windows.

I stood inside, my head going back and forth from my vacuum to my laptop and I surreptitiously neglected my remaining chores.  I opened my laptop and sat down to write what would end up being over three thousand words for my new book.  My dog was still shedding even though I had her shaved, my carpet looked like my dog had exploded, more dust had settled on every surface in my home and my dishes were still waiting to be put away but I didn’t care.  I deferred the menial tasks to concentrate more on the things that truly make me happy.

My vacuum will still be in the same place on Sunday.  My dog will still be shedding and the dust particles will still be dancing in the light that filters through my windows.  But, just maybe, those words that flowed through me on Friday would not have waited for another day.

Do more of what makes you happy and do it often.  Life is much too short to spend it doing things that don’t truly inspire you and make you feel like you are living your best life.  I spent a great deal of my past living for others and now it is time to put aside the things that can wait and focus on the things that consume my thoughts and make me the happiest version of myself.

I just got “Litt up”

3 Comments

The title of this post directly relates to the TV show Suits that I have been obsessively watching on Netflix and I am ashamed to admit that I have been neglecting my duty as a writer. I should be actively pounding the virtual pavement to find an agent but I have shelved my book for the last couple of weeks because my spare time is waning and my creativity is in hibernation. Watching Suits gives me the chance to escape into some brilliant writing, but it’s not my writing. I still have a few queries out there and certainly still have some chapters to go through with a fine-tooth comb but the spark of my enthusiasm had almost been extinguished.

The other day, however, I had the chance to speak to one of the people who read my book and my fire was fueled once again. Her rhetoric about my story made me giddy and the child-like excitement I had when I finished writing the book bubbled up inside me and lit a fire within me. She said the story was fantastic and she could definitely see it being made into a movie.

So once again, I am cutting out blocks of time throughout my day to edit what needs to be edited and query like there is no tomorrow. Somewhere out there, an agent is looking for MY book and somehow, when the timing is just right, our paths will cross. I may have been slightly discouraged with the lengthy nature of this process but I also know I am willing to continue the journey and follow it to its happy ending.

 

It’s happened before and it will happen again

12 Comments

They are gone. The words from my beloved muse have disappeared from the recesses of my brain and left behind a stagnant pool of mush. I want desperately to write and, ironically, the only thing I can come up with is a post about not being able to write.

I have been in this situation before. After sulking for a few days, my muse returned ready to fight the good fight again and we wrote. Sometimes the writing was light and other times it was a frenzy of words fighting for their space on the page but, regardless, we wrote.

Now my fingers dangle over the keyboard waiting for inspiration, that divine breath, to whisper those words into my ears but the silence is deafening. I want to smash this writer’s block into a million tiny shards of concrete and hope that each piece holds a story that will get me back on track.

I put my faith in the phrase, “this, too, shall pass” and await the return of those nagging voices that make me rise at 5:00 am to do their bidding.

The waiting is the hardest part

5 Comments

If I had a crystal ball to look back at all the times in my life I had to wait for things, I would probably be astonished at how many hours I have spent in a holding pattern.  In those moments of uncertainty, time takes on a mystical quality and one day feels like a week, a week feels like a year and anything longer than that feels like an eternity.

Trying to connect with, and build a relationship with, a literary agent has taken waiting to a whole new level.  I have crafted something I am extremely proud of and want so much to find someone as passionate about sharing my story as I am.  But that takes time – a lot of time.  Agents are very busy people and I understand that.  My manuscript is one in a pile of hundreds that they have to sort through to find a collection of phrases and characters that speak to them and that they think they can sell to a publishing company.  I get it.  But that doesn’t make the waiting any easier.

I recently submitted my full manuscript to a literary agent in New York.  Her email, although encouraging, did say it would be a few weeks before I heard back from her.  That email was sent 9 days ago but, in my estimation, it feels like 9 months have gone by since we had any communication.  In that 9 days, my emotion has gone from elation to worry, from feeling confident to being self-deprecating.  It has been a roller coaster of emotion but it is a train I have been hanging on to because that ride up and down those tracks and through those loops is part of the thrill of the journey to being published.  I can only hope that the ride ends well and I don’t veer off the tracks into a wall.

 

Listen to those who have been there

11 Comments

Knowledge is power, this is a universal truth, and over the last few days this truth has made itself extremely evident.

I have been immersing myself into a world that is new to me and there is a huge learning curve as well as many veins of information that branch out from that curve.  To gain as much knowledge as I can, I have been spending a great deal of time travelling down those arteries of wisdom and storing as many nuggets of information as I can into the recesses of my brain.

Every author I have spoken to about getting published has said the same thing – it’s really all about luck and timing.  I have no reason not to believe them because they’ve been there.  They have pounded the same pavement on which I now find myself so they know this route much better than I could ever claim to know.  I have been spending a great deal of time learning about different literary agents, what they like and what they don’t like, and only adding those agents who may be a good fit for my book.  I have been spending much more time on Twitter as that seems to be a more popular social media site for those in the writing world and last week I was introduced to the hashtag #PitMad.

PitMad is a pitch party where authors have 280 characters to describe their unpublished manuscript.  If an agent likes your tweet, you have the green light to send them a query based on their submission guidelines.  I tweeted my first pitch and sat back, hoping for the best.  But then I wanted to know all I could know about PitMad.  It turns out, you can send a maximum of three pitches for the same book, so I carefully constructed a second tweet and sent it out into cyberspace.  When I checked back a while later, my second tweet had a beloved heart below it.  An agent liked my tweet!  I had the go-ahead to send a query and I did that as quickly as I could so my story was still fresh in her mind.

Luck and timing magically combined and, when I got home from work that day, there was an email from the same agent requesting to read my full manuscript.  I’m not under any illusion that her interest in my book is going to mean that she is going to take me on as a client.  I am quite grounded in reality.  I am, however, under the illusion that her requesting my full manuscript means that my writing has enough merit to make her want to see where I take the story and THAT is a huge step for a new author.

I follow “LitRejections” on Twitter and they post very encouraging tweets to help authors keep writing and survive rejection.  This tweet is the one that got under my skin and keeps me going ~ “Rejection of your writing will not break your spirits. You are going to do this. You will not quit. You WILL be successful. “

Looking for a job

10 Comments

Do you remember when you were fresh out of college or university and wanting to find that perfect job in the field you just spent four years studying?  You got money from your parents to buy the perfect “power outfit”, perhaps an attaché case to look more professional, and then you set off in search of gainful employment.  You arrived on time for each interview and got told the same thing from each prospective employer – come back when you’ve got some experience.  As you left the interviews, the thought in the back of your mind got stuck on a crazy loop in your head and played incessantly – if nobody will give me a job, how can I gain the experience I need?

Looking for a literary agent is much the same for a debut author.  It took more than four years, from conception to finished product, for me to write my first novel.  I put more focus and emotion into creating the story than I ever expended in college and I am truly proud of the finished product.  The people who have taken the time to read it have loved it.

But convincing an agent to give the whole story a chance is like applying for a job with no real world experience.  Those first five or ten pages you submit are like your first two minutes in a job interview, they are introductory and don’t really give the person reading you enough time to see what you are really about.  They can only judge you based on a succinct appraisal that doesn’t give your story time to prove itself and, in the end, they prefer an author who has been previously published.  In other words, they don’t want to give the job to people who don’t have experience.

This post is not an attack on literary agents, by any means.  I get it.  They receive a plethora of emails from thousands of people who think they could be the next Dean Koontz, Nicholas Sparks or J.K. Rowling.  Their email inboxes must feel like a revolving door, having multiple queries thrown at them every time the door makes a new revolution.

My intent with this post is not to blame literary agents for being so busy.  My intent with this post is to merely put a wish into the universe that, one day, that revolving door will find a giant foot wedged into it allowing my query to fall into the right inbox at the right time.  Just maybe, I can impress someone enough to have them read the whole manuscript and to get the job without having previous experience.

 

 

 

 

Can you describe yourself in one sentence?

1 Comment

I have learned a great deal about the writing world as I have begun to emerge myself in my quest to find a literary agent.  Each agent has unique specifications for sending a query and a fledgling author is bound to follow those guidelines or run the risk of having their submission thrown into the slush pile.

Many agents follow a similar model for submissions so it becomes a less daunting task as time goes on, but then you get the agent who asks you to sum up your manuscript in one sentence.  For me, that is a very arduous task.  There are so many twists and turns to my story that it is extremely difficult to craft one sentence that can convey every nuance of the story.

Imagine that you are in a job interview and you are asked to describe yourself in one sentence.  Can you do it?  Or are there so many different facets to you that coming up with one line to describe all of those things is impossible?

While I gave my all to put together a sentence that did its best to describe my novel, I know I did not do my story justice.  My book requires much more than just one sentence to fully illustrate its depth.  After I wrote that sentence, I felt like a test car that had crashed into the wall before reaching its maximum speed.

I have been more careful in selecting agents who are willing to allow me to give much more insight into my novel than just one sentence.  Even sending the first three chapters does not truly allow the people who hold my future in their hands enough material to see what the story truly has in store for them.  I can only  hope that they see enough bait to make them swim closer to the hook and take a full bite.  I can promise, they will be reeled in if they take the chance!

Where is it written?

4 Comments

Writing is a portal into the deepest reaches of our imagination.  There are no rules, apart from grammar and sentence structure, so a writer is free to craft a story about anything that tickles our fancy.

I really began my writing journey when I was eleven years old.  I loved the fact that words could take me to far away places, places that I had created, and that I could get lost in those words for hours.  It didn’t matter, back then, if the story was silly.  All that mattered is that I was transported into another world by words, captivated by ideas and compelled to chase the feeling of elation I got by writing a story or a poem.

I still get that same feeling of euphoria when I write.  Some days the words don’t flow as easily, but on the days that they do my fingers can’t type the words fast enough.  I love to look back at the beginning of this blog to see just how much the voice of my writing has changed.  I didn’t know that the stages of writing included puberty but I certainly found that stage and my writing voice changed to become the one I have now, the voice that wrote my book.

(image credit)

I am hopeful that becoming a published author is something that is written in the stars, for me, and not written in the sand.  But if the writing Gods have scribbled my name on the beach, only to see it washed away by the tide, I will always have my words.

 

Handling rejection like a boss!

14 Comments

I am a people pleaser.  I’m pretty sure I came out of the womb asking the medical staff if there was anything I could do for them.  I invariably want to go out of my way to make sure everyone is happy, but my ambitious goal is not necessarily always an attainable goal.  In the words of John Lydgate, later adapted by President Lincoln, ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’.

As a young writer, back in my grade school days, I was afraid to let people read my poetry for fear they would not like it.  That same phobia applied to my poems and short stories through high school and college.  Writing, for me, is the biggest part of myself and I used to feel that if people didn’t like my writing, they were somehow rejecting ME.  It wasn’t until I began the process of seeking an agent or a publisher that I began to truly understand how rejection makes us stronger.

I received my most recent rejection last night.  It was a curt line that simply said, “Thanks for submitting, but I’m afraid this one isn’t for us. ”  Instead of feeling unsettled by such a quick and negative response, the thought in my head was more of understanding that my book was not a true fit for their collection.  I wasn’t sad.  I was merely determined to continue the quest to find an agent that would best be suited for ME and not the other way around.

Writing a book is not for the faint of heart.  Hemingway said it best when he quipped, “There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”  My blood is now the ink on the pages that I crafted.  My skin is much thicker now than it was and I am more than prepared to deal with my overwhelming share of the writing world’s brush-off.  Those abrupt dismissals are the constant in the ‘writer seeking publishing’ equation and I am prepared to rework the problem until I come up with an acceptable answer.

To bastardize Sally Field’s 1985 Oscar acceptance speech, “They don’t like me. Right now, they don’t like me.”   And I’m okay with that because, someday, that will change.

One step away

8 Comments

The hopeful feeling that something great is just around the corner sparks in the back of all of our minds.  That fire is fueled by the creative desire that drives us to do what we love.  But more often than not, that spark is quelled by the reality of our day-to-day lives.  Imagination allows us to light that fire again but reality can be a tropical rain storm when we are desperately hoping for the dry Santa Ana winds to turn that spark into a raging creative inferno.

I was tagged in a Facebook post last night by a friend I have known since I was 5 or 6 years old.  Ironically, from his tin boat, he used to deliver words to my dock in the form of the morning newspaper.  Now, forty-plus years later, through a tag on social media, he delivered some words to me that really hit home, words I needed to hear.

Success is a funny thing.  You can dream of it.  You can chase it.  You can feel like you can almost touch it, but never do you imagine it could be a mere one step away.  He sent me this video of Anthony Bourdain describing the life he was living before that one step closed the gap between his reality and his eventual success.

This video is the wooden match for all of us who have dared to set the kindling for that fire but have second-guessed torching the wood to start the spark.  Light it.  Bathe in the light from its embers.  Those Santa Ana winds could be one step away.