Bigger than I thought

I'm working on a big revision right now. It's for a big book. It's not like anything I've ever written. It's so much not like anything I've ever written that I keep putting it off. It scares me. 
What if I completely fail this really beautiful idea?
What if I'm just not as good as I've always thought I was and the real reason I normally write fluff is because I'm scared to learn that I'm not good enough to write anything else? If I don't try, I won't know, right?

These are the the thoughts plaguing me as I tackle this monster, and by monster I mean a three part story that MUST be a three part story, and each part is about 90K, so I can't just smoosh them all together into one really long book. 
And it's full of pain and jealousy and duty and family and revenge and forgiveness, and I never write like this, so I must be screwing this all up. 

I feel like a fool for hoping. I feel like an idiot for trying. And I'm completely convinced that I'm just falling flat on my face, and everyone can see it except me.

Someone very helpfully suggested I send it to a beta. 

I did. I sent it to beta readers in 2017. My betas loved it. They thought it was great, but in 2017, I could see where it needed something more. More depth, more character, more something. It's taken me 2 years to figure out what that something is, and I love it even more, but as I'm standing here trying to implement that SOMETHING, I'm terrified that I can't do it. I'm terrified that I'm just flinging words around in the hopes that something sticks to the wall. 

So that's me, scared that I'm destroying an idea I love and thinking I'll never write another story like this one. Which just means I'm a writer with the kinds of worries a writer has. 

This is an Insecure Writer's Support Group Post. You can visit the Ninja Captain here, and don't forget to say hi to this month's cohosts: Gwen Gardner, Doreen McGettigan, Tyrean Martinson, Chemist Ken, and Cathrina Constantine.

Not the Only One: IWSG

I grew up in a very small town. I grew up in the kind of small town where everyone was just certain of my path and my destiny.

“Oh, that Rena. She’s going to be an amazing veterinarian when she grows up.”

“Rena you’ll be such a great teacher.”

“You know, Rena, you can make real money raising sheep. If you do your herd right, you’ll be able to go to college in the winter and work lambing on spring break.”

“You need to study hard if you’re going to save the environment.”

Yup, my whole life was planned, signed and delivered by the time I was 11. About then someone asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to be an astronaut. Reader, I broke hearts with that simple proclamation.

But it’s an old small town and they knew the true path to getting their way, patience, solidarity, and a steadfast denial of all words actually issuing from my lips. I played a pretty convincing part, raising sheep, showing horses, training llamas, you name it, I did it. But I also memorized all the features on the near side of the moon. I studied the stars, I took extra physics classes when I could. I sang in the choir. I was in the band, and drama, and soccer and swim team. I wanted to play football, but that path was closed to me. Small towns can only allow so much.

In school, I read every book in the library with a horse on the binding. When I’d read all of those, someone recommended that I try the ones with the rockets: and I did. And it was amazing! The only problem was, none of those books were about kids like me. Not one. I grew up lonely and never seeing a girl from a small town who got to have a story other than grow up and fall in love. The story was always girl grows up and realizes horses are childish and falls in love with a boy.

First, I desperately didn’t want to think horses were childish (one of my first real jobs was as a horse back riding instructor). I loved horses (and had to sell mine to go to college), and well, let’s just say the guys weren’t exactly throwing themselves to date the girl who ran faster, got better grades, and could literally throw hay bales, so a love story wasn’t exactly going to cut it for me. I was lonely, and my life looked nothing like the books that should have been hand made for me.

So one day, I wrote a different kind of story where a girl rode her horse into outer space to go save the Starship Enterprise. Firstly because everyone should ride a horse to go save the world, and secondly because I’d never seen a girl like me, do anything the world seemed to think important. Surely saving the Enterprise would count as important.

That story was very important to me, and no, no one will ever read it. But it had everything that I loved and it spoke to me. 

Hooked, I wrote another story just for me. This one didn’t use nearly so much Intellectual Property not belonging to me. As with many of my works, I cajoled, bribed, and begged until someone else read it. And that time, that time I heard the timid voice whisper back, “I thought I was the only one.”

I thought I was the only one.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard that whispered back to me by people who were embarrassed by some deep truth so close to their hearts they’d never shared it with anyone until I showed them the scars on mine. People I didn't think I had anything in common with, people who didn't look like me, grew up under totally different circumstances saw something of themselves in my words.

And that’s why I write. I write because even in the world of over sharing social media, I still hear it. People read my stories and confess that they had always felt alone. They’d always thought they were the only one who felt it—the shame, the secret joy, the guilt, the pain, and the pure exhaustion that is life, or just how lonely it is to feel something you shouldn't feel because society tells you that you're supposed to have exactly one emotion (I'm looking at you motherhood).

In short, I write so people will know they are not the only one.

It's Insecure Writer's Support Group, so hop on over to the Link, wave at The Ninja Captain, and say howdy to this month's cohosts:  J.H. Moncrieff, Natalie Aguirre, Patsy Collins, and Chemist Ken!

Avoidance IWSG

I’ve talked before about how the best way to protect yourself from failure is to never try. You are absolutely guaranteed to never experience any rejection if you never put yourself out there for others to see (and all too often, criticize).

Which brings me to today. I have cleaned my work area, swept the floor, answered every email, done the dishes and cooked every breakfast the people in my house are going to eat for the next week. Yeah. All of that.

I’ve spent the whole week thinking about how much writing I was going to get done, but instead I have done LITERALLY every other chore in the house. I’m avoiding it. I’m worldbuilding. I’m plotting, I tell myself, I need time to think. Okay, that might be true, self, but it looks like, from over here in the no word count land, that you are actually doing the thing where you are avoiding writing.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: I have an idea for a novel, and I LOVE it. As in, I love it so much it might just break my heart. I love the idea so much, I might just never write it because the book it will become, no matter how good, will never feel like the shiny thing in my imagination. If I could have one wish, it would be to be able to make books fell the same way the idea feels in my head. It just doesn’t happen. Well, I should say, It hasn’t happened yet.

Am I the only one, or do you procrastinate putting pen to paper when you have an idea you’re in love with?

Jump on the link, visit the Ninja Captain, and check out this month’s co-hosts: Raimey Gallant,Natalie Aguirre, CV Grehan, and Michelle Wallace!

Hey, did you know my books are up on Amazon? 

Check them out here and here! 

Doing Better

I’ve been thinking about my journey lately, and I can’t really complain. I’ve published three books. I have a sequel in the wings (not until at least 2020, alas). Working full time has definitely slowed my process, but even there, I still have no complaints. I’ve put together a book a year since 2009 plus a handful of extras.

I don’t know how others are doing, but things seem to be going cautiously well for me. I feel like that’s a somewhat controversial statement in our current political climate, my home state going through disaster after disaster, and the actual climate, but things are okay. I know it’s crazy to say, but I have finally sorted out something big.

When I first started writing and querying, I would always wonder if my writing was “good enough.” I’d get a rejection and it would say something like “sorry to say, I’m passing at this time,” and I would say to myself, “was it the project or was it the writing? Can someone tell me if it’s the writing or the project, please?”

The funny thing there, is that people did. They did say “your writing is great, but not this project.” Agents and editors said this a lot, but it wasn’t enough. It never passed through my thick skull. I always assumed that the agents were just being nice. When I read reviews of my work, I only ever found resonance in the negative, letting it outweigh the good reviews, even though there were more good reviews by a factor of ten.

The problem for me has always been my own demons, but I feel like I had to go through those things so I could be in this position where I’m writing what I need to write. I’m telling the stories that burn in me, and if I’m not marketable right now, that’s fine. The only thing I can control is the thing I create. Everything else will come, or it won’t. I have no control over editors or agents. I certainly hope I will connect with them through a book, but I can’t control that.

I’ve spent my time focusing on craft. I’ve sought out critiques anywhere I could get them, and bit by bit, I’m starting to understand how much I have sought agents and editors for validation of my writing. I can definitively say, that’s the wrong approach. If my words are finding fertile ground in your heart, I have another gem that’s finally started to sink through my thick skull: if there is a hole in your heart, no amount of accolades that can fill the hole. No amount of external positive things can actually give you self worth.

I know, this got deep fast, but hear me out. I’d been using publishing as a way to fill something inside me that was empty and broken. Publishing couldn’t fill that hole. At first it felt like it did, but as time went on, it became increasingly clear that I was playing a shell game with my heart, skipping from good review to good review like I could tie the sinking ship of my heart to the words of a stranger and that could somehow right the ship of my life. Inevitably, each sank as the feeling of joy wore off, and worse, my ship got bigger and heavier so the next positive thing I needed to keep my head above water had to be bigger than the last. It’s a bad cycle.

The truth is, if you don’t feel like enough without an agent or publishing contract, you certainly won’t feel like enough with it. I’ve talked about this before in other IWSG threads, but it bears repeating. It’s something I still struggle with, even as I move forward. So that’s the big one today. (I’m super excited about my current manuscript! I really love this story. It’ll be interesting to see how this next part unfolds.)

Jump on the link, hop over to the Ninja Captain, Alex, and say hi to this month's co-hosts: J.H. Moncrieff, Tonja Drecker, Patsy Collins, and Chrys Fey!

An Evolution

The question this month is "How has your creative life evolved since you started writing?" 

This one is really hard. I've been writing novel length works of fiction on and off since I was 12. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I recently crossed a very BIG birthday number milestone, and to be honest, Things Haven't Changed A Lot. 

Big caveat here: I have absolutely changed my writing style, but one thing has always guided me. My first novel was about the book I NEEDED. My most recent book was the book that I NEEDED. And to be fair, most of the books in between have been the book that I HAVE NEEDED. 

But I have strayed from the path. I have tried to chase a trend (it did not end well, no you may not read the result). I have maybe started projects that were not in my best interest but were in the best interest of the market. They failed. Each. And. Every. One. 

This has helped me refine my voice. My failures have, in one way, sort of shown me who I am, and what my wheel house is. It's been... useful, if painful. Rejection is part of the path, but what it does better than anything is show you where and how you're willing to accept rejection. Specifically: when I'm writing to the market and that gets rejected, it's MUCH WORSE. It's worse because I KNOW that I was chasing money not heart. It hurts because I sold myself short. People judged me on my lack luster work, and it was lack luster because my heart wasn't there. The dollar signs were in my eyes.

And now I know better. So that's the real thing that has evolved. I know that if I can't put the full metric force of nature that is My Heart, there is no point in trying to write that project. It will not come alive. Like the life stone of the Deathly Hallows, that project will have a half life, a cursed life. (and I don't have any unicorn blood to feed it!). 

In short, the only thing I have learned is that it's not really worth writing a project unless my heart is in it. Which sounds really cliche, but it's very, VERY true. 

Don't forget to visit the Ninja Captain Alex, and say hi to this month's cohosts:  Ellen @ The Cynical Sailor JQ Rose Ann V. Friend and Elizabeth Seckman!

Moving the Posts and something about green

I almost missed Insecure Writer’s support Group!

I’ve been steady on for a long time, and I’m starting to have that feel you get when it doesn’t happen for you. When I started trying to get published and find an agent, I couldn’t have imagined what being where I am now would be like. I’m sitting here with three published novels, news I have to keep quiet about, and things are looking…

Ah, but that’s the problem with goals and the feeling of having arrived: You Always Want More.

I know it gets hard to imagine, but the goal posts in your life are always moving. Sometimes this is subconscious, but sometimes it’s planned. In publishing, it’s a list of steps that we’re told is “The Way” (yes, the scare quotes are necessary there). The steps are: Write the book, Revise the Book into Awesomeness, Query dream agent, SIGN with DREAM agent, SELL BOOK AT AUCTION!!!!! *confetti flies into the air and the words PUBLISHED AUTHOR are permanently displayed above your head so everyone will know you are amazing*

As you might have guessed, this isn’t going to work for most people. I always longed for the day when I would sign with an agent. I watched while trying to control my jealousy as friends got agents. I fumed when books were signed that were similar to mine (quietly and away from the internet), and then I’ve started to see more of something else. More of my friends have parted ways with their agents, or books that had been sold are orphaned as an imprint folds. Great books sit on shelves, not moving. Mediocre books sell like hot cakes (also really great books sell like hot cakes), but there’s no reason to it. There is a solid element of luck in all of this. I love my fairytale version of publishing, but it just isn’t reality. And when one of the things on the fairytale list is one of your goal posts, it gets hard to keep taking yourself and your career seriously (yes, I can totally hear some of you saying “what career, Rena?”) when you don’t hit all the markers (or don’t hit them in the right order).

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I do know it helps to remind ourselves that the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence.

And don't forget to check out the IWSG link and visit Ninja Captain Alex, and this month's co-hosts: Olga Godim, Chemist Ken, Renee Scattergood, and Tamara Narayan!

Like a Machine: an Insecure Writer’s Support Group

This is an IWSG post, and you know the drill: visit Ninja Captain Alex, then jump on the linky.  Be sure to visit this month's cohosts: Mary Aalgaard, Bish Denham, Jennifer Hawes, Diane Burton, and Gwen Gardner!

Lately, I’ve been taxed past my normal operating parameters. I sound like a machine because I’ve been working myself into exhaustion and dealing with crap WAY above my maturity level. We pulled up the floor in my house and low and behold, there was a leak…from under the tub. Yeah, a leak at the drain. So we had to rip out the tub, the walls, the sink (which started it all!), and we’ve been furiously working to replace everything.

But wait, there’s more.

Everyone in my house has been through some sort of flu and/or cold.

Yeah, nothing like being sick when the only functioning bathroom no longer contains a working shower (going to the gym for those) or a sink (gotta wash your hands in the kitchen).

And this wasn’t a planned construction project, so it’s not like we saved up.

Also all the adults in my house work full time jobs (mine has 10 hour shifts, joy), and we’re doing all the construction in our off hours.

We hit a design flaw, add two weeks of showering at the gym.

So there I am at the grocery store, shopping the sales hard because I just bought a couple bags of cement and some sheetrock and I hadn’t budgeted a construction project in my post Christmas austerity period, when the stupid card processing pad loses its mind and stops working. A line of frustrated and annoyed grocery shoppers behind me all glaring at me and my malfunction, and someone says “Stupid machines! One spec of dust and they die!”

But I thought machines were the preferred mode. When I’m getting a lot of work done, people say “Wow, you’re like a machine,” but it wasn’t until I was standing in that line that I realized how ridiculous that saying is. Like a machine, implying that machines have some sort of better ability. Admittedly, a machine performing it’s only function will have some great longevity, but only sort of.

Take that stupid card reading machine. My grocery store put the new ones in about 9 months ago. That store is open from 5 am to midnight, and they break the shifts into four hour blocks, so about five four hour blocks a day. Most people work two four hour blocks. So the machines that are already breaking have, for the last 9 months or so, have been working 5 four hour blocks a day, the equivalent of 2.5 full time employees. But they’re breaking at 9 months. So they’re dying after the equivalent of 23 months of full time work. Two years. (Coincidentally, this is how long I budget for my laptops to last because I’m rough on electronics). And those machines didn’t have to go home and deal with all the crap that comes up in the real world. They never have to push through a shift when all they want to do is go home and read a book, or curl up under a blanket and pretend that North Korea isn’t ready to blow up the world. The machines never have to come in to work when their kid is sick. And the machine only does ONE JOB.

The second things aren’t perfect for a machine, it ceases to function. No limping it off, it just dies (well, I guess Opportunity limps, but that’s a super machine with an AI, but even that is pretty limited).

So the next time someone is implying that you’re almost as good as a machine, feel free to remind them of these handy dandy facts:

“I don’t freeze up when a little dust falls on me.”

“I can fix my breakfast then go for a walk.”

“I can work through the drowning emotional pain of loss; my NES froze up any time I played it for more than three hours in a row.”

“My computer won’t turn on if it’s 40 degrees F in the room or colder.”

The only real caveat to this is the Boston company and their freaky door handle opening robots. Those are freaky, but they still have the falling over problem (but, the Boston company is pretty much skynet, so there’s that!).

In short, you’re better than a machine. Now go write like it!

FEARLESS WRITING: an Insecure Writer's Support Group Post

I quipped the other day that I was checking Twitter to see if we were in the midst of Nuclear War. I’m pretty sure that’s how I’ll find out. It’s how I found out about the bombings in Boston. I’m absolutely terrified of nukes. I’ve studied nukes, so I have highly accurate nightmares about them (it’s a branch of the field I studied). Needless to say, my constantly being on Twitter and Facebook has made for fertile grounds for my Nightmare Bunnies. My productivity has tanked.

And that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?

If the artists and the thinkers stop making the content that drives the minds of the next generation, then where are we? If we let our creativity die, then we won’t be able to move forward. The point of art is to make people think and feel, to understand others and bridge the gaps between us. If we let our art die, we burn the bridges between us. We become isolated. We become divided without art. And that’s how a people are conquered. That’s how a minority rules.

Right now, we’re once again flirting with nuclear action. I have to remind myself that the writing I’m doing is more important than me being glued to Twitter. It’s more important to create. Art is resistance. So I’m trying to task myself to write as though I’m not terrified of nukes. Maybe fearless writing isn’t the right term, but “Write because staring at twitter isn’t helping anyone and sure isn’t getting this book done any faster” doesn’t fit in title slot very well.

Anyone else having a hard time reconciling the news climate with getting stuff done?

Anyhow, as you can see, this is an odd IWSG entry, but it’s what I needed to tell myself. Don't forget to check out the Ninja captain, Alex, and this month's co-hosts, Tyrean Martinson,Tara Tyler, Raimey Gallant, and Beverly Stowe McClure.

Rushing to Happily Ever After: IWSG

If there’s one piece of advice writers like to give other writers, it’s “Don’t compare yourself to others.”

I cannot tell you how many times I sat with my laptop, viewing the success of others and reading the unwritten subtext put there just for me: You’re a failure because you don’t have an agent/book/deal/best pound cake on the block.

To be clear, the subtext of almost every book deal and I got an agent post is “Oh, gods, please don’t see that I’m a fake and have managed to completely bamboozle this person into liking my work! I’m so happy, but TERRIFIED because no one talks about the After in Happily Ever After.”

Yes there are a lot of writers who feel like they worked hard and deserve it (I applaud you confident writers who don’t suffer from the dreaded impostor syndrome), but there are heaps tons more who feel like some person with a clipboard is going to show up and say “I’m sorry, but we both know you’re a fraud.” (this, is a direct quote from Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art commencement speech, good stuff)

Our stories tell us that the part that’s actually super hard is something those movie people cover up with one song (usually edited), and the whole process is really a great backdrop for a Rom Com. The stories most of us consume have endings (some happy, some not), and we try to fit our lives into these story templates. And it doesn’t work. We compare to other people, and we see that what they present to the internet fits the mold: worked hard, made the thing, queried and got the agent, BOOK DEAL!

It’s the perfect happily ever after rolled up in blog posts and tweets. Sometimes these success stories feel like fairytales, all wrapped up with a perfect little bow. And do you know what bearing this has on your journey?

None. Absolutely none.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll tear yourself apart comparing yourself to these fairytales. And they aren’t real. The path in writing is so very unclear. So much is about taste and preference, it’ll kill you to go about assuming the normal rules apply to publishing and agents and writing.

In the movies (which we’ve been taught to use as our gauge of how to process the world), it’s simple: You work hard, you put in the time, and you get the reward. Our stories are built this way so we understand that our culture values hard work. Unfortunately, the formula in movies doesn’t pan out in real life. In real life, you can work as hard as is humanly possible, and the reward you were working for might not come. You did nothing wrong, but you don’t win the game or get the book deal/agent/job. And we don’t have many stories like that even if it is a reality of our world.

But Rena, how can you talk about disappointment when you have Book Deals and even a book coming out in November??

Oh, sweet summer child, I know more pain than can be seen in my scars. I struggle everyday with the doubt born of how I clearly bamboozled my way into having a book deal, but I’ve never been a good enough con-artist to get an agent. My rejections folder is filled with “Not right for me,” “Send me your next project,” “I’m sure someone will snatch this up if they haven’t already.”

And I know those sound like I’m on the right track, but those were responses I got with the second book I queried. I’ve queried a number since then, and I still get those responses. And some of that is my fault. I tend to query my books too early. I have taken some of those books and revised them and that’s how I got my book deals (you know, after collecting a no from every agent who will even read SFF).

And here I am, on the brink of #Pitchwars with the very awkward path of trying to get a mentor for a book I’m probably rushing towards a Happily Ever After that probably doesn’t really exist while juggling an upcoming book release, trying to plot out another sequel and promotion. It’s awkward. I was supposed to get the agent, then get the book deal. I never did anything the standard way, but I’m worried my rush to get to Happily Ever After may have hamstringed my attempts to get an agent. I’m worried I’m no longer a fresh naïve writer. I’m wiser now, but I’m still worried I’m rushing. Just the other day, I realized there was a major revision I could put into my manuscript to make it significantly cooler, so I’m trying to nail that down before I throw my hat into the arena.

So that’s this month’s insecurity. How about you all, anyone else struggle with rushing their projects?

Being skilled doesn't mean you'll get an agent, but it helps

One of the most important things I’ve learned about writing since I released a book with Curiosity Quills, is that Publishing is subjective.

When I queried the book that became Acne, Asthma, And Other Signs You Might Be Half Dragon, agents said they loved it, just not enough to represent it. As time went on I came to learn that there was a book very similar to mine that apparently flopped, and so my book was relegated to the back burners for a ton of agents because of a business happening.

At the time, what I thought was that all these agents were being nice. The invitations to sub again with a new project? Just politeness.

I had come to equate skill in writing with getting an agent. To a certain extent, that’s true. If the writing is really terrible, it’s very unlikely to be the one that lands an agent. On the other hand, even if your writing is spectacular and impeccable, if there’s something fundamentally not matched to the agent, or your story is in the unsalable category, it’s very unlikely to be something agents are after.

From the writer’s side, there’s a feeling that if my book is just good enough (great even), then I will have crossed that magic threshold of skill and be on to the realm of agent land, and it’s just not true. I really wish I had understood this earlier in my writing, and, to be honest, I still suffer a bit from this misconception. But today I’m here to remind all my writer friends that there’s something else, something more than skill when it comes to finding an agent. It's fit. It's passion. It's all the things you have about your book, the untranslatable bits that make you love it. If your agent doesn't have those feels too, it's not going to work. And I've seen enough writers part with their agents to know that process isn't always a walk in the park, but it's often a hit to the self confidence. They tell me it's worth waiting for the right one. 

What do you guys think? Do you feel like rejection is an indication of low skill and quality?

I have to remember things sometimes

Sometimes, I forget to enjoy writing.

Which is a funny statement on the surface, because writing is very much my passion. It's definitely the thing that keeps me up at night and drives me from my bed in the morning. It's sort of an impossible task, and I like that about it too.

My troubles with writing all stem from the difficulties associated with Publishing. Publishing has a unique way of making your craft a consumable product that you sell. For us writers, we spend way too much time making sure we are palatable to as many potential readers as possible, and I'm no exception. Before I tweet, I try to remember that a large chunk of my fanbase is very conservative, and I think that's wonderful. Everyone gets to be who they want to be. But knowing that definitely makes me hesitate before posting something polarizing and political--and considering how political my social media feeds have been, that should say something--I have sort of whitewashed many of my stances and beliefs on social media. I definitely don't talk about my family with the kind of candor I would if you were to meet me in person.

As well as combing through my public appearance, publishing has also sort of driven many of the stories I have tried (and sometimes failed) to tell. And that's simply no good. I have driven a story one way to be more on point, and then it suddenly wasn't. I've tried all kinds of things to make my stories fit into the buckets made available (or maybe more appropriately, known) by the market, and it just hasn't worked.

This has been a constant battle for me, and only recently have I come to understand some things about my work. When I have a project and it doesn't sell, or it doesn't get an agent, or it doesn't immediately have a huge selling, I used to think it was the writing. Now, to be clear, poor writing will often kill opportunities, so all writers should spend a lot of time absorbing craft. However, the idea of fit is starting to be a real concern.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that I qualify as an odd duck. No really. I'm a little off. I see the world differently, and that informs my writing. Some people like that, some people don't. And that's okay.

What isn't okay is when I try to write my stories to fit in. That's a no go. And I know I've talked about this before, but it's way better to fail as yourself than it is to succeed as a fake. Good luck out there, and some big news is coming soon (sorry, I'm such a tease).

Queries are more fun than usual, IWSG

After a lengthy hiatus, I've returned to the world of querying agents. I have to admit, I did not miss all the anxiety and crazy feels I get when I'm querying. I hate that I'll attempt to tweet something, you know, to interact with an agent then fret over the interaction for hours. I hate that feeling of "Whelp, now that agent thinks I'm a crazy person, auto reject in 3... 2... 1..."

Generally, that doesn't happen, but the feel is there.

The funny thing is that I didn't worry about these things when I wasn't querying. I interacted with agents (various reasons) while not querying, and it was amazing. I didn't worry about how my emails sounded (other than sounding professional, but not written by a robot), and amazingly, finding agent email in my inbox didn't fill me with one part hope and three parts demon riddled anxiety. They were normal emails saying they could or could not do a thing.

My point is that all the insecurity I've been feeling lately is wondering if an agent will love my work. After publishing, I thought I had crossed some magical landscape and found myself in the valley of self confidence. Alas, that wasn't the case. Even as I'm getting super good news, I'm still struggling to feel confident in my work.

When I was first starting out, I didn't have much feedback for my work. Now I have reviews for published works to give myself a counterpoint to the inevitable rejection, but the last time I queried, I didn't have that, so I wanted to offer up some quick thoughts.

I have hundreds of requests for a sequel to my book. People FB me all the time and ask if it's going to be a thing, and I still get down about rejections.

In short, anytime you put yourself up in a situation where someone could reject you or your work, it's going to mess with your head. Your writing is probably good, maybe even great, you just haven't found your lobster. That doesn't make you a bad writer, that makes your work not what those agents are looking for right now.

Okay, I could talk about this for a very long time, but I want to know how people manage to handle the feels that come with querying. I art. (yes, I verbified it).

Also be sure to stop by the Ninja Captain Alex, and to thank this month's Cohosts: Christopher D. Votey,Madeline Mora-Summonte, Fundy Blue, and Chrys Fey!

Doubt Colored Glasses: An Insecure Writer's Support Group

Oh Insecure Writer’s Support Group, you’ve taught me things. When I first started down this journey, I was so very jealous. I was trading manuscripts with people and our work seemed to be on par. Then, very quickly, those people all got agents. Then they got book deals. They were suddenly the shit, and I was twiddling my thumbs (if you count writing five more books twiddling).

I was so jealous of those people. I assaulted myself with all the feels because I couldn’t, or wouldn’t understand my own jealousy. I let myself think the terrible thoughts: I’m not good enough. I’m completely delusional about my talent. The world is out to get me. It really is about who you know. I thought those things and more, my jealousy festering inside me. It was dark, but those times were tinged with another darkness that had nothing to do with writing. Doubt fogged every pair of glasses I used to view the world.

I went on to publish my first book, and I’ve written about how I didn’t think it was a really real success. In fact, it’s been the problem all along. I can see the success of others, but never my own. I think that all the success I receive is part of some participation award, and everyone else was living the highlife. Better published, better written, better agented. Everyone seemed to be posting their Agent call, or their call with their editors—somehow, all of my success came with an email, never a phone call. Was I defective? How come my success looked different? That’s right, because my success wasn’t really success at all.

Then, publishing turned, as it always does, and those people I was jealous of started to be ground under the wheel of publishing. I had thought those people had made it. I’d thought their dreams were coming true. And for many of them, it did. But for others, Publishing did the thing publishing does, it moved on. Agents left. Books died in editing. One of those people had a whole writing career—agent, books, big promo—and then said peace out and deleted all of her social media profiles. She no longer publishes. (Odd side note, there are three people who fit this description, five if you relax the circumstances a tad to just let those sites go dormant).

Which is to say, Publishing is hard. It takes people’s dreams and destroys them on occasion. I don’t see their paths as successes anymore. It must be hard to get an agent and then lose an agent in the span of a couple months. I know more than one person whose book died in editing at a major house—these are the stuff of nightmare—but I coveted their place and success because I have always had a hard time seeing other paths as successes.

It’s been hard to learn to look through my doubt colored glasses and see the world. There’s more ways to success, and it’s important to remember that what looks like success on the outside might actually be a complete pile of dog poo on the inside. Doubt changes what you see in others and yourselves.

Be sure to visit the Ninja Captain, Alex and to thank this month's Co-hosts: Tamara Narayan,Patsy Collins, M.J. Fifield, and Nicohle Christopherson!

Happy Writing, everyone. (Psst, did you know next month is A to Z??? Where has the time gone!)

How Participation Awards Sabotaged My Accomplishments

I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but I have a hard time recognizing actual real life accomplishments. I suffer from “they’re just being nice” syndrome with a side helping of “everyone gets that.”

As a kid, I played soccer, and at the end of the season we all got trophies. When we got to the end of fifth grade, we all went on to sixth. When enough of us passed the Golden State Exam with REALLY HIGH MARKS, we all got a pizza party. We all graduated from High School. We all got the diplomas. I graduated from college in a really large group of people, and all my friends in the same grade graduated at the same time. With my masters, I got to the end of the study, jumped through the hoops and, tadah! I have a Master of Science degree.

Some of those don’t really look like accomplishments, but my inability to decipher what was, in my eyes, a participation award and what was real accomplishment became blurred. I feel like the pizza party was probably where it started.

I was one of the high marks that got us the party. At the time they didn’t tell us who had passed (to be fair, I might have been out of class that day for a swim meet or a soccer game, or even a band trip; it’s a miracle I managed to pass highschool with all my extracuriculars!). I didn’t know I’d done well on that particular exam until I saw my transcripts later—teachers tend to assume that if you’re doing really well in a class, you know what your grade was on the exams. I got high honors and no one told me. I think they didn’t tell me because they figured I knew. Maybe they didn’t tell me because they didn’t want me to have one more thing to lord over my classmates as I already had the high grade in the class, but even that didn’t feel like an accomplishment. Besides, the guy who sat next to me did okay, at least he told me so, but I had no way of knowing how I’d done. And everyone got to have pizza because it would be cruel not to let the rest of the class have some pizza.

I know it seems like something silly to bring up now, decades later, but people have been saying a lot of mean things about participation award recipients lately, and I wanted to put my thoughts out there. Participation awards when I was 5 were really important to me, but they are important to every five year old. By the time I was eight, I knew that everyone was getting them and they were basically meaningless, but if everyone else was getting one, I certainly didn’t want to be left out. By the time I was ten, they didn’t mean anything to me except to mark my years of playing soccer.

Somewhere between everyone gets one, and I completed a Master’s degree, I began equating more than one person getting an award as making the award meaningless. As in, I graduated with a large group of scientists to get my bachelor’s of science, but since there was a large group, it didn’t mean anything. We’d all made the same accomplishment, so it was no accomplishment at all.

To be fair, when I graduated from college, my family came and made a fuss over me. They gave me all kinds of gifts and what not, but I treated it like a neat birthday party, something that was expected and just part of the game, not a celebration of the fact that I’d done something that’s actually kind of hard. I was unable to accept it as an achievement (bleepbloop).

This inability to decipher participation awards from real achievement went right up through my first book contract. I treated it like a participation award. Which is a big trap, because people don’t understand that when everything is viewed as a participation award, it means that if you don’t make the curve, how bad were you at it to not even make the participation award level??

When I started to fail at things, it felt like being the only kid at the soccer team party who didn’t get a trophy, and not because they didn’t have enough, but because they singled me out to deny me one. I know this is largely the fault of depression (Yeah, I’ve got some of that), but it was also because the expectation had been set.

What I’m upset with is that the people calling young people weak and needing a participation award don’t realize is they’ve twisted expectations in the generation younger than they are because of these awards. There’s a whole generation of people who have a hard time sorting out real accomplishment from participation awards. Mine found my depression and went on a destructive tear through my psyche.

So what’s your take on participation awards? Do you also suffer from a lack of achievement? 

#ArtStorm2017

The Face of the Resistance

Life is sometimes really hard. I’ve been in what can best be called a rough patch for the last few weeks, and no I don’t plan to talk about it here. But I will say that for me, when things get too hard, I revert to art.

When my master’s degree started to kick me in the pants, I wrote a novel. When my defense came and there was nothing else that could be done--I was literally just waiting for the day to arrive--I started painting again. I hadn’t painted since high school.

After these bursts of art, I always “settle back down” again—as if the pursuit of art is some sort of uppity, agitated state. As if the act of expressing ourselves is somehow a threat to the establishment.

One of my coworkers was looking at my art and asked me “why do you work here?”

Good question (more on how I like to live in a nice home and having electricity and heat at the bottom). It made me think, What does the world gain by me toeing the line and coming into my day job day after day? What would I do if I weren’t going to work all the time? Well, the last time I wasn’t going into work, I wrote two novels in just a couple months. I advanced my craft in writing and I took up dancing. When I started working again, I didn’t write as much and I’ve almost completely stopped dancing.

I stopped making art. I stopped doing the things I wanted to do to make sure I could do the things I HAD to do. Imagine if I’d stayed in that heightened state of making art? I’d have ~10 more novels. I’d have too many paintings to even fit in my house (well, I already do). At this point, I’d probably be making real money with my art. Probably not enough to live on alone, but there’s a potential. It makes me wistful to think of that life free of having to do the daily grind.

Free of the daily grind. Ah, there it is.

Then it dawned on me: art is a form of resistance. It is a threat to the establishment. If enough people make art and make art a way of life, it disrupts the drudgery work required for the oligarchy to function. The rich men in the world don’t need art. They need someone making their stuff that they sell to other people for double the price. They need the middle men. They need art to not compete with the products they sell, that they tell us we need in order to live the lives that they tell us we need to live. They don’t want you spending your money on that cute dragon you saw on etsy. They want you to buy the products out of the big box stores, the ones that are made overseas by the thousands and cost them pennies on the dollar.

Art is a threat.

Let that seep into your brain for a second. Art is the threat in the world of oligarchy. Art is the resistance.

Welcome to the resistance:

And about paying the bills: You have to do what you have to do. In general, there’s room for doing the things that make you feel alive. I have a day job, and it’s not something I’m giving up anytime soon for reasons of practicality. But just because I’m working a 9 to 5 (or more specifically, a 6 to 5), doesn’t mean I can’t be dedicated to making art as well. Do the things that bring you joy. That saying about the only real revenge is to live well? That’s the truth. 

Fill the box

Art has this funny way of being really hard on beginners. I think most people have heard the quote from Ira Glass about how a lot of artists get into the creative business but drop out when what we envision isn’t something we can manifest into reality. This is the most frustrating thing.

With drawings, if you take every sketch you’ve made, and you put it in a box, once you’ve filled the box, you’ll have improved your drawing skills. It’s simple, the more sketches you do, the better you will be at making sketches.

On some levels, we think this should work for writing, but it isn’t that simple. With visual arts, it’s sometimes easier to judge it because you have this sort of third eye in your mind. You can see it in your mind and compare it to the thing you make in reality. When you start making the paintings look the way they look in your mind, you know you’re close. But how do you do that with a novel?

 Encompassing an entire novel in your mind isn’t an easy thing to do. There are parts, ideas, feels, but the whole thing? Not so much. With a sketch, the whole thing can be judged in one moment, but it takes hours to read a novel. Even though they don’t compare to paintings or drawings, one thing remains the same: the more novels you write, the better you will be at writing novels.

Does this make them good? Being competent at an art form does not make a person good at it. For instance, I’ve been watching Bob Ross painting shows. That man is amazing at how he takes shapes and boils them down quickly into things that can be put together into a painting. He’s got composition, and the colors go together very nicely. I have enough craft that I could probably reproduce his tutorial pieces by following along and being stubborn.

I could do that with novels, too.

I could (and have!) sit and diagram out my favorite novels. I’ve studied the way the plot unfolds, the way the characters are presented, and I could reproduce them if I were to go painstakingly through them. Bit by bit they could be remade. But you know what that makes? It makes a sort of puppet novel.

And that’s why paint by numbers offends some people. You can do what Brandon Sanderson calls the cook method, “Oh, I need a mentor and he needs to die so the main character can grow his wings and fly.” Those are perfectly acceptable forms of novels. Some of them even do very well, but if you’re in writing because you had a vision about the kinds of stories you wanted to tell, making your book according to a recipe isn’t going to work out.

Which brings us to the problem of going from competent to great. I am certain that anyone with enough dedication can reproduce something they love in the same way that a photograph reproduces the view from the top of half dome. But the view just doesn’t compare to the way the wind slips up the cliff like it’s going to suck you off into the void. I doubt the photograph makes you feel as if your life is in danger by standing on that razor edge between two feet firmly on the ground and the better part of mile drop to the valley below. The picture is beautiful, but being there will change your soul.

With novels it’s harder to know if we’ve lost someone in the woods, or the path took a wrong turn until we’ve gotten to the end of the novel and had others read it. They didn’t get to the mountain top, or they felt like it was more of a mole hill. Always so vexing when our vision isn’t understood, but those attempts have given us something. At least the reader felt the rise. Maybe they saw bits of the view between the forest of melodramatic metaphor (such as this bit here). The point is, you have to put in the effort. You have to fill the boxes with your art.

Oh but Rena, my best friends, sister’s ex-girlfriend wrote her first and only book and it sold a bajillion copies. She had ten agents offer her representation—the only ten agents she sent her query letter to!—and she now lives in Scotland with a castle and a staff to see to her mandatory hiking breaks.

Wow. Welp, that’s super awesome for your best friend’s sister’s ex-girlfriend, but I also heard about this guy who got struck by lightning 19 times. I don’t use that as a reason to assume the first rumble of thunder is going to nail me in the back of the head (though, to be clear, I definitely practice lightning safety as I am a coward!). My point is, yes, some people are really lucky and everything falls into place perfectly. For the rest of us mere mortals, the way to making the art we envision is through practice.

You will have to write more than you ever dreamed, and before you think about how you’re done with that nicely polished novel and its three major edits, just wait until you get an editor and they ask you to rewrite most of the end… and most of the beginning… and maybe we could do something different with that middle bit?—but that’s a discussion for another day.

I'm waiting for Vicini: an IWSG post

Wow, it’s been four long years since I started Insecure Writer’s Support Group---wait, hold on, I can’t count. It’s been FIVE YEARS!

Five Years.

It seems impossible that so much time could have passed since I decided to jump in on these Insecure Writer’s Support Group. When I started on this journey, I imagined I’d be farther along by now. Little did I know, publishing is VERY slow.

Did I mention slow? Glacial would be more accurate.

It takes forever to hear back from agents. Then it takes forever to hear back from acquisitions. Then it takes forever to hear back from editors. Always the waiting. When I remind myself of how much time I spent just waiting to hear back, it doesn’t surprise me that it’s taken me this long to get a book out into the world.

So, if I could give any new writer one piece of advice, it would be to not wait. Write more, wait less.

That doesn’t mean skip directly to self publishing—that can take a long time too! What I mean is that while you’re waiting for responses, don’t just sit on your thumbs. Get back to the writing, it is the only thing that will help your career as a writer that you can actively work on while you are waiting. #LearnFromMyFail

Don’t forget to visit the Ninja Captain, Alex, and this month’s co-hosts: Eva @ Lillicasplace,Crystal Collier, Sheena-kay Graham, Chemist Ken, LG Keltner, and Heather Gardner!

A Challenge

Here we are, running headlong into another month which means it's time for another installment of Insecure Writer's Support Group. Stop on by the Ninja Captain's blog and say hi or jump on the linky. This month's co hosts are Tamara Narayan,Tonja Drecker, Ellen @ The Cynical Sailor, Lauren @ Pensuasion, Stephen Tremp, and Julie Flanders!

More and more, my words are dogged by doubt.

Well, I mean, that’s unfair. My words were always filled with doubt, but now I can see where those doubts come from: now I know the shape of them.

It’s a funny thing that by the time you know enough about writing, you know to be careful with it, when really, when we’re writing our early drafts what we really need is to be wildly carefree. We need to throw our words around, send them where we will, experiment with the emotions of a scene.

But you’ve heard all this before, and this probably isn’t helping except to reaffirm that these feelings we have are real and other people have them too.

So here’s something new. A challenge. Are you still with me?

I’m always talking about learning how to not compare myself to others? How when I compare myself to others, I only disappoint myself? Well, there’s someone else I keep comparing myself to, and it drives me nuts. I keep comparing myself to me. I compare my rough drafts to my finished novels. I compare my scenes on paper to the ones in my head. And the most annoying thing about comparing myself to me is that I always find myself wanting.

Like I did a good job back then, but that ain’t happening again. I’m convinced the thing that makes the stuff suck between the idea and the words is that the idea and the words pass through me, like I’m some filter of suckage.

Of course the rough draft isn’t going to be anything like a polished published novel. Why do I even compare them? It’s like I forgot all those intermediate steps I took to make it all the way to the end.

Of course my ideas aren’t going to translate perfectly to the scenes in the novels. Those scenes are just guideposts anyways.

So I need to challenge myself to stop comparing me to me. No big deal. This should be totally easy.

Spoiler alert: Totally not easy!


Also, did I mention I'm running a little giveaway for my book? Just comment on this link (FB link) for a chance to win an eCopy of Acne Asthma and other Signs You Might Be Half Dragon!

Under Paintings

I don't know how, but I've managed to survive to another Insecure Writer's Blog Post! It was a narrow thing on my part, I assure you. So if you haven't heard of the Insecure Writers support Group, head on over to the Ninja Captain, hop on the Linky and say "Howdy" to this month's cohosts Yolanda Renee, Tyrean Martinson, Madeline Mora-Summonte , LK Hill, Rachna Chhabria, and JA Scott! .

This month, I'm insecure about not having masterpieces fall from my finger tips. I know, I know, I need to give myself some credit because just the writing of a first draft is both hard and important. It's actually been slowing me down as I write, this need to have everything perfect as it hit's the page, but then I remember: this is a first draft.

Say it with me folks: First Drafts have permission to suck.

You know what doesn't have permission to suck? The final draft.

But I keep getting the two confused in my head, so I'm trying to remind myself that my first drafts are like under paintings. Sometimes, in painting, you sort of sketch out the form of what you're going to paint in muted colors. It's to give you a road map for when you're really slinging the paint around.

Here's one of my recent paintings with it's underpainting.

This is me not being finished

And this is me being finished.

So yeah, I need to pull back a little bit and judge my first draft by the standards of a first draft.

Comparisons

So I’m sure everyone’s heard about how we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others. We always seem to be looking over the other the fence and thinking things aren’t going the way we’d hoped or planned. It’s a hard place to be to think we aren’t as smart/pretty/successful/strong/financially stable/whatever the new thing is today. It’s easy to compare ourselves to others, but it’s also toxic.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to the Amazon pages of my fellow writers to see how my book is comparing to them. I’ve wasted a ton of time reading other people’s success stories for how quickly they found their agent and sold their perfect book and how everything was roses and then lamenting how my path had gone up until that point. But even an old bat can learn new tricks, and I’m starting to understand.

With agents and publishing, there are so many reasons things don’t work out. A really big one is that sometimes the book isn’t ready, but even more commonly, it’s just that the book isn’t super special to an agent or editor. I can’t tell you guys how many times I’ve been reading through the entries on a pitch contest and absolutely fallen in love with an entry—to the point of “I would buy this based on this description alone”—and those entries get no requests.

Does it suck?

Oh yeah, it sucks.

Is it fair?

Ah, now that is an interesting and complicated question. Is it fair? In a heartbeat, no. But you know what else isn’t fair? I have friends who have written books and their writing is a million times better than mine. They write lyrical works of art, carefully constructing story arc and pacing. I write explosions and car chases, magic and wizards, and dragons(except for my contemporary stuff). Is it fair that I got a publishing contract for my car chases and dragons when those beautiful books that will make you cry make the rounds in the slush piles to no avail? Is it fair to be rejected because an agent had a bad day and your book reminded her of why she was having a bad day? It isn’t fair. If books sold by some metric that measured “how good a book is” who’s would we use anyway?

I know people who hate Twilight. I know people who didn’t commit suicide because they read Twilight and wanted to know how the next book went. Is it fair?

Life isn’t fair. But, I offer this other bit of terrifying observation on the fairness of life: If life really were fair, then you would have deserved all of the bad things that have ever happened to you.

So smile! Life isn’t fair. Maybe you don’t deserve your success, maybe you do. Who are any of us to judge? Life really isn’t fair, so try to enjoy the path your feet are on.