Send (#atozchallenge)

Welcome to today's post on the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. My challenge, as I have chosen to accept it, is thus: I have asked on my Facebook and Twitter accounts for people to contribute random words beginning with today's letter. From Random.org, I have selected one of these words, and will below challenge myself to connect said word to writing.

For the letter S, I received 58 suggestions. Random.org selected number 46: send.


Send

For me, the "Send" button on my email can be intimidating. Does anyone else feel this way? I'm not talking about just to send an email to my friend, or respond to a blog comment, but when I have added that oh so gentle Word or PDF attachment to that email and am sending it to someone for critique or just general comments. Honestly, I can feel the tip of my finger sweating as I reach for the mouse button.

Click.

And let the nail-biting begin.

Really, this is just the beginning, because I haven't started querying yet. How am I going to feel once I start sending the blurb for my baby out into the wilderness, waiting for some helpful woodland critter (agent?) to help it on its way to maturity and its reemergence into the world? I'm worried it will feel akin to an outright fever, with the shakes and sweat and nausea.

So, folks, I ask you: What's your way of handling the anticipation and waiting during the query process?


Also, today I'm taking suggestions for the letter Y. Have any? Leave them below. Thanks!

Taking the Initiative

Change scares the toe-socks off of my poor little feet.**  I like consistency.  I'm not spontaneous.  I'm bordering on OCD control-freak.

Aren't you glad you follow me? Heh.

So one of my most nerve-raking experiences came a few weeks ago.  And before I tell you what I did, please know that this was an educated decision on my part, two to three years in the making.  It was not rash, and I'm pretty sure I have burned no bridges.

I told my adviser that I don't want to take my PhD exams, I don't want to write a dissertation, and I would much rather be able to spend my time writing fiction.

After much promise to help me through the writing process, giving me no less than four possible dissertation topics, and suggesting the difference in employment opportunities between having a Masters and a PhD, he said, "I'm fighting because I hate to see you go.  It would be insulting if I just said, 'Sure.  Okay.  Good luck.'"  Annoyed as I might have been through the whole discuss, I appreciated his efforts to keep me around.  He's been a great adviser for the past few years, incredibly supportive, pushed me to go beyond where I thought I could go, and got me opportunities I didn't think I could get.  I'm grateful for all of those things in ways I don't think I could express to him.

But, with all of that support and all of the push, I've learned a lot about myself.  I've learned that many of my boundaries are self-imposed, and I feel I can better recognize the ones that are real and the ones that aren't.  And I have a drive toward something I love that I didn't know I had.

So, toward the end of the meeting when he said to me, "There are creative writing class you could take..." and continues to tell me how he knows the prof and could take to him to see if I could take the class, I should have been elated.  But I balked.  Why?  Well, it was a 600-level MFA course.  MFA students go through a rigorous process to get in, submitting portfolios and publication references, etc.  It wouldn't be fair for me to walk in, sit down, and say, "Well, I published a short story in my HS writing magazine in 1995.  I'm also working on a novel, but the professionals who have seen it haven't even seen the first 10K."  Can we say "instant resent"?

But it got the idea in my head.  I began hunting through the English department's course offerings for the fall semester, and found a 200-level course—the only prerequisite being E103, or Writing for Those Who Didn't Learn How to Write in HS—on creative fiction.  Of the four or five section, one had one available slot.

So I emailed the contact to get permission to take the course, despite my lack of "How to Write a Thesis Statement" course.  As of about 3:00 this afternoon, I am officially registered in an intro to fiction writing course with a bunch of 19 year olds.

But the bottom line is, I can hear my knees rattling.  Nerves are a beautifully annoying thing.  I'm not sure what's making me so concerned about it, since the last time I took a writing class was 1999.  I can certainly use the pointers.  I want to write more short fiction to have SOMETHING to list in a query letter for publications.

It's just change.  There's no good reason to be afraid of change, except for the unknown.  That's where I'm at, folks.  Wish me luck!

And wish me luck if I don't get in, too.  I need to find three more hours of something remotely interesting to take this semester :)


How do you deal with change?  What kind of leaps-of-faith have you taken for your writing?



**Disclaimer: My feet are far from little, and I long ago got rid of all my toe socks.  My wearing them was said to scare small children due to my overly large second digit.

Waiting for the Rain

Last night I sat at my computer with seven word documents open: 2 chapters from draft 7,352; 2 free-writing documents to help with characterization; and 3 "new" chapters that I decided to try and blind-rewrite based on a suggestion from Alan Rinzler's blog (disclaimer: not from Alan Rinzler himself).  Normally this isn't a huge deal.  I don't have a problem hopping between .doc's, though I try to work on one as consistently as possible... or I can't move away from it because the juices are just flowing and maybe it's crap but I can't stop it.  However you'd like to describe it is fine.

But last night?  Not so much.  I stared at the doc entitled "Marcus" for 20 minutes, and then checked my email.  After responding to a message from July 16 and spending 30 minutes correcting a translation from a non-native-English-speaking friend, I decided not to go back to "Marcus" (he's laid back enough that he didn't complain).  I hopped over to "new chap 1-1" and read through what I already had.  I know—sort of—what I have to do next in chap 1, but somehow there were no words.  Skip over to "new chap 1.5-1".  I thought I'd had a decent idea on how to introduce all of my alternative US history, and as I started into it I couldn't help thinking about how lame it was, how it would just come off to the reader as me—not the characters, not even the narrator—trying to fill them in on how this land wasn't exactly the same land made for you and me.  Break.  "new chap 2-1".  Same thing.  "new chap 7"...

So I stopped forcing it.  We watched TV.  Well, I frequently "watch" TV and write at the same time, but I actually closed the computer.  That's pretty rare for me these days.  But there was no new email, no new blog posts, and I'm honestly getting kind of bored with FB at the moment.  So, closed.  Asleep.  To dream...

So this morning?  Well, I try not to get the creative side of my brain firing before I have to spend 4 hours learning about something completely unrelated.  Normally I'm reading other people's blogs and writing my own (ta da!).

The bottom line is, I think the soil's dry.  The plants aren't dead, but they just can't grow any more fruit.  I need a good, hardy rain.  But I'm impatient—a good, strong product of the American media insanity.  I don't like waiting for things.  Oh, and did I mention the perfectionism?...

So, I'm giving myself a prescription:

1) Take a break!  I'm closing word officially until next Friday.  If I have ideas, I have a notebook and I can write by hand.  (I hate writing by hand because I get excited and then I can't read my handwriting later on, which is a lot harder to deal with than typos from flying fingers.)  I should try not to write anything huge for the whole week, and see what happens.

2) Read more!  I'm currently in the middle of Lizard by Banana Yoshimoto—a collection of short stories that are beautiful, but there's no cliff-hanger ending to get me back into it.  I also have I Heart You, You Haunt Me by Lisa Schroeder and Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto sitting on the shelf from the library, whose covers have yet to be turned.  And, as is visible from yesterday's post, I'm now in the Eat Pray Love book club.

I think this decision was made for me.

3) Clear my mind!  I need to make my way through Clearing the Mind for Creativity by John Kao.  This book had been free from Amazon for the Kindle a few weeks ago, although apparently it's not anymore (but it's only $2.39).  I don't have a Kindle, but there's a free Kindle app for Mac OS X.  I've had Kao's book open for close to a week now, and I don't think I'm past page 3.  So much for clearing the mind.

I'll still be online, reading and blogging, etc., but Word is hereby closed until further notice.

Oh!  I just quit the app, and my stomach flipped.  Maybe it's because I haven't eaten breakfast yet...?

Wish me luck!

Don't Get Cocky, Woman!

Today, I had a reality check.  I'm currently taking an intense language course--1 year's worth of language in 8 weeks--to finish up my PhD coursework.  I'm the only person in the class (of 3) with extensive background within the same language family.  In fact, this is my 3rd Slavic language--Russian, Polish, and now Macedonian... And, no, it's not Greek.  It's Slavic.  I promise.

And the class--of course!--is moving quite quickly.

But, this weekend, I didn't study.  In fact, I did very little work for class at all (and I'm hoping that my instructor doesn't link to this blog from my other one to see me admitting this).  After a trip to the farmers' market and a little gardening, I spent virtually all of Saturday working on writing the correspondence between my 2 main characters, and trying to imagine what it would have been like for my male lead when he was 14.  Sunday, I got up late, cleaned a little, did the bare minimum of my homework, and then we had people over for a BBQ potluck.

So, how did that go for me, you wonder?  Or do you even need to ask?  How many words were there today that I couldn't remember from just last week?  How many ways did I mispronounce the numbers we learned on Friday?  And yet I could still guess what the verb is for "sell" and "sing" based on the other languages in the family.  But that doesn't mean I know what I'm doing.  That means I'm a halfway competent linguist with a good aptitude toward guessing.

After feeling rather embarrassed this morning by my lack of preparation, I've decided to kick it into a higher gear.  Despite the fact that I've spent the last two hours reading my blogs and finding a few new interesting ones, I'm getting ready to go to work.  You may think I'm procrastinating by blogging first (and maybe that's true), but I felt compelled to write about this.

As Charity Bradford has been comparing her writing process to cake baking in her recent blog posts, I would like to compare my language class to my writing.  When I finished the first draft of book 1 (ahem... Russian), I started book 2 without hardly blinking (Polish).  And then book 3.  Admittedly, my momentum dried up about halfway through #3, and I had to pause and "rewrite".  I put rewrite in quotes because what I did constituted hardly more than copy-editing.  So I "rewrote" #1-2 before making my way back to book 3 and "finishing" (Macedonian).

And then I got cocky.  People started asking me if I would want to get it published.  "Sure!"  Who wouldn't want to do just that?  I hadn't even spent a year on it, so why shouldn't I expect a nice advance and instant fame a la Stephenie Meyer?  HAHA!

A number of humbling experiences have brought me back to reality, and I've gladly pulled my head out of... er... the clouds.  I have good friends who are graciously critiquing my work, telling me which areas I need to work on more, or where I'm just missing the bigger picture.

Is this sounding like a good teacher yet?  There's only so much that a person can do on their own.  Of course, there are those few people in the world who sit down and 48 hours later they have a publishable novel, or they sit down with a textbook and are fluent in Chinese the next week.  I am NOT one of those people.  I need to talk things through.  I need a guiding hand.  Eventually, I can get to the point where I can be self-sufficient and continue learning on my own, but that takes time.  And I'm not there yet.

So, before I let my head inflate to unmanageable proportions, I'm off to study my vocabulary, my verb endings, and my numbers.  And I'll probably post at least one exercise on my other blog... after I go back and revise some of the old ones :)

Looking for Validation in All the Wrong Places

I love writing.  That's why I do it.  I love the sweat and angst that comes with editing.  I love that I reread the damn stuff so many times that I hate it... then move away from it for two weeks, and then I love it again.  I love being able to say, "I created this."  And maybe it's mediocre dribble, but it's still mine.

My problem, I think, is that I seek validation constantly.  And since, before, oh, Monday I had only been writing for myself and not seriously considering polishing it for publication or networking or taking writing classes or working with professionals, I was looking to my friends and family for that validation.  The problem is that I send them chapters and then they don't read them, or they promise they will later, or they just kind of say, "Oh" when I say that I'm writing again.  And that hurts more than for someone I don't even know (well) to tell me my writing is crap and to ditch it and start from scratch.  I would much rather have that.

So, I hereby vow to myself that I will not solicit validation from any one of my friends and family from now on.  I've joined an online community of women writers that I can't wait to delve into.  I've found a local organization that has writing classes for women, and has a drop-in class once a month so I can see if it will fit me and my work (the women who run it are all amazing activists, and I'm a little intimidated....).  I've started following blogs of authors and agents, entering contests and trying to get my name out there.  And I'm just diving in without a safety net.

Am I scared?  Oh, hell yeah!  But is it the best thing for me?  Absolutely.

Don't Give Up Your Day Job

This is advice that I should actually listen to.  For the past month since classes ended, I have: written, rewritten, edited, rewritten, started something new, weeded the jungle that is our back patio, rewritten, played on Facebook, rewritten, and started looking at literary-related blogs.  Where in there do we see anything about writing one of those three papers I had planned for the summer or working on the freelance book-editing jobs that I agreed to?  Hmm...

So today, exactly 4 weeks since I turned in my last project of the semester, I decided to get back to work.  I left my house--always a big help to get away from the scene that sucks me back to Anabelle all the time--and went to the public library.  Bear in mind, I never spend more than 15 minutes in the public library (tsk!), and when I do, it's usually in the CD section (double tsk!).  If I want a book, I usually request it a couple of days in advance so the staff will pluck it off the shelf for me and all I have to do is go to the desk, hand them my card, and leave again.  Lazy much?

Oh, but not today.  First thing I did was actually try to find books on my own.  While it doesn't help that the library seems to be under renovations right now, that wasn't really the issue.  The fact is that I've never had to find the fiction section before, and I thought that the YA section would be in the Children's area.  Wrong!  As I was walking around down there, I thought, "If I were 15 and looking for a YA book, I'd be pretty sprickin' pissed if I had to go to the kiddie area."  So, off on the hunt again.  I finally found the fiction, first stumbling accidentally upon the YA, which led to the adult, SciFi, Mystery, etc.  *whew*  That was rough.  At least now I know for next time.

Okay, so, check out, pick up the CD we had on hold, and then off to the silent reading room (in which I am currently making a lot of noise because both my keyboard and my mouse button are far from silent... triple tsk!).  After once again procrastinating for a good half-hour, I close down my A&M #2 epilogue, I hide my two open Firefox windows, one with Facebook, my email, and a random page on natural mosquito repellents, the other with my Blogger dashboard and a number of other literary blogs (especially this post, which is proving to be invaluable to me right now).  All this done, I open my other email account (yeah, #2) and start looking for the email from my boss with the working files for one of the books I promised to type-style.

.........

Fifteen minutes of hunting through my university email, scavenging through my migrated email on another account on this computer, searching the whole HD with Spotlight (oh, this now works so much better than it did on OS 10.4!!), and I remembered:  G gave it to me on my flashdrive.  So, I reach into my handy bookbag, into the little bitty mesh pocket where that little flashdrive lives and only ever leaves if it's stuck into a computer, and.... it's not there.  Of course.  Then I vaguely remember leaving it on the coffee table last week, then moving it for the Memorial Day party we had over the weekend, and realize that it's sitting on the bookcase next to the couch.  Mother sprickin'....

Okay, yeah, I could blame the flashdrive for my problems, but I know it's my fault.  So, now that I've been at the library for, oh, at least an hour.  I'm ready to pack up my bag and head back home, have lunch with my husband, and then potentially come back here WITH THE FLIPPIN' FLASHDRIVE and work in the afternoon.  Assuming I don't leave it until tomorrow.

Wish me luck!

------------------
UPDATE:
So, I originally posted this at 1:15pm.  It's now 3:30.  In the last 2 hr 15 min, I have played on the blog, tried to add a widget from Goodreads that I made infinitely more complicated than it needed to be, and then played around on Goodreads.  Oh, yeah, I ate lunch with my husband, and I copied the files from my flashdrive to my HD.  So, at least I did one thing that could lead to potential productivity, right? :)

Figuring Out the Market

I'm terribly new to all of this, but, on a whim, I started looking at different websites for literary agents yesterday, and have spent the vast majority of the last 24 hours--through sleep deprivation and the incessant buzzing of the fire alarm in dark, dank scary basement of my rental that is the dungeon horror films are made of (and therefore I refuse to go down there and turn it off)--looking at literary blogs, writers' workshops, editors' blogs, writing community websites, etc.

This has all caused me to realize a few things about the trilogy I've been working on for a year and that I need to change (e.g., *hook your reader on the first page*, which I think I fail at terribly).  While I have two people currently reviewing book one for me (and yes, they're friends, but see below as to why), I think I need to go back and completely rewrite chapter 1 of book 1, making it more of the "show" and less of the "tell".  Somehow I am a lot more aware of this everywhere else in the 425,000 words, but this first chapter somehow keeps avoiding the big red correction pen.

The second thing I've realized is that now is probably not the best time to work on my marketing skills.  I'm taking my PhD exams this fall, and I know I'll need to put a lot of effort into that, as well as my summer class and that darned incomplete I have from December.  Of course, I've spent the last month of my summer working on, what?  Oh, that's right.  None of the above.  Instead, I've just cuddling up with my new computer and writing at the work that doesn't pay me.

And, finally, I've realized that I'm terrified of the whole huge process of selling myself and my work.  I like my work (mostly... on the good days), but that doesn't mean that anyone else will.  The fact of it is that, in a shameful, shameful effort to build my own self-esteem about my work, I've given draft copies of the first few chapters of book one to about a half-dozen people.  To date, only two have read past chapter 10 (there are 28 in book 1 alone, I might add), one of whom is one of the two people currently reviewing it for me.  While this does wonders for my self-esteem (here, let me give you a rag to clean up that dripping sarcasm), my confidence level in my work is far from high at the moment.

A few weeks ago, on a whim of advice--*always have a minimum of two projects at once*--I started another story which consumed my life for eight days (the story that I'm slowly posting here).  I sincerely needed a break from Anabelle and Marcus (the protagonists of my trilogy), and took it eagerly.  After a couple of weeks, I felt ready, reinvigorated, and I went back, making the final revisions to A&M #1 to send it off for review.  I moved on to A&M #2, fleshing out what had been 110,000 words of "semi-showing" into 140,000 of "telling", including inserted chapters for character development and extended dialogues.

But now, on the epilogue of A&M #2 (these novels do have names, btw, though I sincerely dislike them at the moment and have no interest in committing them to the ether that knows and remembers all), I'm stuck again.  It hasn't been six weeks since I spent so long working on the wedding story, and I'm frustrated that my momentum has run dry.  I know that taking a break is healthy, and I'm not a writing super-hero. Honestly, I should be proud of what I have and that I churned out the bare-bones of it so quickly (though that just means more revisions now and later).  But still, my confidence is low.

I will mention, though, that I entered a contest for a consultation with literary agent Nathan Bransford in celebration of the release of a client's book.  My confidence isn't necessarily high enough to think I'll win, or even make it into the finalists, but I entered.  Yesterday my confidence was low enough that I almost didn't enter, but I forced myself to do it, drawing from A&M #3 from one of the six chapters of action that come after a very central event (for give my vagueness).  I won't know which 500-word snippets made finalists until Friday.

So keep your fingers crossed for me (whoever you are, if you're out there).  Even if I don't make the finalists, something has to come my way soon to raise a wave of confidence in me again.