The Edited Life

Random Notes on a Writer's Life


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Epiphany at a workshop

IdeaOver the weekend, my local RWA chapter hosted bestselling romance author Virginia Kantra for an interesting workshop on characterization, gender roles, and the struggle our characters face between developing intimacy and maintaining control.

She talked about starting with gender stereotypes to meet reader expectations, but taking it further to create unique, compelling characters. She discussed how gender differences can be a source of conflict (e.g. her desire for independence vs his need to protect/provide, their different attitudes toward sex, and so on). And she went over the three character arcs in a romance: his, hers, and theirs. (And people think romance is easy to write.)

But the biggest value I got from the workshop was possible insight into one of my characters. Tara starts out as a secondary character in Blind Fury and becomes the main character in my second manuscript in that series. She has a fairly promiscuous background—something she’s trying to move beyond because it eats at her self-esteem—and the main reason is her desire to feel loved. Unfortunately, all she’s getting is a temporary connection.

(I think the motivation is important for making characters unique. For example, another woman might gravitate toward casual sex to avoid the intimacy and loss of control that comes with a long-term relationship.)

My epiphany was that Tara’s willingness to keep jumping in the sack on the first date—despite her desire for a lasting relationship—might also stem from the sense of feminine power she feels during the seduction and the act itself. I like the idea of having another layer to her behavior.

I don’t even remember what it was Virginia said that made me think of it, but I’m glad I was in the workshop.

This is the reason I often attend chapter meetings and conference sessions, even if they’re not strictly a topic of interest for me (though this one definitely was). Ideas often come from the most unexpected sources. An offhand comment by the speaker, a conversation with another workshop attendee during lunch. You just never know.

Had any serendipitous moments of your own lately?

Image credit: By Producer at ar.wikipedia (Transferred from ar.wikipedia) [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons


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My favorite season

Spring is my favorite season of the year. I love the weather, the flowers, the bright yellow-green of new leaves, the early sunrise and late sunsets. Winter’s cold grip is gone, Summer’s hot breath is yet to come, and Mother Nature is dressed to celebrate.

What’s your favorite season?


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Read it later

Pocket reading app

Pocket reading app

Years ago, I spent a lot of time commuting and listening to motivational and time management gurus (on cassette tape!). I remember Brian Tracy talking about how to fit in all the reading a successful businessperson must do. One of his tips was to go through your magazines, look at the table of contents, tear out the articles you wanted to read, and then get rid of the magazine (please recycle).

The next step was to put all the articles into a file, and carry it with you everywhere so you could read any time you had a few minutes to kill.

Nowadays, most of the articles I’m tempted by are online, but there are several applications that allow you to take Mr. Tracy’s time-saving approach to reading what has been dubbed “time-shifted content”.  Think of it like recording your favorite TV show on your DVR for later viewing, but for reading material.

Instapaper reading app

Instapaper reading app

Smartphone apps like Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability let you mark an article or blog post to save, then make that page accessible from your computer, tablet, or smart phone.

Now, instead of wasting precious writing time reading blog posts like this one, you can read them while waiting at the doctor’s office, riding the Metro to work, or sitting in the kiss-and-ride pick up line after school.

If you love the article and want to keep the information, send it to Evernote. Otherwise, delete it and move on to the next article. The apps let you organize the articles by folder or tag, and are compatible with other applications like Evernote, Flipboard, Twitter, Zite News Reader, and more.

Even better, sites like Longform reformat long articles from magazines and newspapers for easier reading on these “time-shifted content” apps.

I’m pretty sure Brian Tracy would approve.


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Retreat from solitude

J.T. Bock and me

J.T. Bock and me

Writing is often a solitary profession, and though the Internet can bring provide us with the networking and learning opportunities we need, nothing compares to getting out and mingling with other writers.

I spent the weekend at my local RWA chapter’s annual retreat in a cute college town in Maryland. The mini-conference eats up precious time with my family and a nice little chunk of change, but it’s worth it. Just knowing that you’re in a room full of people who “get” you is valuable. Not to mention the ideas that start pinging around in my head as we discuss our craft, our stories, and our struggles.

Editors and agents become real people—rather than sources of fear and stress—as we sit next to them during lunch, or share cookies and life stories with them after a mean game of Romance Jeopardy.

Bestselling authors share their long road to success, their fight to stay relevant, and the self-doubt that never seems to fade, no matter how many books you sell. We are not alone. Every fear we harbor, every doubt that plagues us, every nasty rejection we receive is part of the process that thousands of published writers have faced before us.

Like a hazing ritual that you must endure if you’re serious about making a living at this crazy profession, it would seem even the best writers have suffered for their success.

Of course, conferences are not just about tales of commiseration and lessons on better pacing or dialogue. There’s fun too. Meeting friends you’d only known online, making new acquaintances, talking to an editor or agent without the strain of trying to pitch to him or her.

Some of my favorite moments this year:

- The epiphany I had while trying to answer questions about the barriers between my hero and heroine during a workshop presented by Kathleen Gilles Seidel and Pam Regis, Ph.D.

- Hanging out with Christopher Keeslar, Editor in Chief at Boroughs Publishing Group, an incredibly well-respected editor in romance, and a super nice guy.

- Learning that publishers (traditional, and especially e-publishers) are realizing they have to compete with the ease of self-publishing. They’re now trumpeting their rights reversion clauses, marketing, and editorial quality.

- Spending time with writer friends old and new, which always gets my creativity flowing and buoys my flagging motivation.

Do you go to conferences or belong to a writing group? Why?


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My big, scary goal

I couldn’t talk blithely about my goals today without stopping to mention the tragedy in Boston yesterday. My heart hurts for all those affected. It also swells at the stories and pictures of those who raced in to help just seconds after the bombs went off. After such devastation, we need a reminder that most people still care about their fellow humans.

♥♥♥

Set a goal so big that you can’t achieve it until you grow into the person who can. ~ Unknown

LadderLast week I talked about being bold and setting big goals. Not just big, but scary goals that represent what you really want out of life in the long term.

Since I’ve been challenging you, I figured it’s only fair that I set my own goals and share them here. Talk about scary. If I put my goals on the Internet for everyone to see and then fail…

Here goes. My overarching goal:

To make enough money from my teaching and writing activities that my husband can quit working when he’s eligible to retire from the Air Force in 2016.

(Excuse me while I go breathe into a paper bag for a minute.)

That’s my big, scary goal. It used to be just a dream, something that would hopefully happen one day after I finally got published. But wishing for something—which often means you think it can’t really happen—does not get help me get things done. Nor does it help me figure out which path to take. Goals, on the other hand, can be broken down into progressively smaller pieces until you get to something you can start today.

I’m already making some money from teaching—and from Scrivener For Dummies—but I really want to generate income from my fiction. With that in mind, I started thinking about the best way to do that.

Keep working toward traditional publication, or self-publish?

Even a year ago, this would have been a no-brainer for me. New York all the way, baby! But times have changed. While I would love to be on bookstore shelves—if there are any left in a few years—and would love the ego stroke that getting a traditional publishing deal would bring, I don’t need either one to consider myself successful. Neither is a guarantee that the money would follow.

So, my plan is to self-publish. I think for all but the best writers among us there’s more money to be made going it alone.

That said, I don’t want to self-publish just because I’m not good enough to get a deal. I’ve seen enough work by authors who should have waited a few years to upload their books to Amazon, and I hope to not be one of them. But the kind of feedback I’ve been getting tells me I’m close. With a little help from an editor, I hope readers will never even notice my book doesn’t come from Avon, Signet, or St. Martin’s.

Am I averse to risk? Oh, yes. But there are different types of risk. While I’m loath to plop down the cash (that I might never earn back) for an editor and book cover designer, I’m even more worried about giving up my rights indefinitely to a publisher.

I also like to be in control. By self-publishing I can choose my covers, titles, release dates, book lengths, and story lines. For better or worse, success or failure is all on me.

(Where’d I put that paper sack again?)

By defining my ultimate goal, and determining that I intend to reach it by self-publishing, something dramatic happened. My daily priorities changed drastically.

I dropped my current WIP cold. It doesn’t fit with my new plan to release a trilogy in the spring of 2014, so it had to be pushed aside so I can work on revisions for the first book in the series and get to work finishing book two.

Without defining my goals so carefully, I would have kept pushing really hard—25,000 words in January, for example—on the wrong thing. Productive, yes. Helpful, no.

I can now make more informed decisions about how to utilize my time.

Sign up for editor/agent pitch appointments at a conference? Nope.

Read a blog post on writing great query letters? Pass.

Take a class on self-publishing? Sign me up.

See? A month ago, the answers to those questions would have been very different. There’s the real value of creating specific goals and plans for achieving them.

There’s no guarantee I’ll succeed, anymore than there was ever a guarantee I’d get a publishing contract. But at least I know I’ll be heading in the right direction.

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Photo credit: By SOIR (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons


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Be bold, set a goal

Fortune befriends the bold. – Emily Dickinson

Climber_at_Stanage_Edge_-_geograph.org.uk_-_578912Do you have long-term goals for your writing?

I’m listening to a recording of the Bob Mayer workshop I missed while I was in California a couple weeks ago. A lot of his advice is centered around facing your fears and moving outside your comfort zone, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

But what really struck a chord with me is his suggestion that we should all create a plan for what we want to accomplish, with clear, measurable goals. Not just measurable, but visible, just like the goals we create for our characters.

Whoa, talk about getting uncomfortable.

Sure, I have goals. I have goals for things I have direct control over. Like how many words I write per day, how many query letters I send, or when I want to have a manuscript finished.

But he thinks we should go beyond that and think sales and money. Money, people!

I have no control over money. How can I possibly know what I’ll make in one, two, or five years? How can anyone plan for such a thing?

But if I don’t set a goal, how will I know what I’m shooting for? How will I know if an opportunity that comes along supports my vision of success or hinders it? How will I know if I a success or just spinning my wheels?

This is where the fear sets in. I feel silly picking a number, but it’s really fear talking.

What if I say I want to be making $50K/year on my writing and teaching activities by the end of 2015 and I fail? My number might be too unrealistic, just wishful thinking. But now that I’ve asked myself the question, what seems silly is worrying about not reaching my number. If I don’t, so what?

Will I likely be better off than I am today? Will I have made decisions that move me toward what I want instead of away from it?

Yes!

And if I end up making $70K, then I’ll really know it’s time to party.

So, great, you’re convinced. Me too. I’m setting a goal. Several of them.

The next step is to share it with those who have a stake in it—family members who have to put up with you closeting yourself away to write and spending money on conferences, books, and workshops—so they’ll understand why you’re working so hard. They’ll see that you’ve thought about it and you’re serious. Hopefully, they’ll support you. (Just tell your spouse you want to make enough so he/she can retire. Might help.)

But spreading the word is scary, because now you’re committed. Tell your mother you plan to be a New York Times #1 bestselling author and she’ll ask you how that’s going. Every. Time. She. Calls. See if that doesn’t spur you on.

Finally, a goal doesn’t really have meaning if you don’t have a reason behind it (and this helps you sell it to your stakeholders too). Like Bob points out, just as our characters have a motivation for everything they do, so must you. It’s great that you want to make $30K on your self-pubbed books next year. But why $30K? Why next year?

Wouldn’t you be more likely to stick to your plan for achieving your goal—another topic for another day—if you kept in mind that the money means your graduating senior can go to college? Or you can take the trip to Australia and New Zealand you’ve always dreamed of. Or you can quit your day job to write full time?

Now there’s something to keep you motivated.

I challenge you write down your goals and the motivations behind them today. Even better, since the goals should be something visible/tangible, see if you can find a picture to represent each one and put them somewhere you’ll see them every day.

Take control of your fear, figure out what you really want and why, and get to work on making it happen.

Be bold, and may fortune be your friend.

Photo credit: J147 [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons


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Work and play in California

I had a fabulous time in San Jose two Saturdays ago, delivering my first in-person Scrivener workshop for the Silicon Valley Romance Writers. Lots of good questions and enthusiastic students, followed by a delicious Indian lunch buffet.

To top it off, my flight didn’t leave until Sunday night. Never one to miss an opportunity for a little extra travel—or a peek at the ocean—I took a side trip to Santa Cruz before meeting a longtime friend and his family for dinner.

If you’ve been hanging around my blog long enough, you probably know that I was meant to live on the beach. So far, destiny and reality have not caught up with each other, but I’m an optimist. Until then, I take every chance I can to feed my need for the sight, sound, feel, and scent of the ocean.

Besides, when the rental car company upgrades you to a red Mustang because the compact you booked is not available, you must take a road trip.

Here are a few highlights from my fun in the sun.

Workshop photo taken by Kristina Wright.

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