Encouragement

I received two very encouraging emails this week about Hurricane Baby–one was from a contest I had entered that directly invited me to revise and resubmit, telling when the new contest deadline was and everything.

I was so shocked I wrote back to make sure I had read correctly.

He (the publisher) responded that that was exactly what he had meant.

So that got me thinking. Another press that I think a lot of had held a pop-up submission window for short-story collections that I had sent to last Thanksgiving and had ultimately been rejected by, but they had a specific short story contest coming up in September that they had not held last year. So I wrote that publisher and asked if I could revise and then resubmit to that contest. She replied that of course I could–people did it all the time.

So i am taking Cheryl’s comments from my last story swap and using them to revise and deepen the reader’s understanding of the characters and pick up on other notes she made about the stories, and I’m going to submit to the last few presses on my list and then to those two in particular. Hopefully we can see results.

I am also putting my other strategy in place of sending a few of the other individual stories to high-quality journals as they open submissions and see if I can place a few in some nice publications and get a little buzz going. So I spent yesterday doing that with the first story, Still Waters. We will see what happens.

Good writing vibes to all!

Moving Right Along

I drafted a first chapter of Missing and Mentally Ill in Mississippi in my writing sprints this week, about 9,000 words. It needs maybe a few stats to fill it out, but I finally worked out the arrangement of the scenes and what order I wanted everything in. I had to figure out what I wanted to accomplish, which was introducing major characters and drawing parallels between us, then summing up what I wanted to do in the book. So I feel good about it.

Now I need another sample chapter and an introduction to my proposal. Then I’ll continue to draft more sections and see if I can get an agent on proposal only. I am selling it as true crime, so we will see how that stacks up with what agents are looking for.

My writing friend is really keeping me accountable. She reminds me it’s a writing day and that we start at 6:30 p.m. and write for an hour. Other times I remind her. But we check in at the beginning, then give a word count and what part of the story we wrote after we’re done. So it’s nice to know someone wants to hear about your writing when you finish.

Onward and upward!

Progress!

So far I have typed 3000 words on my current work-in-progress. I’ve done the writing sprints with my MFA buddy Shannon and am making progress past my initial fear about taking such a project on. When I start I just think, “It’s only for an hour.” And I just write!

The more I write the more excited I get and the more daunting it gets, but I’m not letting myself think it’s a book; I’m treating each chapter like a newspaper article. That’s helping, too.

I can’t wait to get back to it Monday night!

New Project!

Time to announce my new project for the year–Missing and Mentally Ill in Mississippi.

I plan to write about working for MCIR and covering mental health issues, specifically the disappearance of Travis Sean Hunt from Choctaw County, which is where I grew up as well. I hope to tell his story as well as mine about being mentally ill and how similar our conditions were and how there but for the grace of God, go I. I will be chronicling the writing of this story the same way I have been doing Hurricane Baby in hopes that it can encourage others who want to tell their own stories as well.

As for Hurricane Baby, here are the latest statistics:

Presses sent to –62

Rejections–37

Presses left to hear from–25

Presses left to send to–6

So I will let the process work its way through the rest of the list and just see what happens. But I am excited to work on this new one and stay busy creating my own future. If I have to put away Hurricane Baby, I suppose that’s just the way it is. But I am excited for this new venture and hope you all can be excited with me!

Onward!

Bucket List Visit

We went on a trip to Wisconsin for summer vacation and as a side trip, we stopped in Madison and visited a former professor of mine from when I was at Mississippi State University; he’s now at University of Wisconsin-Madison. We haven’t seen each other in thirty years, but we’ve stayed in touch on and off through that time (basically the whole time the Internet was being invented around us).

We had a great visit, and at the end of it, he said something that will stick with me, I think. He said he admired my persistence and always had.

That will keep me going for a while.

New Notebook

I bought a fancy pink suede blank lined notebook today at a Renaissance fair this weekend. Not sure I will ever write in it, but I might. You never know.

(I can hear all the blank notebooks already stashed in my office desks mocking me from afar. You? Write? Ha!)

I’m going to, though. Just you hide and watch.

The Question of Social Media

Let me preface this post by saying–I love blogging. The immediacy, the honesty I can muster up, the value of my ability to produce really clean copy on a rough draft–it all makes me a natural blogger.

Not so much with other social media–especially in a post-literate age.

I once had to do a film project for a class ages ago in my journalism program. We did a TV news story. I only passed it through the efforts of my partner on the project; I was the on-air talent because of my public speaking skills, and she did the technical work–and word got back to me that the professor had commented that I had “a face made for radio” the first time he viewed it.

He wasn’t wrong. I’m not conventionally attractive–the word I used to get was “handsome” rather than “pretty”. I had accepted that about myself and knew I wouldn’t make it a day in TV. But the comment still stung.

So I don’t do TikTok. Or Bookstagram or Facebook reels.

I do have Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jdlwhitehead/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/julie.whitehead.146), Twitter (https://twitter.com/julielwhitehea1), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-liddell-whitehead-716a259b/), Mastodon (https://writing.exchange/@JulieLiddellWhitehead), and now Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/julieliddellwhitehead/).

But I’m at a bit of an impasse as to how to make them work in my favor. Most of my followers are from Twitter, but of course so many people have left that platform that it isn’t as good a resource as it used to be.

So if anyone else is still trying to figure out how to grow their social media program, I think we may be asking the wrong question–how does publishing need to restructure itself so that social media reach is not the important thing, but writing is? I think that’s the question to ask.

Swap

My writing buddy Cheryl sent me back her read of Hurricane Baby: Stories, and her read was much more favorable that I thought it might be. She noted a very few places in the manuscript where she lost track/got tripped up in the narrative, and she thought I could actually cut some places where I was describing actions that didn’t necessarily move the plot forwards–she urged me to focus on the action throughout, which was a nice surprise. She said she really, really loved it, and her favorite character was Tommy Hebert, the one I turned from a peripheral character to a major one –she said his character arc really held her attention.

So now I think I know what to do with it in the next stage of revision, which I am probably going to take up next year (if it doesn’t get picked up by someone before that) after I draft my new project I want to work on. I am going to make each story as individually strong as I can and start sending them out to see if I can publish them in high-profile places and get them some attention. We will see what happens.

Some of the items she mentioned I can fix now before it goes out to anyone else this year–they’ll be quick. And I need to finish reading and reacting to her manuscript before the end of the month. So i am gong to look for some time to finish that before May 30.

i am very glad I did this new swap. I feel more confident about the manuscript’ strengths and know where to fix the weaknesses. So good. Onward and upward!

Genius Move

Just got off Facebook with a solid plan to write this late summer and fall.

A writer buddy of mine and I were talking about writing, and I said I was going to start on my next short story collection in mid-August once my kid goes off to college and need something to distract me from the empty nest.

I remembered how a lot of people talked since the pandemic about doing writing “sprints” where you and others meet over Zoom and write for a while together then compare notes when you finish the sprints. So she and I agreed to start meeting on Facebook at 6:30 p.m. three times a week, and each write for an hour, then compare notes.

So I feel good about what I’m going to do. I’m going to only write an hour a day, three times a week, and write a very rough draft.

I’m now aware that I’ve got to give up the notion of I’m putting down something magical right as it flows from the pen. I need to just get the story out. I have a good outline, a throughline, and lots and lots of details to squeeze in. I’m looking forward to it. Really. 🙂

Accountability is really good for me. How do you feel about writing partners, workshop partners, accountability, and deadlnes?

Numbers Update

So it’s been a few months, and i thought I would update my query numbers.

Presses queried–53

Rejections–33

Submissions still outstanding–20

Presses left to send to–8

I am still hopeful. But I have a few backup plans in place now, so we will see what happens. I went ahead and sent it off to my workshop mate Cheryl to see what she will say about it. And I will spend time reading her work and see how I may be able to help her improve her new novel project.

We will see what happens. Some really nice places still have the manuscript, so I will see what develops. I will send to a few places tomorrow that open on May 1. So that is the next step. Wish me well! Happy writing!