Tag: writing

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.

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!

Professional Jealousy

I had kind of a bad week the week before last as far as how I felt about my writing. One author in a writers’ group I am in posted the story behind her book deal. I am trying to be charitable and think that she was just posting encouragement. She talked about how long she had been writing in her spare time and how she’d always wanted to write a book, and she got laid off at her job. She decided to take the plunge and try to do a book on a volunteer passion project of hers.

She consulted with another person in this writers’ group, and together they crafted a nonfiction book proposal. Within a month, she had a literary agent. Within six months, she sold the book at auction for a six-figure advance to a Big Five publisher. She hasn’t even written the book yet; she asked for encouragement going forward.

I am trying so hard to be joyful for her and not think of myself.

But it’s so hard to.

I have been kicking Hurricane Baby around for almost twenty years. I got an agent fairly rapidly, and I tried the big New York presses first. No dice. Now I have refined it several times over and am trying to work with the small presses. So far the query letter got some hits, but I’ve collected polite rejections after that. I still have about twenty possibilities for it, but I’m starting to think that maybe it’s just not going to happen for me–a feeling that reading this story intensified.

But as Anne Lamott says, I am comparing my insides to someone else’s outsides. It probably wasn’t as easy as it seems for this person. On social media, you only see the end result. In this blog, I’m trying to counter the myth of the “overnight success” by being transparent about what this process is like. I believe in telling all like it is. And right now, it’s uncomfortable to sit with the idea that Hurricane Baby might never be all I want it to be.

But all I can do for myself is press forward. And press forward I will. It was hard to pick myself back up and send the book off to yet another press this week. But I did it. And I will wait and see what happens with it. Wish me well. And I will take heart in the fact that I have my own tribe cheering me on, here and elsewhere.

Persist. That the word of the month for me. I hope it can be yours as well.

Confession Time

I am not keeping up with some of my resolutions.

I am not reading very much, and I’m not working on my fiction project, either.

I have just been so tired when I finish work, so I want to do something mindless after work instead of concentrating on reading and writing. I think some of it is a lack of motivation due to the bad weather we’ve had. The forecast is promising to get warmer and warmer as we go throughout February though, so I am looking forward to an improvement on that front.

I think some of the lack of motivation of particularly writing on my fiction project is that I’m still getting rejections on Hurricane Baby with pretty consistent regularity. I went back and checked on a lot of my submissions from September, and many of those are rejections (I think) because I never heard any response back. Many of them say no response after three months is a negative response. :(. So.

That makes 20 rejections thus far.

I’ve not given up hope on Hurricane Baby–I have yet another email ready to go out on February 15 to yet another press. I still have 14 total I plan to send to. But a lack of response to it has dampened my enthusiasm to work on another manuscript.

But (and this is a mindset I am learning to embrace) the sunset of tomorrow is not the end of the world–it’s barely the beginning.

What do I mean by that?

My youngest daughter leaves home for college in August of this year. I have resolved to wait until then to get back into the fiction writing. She will have moved on to her new life at college, and I will have more time during the week to devote to writing, what with the end of going to her school activities and such. And I may need to immerse myself into something new to take my focus off of missing her.

I do plan to continue the blog with updates on Hurricane Baby (especially the play coming up this spring!) and my querying journey. I also plan to write a few craft essays to post here as well. So I’m going to still be writing here, on my other blog projects, etc. I’ve been at this too long to give up altogether.

But the time just may not be right at this particular second. That’s okay. Later is fine. Totally fine. I will keep reading, living, experiencing. That can only enrich my fiction–when the time is right for me to take it back up.

I hope you can stick with me on the journey. Thanks to all who read and write and encourage us writers in our dreams.

Update on Numbers

So I decided to look at numbers again for Hurricane Baby’s querying journey–here we go.

Queries submitted: 38

Rejections received: 15

Places still on the list to send to: 10

I did get a lot of rejections over the holidays, but I was expecting that so I am still okay about it 🙂

I am going to send another query this afternoon or tomorrow, to Prairie Schooner Book Prize. More places open up in February, so I have a plan to continue submitting for the rest of the year, just about. And I may find even more to send to. We will see.

Persistence pays off. That’s what I’ve been told. So we will see. Wish me well!

To-Be-Read Pile

So I have a nice pile of books to be read stacked up for the new year. I plan to be a lot more intentional about reading now that I am a year-and-a-half out of graduate school. I was so TIRED of reading. But now I plan to really get back into it and see where I go. I am going to list my books out and log when I read them on here as they are completed. The list (so far) contains:

–Defining New Yorker Humor, University Press of Mississippi, 2000

–Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear After 100 Years, University Press of Mississippi, 2021

–Best American Essays 2021, Mariner Press, 2021

–Best American Essays 2020, Mariner Press, 2020

–Best American Short Stories 2019, Mariner Press, 2019

–Best American Short Stories 2018, Mariner Press, 2018

–Always Happy Hour, Liveright Publishing, 2017

–Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond, University Press of Mississippi, 2019

–A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring The Spiritual Life and Work of Charles Schulz, University Press of Mississippi, 2015

–A Year In Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi, 2017

–Born To Shine, Hachette Book Group, 2022

–What If? 2, Riverhead Books, 2022

–Little Pieces of Hope: Happy-Making Things in a Difficult World, Penguin Books, 2021

–The Potlikker Papers, Penguin, 2017

–American Housewife, Anchor Books, 2019

–Dispatches From The Golden Age, St Martin’s Press, 2022

–Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light, Anchor Books, 2021

There’s a list. There’s a plan. Off I go!

Doing a Little Research

I read an article recently talking about an illustrator who lost the ability to visualize what he was supposed to be drawing–for him, it happened after he went back to work from a three-week bout of COVID.

Going through the article, I learned a new word: aphantasia.

It means the inability to visualize images in your mind.

I found out that most people are able to “see” imagined images.

Now I have heard all my life about the “mind’s eye”–where you can recall how a person looks or imagine a scene in your mind to relax. I’ve read a lot of literature talking about visualization–imagining the outcome you want, and that imagining preparing you for various scenarios, such a public speaking, etc.

I never knew, however, that most people, when closing their eyes and being asked to visualize something, ACTUALLY SEE SOMETHING. This bit of knowledge was surprising because–

All I see are the backs of my eyelids.

I don’t see ANYTHING when I try to visualize. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Why am I talking about this? Well, it seems that most writers do a bang-up job imagining people, places, and things and are then able to narrate what they see in their mind’s eye, describing their characters, settings, and action.

I have always been told my writing is missing that kind of description. It was something I worked hard to try to do in my writing for graduate school for my MFA, something I tried to learn as a matter of craft.

But now I know it’s a case of my brain, again, being different from other writers’ brains.

I’ve been chewing this insight over for a while.

And right now, I am in a bit of despair about it.

Do I need to give up fiction? And on the hope of succeeding with my fiction? Are readers now so addicted to visual stimuli that if I can’t do this thing, I don’t have a writing future?

What should I do?

Starting Again From Scratch (Almost)

So this afternoon I typed the first paragraph of my new linked short-story collection with a working title of “Strong. Southern. Women.” (periods are intentional) The story is about a widow who was left to raise three young daughters on her own. Each of the twenty stories currently planned is about how the girls grow up, leave home, and (because each has an individual fatal flaw) fall from grace, destroying their lives–they think. One goes to white-collar prison. One descends into opioid addiction. And one winds up in a battered women’s shelter with her young son.

But their mother, who is both the one who held them together and who instilled the seeds of their self-destruction, gives them space, after they make the hard decision to reorder their lives, to grow, to gather up the pieces, and to get back on their feet. It’s going to be Southern Gothic again, but much more inspirational and happy-ending than Hurricane Baby.

I have an outline of all the stories and the backstory, and I’ve so far finally gotten started. We will see where this writing journey takes me. Wish me well!

So How Do You Do It?

How do you take on a long project and stick with it to completion? Good question.

One way to NOT do it is to talk about it too much. I try to reserve my initial enthusiasm for the project by keeping it under wraps. I actually started revising Hurricane Baby in January of this year but didn’t blog about it until much later. Why? Because I was afraid that I would lose enthusiasm for it if I talked it out too much, exposed too many of my ideas to scrutiny before they were fully formed.

Another way to keep the enthusiasm strong is to think about it in terms of craft and process instead of results. I used to find myself so carried away with the future of a project that I lost sight of the project itself. This phenomenon happened to me with this manuscript as well, which is why I abandoned it for a bit in April and May–I thought too much about where I wanted it to publish and who I wanted to pitch it to that I forgot I needed to spare my creativity for finishing it first.

Another way to keep the enthusiasm is to limit the project to something achievable. If you set out to write the Great American Novel, I guarantee that somewhere along the line you will freeze up because you will realize that the project is not living up to the hype you have put on it in your mind. I set out to write a series of short stories that were linked by Hurricane Katrina. I limited it to twelve stories. Only after finishing that initial plan of those twelve did I allow myself to think about how I could make it longer and bigger and more extensive.

As you get further into the story and the initial enthusiasm begins to wane, then it’s time to think about enlisting an accountability partner. For me, having a deadline is a blessing because it means I cannot take off too many days from writing or dawdle too long over any one particular story problem. And having someone eagerly waiting to read what you’ve written can be a boost to your productivity in that the audience is no longer just you–it’s someone else whom you are now accountable.

Just a few suggestions that have helped me sustain energy to stick with this project and finish it.