Getting over

I have shut you away
in this closet of mind --
there to hang with the shirts
that I no longer wear,
and you notice it not
'cause it looks just the same.
But for me, I perceive
that the world is less bright.

Updates and Musings

1. A question for myself: What is more important -- success (not really), recognition (maybe), or skill/talent/competence (heck yeah!) I will always choose improvement and growth, given the circumstances. And I can see many situations where success happens because of factors that have nothing to do with competence and honing one's craft.
2. I'm feeling like I have to blow some cobwebs out of my brain. I don't know if my muse is still on the job (if you're reading this, Muse, send me a smile!) I need some fantasy, some novelty, some surprise, a little mysticism, fairy wings, talking cats, a rainbow in a dandelion. I need a charge to help put the young love in this damn book I'm working on. 
3. I will continue writing. I've decided what my pdoc was addressing was my sense of perfectionism and inability to stop at some point of "good enough"*. So, although getting published is a nice to have, it's not a measure of moderate proficiency. While I'm employed, I might have to settle for moderate proficiency, whatever it is. Or maybe not -- I don't have some of the more time-wasting habits like Netflix and excessive Facebook use, so I might have time for both.   
4. I find out tomorrow or Tuesday about my Kindle Scout submission. I don't think it will get adopted into the (now defunct) program. Try, try again. I'm not quite ready to throw it in the abyss of self-publishing.
5. Any love and support  you can give will be appreciated. Even if the only people reading this are actually bots from Russia or Poland.

********

* I often can only focus on one thing at a time because it has to be constantly getting better; I can't stop at good enough. This is why "walk a half-hour daily" becomes "walk four miles a day and eight miles a day on weekends" becomes "walk the Illinois-Michigan Canal in a week". (Note: Running isn't part of the plan. In my case, running isn't part of God's plan.)

Seed starts

It's gardening season.

I have spent the whole dreary winter working in my basement greenhouse planting seeds, most of which have grown into cute little seedlings (or in the case of tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers, big monsters.)

I'm trying to find places for all of them in my yard. This is a good problem to have.

I've had far worse years for plants. The only seedlings I completely lost were hyssop, purple mitsuba, and Canadian garlic. Most of the herbs that I'd planted last year survived the winter; the exceptions were parsley and rosemary (the sage and the thyme are fine).

I can't plant the monsterous tomatoes, pepper, and eggplants out till Mother's Day, nor can I plant their overly abundant basil companions, but I have lots of baby perennials that, in the worse case scenario, can put up with a little reemay over them. Basil thyme and savory; campanula, pinks and yarrow; hablitzia; the humongous perilla (who knew?)

I don't know if I said this before, but all the things I plant need to be edible in at least one part -- the rampion has edible roots; the cardoon has edible leaf stalks as does the surprising fuki that I planted two years ago and just saw peek up from the ground yesterday.

Someday, I will have the urban Garden of Eden I've always wanted.

So, what is writing "good enough"?

I talked to my Pdoc (psychiatrist) the other day about how I don't just want to be good at things, but excellent at them. I don't just want to write, I want to get published; I want to earn awards at school, which makes me discount when individual students thank me for helping them, etc. (I'm sorry students, it's not that you're not important or good enough! It's my problem!)

Dr. Jura suggested that I look around at what is held as the standard definition of good and then reduce it ten percent.

I would love to be doing things good enough rather than try to be the best, especially as I'm the best only in my dreams. I would love to write "just for myself" -- much less strain, much fewer down moments. But I don't seem to be able to settle for "good enough", especially to writing. I associate love with accomplishment, and I want to feel loved. (Yes, Richard loves me, but my inner child is a voracious monster who needs love every moment of every day.) I want to earn being loved (I didn't grow up with unconditional love). I want to --

I obviously have a values conflict here between "I want to win" and "I want to be accepted on my own merits. I need to resolve it.

I'll be back to creative excerpts tomorrow.

Post-semester crash, or "My brain shut down".

(Note: I love the Victorian way of titling books with the "or" in the middle, such as Syphilis, or the French Disease). So I decided to try it.

My brain, in a word, is empty right now. It's a form of inertia. It's what happens if I spend two weeks laser-focused on getting final projects and exams graded -- and I fun out of grades. Like I'm plowing a field, but then I run out of field and crash face-first into a wall. 

I'm trying to write on a story, any of my stories, editing, scheduling, ANYTHING.

But my brain seems incapable of creating right now.

I hope it comes back soon.

Autographs

I asked for an autograph from a friend yesterday. I may or may not have gotten it, depending on whether the Instagram post was meant for me.

What my friend doesn't understand (even if he's given it some thought) is that I did not ask for the autograph because he was an up-and-coming actor, but because he was my friend.

I don't like the whole concept of autographs. They disturb my Quaker sensibilities by putting someone else on a pedestal -- "I'm so honored to have breathed the same air as you!" They treat famous people like trading cards -- "Hey, I got Ryan Reynolds!" "Oh yeah, I have Elvis Presley! Mine's much more awesome!" And finally, because I'm arrogant, I want to respect the person and want them to respect me as well.

That being said, I think there are reasons for autographs, and I actually have a few. Most of my autographs have been from children's book illustrators, because I admire the art of translating ideas into pictures. I also knew the illustrators in question, and I wanted them to know I admired their work. I have an autograph from Morgan Spurlock, because I admired his documentary series 30 Days, and because he showed me appreciation for being a college professor.

In other words, I find the relationship between artist and audience not to be that of the little audience in front of the huge stage (ask me how I feel about stadium concerts!) but of connection between a performer or a writer and their audience.

Or maybe I just want to adopt creative people into my life.

PS: Thank you for the virtual autograph. If you didn't mean it for me, thanks anyhow.

Re: Poland Scammer Attack

Dear Polish person trying to involve me in what's obviously a turnkey Ponzi scheme:

Don't come back. Never show your face here again.

Dear rest of Polish people who may or may not visit my Blogger site:

Let me know who you are and restore my faith in your country.

Editing, as much as I dislike it, may be where the magic happens.

Writing is delightful, full of beginnings -- meeting the characters, exploring their world, setting them on an adventure. Writing feels like the first of May -- trees in bloom, journeys started.

Editing feels like carving into a knotty tree with a chainsaw. Every spare subplot, every awkward sentence, every cliche causes the saw to buck. And then, when all the negative space is trimmed out, the question becomes whether or not what's left is the true seeming of the story.

I had a revelation about where a couple of my stories  (novella? novel?) should go, and I've been wielding the chainsaw lately. I think they're getting better. I think. It's sometimes hard for the one with the chainsaw to judge.

Failure as an opportunity for change

What should you do when someone reviews something of yours badly?

Find the truth in their comments.

It's the hardest thing to do, to accept that the quality of your output is low, that you haven't accomplished what you set out to accomplish, that you're not as shiny as you thought you were. It is easier to excoriate the messenger, to discount their observations, to explain away all your responsibility for your poor performance. It's easy, as well, to indulge in self-pity, becoming the misunderstood one.

But none of that will kick you out of your complacency. None of that will help you grow.


The rhetorical "you" is not fair to you, the reader, because I'm speaking from my own experience. This week I got what could be called a bad review, where I performed below the evaluator's expectations. This forced me to look at my performance and say, "Yes, I performed below my expectations."

I had reasons, mind you -- I had been depressed and foggy from medications, but my work still wasn't what it could be. And I had to admit that.

But it was liberating.

I gained a sense that my evaluator cared.

I gained a sense that I could bounce ideas off someone.

I gained the belief that I could improve.

I started to develop a plan.


I need to find a way to do this as a writer. I have had horrible trouble finding beta-readers, because novels are long and everyone is busy. I don't have the money to hire a developmental editor. But I've faced the truth in one area of my life, and I survived. Time to face the possibility of negative criticism in another.

Another detour

Note -- this is finals week at Northwest Missouri State University, where I finish out the school year by giving final exams and hearing last-minute entreaties from students who forgot to turn in 50% of the assignments.  I feel for the students -- there were classes I missed 40% of when I was a student, but I didn't ignore due dates in a class and ask for mercy on the last day of class.


Poor Prodigies -- it may be the novel that never gets written at this rate. After editing Gaia's Hands into a novella -- the best decision I've made thus far -- I'm doing what needs to be done with Mythos and Apocalypse given the time frames and moods -- splitting them up into a novella and one novel.  I think my instincts are right here.

I'll get back to Prodigies. And Whose Hearts are Mountains.  Sometime this summer.  In-between intern visits, writing on one of two non-fiction books, working in the garden, and maybe some sleep somewhere. Oh, and exercise. I promised myself some exercise.

Excerpt from Gaia's Hands (the novella).

An excerpt from Gaia's Hands. Warning: Very indirect references to sex -- less so than in a romance novel.

Josh couldn’t sleep. Images of the last several hours swirled in his head: the fruit trees in the forest, Jeanne’s face at a particularly unguarded moment, the blues band at the café, Jeanne’s body, all curves and sags and comfort like a favorite easy chair. He could smell lovemaking, had never been aware before that it had a smell. 

The vision — the garden; Jeanne standing in the garden, tending it. Jeanne — the garden and the gardener, the secret and yet not the whole of the secret. He chased the thoughts around until they became the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, the infinite. The lovemaking — she had been Eve to his Adam — did I just go there? he groaned. He would not put that phrase into his next poem. Something, everything — Josh did not act on impulse, yet he had. 

Josh threw on dry jeans and shirt, and dragged his bike back down the stairs and out under a clearing sky. “Who am I?” he queried himself as he rode toward Eric’s apartment. An introvert, an observer of human nature, a practitioner of aikido, an aspiring writer, only son, half-Asian. He dug deeper: a dabbler in Shinto, a pacifist, a former problem child. He felt heart and gut, ai and ki. And now, something bigger than himself — not just a lover, but a holder of a vision, a mystery. He would not tell that last part to his best friend Eric.

The Inertia Paradox

I am into Finals Week in my day job here at Northwest Missouri State University. My schedule has already relaxed as I make it a point to get all my grading done before finals week, and my exams are multiple choice. For all intents and purposes, then, I'm done with the semester except for paperwork.

My summer will be much more flexible -- I will supervise 20 interns, which will require visiting them, calling their supervisors at the beginning of the semester, and some grading, all of which can be scheduled at my discretion within reason.

I will have more time this summer. And it will make it harder to write. Does this seem like a paradox? Wouldn't having more time make it easier to write?

As it turns out, having more time -- or more specifically, less to do -- makes it harder to write. We are all victims of inertia -- a body at rest stays at rest. But inertia works both ways -- a body in motion stays in motion.

During the school year, I am a body in motion -- four classes, half a dozen interns, meetings, other committments. On a summer schedule, I have plenty of time to be at rest, with no timetable set for me. I can spend all day checking for readers on Blogger if I want. Therefore, I'm a body at rest, and without solid goals -- more solid than I have in the school year -- I will become a body at rest.

After this school year, which was one of the hardest I've had in a while, it would be welcome to rest. But not long enough that I become a body at rest.

Potentiality, optimism and cognitive journaling

As I think I've said before, I'm in love with potentiality. Potentiality is the possibility -- not the probability -- that something will blossom. (I'm all about the blossom motif today, even though it's too cold for anything to bloom still.)

I think that the love for potentiality is what sorts those who seek change and those who hide from change. Change is scary, rejection hurts, but those who seek change recognize the potential pitfalls. There is a term for those who seek change -- those people are morphogenic.

What morphogenic people don't always do a good job of is deal with disappointment when the desired goal fizzles. No amount of effort, good planning, or knowledge will guarantee success; there are so many other factors. I have an optimistic friend who takes rejections very well -- in public, at least. I don't know how he takes them in private. He seems to be an optimist anyhow.

I don't deal with rejection well. I tend to prognosticate more rejection and failure when I've failed, as I have with not getting published over and over. Honestly, getting rejected has improved me as a writer, but that's not what I see when I don't get published. I tend to beat myself up, saying I'm not a good writer, I'll never get published, etc.

This is where cognitive journaling comes in.

The theory behind cognitive journaling is that, when something bad happens, our brain reacts in automatic ways -- maybe from parental or cultural conditioning -- that causes an even more bad mood than previously, and that path in your brain from happening to feeling becomes (figuratively) a groove your mood gets stuck in. These bad ways are usually encapsulated in what are known as cognitive distortions -- such as "I'll never get published," above.

Cognitive journaling seeks to replace the cognitive distortion with more balanced thoughts. For example, let's tackle my cognitive distortion:

CD: I'll never get published. I'm a bad writer.
What are some ways we can identify these as cognitive distortions?

• I can't predict the future
• I've already been published -- several academic articles, one essay in a progressive religious journal, and a couple poems in Lindsey-Woolsley (the Allen Hall literary magazine at University of Illinois

These become the basis for contradictions to the cognitive distortions:

• If I quit trying, I'll never find out if I can get published
• I really can't predict the future (otherwise, how come I can only predict bad things and not the latest lottery winners?)
• People liked my writing before, it can happen again.
• This rejection may have nothing to do with my writing.

If I write these down and look at them occasionally, I can (the theory holds) program my brain into thinking more positively.

*****

If I knew about this already, why did I not use it earlier? Because I was depressed, and deep depression tends to believe that everything negative is true. I couldn't get myself to use cognitive journaling because I really wasn't a good writer and I wouldn't get published. 

The irony was, in not doing my cognitive exercises, I was pushing my depression further by getting stuck in my negative rut. I'm not saying my depression was my fault because I didn't do my cognitives, but my refusal was a factor in how deep the depression got. 

So I'm journaling again, and hoping that it returns me to my optimistic self.

... and in my spare time I write protest poems ...

Women do not forgive

the furrows cut by age,

the softened curves prone to sag.

We fall back on cliché,

diminishing ourselves

by hiding in more pleasing light.

I will forgive my face

for daringly claiming its space.

Alpha males.

I'm beginning to hate the phrase.

This morning I got a friend request on Facebook from someone who is most certainly an Internet scammer. Tipoffs: He's pictured in military uniform with a military background. He lists his home as three different places in Africa so he's apparently doing something dangerous, and to sweeten the deal, he's widowed.

In other words, he's the perfect romance novel hero.

I once got rejected by Harlequin because my story needed a hero who was 

1. older than the heroine; 
2. richer than the heroine and 
3. more powerful than the heroine.

In other words, an alpha male, and the female protagonist is his dazzled (and subservient) woman.

Is this what I, a female, am supposed to fall for? If this supposed to be my fantasy? As a highly educated female, and one who lives in voluntary simplicity, my male won't be alpha, but egalitarian. He might be dark and brooding, but smart enough to learn how to manage his own feelings. He might be an entrepreneur or a college professor or a social worker, but what he contributes is complementary skills.

It's not sexy enough, where sexy is defined as a female so desirable the lone wolf tears off her clothes and pledges to change (but not enough to get a social work job). The female is thrilled to find her needs will be taken care of and she won't have to be challenged at work anymore.

I probably will never write a romance novel again.

And I rejected Alpha Military Man for the third time. Who falls for these guys anyhow?

Wrestling with my Problem Child, part 2

Through a series of edits and rewrites, the novel Gaia's Hands (about 90,000 words) has been reduced to a tight novella with a feeling of impending doom -- and impending resurrection.

I do not know where that novella came from, except that I think it was lurking at the edges of the novel I wrote, with the symbolism pointing in that direction, but my not having the guts to go there. I think there's a tinge of my mood in the middle of Trump's presidency and its unrestrained pro-business stance. My story has become in many ways dystopian, where fear and threats rule the day for those who are different.

The source material is almost five years old. I've been struggling with it for years -- as my first novel, it probably lacked  voice. After some serious, intense editing and a painful and beautiful ending, I don't know if it has its own identity yet. But it's a lot tighter, a lot more poignant, and I hope it's a good story.

Wrestling with my Problem Child

I have always struggled with Gaia's Hands as a story.  If you're having trouble keeping track, that was my first novel that emerged from a series of short stories which arose from a very strange dream that had nothing to do with the story. That's the way dreams work -- you dream of (*censored*) and all of a sudden you're writing a book about environmentalism and plant diversity and love and sentient beanstalks.

Being my first novel, it has its flaws, and I couldn't figure out how to fix them. Did it want to be a mystical story? A grounded story? I was trying for magical realism, but I ended up with a book at odds with itself. It had plenty of themes, but what was the plot, anyhow? Which plot was the plot?  Did the plot need to be longer? Did I need to talk out the segments I added in? What could I fill in that actually assisted the plot?

Then yesterday, I heard that Tor/Forge (a major science fiction publisher), is looking for novellas to publish. A novella is between 7500 and 40,000 words according to Wikipedia and between 20,000 and 40,000 words according to Tor. It is, as the name implies, a short novel.

Given that I had just edited out all the parts of the novel that weren't bare bones plot, the tug was clear -- Make Gaia's Hands into a novella. I've cut more out of the plot (there are a lot of subplots) and completely changed the ending -- and now I have to add some more flow and description and cranking up of the plot (and get back to 20,000 words).

I don't expect to get published. As I said, this manuscript is like the kid with the runny noise who you wish would quit crying. His own mum thinks he's precious; everyone else wishes the kid would quit whining. Time for me to take care of the kid.

Love, Lauren

What Happened with the Blog

Remember when I said I was moving this blog over to Wix?

Wondering why I'm still here?

Don't get me wrong -- Wix is a beautiful blog, glossy and important looking. But it's not a blog for words as much as for pictures. Wix optimizes for the quick attention span -- big pictures that dominate the scene -- and for search engine optimization. That's fixed by this Blogger template -- a front page that lists Every. Single. Hashtag. on it.

I think the biggest reason for my disillusionment with Wix is that you weren't there. According to the high-tech statistical analytics, none of you were there except one person in El Macaro California, one person in Fort Worth Texas, One in Minooka IL, one from Gilbert Arizona, one from Toronto Canada , one from the middle of nowhere Indiana (not sure who that person is), and multiple hits from bots -- Wix in Ashford Virginia, Google in Mountain View California, and Suddenlink (my internet provider) in Tyler, TX.

I know more of you read this blog. I know not all of you are bots, even if you never say anything. I can't zero you down to city, but I know you by country. There are not many of you, but you are precious.

And I will remind you of my Wattpad serials:

The Kringle Conspiracy (romance)

Stories inside Stories (short stories in the Archetype Universe)

Frustration in iambic pentameter

Cacophony of lights and noise and smoke.
Across the room, you glance, then look away,
and I can’t read avoidance or approach
in what you haven’t said or will not say.
I know. I want to know! I cannot say
a word, however, lest I break the spell.


edited for more iambic to the pentameter

PS: To My Friends

If I base a character on you, it is not you. Seriously, if that were the case, I wouldn't be able to kill off any of my characters.

More specifically:

• Some characters only look like you. 
• Some characters have some of your basic characteristics (personality, looks, likes), but not your stories.
• Some characters have your stories, but don't share your basic characteristics.
• Some characters are you from the Mirror Universe. 

Why do I base my characters on people I know?

• I can't visualize people. Honestly, if I try to call up your face in my mind, your nose floats off somewhere and I can't see your eyes. So, yeah, you have hair.
• Apparently, from what I can see in Wattpad, everyone does this, except they base their characters on movie and TV stars. My characters are quirkier than that, so they look like you.
• My friends (including you, reader, a friend I haven't met) have cool stories.
• My friends (including you, reader, etc), have rich personalities.

On the other hand, I once killed off my ex-husband in a novel after establishing him as a pathetic womanizer. I have a t-shirt that says "You are dangerously close to being killed off in my novel."  So I suppose there is some danger of being killed off by me. Sorry.

Clawing My Way Out

A friend of mine, upon reading my missives of the past few days, declared, "It's worse than I thought."

He's right. I stepped into a maelstrom of selling myself, and it drowned me. And I'm practically dead, washed up on shore, and I'm the only one there to resuscitate me. 

Ok, the first thing is to claw my way back up the beach before the next wave takes me back out. One dragging crawl at a time. 

Once I'm far enough from the waves, I flop on my back and think: What do I want out of writing?

I want to write well and improve.

I want to be read by more than just my husband.

I want people to enjoy my work.

I don't want to be big; I just want to be read and enjoyed.

I don't know how to do this, which is why I waded into what ended up being the SEO maelstrom, the belief that selling one's work is more important than writing and that quality is defined by how many page hits one gets.

There was a saying once upon a time: "Do what you love and the rest will follow." I don't know if I believe this; it assumes that there is a force in the universe that will promote my project over someone else's.  I don't want a God who will prioritize my dreams over Flint's water problem or Puerto Rico's ravaged infrastructure. I'll do what I love, but I don't have faith that the rest will follow. Which is why, I suspect, I walked into the shrieking maelstrom in the first place.

  

Where Did I Get Lost?

Once upon a time -- no, I'm not starting a blog with something as lame as "once upon a time"!

Then again, it is like a fairy tale -- but I'm up to the part with the swamp, and the rodents of unusual size, and Baba Yaga with her hut on chicken legs trying to put me in her cookpot ...

I've been writing all my life. My first recognized work was that Groundhog Day poem my third grade teacher posted on the classroom door. I'm not sure my sister, ten months older, has ever forgiven me for a day full of "Did your sister really write that poem?" It was the first time I'd been complimented on my writing.

My eighth grade English teacher kept all the poems I wrote in a folder, and gave them back to me when I graduated eighth grade. She told me to keep them, so I did. If she hadn't told me that, I would have thrown them out, because I hadn't gotten any indication from my parents that they were important.

When I was in high school, the people who sat around me in General Business class -- well, let these lyrics speak:

John told me he would marry me

Right in the middle of Civics class –

I guess I never believed him;

You had to know how I was –

A girl who hid inside her coat

And startled at shadows, wrote poetry

That Marsha and Tammy read to him –

But I never wrote a poem for John.

John and Tammy and Marsha told me I needed to get published someday, and I realized that getting published would be a way to get the recognition that was so rare in my home life. 

In college, my repertoire for poems (and later lyrics) fit one of two categories: "life sucks" and "there's this guy." Nope, I forgot the third -- "life sucks because there's this guy". My first college boyfriend broke up with me on my birthday because he met a woman at a party he liked better. But, according to his fianceé, he kept all the poetry I wrote him, even though he "didn't understand it".

I was once a singer-songwriter, during grad school, until I divorced my guitarist. It was the first time in a long time where I was allowed to bring my writing out in the open for recognition. Those lyrics above were from that era, and time spent in open mic and in jam sessions exposed people to my writing.

It was only a few years ago that I wrote a novel. My first novel exists because I kept writing short stories around a dream I'd had, and my husband (not the guitarist) told me I might as well write a novel, so I did. And then I wrote more, and I improved, and I had a pile of novels on my hard drive. Three things occurred to me as I wrote novel #5:

1) These were novels, which were things that publishers actually liked to publish!

2) Nobody would ever see them unless I published them

3) I was hungry for recognition on my writing, and I hadn't had any for 20 and a handful of years.

(Recognition, as you might have guessed from reading this essay, is a difficult subject with me. According to my mother, she never complimented me on anything because I was a gifted student who read at age 3 and she was afraid I'd get a "swelled head". Instead, the school district treated me like a little prodigy and the praise I got from them wasn't enough because it wasn't from my parents.)

So I explored getting published. I started the traditional method, which was sending to agents, and I got a bit bucket full of electronic rejections. I wrote to a couple publishers directly, with equal results. I tried Kindle Scout, and neither time were my books ever regarded highly enough to pull into contract.

I decided to try Wattpad after a friend's suggestion I publish something there, and I came out of terribly disillusioned. It appears that if one wants to be seen on Wattpad, one must carefully calculate how to "sell" the book. I admit that I have no talent for selling things -- my pitch tends to sound like "well, if you have to read a book, you might not mind mine." 

So now I'm at a crossroads. Not as in "Will I keep writing?" but as in "How can I try to be heard/read without losing my humanity?"

Any suggestions welcome.

Quirky Characters I Have Known

I think what drives me to write is the characters. My characters have been known to show up in my imagination during coffee hour. For example:

I sit in my favorite coffeehouse at the moment, a Starbucks in an expansive space at the corner of our college library.  Grzegorz visits -- he orders tea and brews it strong. He folds his lanky frame into the chair and cups his hands around his tea as if it was his chance of salvation. His copper hair spills down his shoulders and gets into his eyes.  He speaks with a low, sibilant voice, sometimes halting to find a word. "Did I ever tell you about the time I had to pass as a college professor?"

"No!" I exclaimed. "How did you do that?"

"It's actually pretty easy. Wear a tweed jacket, put on nerd glasses, wear the hair in a man bun -- the bun was so tight it gave me headaches -- and explain nonsense in an authoritative manner."

"Hey! I protested. "I resemble that remark!"

Grzegorz chuckles and makes a defiant face at me.

Kat pops in occasionally -- I mean literally pops in, because she's a hereditary time traveler. This is her "natural time", but chances are she set a bounce point in her favorite place, Starved Rock 1958, to get here.

"Hey," she says, standing by the table, gazing with ice blue eyes. "Do you know what the hell that blonde espresso is?"

"As far as I can tell, it's a light roast put through the espresso machine."

"There's no there there, if you know what I mean." She brushed back the lock of white in her otherwise black hair. "Ian says he wants a blonde espresso -- "

Ian pops in, five inches shorter than Kat, his crinkly brown eyes merry in his freckled face. "We were playing hide-and-seek; it took me a while to figure out where she went,"he noted, putting his arm around Kat's waist. 

"I thought you'd never show up," Kat scoffed. "I was about to get you a blonde cappuccino. Which is so far removed from coffee I might as well give you chocolate milk."

"Hey, I like chocolate milk!" Ian protested.

Amarel, their* white-blond hair braided neatly down their back, sits down across from me, smiling with dimples showing. "Lauren," they say, head propped on knuckles, china blue eyes focused on me, "Tell me about your writing."

I had forgotten that Amarel was in training to be a social worker. "I've been struggling for a while. I'm demoralized because I can't seem to get anyone to read my stuff."

"You could," they said, flexing their long fingers as their hands steepled, "write as if they are reading. And then maybe they will find you. Your words deserve to be heard."

Maybe Amarel is right -- maybe I need to write for my potential audience rather than mourning the lack of hits on this blog or on Wattpad. Moreso, maybe I need to write for Amarel, Grzegorz, Kat, and Ian. And all my other quirky characters.

*************

* Amarel is genderqueer, having been born with male and female genitals. This is a preferred gender pronoun form for them.

An Old-Fashioned Girl in an SEO World

​I'm getting bewildered by these newfangled ways of finding readers.

I always thought the situation was "get in contact with agents; if you're any good, you'll land an agent." That doesn't seem to work for me. It doesn't seem to wok for a lot of people, given the number of listings on Amazon Kindle that are self-published,  the huge number of volumes on WattPad, the burgeoning indie press movement, a few of which seem little different than the vanity press ... 

A friend suggested I try WattPad. I'm building two works through installments, the suggested WattPad way. One of them is a set of short stories about my alternative world where demi-humans with great power live among humans; the other is a romance centering on good Santas, bad Santas, and the secret Santas out there. 

As far as I know, I'm the only one who has looked at them, and I've looked at them a number of times because I love to see my words in print. Given the lack of *ahem* acclaim, I decided to look at the advice they give their users:

1. "Find famous people who look like your characters and post their pictures here." It might just be me, but I wouldn't post someone's picture for potentially thousands to see (there are books on WattPad with thousands of hits)  without their permission, no matter how famous they were. (David Chiang, if you are reading this, one of my characters looks like you and I have not posted your picture on WattPad.)

2. "Invite friends." How many times can you invite friends before they get horribly upset at you? I post on Facebook, and people are free to read or not read -- usually, not read, I guess. 

3. An entire section on "How To Get Reads, Votes, and Comments - A Guide." I can't wrap my mind around this -- this would take up enough time that I would never get to write again.

I grew up in a meritocracy: if you were good, you would get noticed. And, frankly, I was good -- I was the first National Merit Scholarship winner from my high school. Things have changed, and for the first time in my life, I'm having trouble embracing change. 

The World Needs Your Novel

Are you familiar with NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) is an annual writing contest where there are no prizes but a certificate and the only one you're competing against is yourself. The name comes from a contraction of "National Novel Writing Month" but has grown far beyond its bounds, with international reach.

Every November, thousands of writers and aspiring writers unite over the Web for NaNo.  Each will write toward a goal of a written work of 50,000 words.  In October 2016 (the last year for which data is available), almost 400,000 participants worldwide participated, with 34,000 people finishing the 50,000 word goal (Office of Letters and Light, 2016). The NaNo website provides blurbs of advice from writers, encouragement emails, and forums where people can ask for advice, seek information, and at times lament lack of progress.

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The motto of NaNo is "The World Needs Your Novel", but that doesn't necessarily mean that the world needs your novel to be published. With Google making research easy and the boom in potential writers, those who seek an agent may never get one and those who self-publish may find their works mouldering in a corner of the Internet. Nowadays, having your work read may be more a matter of search engine optimization than the quality of your writing.

I struggle with this all the time. I do not write for the market; I write from my heart, which is deep and quirky. My heroes are pacifists and horticulturists. Nobody has rippling muscles; my sexiest hero is androgynous. I persist, however, in writing and posting some of my works on Wattpad and sending manuscripts to agents who tell me "It's not you, it's me". 

I persevere because, deep down, I believe the world needs my novel. Not in a way that makes me famous (Fame actually makes me nervous). But in a way that makes people take a deep breath and think. And feel. And look at things like pacifism, environmentalism. and love differently than before. All I need to do is get my writing into their hands.

And there we are -- back to the hard part.

Office of Letters and Light (2017). Press release 2017. Available: https://nanowrimo.org/press. [April 14, 2018].

Loving Like an Adolescent

Adults fall in love all the time,

Fall into perdition,

Burn their houses over their heads,

Drink themselves insane.

In my adolescent moods,

The petals I have plucked drift away,

And I ask only that you smile at me.

Keeping the Dream, Fortifying the Dreamer

I am in love with the world "potentiality". According to Merriam-Webster (2017), the word means "a chance or possibility that something will happen or exist in the future." When a writer puts something out there, whether it be sending a manuscript to an agent or posting on Wattpad (shameless plug: I have a short story collection developing at https://www.wattpad.com/user/lleachie), they are activating potentiality. The possibilities for getting noticed or getting published in a crowded field of manuscripts are small, but the dream is great. 

And then the agent rejects the piece with the common "It's not you, it's me. Keep writing", or the story moulders on Wattpad ...

It's easy to become dejected, call yourself a failure, believe you'll never be published, want to give up. But if you're a writer, you can't. You just can't.

Writer, do not give up the dream. Do not buy into the belief that your only hope to be noticed is wishful thinking and a SEO guru. Don't focus on fame (although wouldn't that be nice?), but focus on the experience of getting further than you have before and having new experiences and learning. Create your own goals and stretch yourself to make them. Fortify yourself with what your writing means, that it's important, and that the world doesn't always honor what's important, focusing instead on what is loud and flashy.

Maybe the goal in letting your writing out into the world is to release it and see what happens. Does it change a person's mind? Does it get you on the stage at an open mic? Does it turn you into a blogger? Where does it lead you?