Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Sorry for the Debbie Downer

I got a big rejection last night -- CRAFT's first chapter contest. It would have provided lots of opportunity and support toward publication of a book. It was a long shot submitting, because I think they favor literary fiction and I write genre/literary crossover. 

It was worth a try. I'm trying to analyze whether the effort I spend writing and improving is worth the results. Whether the money I invest (in dev editing, in reader's fees for short fiction, for writers conferences) is yielding enough return on investment. Whether staying in writing because I've invested so much is just the sunk cost fallacy in action. 

I keep going back to writing, fancying that it will be my retirement career. But for it to be a career, I have to go someplace with it. I need to be published; otherwise it's just a hobby.

I really have to figure this out.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Snow. In October.

Snow. In October.

We had flurries last night here in northwest Missouri, just enough to notice, not enough to coat the ground. I wouldn't complain about that, but we are getting a freezing rain/snow of up to three inches precipitation tomorrow, just in time for Halloween. 

Between the unseasonably warm weather and the snow, we have had about two weeks of autumn. I demand an explanation.

There's an old adage that cautions against complaining about the weather, but snow. In October. I think this is an extenuating circumstance.

The snow will melt, leaving our lawns drab, sodden leaves and dun grasses. Because this is Missouri, home of the four seasons in one day, we may even see temperatures in the sixties -- or, who knows, the seventies -- before December. But the damage has been done. November will be a child of winter, not autumn, and we will be tired of snow before the year is out. 

Halloween is Thursday, right smack in the middle of the snow. Maybe I should go as a snowman.

Monday, October 28, 2019

Feeling the need for inspiration.

I'm wrestling with the whole writing thing again, which I understand is part of writing.

In my mind, the struggle manifests itself as a lack of inspiration, a general blah. I've written five novels (and need to edit two but have lost my dev editor), which is a big accomplishment. 

I think what bothers me most about not getting published -- when I accomplish something (a novel), I want a stretch goal, and getting it published is a stretch goal. Otherwise, once one has written one (or five) novels, what else is there?  I'd like to be published so that I feel that the goal isn't totally unattainable.

Lately I've written some short fiction, which gives me something to enter on Submittable for a feeling of accomplishment, and hopefully publication. I have nine items in review, another nine waiting (I think I've said this before). I still wish I felt motivated toward editing/writing the longer stuff.

 Oh, yes, my flash fiction, Becky Home-ecky, now can be found in the A3 Review Volume 11, found in finer bookstores somewhere in the UK. 

I just hope I get out of this slump soon.

Sunday, October 27, 2019

On Second-Guessing My Ability

This picture has nothing to do with today's topic.


I second-guess my writing talent all the time. I live with a constant critic who has no trouble getting into my head (as it is already in my head) to tell me that my writing isn't enough -- not interesting enough, not good enough, not publishable enough. The voice insists that I am writing the same stuff I wrote back in sixth grade.

Despite this, I'm not adverse to critiques. In fact, I relish getting better. But I'm still afraid I'm not good enough.

I hear this is not uncommon to writers, that most writers feel a constant sense of doubt, and that we wouldn't want to meet one who doesn't. But I need to shake this sense of self-censure (and self-censorship) for my long-overdue re-editing of Gaia's Hands. I have to believe in the book to make it better.  

So, how to believe? Cognitive journaling might help -- counteract all the mind-reading ("the critics hate it") and fortune-telling ("I'll never get published") and name-calling ("I'm so talentless!") and awfulizing ("my stuff sucks"). 

I joke about a magic spell, because I feel like my writing career is cursed. Of all the things I pooh-pooh in my life, curses are not one of them. I half-way believe in curses, even as I suspect they're an externalization of one's failure scripts. I'm looking at how to break the curse.

I suspect, though, I will have to live with it and create despite it. And someday, when/if I get published, I will celebrate all the harder.


Saturday, October 26, 2019

Another Homecoming and the Words that Come With It

The leaves have finally turned, orange and red and brown, dazzling the campus for Homecoming. I remain convinced that Homecoming is the remnant of a pagan ritual that captures parts of the harvest festivals and part of the sacrificial king (in the guise of a football game.) This would make pumpkin spice latte a sacrament, and I'm not sure I want to go that far.

It's been a long time since I've thought this way, of the seasons of the year yielding a mythology we live by. I had no reason not to think this way, given that both Quakers and Episcopalians can skew romantic about the seasons, and rare individuals of each even call themselves pagan. In fact, the liturgical Christian traditions follow a liturgy of seasons, and mystical Christian traditions offer a glimpse of the movement of the year as well.

When I was younger, I was what I called a kitchen witch, making my own rituals in solitude, following the seasons of the year. This faded with my years as a professor, even though my religious life didn't give me the hands-on relationship with life that I wanted. (Correction: Membership in the Religious Society of Friends did, but I've been 90 miles from Meeting for 21 years. The Episcopal Church put me too far from the feeling of sacredness.)

We need our rituals, whether dressed Wiccan or pagan or Christian (or one of the many other religions we profess). Those who have stripped ourselves of rituals because they're "pagan" lose our moorings to the seasons and to the earth. Those without rituals that speak to them frantically try to rip rituals from others by brandishing the word "Satanic", or create a mockery of ritual that worships hatred, bullying, and totalitarianism (MAGA rallies, I'm looking at you.)

I think about what Autumn says to me -- golden and bittersweet, rejoicing at the leaves and wrapping up against the chill. Saying goodbye (Les's death still resonates) and hugging the last of harvest to my arms. Snuggling with cats -- always snuggling with cats. 

Hoping it makes for good poetry now that I vow not letting work become everything.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Elegy (For Les)


Cells expire,
Molecules cleave,
Life departs.
Your atoms scatter,
We breathe them in,
We breathe your love in,
We breathe your magic in,
Your last communion.

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Loving and Nurturing my Story

I'm struggling to get back into writing. No, I'm writing poetry and short/flash fiction pretty well. I'm having trouble getting back into editing Gaia's Hands.

Gaia's Hands is my problem child, as I have said before. What do you do with a problem child?

My friend Les, who we memorialized last weekend, would say we love and nurture our problem children.

So, how do I love and nurture the story? I need to go back to the characters, because without them the story would not exist. I probably need to converse with them again, to get back into the game. 

The editing will be my project for NaNo, so I have time to get back into it. 

Time to nurture my problem child.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Back from my journey

I'm back to Maryville, and back to my routine, changed. 

The things I forgot while living out here, far away from home: 

  • There are people who love me unconditionally, who don't seem to care that I have and have always had bipolar disorder. 
  • I know how to hug and I, as a matter of fact, love hugs
  • Time passes, but what matters endures.
I don't have too many words yet, because I am very tired still from the journey. 

I love you all.

Monday, October 21, 2019

Eulogy

Mother Magpie leads me
past sere cornfields and buried bones
to the place where people say their goodbyes. 
There we eulogize the man
whose fireplace we huddled by,
who shone light in our dark corners,
and we leave that place with light in our pockets
to bring to others.

Sunday, October 20, 2019

On returning home

No matter how far I've strayed, I feel at home when I come back to Champaign-Urbana. It's not the landscape, which has changed so much since I've gone with all the new, taller downtown buildings, and it's not the old hangouts, which aren't what they used to be. It's the people I used to know, and how we still talk as if we just talked yesterday.

Jodi and I talked yesterday as to how convoluted our lives were and how intertwined the different groups who knew Les really were. I know of people Jody didn't know who knew Les -- I'm not expecting them to come to the wake or memorial, because they've grown away. 

How to articulate this feeling? It's like being home.

Home is a strange concept. My family doesn't feel like home since my mother died, perhaps because my mother died in the Christmas season. I feel home at Starved Rick Lodge, however, because it seems welcoming. 

I'm glad to be here, even if it's for a sad reason.

Saturday, October 19, 2019

Surprises on the road to the memorial service

On the road to Champaign-Urbana to my mentorLes's memorial service. Richard asked me if there were any surprises on the guest list (of course I don't know the guest list). 

There are always surprises on Les's guest list. Les knew a lot of people, so there will be more people I don't know than those I do. But Richard wanted to know about surprises.

I don't expect to see my ex-husband. I expect to see at least one ex-crush, but as it's been years (I won't say how many), it's not going to cause any turmoil. There's a possibility I might see an ex-boyfriend, and that would be a surprise, of course.

I haven't lived in Champaign-Urbana for, I think, 25 years. I was just as -- flamboyant? That's not the word -- Les said I had a large aura. That's as good as any explanation. I was more emotional then, having not been diagnosed as rapid cycling bipolar then. I felt more insecure, because I hadn't learned that admitting one's insecurities made them a lot more manageable. I became obsessed with difficult, ambivalent men (the ex-boyfriends listed above). 

I knew a lot of people back then, and some of the people who found their way to Les's cluttered living room were because of me. So there might be surprises.

Friday, October 18, 2019

About exorcism

I think my writing career needs an exorcism.

I'm mostly joking.

But something seems to have infested it, giving me rejection after rejection and making me feel like I'm never going to make it.

When I read the above paragraph, I get a little disgusted with myself, because I don't really believe a demon could prevent good things from happening in my career. It sounds like an externalization of something that could very well be a matter of me not writing well. 

I doubt my career needs an exorcism, but maybe my attitude does. I'm convinced I'm not a good enough writer to be published. Every time I get a rejection, I think "Yeah, I would have rejected that too." And then I feel down.

I'm told that negative attitudes affect reality. I don't know if I believe that, because it sounds uncomfortably like blaming the victim -- "Oh, you lost your job? It must be because you were thinking negative thoughts." There's also too many charlatans (I'm looking at you, Oprah) that have put forth the belief that you can attract love, success and riches from just thinking positive. 

Yet I wonder if my negativity about my writing affects something -- maybe the writing of my cover letters, maybe even how my work resounds in the universe. I don't know.

How does one exorcise an attitude?


Thursday, October 17, 2019

Eulogy for a Good Man

I guess it's okay to writer about this now -- the obituary is now up; it has been posted on social media. 

My friend and mentor, Les Savage, died at 92 last Saturday. 

Les looked like a garden gnome -- short, with wild white hair, chubby cheeks, and a beard. He had twinkling blue eyes, and yes, at least one person I know called him Santa Claus. Like Santa Claus, he gave the most wonderful hugs.


He'd led a fuller life than most; his reminiscences were peppered with phrases like "when I had my pilot's licence", "when I was in the navy," and "when I worked in a lab in Glasgow".  I didn't learn until his obituary that he also could have included "when I consulted for the Apollo missions." He was a combustion expert with a PhD in mechanical engineering who led a side business blowing up coal mines (in a controlled manner) to get rid of mine gases. He did carpentry in his basement and had wired up a house-wide stereo system long before Bluetooth made that easy. He appreciated good coffee, good wine, and good whiskey and taught me a little about each.

He also friended a motley crew of folks who needed a father figure and some emotional support. I was one of those folks, having a contentious relationship with my mother, undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and an unlucky love life that absolutely obsessed me. The group I hung out with Les called themselves Saturday Night Group because of their tendency to meet on that night to occasionally cook dinner, watch Star Trek: Next Generation, and talk. Membership rippled in an organic manner -- new people showed up, some stayed, and we developed close bonds. I am still friends with many of those people, and I will see many of them at the wake.

He gave. This is what strikes me. He gave to his religious community as a communion bearer, he gave his support to the local LGBTQIA community, he gave to his "kidlings" as he called us. He did not judge us -- we who were gay or pagan or atheist or struggling with mental illness or nonwhite or multiracial.  If ever there was a good example of a Christian man, it was my friend Les.

I loved the man. I still do.

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Coffee coffee coffee

This is a not-enough-coffee day.

I'm on my second cup of vacuum pot coffee. A vacuum pot is not a common way of making coffee in the US anymore, although in 1910-1970's (probably) they were a known way of making good coffee, better than the automatic drip which supplanted them in US kitchens. 

We have an electric vacuum pot because we're a little lazy about trying to get the temperatures right, and right now we have fresh beans from the Board Game Cafe downtown. (Sometimes Richard roasts beans, and then we have really fresh coffee.)

We also have a Nespresso Vertuo for in-between coffee pots -- for example, later in the afternoon. We prefer this to the ubiquitous Keurig brewer, which is impossible to clean properly and eventually yields a bitter coffee.

Sometimes we use a press pot, for good stout coffee, or a Chemex, for well-filtered coffee. Or a moka pot, for the closest you can get to real espresso without a machine.

We drink a lot of coffee here -- I may drink over the daily limit of coffee. But if I quit drinking it, I would get the worst caffeine withdrawal -- pounding headache and grogginess.

Besides, I like the taste. I like the coffeehouse culture and the fancy pot. I like espresso with a twist of lemon (or better, with a dash of sambuca). I like the coffee jokes. 

Coffee, good or no, is a part of my life.

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Adrift

I'm feeling adrift lately. 

My developmental editor is taking a break from editing, so I have to find a new one or wait (I'm tempted to wait, because I like her). 

My old mentor/surrogate family from my grad school years has died, and my brain circles around about who I was back then (bipolar but not medicated -- think "getting obsessed about guys and crying a lot"). Yet, it was the richest part of my life, and I wonder how to find that again.

Days like this I feel detached from my writing. Should I continue to write? (Probably). Do I need to find a new dev editor? (Yes). What should I do about getting published? (Wait to see if I'm accepted by Pitch Wars before I take on another possibility). 

I don't sound so adrift, but my mind keeps wandering to reanalyze the past in terms of who I was and who I've become.


Monday, October 14, 2019

Updates on Gaia

The latest on Gaia's Hands stuff -- I changed the timeline as I said I would, and I'm adding some of the relationship stuff in that I massacred in a previous edit. This time, though, I'm writing it in terms of what I understand their budding relationship to be -- at times frustrating and confusing but usually a matter of joy. 

I also did move Jeanne's age back to 45. I don't know why that five years makes a lot of difference, but it does. At age 45, I honestly believed I could keep up with a twenty-year-old. (In actuality, I suspect they couldn't keep up with me. Take that how you will.)  Fifty, though? That's a milestone birthday, and one with superstitious portent of old age.

I'm still far from finished, though. And I'm not sure the novel will clear 60k. (Can I publish an omnibus edition? Or be an outlier with fewer pages and get published? I just don't know.)

Sunday, October 13, 2019

This story is killing me.

I'm doing a major editorial change on Gaia's Hands again. This story is the bane of my existence and I should just burn it, but I'm compelled to make something of it. 

The time table is too compressed, it seems. There's not enough time to develop Jeanne and Josh with the current setup, because it only runs from March to May 31.  

Too little time, I think.

So I'm moving the start date back to October (which is important, because Josh needs to be riding his bike) and keeping the ending at Memorial Day (because there's a big planting of a food forest to be done, and a horticulturalist wouldn't plant much later than that.)

I will have to add in stuff.

I still wonder if I can make this story into something.

Saturday, October 12, 2019

Struggling with Jeanne and Josh

Weiting Jeanne and Josh negotiating a relationship in Gaia's Hands is harder than I thought. I'm getting hung up on the age difference, although it intrigued me years ago when I was in the middle of a hypomanic episode.

May-December marriages happen all the time when the man is older than the woman. Although a minority thinks it's unnatural, society in general accepts it. If the woman is younger, has less education, is just getting settled in life, we have some questions but leave well-enough alone if they look happily married.

Older women/younger men pairings, especially when there's that much distance between the two (30 years) tend to be dismissed as "gross". Sociobiologists say this is only natural because men look for older women because of their fertility and women look for protectors -- just look at chimps with their harems. The problem is that the primate closest to us, bonobos (miniature chimps) tend to have sex with pretty much everyone and don't make a big deal of age. Sociobiology has its limits, which is that most practitioners are men and select for what they (as men) want to see that establishes the status quo.

And what if we're evolving from that exchange of babies for protection? In the US, most women work in the marketplace. Childbearing is held off to later ages, and many choose not to have children. Jeanne is 50 years old and has a steady job and income -- Why would he need to be a breadwinner immediately? Why couldn't she help him through grad school?

But oh my God, what about sex? How could he possibly find her saggy body sexy? Art studios have enlisted the bodies of saggy women for ages, because they're more interesting to draw. And Josh finds her fascinating because he's had visions of her in a garden that looks like the Garden of Eden. And Josh, with his slender build and shorter stature, hardly looks like Hollywood material himself.

I have to find the realism and paint them as outsiders at the same time, and this is -- well, difficult. 

Wish me luck.

Friday, October 11, 2019

Cooling down

Hello cold snap.

It's 36 degrees out and I'm wearing my Chicago Bubs sweater (see below):


which commemorates my favorite Internet-famous cat, Lil Bub

I want to stay in all day basking by my fake woodstove and writing. But it's a school day, and I have to teach. 

Oh well.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Rebel Rebel

I've decided to be a rebel for NaNoWriMo.

What that means is that the participant does anything but write a novel in those 30 days*. I have two books I'm editing, the problem child Gaia's Hands (which may be a novella by the time I'm done with it) and Whose Hearts are Mountains when I get it back from my dev editor. 

It feels odd not writing a new novel, but it's not the best use of my time. I need to get this backlog dealt with and ready for possibilities. When these are done, I will have five completed novels (or four and a novella): Whose Hearts are Mountains, Apocalypse, Voyageurs, Prodigies, Gaia's Hands. (There's one more novel, Reclaiming the Balance, but I despair over that particular one, and there's Gods' Seeds, the one I'm not finishing for NaNo.

It's time for me to edit. It's time for me to write shorter items and try to get those published (I have one short story and one flash item published so far, Flourish and Becky Home-Ecky.) It's time for me to try something else for NaNo.

*******
* The way one counts progress when editing in NaNo is 1 hour = 1000 words. Which is about right, except when I get really stuck.

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Writing from the Dark Side, Part 2

Yesterday, I interrogated the scenario my dark side put forth (which involved moonlight and walking in on someone disrobing) and found out it was not about me at all, but was inside the psyche of Jeanne Beaumont, the heroine of Gaia's Hands.  Jeanne felt disturbed by the dream because -- oh, hell, let me just show you the passage: 


A silver beam from the moonrise sliced through the darkness of her room. In shadows bled of color, Josh stood, the light falling across his face. He tugged his t-shirt off, the beam illuminating a slender chest and burying itself in his dark hair.
“Why are you here?” Jeanne asked, feeling her voice shake.
He met her gaze, his youthful face serious. “For you.”
Jeanne muttered. “I don’t need you,” and turned toward the door to flee.
“You misunderstand.” A smile flitted across his face; the light showing a dimple incongruous to the moment. “It’s my need.”
“No,” Jeanne shook her head, grasping for the door frame to steady herself. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m old enough to be your mother. If I’d started late. This is impossible.”
“If it’s happening, it’s not impossible.” Josh held a hand out --
Jeanne bolted upright from her bed, squinting at her clock’s luminous numbers in the dark. 3:00 AM, the perfect time to have a haunting dream. Josh? She took a panicked breath. And her?
If it’s happening, it’s not impossible, she recalled from the dream.
If it’s happening …
What the hell was happening to her that she began to dream about Josh, that quirky young man she had become friends with?
She knew. He had become more than that quirky young man to her.
He had become compelling to her, and she tried to deny it. “I don’t need you,” she had told him.
But perhaps she did, and he would reject her instead.
********

My subconscious informed me that, in editing Gaia's hands, I had lost an important aspect of it, the tension (in part sexual, in part fear of rejection) between Jeanne and Josh. 

Let's see Josh's point of view:

Josh wanted. It seemed a perpetual state for him, so much so that he wondered whether he wanted to be Jeanne’s friend or to bed her. Or both. Or everything. He leaned close to his notepad and wrote automatically, ignoring the lock of hair that habitually fell out of place.

I want to be reckless; he wrote. I want to kiss her with everybody watching in the middle of the cafe. I want to take her clothes off in a room where there are thoughts of only us. I want to know her twenty-five years down the road, even though she’ll be seventy-five to my 47 years.
I should care about the age difference, but it doesn’t bother me. It probably bothers her. I would be her child’s age, if she’d chosen to have children. She’s never married. Maybe she didn’t want to get married.
In my most intimate fantasies, she waits for me. In reality, she holds me at arm’s length, and I don’t know if it’s for now or forever.
I want a guarantee where there are no guarantees.
The vision came to him, the garden in its fullness, and Jeanne standing within, naked. All bountiful curves and sags like an ancient goddess. Does one dare to approach a goddess? He walked toward Jeanne in the garden, slowly and deliberately, each footstep pounding in his ears. He reached out –
The vision drifted out of his grasp.


*****
Why does this come from my dark side? It's a reflection of how I struggle with my age and face the invisibility that women "of a certain age" (I hate that phrase!) experience. The book is, in part, a biological fantasy about outliers -- Jeanne, despite her age, represents a fertility goddess with her preternaturally prolific gardens, and Josh, despite his youth, makes a convincing god of the hunt with the inevitability of his pursuit. That's in addition to the fantasy elements of Josh's visions and Jeanne's preternaturally prolific gardens.
I have to edit this book, bring back to it the tension between the two protagonists, add it to the other tensions and menaces. This is my job, to make these fantasies real and complex.

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Writing from the Dark Side

I stood face to face with my dark side last night. I felt a sense of panic, as I always do when facing that mirror, clutching my hair and chanting "this is not me".

My dark side deals in visions of obsessive seduction, sticky strands of need and betrayal in silent midnight rooms bled of color. It revels in its story: my inevitable fall, my contemplation of suicide. 

All of us have a dark side which stands counter to who we believe we are. If we deny it, if we romanticize it, we may fall to it because it demands that we pay attention to it. What we need to do is to accept our dark side because it's part of us. 

I accept my dark side, the sulky drama queen in the mirror, but I do not let it run my life. I have built a satisfying life in the golden light of autumn, with a humorous husband and five cats. 

Me, coffee, and cat. This is a good life.

Sometimes I write from my dark side -- half-elven children who want to kill their elven fathers, succubi with a pang of conscience, a young man who can kill by touch. I write these with my light side, though, framing these characters in dilemma, in conflict. 

Darkness must contrast with light to be appreciated. If the writing contains nothing but darkness, it ceases to be dark and is merely mechanical, a factory of death and gore. The light must be there to be taken away, so that we grieve for the individual trapped in their circumstances. 

I look at my dark reflection, the person I most fear, because she has the capacity to ruin my life. I nod, knowing that if I try to annihilate her, I become her. She leans over my shoulder as I write, helping me to add her darkness to my bright words.




Monday, October 7, 2019

Getting Practical about Dreams

Dreams don't work the way I want them to.

For the last couple nights, I've been dreaming that I got picked up by a major publisher, and I felt light and strong and perhaps even validated.

Unfortunately, I know why the dreams occurred, and it wasn't because of precognition. I'd been working all weekend in moulage, and that's a very visible thing to be working on, and I got a lot of compliments on it. That translated in my dreams to getting recognition in my other life. 

Dreams pick up little fragments of real life and sort them out in a peculiar way. I've read that we don't dream of anything we haven't encountered in real life. From my experiences, I don't believe that unless I've been in a large underground city whose corridors walled in white glossy formica, accessible by a basement door in an old hunting lodge with a kitchen with avocado appliances. 

I interpret my dreams, usually by a Gestalt method, telling the story from the viewpoint of each significant object (human or non) in the dream. What happened in the interpretation of the dream of the hunting lodge became the first draft of my first novel, the one I struggle to re-edit, Gaia's Hands.

The dream of getting published is easier to interpret: I want to get published. I figure it will be as satisfying as moulaging. I can't wait to get started.

Sunday, October 6, 2019

Another year of Missouri Hope in the Books

Another successful three days of moulage at Missouri Hope.

I haven't written because I was really busy! I had a crew of three volunteers and my husband, and we managed to moulage about 150 people to go out into the field to play victims of a major tornado. 

Here's a couple examples:



I didn't get a lot of pictures because I was too busy moulaging.

As you can imagine, we were pretty busy with all of those people to moulage, but I can credit my team with making it a pretty painless experience. Usually we're several people behind by the time it's time to place them into the scenario, but we consistently finished on time. 

It's great closing on another successful year! And I'm SO tired!



Thursday, October 3, 2019

Missouri Hope has come.

Missouri Hope has come upon us, and I'm not sure I'm ready for it.

For those of you new to the blog, Missouri Hope is an annual disaster simulation held at a park near here. Participants range from emergency and disaster management students to area police and emergency personnel. Missouri Hope is huge for a disaster management exercise.




There will be, over Friday through Sunday, approximately 240 volunteers, who will serve as our "victims" for the exercise. And I, with a small team of moulagers, will turn these people into victims using makeup. 

That's a lot of people.

Today's the day I do last-minute shopping (for face wipes and eyeliner pens), do a little inventory, and try to prepare myself for the frantic rush of doing all this makeup. 

Wish me luck.

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Making a plan

I've been playing with a social media plan to get more readers. Apparently, writers need to do more than write to be successful, unless they get picked up for a $3.4 million book deal with TOR like John Scalzi and get major name recognition.


General goals from my plan:

  • To reach more readers
  • To have a vibrant community to talk with
  • To share my works with people 
So far, my presence on social media is as follows:
  • I have 20 regular readers here on Blogger
  • I have not gotten a comment on Blogger (other than fraudulent sales pitches) for over a year
  • I have less than 20 followers on Twitter
  • I get 2-3 likes a day on Twitter
  • I have 79 followers on Facebook
Time to set outcomes:

  • To get 30 regular readers on Blogger
  • To get 3 comments a week
  • To get 30 followers on Twitter
  • To get 10 likes a day on Twitter
  • I have 100 followers on Facebook
Why are these so small? Because SMART goals are:
  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Action Oriented
  • Realistic
  • Time Bound
But note these aren't really the goals above, but results. The part I'm currently struggling with is HOW to increase readership and interaction.

This is a work in progress.

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

What am I going to do for NaNo?


Someone visited me from Nepal yesterday. Hello!

***********

NaNoWrimo starts a month from now (November first). In Nano, one must write a 50,000 page novel, or realistically, the first part of a novel, as novels generally run twice that length. The organization prefers it's a new novel instead of adding to a novel you have because it's easier to write from scratch.

I was all ready to submit Gods' Seeds as the novel I was going to write, but then I opened it up to find out that I'd already written 21k of it. This was the novel I started for NaNo and quit when Trump got elected President. It wouldn't be a cheat to work on Gods' Seeds as long as I didn't count those 21k words, but it would be harder to get back into.

I could start a new novel. Not sure what that would be yet. 

Or I could be a rebel, which would be writing anything but a novel. This way I might be able to edit/develop Gaia's Hands, which I'm editing and at the same time wondering what I can add back. Or I could write more short stories that fit in the Archetype universe, or ...

I don't know what to do. I'm committed to write, because I'm hosting a NaNo write-in space at the Game Cafe. If you have any ideas, let me know!