Category: Ramblings

The Superb September Submission Scramble!

Be honest, you really opened this one for the alliteration, didn’t you?

Yes, friends, believe it or not, we have made it to September. The slow drudge of March 2020 has finally made it to September of 2021. I regret to say that my writing has had to take a back seat to a few things: a new job, finding a new apartment, and working on my mental and physical health. It’s been a busy time these past few months and my writing has suffered because of that. Not that I haven’t been writing or editing–I’ve been doing that almost daily since we were first told to stay home to help other people. But the work you never share never sees the light of day. Yes, I’m talking about submitting.

Whether your submitting a short story, flash fiction, or a novel, the process of submitting your work is daunting. It’s one thing to post my short little fiction pieces here so that people can get a taste of my writing, but presenting my work to an agent or editor with the sole purpose of them deciding if the piece’s worth? It’s terrifying! That being said, the easiest way to win at poker is to hold as many cards as you can. I know that’s against the rules, but that’s the thought behind the September Submission Scramble.

Every day this month, I will submit one thing to an agent, magazine or contest. I have a long backlog of things that have been rejected and edited, but I so rarely send them out for round two. Why? Fear, maybe. But that’s the point of the Scramble: submit with reckless abandon. If you get a rejection, I tell myself, you’re no worse off than if you don’t submit. If someone bites, you put your effort into it. So, I’m in the act of submitting as much as I can over the next month. Rejections, Acceptance, or Non-Responses: when there’s only three options? It doesn’t feel so bad. Try, Fail, Try Again, and Fail Better.

If you write, how are your submissions going? We’re entering magazine season again, so if anyone wants to join on, let me know! Part of the Scramble is to encourage each other to try.

The Editing Game

Earlier this month, I decided I wanted to take another crack at submitting my novel to agents and publishers, which means I’m back at editing again! With that in mind, I decided I wanted to share a few of my usual editing tricks for anyone who is working on Self-Editing their current projects!

  1. Read to an Audience:
    This is probably my favorite recent editing trick I’ve had the chance to use. Reading out loud makes sure you read and hear every word in a sentence just a first time reader will interpret it. It can also be a good time to get some positive reinforcement. We aren’t all lucky enough to have a captivated audience on hand, so feel free to use whatever is available. Do you have a pet? They’ll love the attention. A plant? Plants do grow better when you talk to them. Rubber Duck? Well, at least it won’t tell you that you’re a hack! (Though it might say you’re a quack.) Currently, I’m using my owl egg-timer that doubles as my Writing-Spring timer (his name is Ap-owl-o…I’m not taking notes).
  2. Highlight the Lines You Like, Not Just the Errors:
    It’s good to have some positive notes when going through your manuscript. Whenever I’m in a workshop, I’ll point out the lines of dialogue or prose that I really like so the notes I give aren’t just critiques. The same has since been applied to my own editing to give Future-Nick something to look forward to. It also helps remind me that there is a reason I love the story so much.
  3. Editing Somewhere Other Than Where You Write:
    A change in scenery can often be great for writing, but it’s also really good for editing. I write at the same spot every day, but editing requires a different mindset in order to do it effectively. I will edit on the couch, so that I can have a different set of eyes while editing. It’s almost like going to a different office to work out a problem rather than looking at the same four walls. Granted, I have a view of my editing space from my writing space, but it’s different enough that I’ll be able to put myself in a better mindset.
  4. Give Yourself A Deadline:
    Like any sort of “Working From Home” experience, it can be easy to give yourself abstract deadlines and set things aside for too long. Procrastination, after all, is a form of perfectionism and that’s what writing is all about. Instead, I make sure a date to have my editing done by so that I can be ready when it comes. More often than not, giving myself a deadline encourages me to finish a project early rather than stretch it out until the last minute. It’s easier to finish things if you plan things in advance.

What are some of your favorite self-editing tricks and tips?

Reset

Every so often, I fall into a bit of a funk. Sometimes, it’s depression or anxiety, but sometimes it’s more about things that are happening in my life that are beyond my control. My anxious brain hates losing control, so it often decides to lock up rather than face things I can control. I’ve gotten better at seeing these funks in advance, but they still sneak up on me every so often. When I get stuck, it can be hard to get out. So, for the sake of anyone who gets stuck, here are a few things I do to reset my brain in an attempt to get some control back. (Obviously, I encourage therapy for anyone who thinks they need it and know that these are only quick fixes that help get through the tougher spots)

  1. Go for a Hike:
    This one is probably my favorite and usually my default. There’s nothing like going deep into the woods and shedding the worries of the human world into the boughs of the tall trees. It gets harder when you need to think about the weather, but getting out of the same routine/place can be really invigorating to me.
  2. Bake:
    This one is probably more people’s cup of tea for the rewards built into it! There’s something about the methodicalness of baking that I find very relaxing. You find a recipe, collect the ingredients, mix them together as instructed, and pop them in the oven. Plus, a nice, warm baked good can be good for the soul.
  3. Photography:
    Taking pictures is another one of my passions. There’s something about focusing through the lens of a camera (pun intended, of course) and blocking out the rest of the world. Whether it’s something indoors or nature photography, I find that shifting my creative gears with no expectations can be really good for my brain.
  4. Reading:
    This one can really depend on the funk or the book, to be honest, but it can work really well in the right circumstances. There’s a comfort in a story, particularly one that you know really well. The words are welcoming and kinder. When everything outside is out of control, knowing that things will work out in the right book is a small glimmer of hope that the outside will work out as well.
  5. Meditate to Music:
    This is better when I’m wrestling anxiety because it gives me a chance to work exactly what I’m feeling and how. It’s hard to embrace the feelings without judging them, but taking time to really sit with some music to help focus my thoughts can give me a chance to really zero in on what’s bothering me and what I can do to fix it.

If you find yourself in a funk, what do you like to do? Do you turn to your passions and push through or do you try to enter the things you love without bringing negative emotions into it?

Lunch Time Novelist

Let’s be honest. Having a writing success land into your lap is unlikely. It takes effort, luck, and time, which are resources few people have in spades when it comes to starting their writing careers. So, the solution is to work while writing and hope for the big break to come along. I’ve often called myself a “lunch break novelist”, taking time on paid breaks to sneak in a little bit of creative time to up my word count (even if it’s a few frantically written ideas on a scrap paper that I’ll have to decode later). With all of the jobs I’ve worked, I’ve decided to go through them all and list the pros and cons of each of the jobs I’ve worked and determine which is the best for burning the Creative Oil.

  1. Library Assistant – Where better to work on writing than in a building surrounded by books! The quiet atmosphere, the literary osmosis from having so many books pass through your hands and a first person perspective on what people are checking in and out on a regular basis! Learn from the best and find new books to read regularly.
    Pros: Quiet space, lots of inspiration, people to talk books with, and access to just about research material you could need! And, unlike a bookstore, there’s very rarely an exchange of currency for people to get upset over.
    Cons: Breaks are often short, hours can be erratic, and weekends are often spent in the stacks. The timing isn’t ideal, but if you can start and stop the writing process easily, it’s not a bad fit. Keep a notebook on your person for ideas and new authors to read!
  2. Office Work/Data Entry – The truly romantic story of an artist wading their way through the corporate swamps is the classic tale for every new writer. The hours are pretty regular and you can plan your time accordingly. Most offices have a break room as well, which can give you a small space to work over the course of a lunch break.
    Pros: Regular Schedule that’s easy to plan around. Nights and weekends can be committed to creative endeavors. If you can find an isolated spot with your laptop, you can get a good chunk of writing done without distractions like internet or minor household chores.
    Cons: Soul sucking work that can be creatively stifling. Mindlessly pushing numbers around or doing basic procedural work can make the creative part of your brain lethargic and tired. Make sure it’s an office where you can leave the work at work and preserve the writing time for writing. Nothing worse than saying “Someday” over and over again until someday becomes yesterday.
  3. Dishwasher/Restaurant Worker – I’ve worked in quite a few restaurants and it’s always come with it’s fair share of characters! Customers and coworkers alike can make for some interesting character fodder.
    Pros: Easily separate work and creative time, lots of time to think about stories and get inspired, lots of social interaction for dialogue study.
    Cons: No real ‘Break Room’ (usually an over turned bucket in the back), hard to stop work to scribble down ideas, mostly working nights/weekends can be overwhelming very quickly when the dinner rush hits, physically exhausting.

So, while I don’t think there’s a “Best Job” for writers, I think that each job has its pros and cons. Personally, I can’t see myself working anywhere other than a library and I think that it’s the best fit. There might be some writers who prefer having the consistent schedule of a desk job or the fast-paced environment of a restaurant. Any number of jobs have factors that can make them good or bad, but since no two writers are the same, there is no perfect job for all writers.

If you’re a writer, what parts of your job encourage or encumber your creative process?

Marking the Way

I love a good map. I like looking at older maps or fantasy maps, working to understand the old roads, territories, and what was considered important to the cartographers of the day. How a place is illustrated and navigated can be as telling as any other artifact. When forests, roads, and cities can be so easily simplified, these places’ stories beg to be told. How did this town come to be? Why did they avoid this forest? What made this road necessary?

I know authors who will start their stories with a map. Sometimes it’s a map of a town or city, sometimes the entire world. Maps of real and fantastic places at the beginning of a book always make me a little bit giddy because that’s the first indicator that the writer has put time into their worldbuilding, which is a sign of a good story. Having a good map can really immerse your readers into a fantasy world as an artifact they can refer to.

I love starting with a map. I feel like just knowing the geography can help create the story. Are the characters sea-side folk, used to a cool breeze over sandy beaches? Are they from the far northern mountains, dressed in thick clothing to keep the chill and the cold away? Or are they from the far inland desert, forged in scorching sands and treating water as more precious than their gold? Here are a few of my thoughts on some of my favorite fantasy maps.

  1. Narnia – The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis: From the humble Lamp Post to Cair Paravail, Narnia is rife with adventure. The major landmarks that will become familiar are easy to see and the locations are easy to find. Reading these a child, one can hop quickly from place to place, even recognizing the familiarity after thousands of years (or 20 if you pick up the books again after a very long time).

2. The Stillness – The Broken Earth Series, N.K. Jemisin: The first thing that really struck me about this map was the marking of plates. Knowing what little I did stepping in, it makes perfect sense that the maps of this world would care about the location of tectonic plates. It’s a simple thing, but it tells so much about the story. There are a few important cities marked, but most of the story takes place on the road, so knowing the major areas take precedence (and even then, more for understanding where people are from rather than where they are). As we learn where the characters are in relation to one another, the scale of the map really makes the journey that much more incredible.

3. Earthsea, The Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin: Even in a land predominantly made of water, maps are crucial aspects of storytelling. When hopping from island to island, knowing the relative location can tell a reader so much about the area, the alliances, and distances between areas. Especially when you consider that clashing wind and water currents make for storms, all these islands can make for death traps when they constantly break against the islands.

4. Middle Earth, Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien: I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say that this probably inspired my love of maps. Like Narnia, it’s easy to track the journey of our heroic hobbits. Being able to see not only the kingdoms, but towns and cities within the kingdoms makes the battles easier to track. It’s east to feel the fear as the forces of Mordor press further into Gondor and threaten the Shire. And with so many adventures going on, it helps to see where all our heroes are throughout the series.

Maps are a powerful tool for enriching the story for readers. Maps add an element of reality that can bring the story to life and–quite literally–put you alongside the heroes in the tale. Knowing how close they are to danger can make the risk that much greater and seeing how close they are to their goals really makes the anticipation for success (and fear of failure) that much greater.

What’s your favorite fantasy map?

Creative Combat

Every so often, when the stars align and timezones aren’t an encumbrance, I like to do creative things with other creative people. Whether it’s a battle for word count, a goal setting challenge or just doing something creative with someone to keep you accountable, I have a few friends I know I can count on for Creative Combat! If you want to feel motivated, here’s how you can do your own!

Everyone has their own project and they don’t always line up. Everyone has a project they’re working on: writing, editing, drawing, knitting, whatever! Everyone sets a goal, either as a time goal or something more specific like word count or pages edited. One friend and I like to add stakes to our little combat sessions (nothing serious beyond having to make our loss public on Facebook or Twitter). Then, the work begins. It’s best to set a timeframe, if only to check in with each other at a certain point.

I’m not a normally competitive person. I’m usually a fan of collaboration which makes writing an interesting choice, due to its solitary nature. However, having motivation with another person–even without stakes–is such a huge factor in my productivity sometimes. It can be hard when you’re working alone, so having someone else to work with is important. Accountability can be so hard (it’s half the reason I started working on this blog), but having someone you promised to work with can make that work more valuable. Even if it just means you have someone to consistently work with and share your struggles with, it beats sitting alone at the computer trying to will the words onto the screen.

Just Finish!

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before, but I am a firm believer in finishing projects. Recently, I’ve been struggling to finish a project I started working on earlier this year. There’ve been a few natural hiccups (including getting all four wisdom teeth out), but I feel like my writing has been something I’ve had to wrestle every morning to get it going. I don’t think it’s burn out, but let’s be honest, I think everyone is a little burnt out more these days considering it’s been over a year since March 2020 started and it still feels like we haven’t gotten into April yet.

Still, I’ve been doing my best to write something every day. I’ve been tempted to put it away and start something, but I really enjoy the characters I’m working with and want to give them justice. The easiest way to keep writing is to just finish a draft and remember that you’re going to fix the parts you don’t like later. I feel like my first draft is really an opportunity to explore the characters in a situation and figure out what they should do or want to do. My current problem is pacing, so I have plans to work with that frame of mind and try to fix it all later. If I only ever wrote when I knew I what I was doing? I doubt I’d ever truly get the the work done.

There’s a saying about “You can’t polish crap”. The problem with that is that it’s easier to polish crap than it is to polish nothing.

What do you think? Agree or Disagree? If a project isn’t working for you do you still try to finish it or do you find it better to shelve things and let them stew a little?

Plotting and Choices

A story’s core comes from the plot. Whether it’s a story about characters or a story about events, a true story begins with something happening. It can be as simple as a character has their wallet stolen or as complex as an attempted assassination of a young monarch. Even if the character doesn’t do anything beyond sitting at the kitchen table contemplating their lost wallet, it’s still a story instigated by something. If nothing happens in a story, there is no plot. So, where does plot come from?

For me, plot comes from conflict and breaking of usual patterns. It comes down to finding the one thing that can make the character’s day, week, or life worse and pulling at that thread. What they do from there becomes the plot. They could make allies or enemies, find a clue or get more lost, succeed or fail. The inciting incident is the plot, but the character’s choices are the story.

A good story has a “Try-Fail” cycle, where even if a character succeeds, they find their in a new circumstance. But the plot comes from the character trying, failing, trying again, and failing again until they succeed. Plot points are choices and their decisions and reactions create more plot points for them to choose between!

Recently, on my twitter, I started playing a Choose Your Own Adventure story that I wrote out. Combining the challenge of interesting choices and hyper-short format, I find that the most interesting thing is what people choose. Sometimes, it’s an undisputed agreement. Sometimes, people will lead one way or the other (requiring me to make a coin flip to decide where the story goes). It’s fun to think about how this is all spreading all the way that people naturally want to explore the space of a story.

What makes a good story for you? Does the character need to succeed after a certain number of tries or does the uncertainty make you want to keep reading? Is the hope of success enough to overpower the fear of failure?

New Years Words

Hello everyone!

First of all, I’m cautiously optimistic about this year. I spent a quiet night in so we can sneak up slowly on 2021 without scaring it off. As long as we don’t open any more mummy tombs, I think we got a good chance to enjoy this year! I normally like to take this time of the year to consider my goals as a writer and what I’m going to do to meet those goals.

First and foremost, I got the publishing itch again for sure! I learned a lot by self-publishing and hope to use that for all my future projects. It was a good experience and I definitely have that itch to send a book out into the world again. Whether that means another self-published book or something different, I’m still not sure, but I hope to write and create more as the year progresses. I got some stuff I’ve been working on, so I’m excited to keep working with it. I think this was the best possible time to try self-publishing, given the current situation of…everything. I have a ton of ideas and still want to keep shooting for traditional publishing, so I’m going to push for that as well.

I want to write and submit more short stories to magazines and things like that. I enjoy giving out little snippets of my writing for free here, but I’m hoping to grow my audience a bit more this year. As it stands, my current mailing list can be easily reached through my personal Facebook, so I’m planning on trying to increase my followers (or site traffic) a bit more. I have some things in the works on how to pull this off, but it’s going to be a constant goal through out 2021.

2020 was, in short, awful. That being said, I’m glad it’s in the rearview and I can start focusing more on the future. I’m in a better place than I was at the beginning of the year, so I hope to ride that momentum and encourage more creativity. My body has been so focused on survival for the past year that I want to get into a position where I can thrive. What are your 2021 goals?

Gifts for Writers

It’s the holiday season again and that means we’re all out looking for the best gifts for our loved ones, friends, and office Secret Santas. But you might find yourself having to buy a gift for the writer in your life. They have so many books and a perfectly good writing setup, but you want to get them something they could really use. So, here are a few suggestions for the writer in your life!

1) A Good Mug: I doubt there’s a writer alive who doesn’t run purely on tea or coffee at least 60% of the time. If you find a clever mug, they’ll think of you every time they use it! Find something from a show or book they love, find one with a good quote, or even put a picture of yourself…if your at that level of familiarity. A mug with your face on it isn’t usually the best choice for your coworker, unless you’re that friendly.

2) A Word Game: Scrabble, Bananagrams, Boggle, even word magnets can be fun ways to let the writer in your life engage their literary brain under the guise of a fun game! Trick them into the writing spirit in a fun way! Games are a great way to warm up the writer brain before sitting down for a writing sprint.

3) A Writing Class: There are a multitude of online courses about everything from crafting a story to fine tuning a novel! Offer to pay for a class for your writer. There are many online classes for all types of writing, so let them pick one out and offer to pay for it for them.

4) A Plant: Writing is a lonely game sometimes. Those of us who are luck can have the companionship of a cat or dog while we work. Those of us on slightly stricter budgets or in smaller living spaces don’t always have the luxury of animals as our companions. A good substitute? A plant! My plants usually hear my stories before anyone else and are a very receptive audience. You know your story is bad when the plant starts wilting while your reading.

5) Time: This one can be trickier. The biggest hurdle separating people from being writers is time! Between work, the kids, eating and just the day-to-day errands, it’s hard for some people to find or make the time for their art. Give your writer time! Have them pick a day and time of the week that’s their writing time and help them keep it! Take the kids out to the park during this time, do the errands that have been piling up, offer to cook dinner while they write.

Your writer will appreciate anything you get them that acknowledges their artistic pursuits. It shows that you care about their passions and want them to succeed! Support is a gift that many people overlook when doing their holiday shopping, so make sure your writer knows you believe in them with a great writing gift!

And, if none of these work out, what writer doesn’t want to add another fancy notebook to their hoard?

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