Category Archives: Making Progress as a Writer

And Then Life Happened

Goals Leigh Galbreath Motivation The Writing Life Work-Life Balance 1 Comment

So, I made, what I thought, was a fairly easy goal in January. Focus on improving on my weaknesses as a writer. It’s not like there aren’t a dozen different ways I could satisfy this goal: read a craft book, take a class, revise an existing work and give it to a friend for them to say, “Yeah, this is better.” I mean, honestly, this one even seems ripe for rationalizing how an action only tangentially related could be applied so I could say, “Yes. I made my goal.”

But I must be honest.

Books read: 0

Classes taken: Nada.

Friends who have read a revision to make me feel better: Niet.

My only defense in this, my great failure at such an easy task? You know that saying about how life happens when you’re making other plans?

This year has been a bad one helath-wise for me. I’ve suddenly become plagued with half a dozen, seemingly unrelated problems, the big one being that I’ve developed asthma due to allergies, which I’ve been plagued with most my life. Apparently, my allergies have shifted so that I’m now allergic to mold and cats. I own two cats and live in Houston (where it’s humid most the year and the mold count skyrockets every time it rains…and it rains a lot). Add to that a few other issues I won’t bore you with, and the result is that I don’t feel well most the time. And just as I thought one issue was figured out, something else went wrong.

Seriously, I’m too young for my body to be falling apart all of a sudden.

Suffice it to say, it’s hard to focus on writing when it feels like an elephant is sitting on my chest. Taking classes isn’t the easiest thing to do when all the money’s going to doctor’s visits and medicine.

We writers and our health – what’s up with that?

I’ve heard people talk about how we have to be careful with our health, because writing is a pretty sedentary line of work. It’s easy to lose track and end up gaining weight and not getting enough exercise, thus bringing on the host of health problems that come with it. Plus there are the writer-specific issues, like repetitive motion injuries and such.

What I don’t hear often, though is how it can stunt creativity, and in the end, sap the desire to be creative. Let’s face it, pain is exhausting, and creativity needs energy behind it. Psychologically, feeling bad all the time makes it very hard to feel good about much of anything—even something I love like writing.

But, things are looking up, as that medical issues get sorted, and I have kept writing, albeit slowly, sometimes painfully. At this point, anything is better than nothing, and I’m addicted to the written word, so I’m not going to be able to stop writing, even if it’s makes it harder to stay healthy, for whatever reason.

It’s the nice thing about writing—it can happily wait out those curve-balls life throws at us. Sure, I still didn’t meet my goals for the year, but I think I have a pretty good excuse. The thing that makes me feel not so bad though is that it’s not like I’ve set a hard deadline. Pretty much, the only real deadline is when I finally kick the bucket. There’s nothing that says I can’t just start again now, so it’s not a lost cause and I’m not a total failure. Yet.

Choosing Your Battles

Making Progress as a Writer Mary Pletsch Reflection Self-Awareness Successes The Writing Life No Comments

2014 has brought me an odd mixture of success beyond expectation and abject failure.

fossilMy goals for 2014 were to duplicate my short story sales for 2013 (six stories, five under my real name) and to complete a novel.

Over the past year, I’ve sold eight speculative fiction short stories under my own name, and an additional two stories and a novella in another genre under a pseudonym.

And I haven’t come anywhere close to completing a novel, though I have two partial attempts and several outlines.

In 2015, my goal is to choose my battles.

I’ve already set parameters for my short story submissions.  As a rule, I submit only to paying markets.  (I do allow for exceptions—for example, if proceeds from sales go to support a charity I feel passionate about, I’m willing to write a story in lieu of a donation to the cause).  But overall, at this point in my career, I feel my writing is strong enough that I should be earning money in exchange for my work, not just a free copy of the finished product.

This statement is not to denigrate anyone who is writing as a hobby.  I spent many years writing fan fiction and giving it away for free.  For myself though, last year, I decided that if I’m good enough to be paid and I want to earn some of my living this way, I needed to to focus my efforts on markets that represent income opportunities.

I’m excited to have my first SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America)-qualifying story coming out in the second half of 2015.  It’s a short story called “Folk Hero” that will be appearing in Apex Magazine.

KITSLIn 2015, I want to refine my parameters further.  I want to limit my short story writing and focus it on pro markets.

This plan is going to be challenging for me.  Pro markets are highly competitive.  I may not make six sales in 2015.  However, I am at a point in my career where quality is more important than quantity.

I want to take a large portion of the time I spent on short stories this year, and spend it on completing a novel.  I’d also like to do another novella under my pseudonym.

Long term, I believe novels represent the best income opportunities.  I don’t regret spending the past two years focusing on short stories.  The short stories have given me the opportunity to practice writing story arcs, strengthen my beginnings and endings, and explore different genres.  They have forced me to learn to be concise:  to introduce characters, establish their world, and immerse the reader in their conflict, with a minimum of wordiness or filler.   And they have provided me with validation.  I can do this.  I can sell my writing.  I have seen my work in print.

Validation, though, has a dark side.  It would be relatively easy, I think, for me to set and meet a goal to replicate my 2014 success in 2015.  It would make me feel good.  Short term, it would make me feel better than dedicating my year to a novel.   Long term, though, I see my career focusing on novels.  It’s time for me to play the long game and focus on long-term rewards.

I have my validation.  In 2015, it’s time to move on and take another step towards making that vision a reality.

In January I wrote about the importance of maintaining one’s health.  In December, I think I’ve done well in that regard.  I suffered hand and wrist injury in the summer, recovered in the fall, and now use a brace to prevent future injuries.  I’ve struck a balance between a part time job, a sustaining family life, and accomplishing my writing goals.  Health-wise, I’m in a good place to achieve my goals in 2015.

Who Stole the Goal Posts?

Ace Jordyn Balancing Acts Failures Reflection Self-Awareness The Writing Life Work-Life Balance No Comments

THEY say, “Goals are not set in stone; goal posts can move; better to have a goal and fail then to not have one and achieve nothing at all.” But THEY never said, “Sometimes the goal posts disappear and you’re out of the game!”

So imagine my surprise when my goals to complete a novel, and revise another and research a third disappeared. I was devastated. All my energy was required to heal a broken ankle compounded with a severe sprain. Ten weeks in a cast, three extra months to learn to walk and the energy drain exacerbated my chronic fatigue. Zheesh! “This is a great opportunity to write,” THEY said. But the energy drain left little for creativity and critical thinking. So now what?

I didn’t fight it. Not one bit. Frustration and anxiety bear no fruit. Putting words down for the sake of it and then trying to revise nonsense later made no sense either. Searching for stolen goal posts was counterproductive. So I went on a holiday! To New York, Iraq, and other cool places on this world and others. Even outer space! Yes, I read books and short stories and loved every minute of it.

Isn’t that why we write? So that others will enjoy the tales we tell, become immersed in the worlds we create and form relationships with the characters we give voice to? I threw away the critic’s hat, no learning the craft for me and I went on a holiday of pure literary pleasure!

Somewhere along the way I made notes for the novel in progress. When I felt more rested and energetic, I proceeded to revise another. And now I’m back – revising. creating. blogging and yes, still reading.

Being forced to fail, which is what a health complication can bring, brought me balance and new joy in the world of words. And for that, I’m grateful and I’m on a permanent working holiday now.

So, I practice my three R’s of the craft – Read to learn, wRite, and most importantly, I Read to enjoy!

Happy reading and writing!

Goal Setting and the Metrics of Success and Failure

Goals Motivation Quincy Allen Self-Awareness Starting a Career The Writing Life Writing Tools No Comments

This month on the Fictorians, many of us are following up on posts we made back in January and July. We’ve given a great deal of thought over the past twelve months to setting goals, meeting them, and coping with the inevitable shortcomings and failures that are common with people managing their own destinies.

Like most careers, becoming a self-sustaining writer is not unlike climbing a mountain—but one that has no summit. It’s more a matter of reaching one plateau after another in a line of them that extends to the end of our days.

I use that analogy deliberately because of something I noticed recently on Amazon.com. Amazon—that mega, web-enabled shopping cart of doom—has become a mainstay for traditional, hybrid, and indie-pub authors alike. We ply our wares there, and many of us track the status of our success or lack thereof in a little place called Author Central. If you have books or stories of any kind, regardless of publisher, that are available on Amazon, then I would recommend you go through the exercise of setting up your Author Central Account and tying in all your available works back to that account.

Once you have this mechanism in place, you can track where you sit in the Amazon author rankings. I must add here that it may be a bit daunting at first. To give you an example, my data goes all the way back to September 28th, 2012. My rank started at 386,929. Between then and November 2nd of this year, I saw a low of 629,888 and a high of 35,451. It’s a jagged graph that seems to plot, at least partially, when the novel came out or was revamped in a new edition. It also seems to reflect when the anthologies I was in came out.

Then something happened. On the 2nd of November there was a sharp spike in my ranking. It jumped to 4,500 and then slid back down slightly to hover for the past month around 20k. That is the plateau I was talking about. The beauty of it is that I can track that spike to three separate releases that all occurred at roughly the same time. Essentially, One Horn to Rule Them All, Fantastic Holidays: The Gift of Stories, and The Best of Penny Dread Tales all hit the streets or had media spikes almost simultaneously, and this gave me a bit more “street cred” in Amazon’s ranking algorithms.

I mention this all because while goals are an important aspect of being a writer, tracking metrics on your successes and failures is the first step in truly managing your writing career. We all need to have an understanding of what a success is—beyond just finishing a story or getting it accepted somewhere. There is a bigger end-game that many of us work towards: namely, making our writing career a viable means of self-employment. You can’t steer your course unless you know where you are succeeding and failing. Author Central is just one mechanism to do this. Maybe what you are looking for are positive book reviews, or sales data, or invitations to conventions. The metric you use isn’t nearly as important as having the knowledge of where you are in your career path.

Be aware of these things. Set your goals, implement the tools to track your success, and consider each “failure” as a stepping-stone to the next success. I quote Thomas A. Edison who said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” While it wouldn’t surprise me that Edison stole that quote from Tesla, the import of what he said is paramount to us. Failures are inevitable. We need to know each one intimately, so continue to have them, and use them as a foothold to the next success. And have a means of knowing when you’ve reached your goals. It’s always more than just finishing a story. In fact, finishing the story is just where the work begins.

Keep writing.

 

Q.