Category Archives: The Writing Life

Don’t Throw The Game For One Goal

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A Guest Post by Jessica Brawner

In football, the kicker takes the field. He kicks the tiny oblong ball through the gigantic goalposts, and the crowd goes wild! Cheering, clapping, praise and acclaim! That’s what we all want; to hear that wild clapping when we achieve a goal, someone to praise us when we did well, to pat us on the back, or in the case of sports fans, dump a cooler full of Gatorade over our head. Right?

What if we missed? What if we didn’t make the goal? Do we get the dreaded mass groan and boo? Do we lose the whole game?

The answer in football is—sometimes. Thankfully the writing process is not a spectator sport, nor does it hinge on one decision. Our misses are seen only by ourselves and the editor who sent us the rejection letter. We all miss sometimes, and even the best kickers in history don’t have a perfect record. Do we beat ourselves up until we’re black and blue for every goal we didn’t make? (I hope not! That’s not much motivation to continue is it?)

So you missed your goal. WHY did you miss your goal? Take a few moments to re-evaluate and see where things went sideways.

Did you miss the deadline? What happened?

Was there a life event that got in the way? Or were you just not motivated enough to sit down and get the words out? Are you using the one as an excuse for the other? (Hint: life always gets in the way. Learn to work around it.) Try setting a reasonable daily word count. For some people this may be 200 words, for others it may be 2000. Look at your life circumstances and what you want to achieve with your writing and set a plan or a playbook that works for you.

Does your writing or storytelling need improvement?

Find a mentor, or take one of the many, many online (or in person!) classes available. Find one that focuses on what you need to improve. Go to a writing boot-camp!

Were your eyes too big for your stomach? (Or did you set a goal that you’re not ready to reach yet?) It’s great to aim for the really big prize; it’s how we ended up with airplanes and rockets and a host of other scientific and artistic inventions. Remember though, each large advancement required intermediate goals to reach the big prize. Make sure you are setting the mid-size goals as well as larger goals.

An example, I would like to put out a book of short stories at the end of next year and have my business, Story of the Month Club (www.storyofthemonthclub.com) to a level where we can pay authors professional rates. These are both large goals. To achieve the first I have joined a group to write 52 stories in 52 weeks. A story a week. Taken as a whole it’s intimidating, but broken down I have set a small goal for every week of next year. If I fail one week, I can succeed the next, and if I succeed enough times I will have enough stories for a book. Success or failure does not hinge on one goal.

For Story of the Month Club, it will probably take longer than a year, but I have laid out a plan and several strategies for progress. The point is to keep going, keep striving, and keep trying. (And try new things!)

If the kicker misses a field goal, the coach doesn’t beat him up about it (much); the coach makes him practice more. Good kickers practice and persevere until they can do their job with their eyes closed and one hand tied behind their back while facing down five defensive ogres. All skillsets require practice. Have patience with yourself. Set reasonable AND stretch goals. Have a playbook to guide you.

 

 

Jessica Brawner writes both fiction and non-fiction. Her first book, Charisma +1: The Guide to Convention Etiquette for Gamers, Geeks and the Socially Awkward was released through WordFire Press in 2014. You can find out more about Jessica on her website at www.jessicabrawner.com

Resolve to Resolve…

Guest Posts Guy Anthony De Marco The Writing Life 1 Comment

A guest post by Guy Anthony DeMarco.

With the holiday season in full swing, many folks decide to make a resolution for the upcoming New Year. With this in mind, here are several ideas to consider for 2015.

  1. Resolve to Write.

Sometimes it seems silly to tell writers that they should write. Too many of them finish a big project, such as a novel, and spend far too much time tweaking, publishing, and promoting their book. Yes, these are important details, but the majority of your time should be spent writing your next book. If you have only four hours to devote to writing a day, three and a half should be spent on writing. As Dean Wesley Smith said, be a writer (one who writes) versus be an author (one who has written). The best way to be noticed is to have a large assortment of items for sale. Each book is a hook on a line. If you have one hook in the water, you may catch a fish. If you have twenty hooks in the water, the odds are a fish will notice one of those juicy worms and you’ll be dining on fish tonight.

  1. Resolve to Complete Projects.

If you’re like me, you have dozens of half-finished projects that are taking up space on your hard drive. Make a decision to pick some of them and get them completed and in the marketplace. If you decide to take on a project, resolve to get it done, barring emergencies or medical disasters. A half-written project of 20K words is wasteful, so go over it, replot if necessary, and get it out the virtual front door.

  1. Resolve to Learn About Writing.

There are quite a few blogs and websites that can keep you in touch with what’s happening in the marketplace. Ralan’s and Duotrope can help you spot markets that are open for submissions. Joe Konrath, The Passive Guy, and Hugh Howey have excellent blogs concerning self-publishing. Local conventions usually have a writing track, so bring a notepad and take notes. If you’re new to the Fictorians, go through the archives and see what catches your attention. Buy a book or three about writing, then actually read them. If you write off of the top of your head (aka a Pantser) or go through great troubles to plot out every detail of your story (aka an Plotter/Outliner), take some time to try out the other method. I personally find it’s easier to be a Pantser when writing short stories and flash fiction, but for a complex story or a novel, being an Outliner comes in handy.

  1. Resolve to Learn About the Business of Writing.

This is a big resolution, and it will certainly take some time over 2015 to complete. The good thing is it can be easily done if you nibble on the elephant, one bite at a time.

Probably the easiest way to cover this resolution is to attend a seminar or workshop dealing with the business side of writing and publishing. The aforementioned Dean Wesley Smith conducts workshops on the west coast with his brilliant wife Krisine Kathryn Rusch. Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta run a seminar on the writing and publishing business each year in Colorado Springs, Colorado, called the Superstars Writing Seminar. The date for next year is February 5-7, 2015, and will feature Kevin, Rebecca, Jody Lynn Nye, James Artimus Owen, Eric Flint, Toni Weisskopf, and a host of additional top authors and editors. They cover everything you could ever wish to learn from award-winning professionals.

There are dozens of books on the business side of writing. While anyone can write a book and publish it, make sure the author has extensive experience before commiting to reading an advice-centric book. Dave Farland has several excellent books (not to mention an excellent free blog), and Wordfire Press in particular has a wide variety of business advice books.

  1. Resolve to Learn About Copyrights.

This is a smaller resolution, one which every writer should know. There are plenty of folks who give bad advice on copyrights because they’re only parroting what they heard—and they heard it from someone who also didn’t have a clue.

In my opinion, the best book on copyrights is published by Nolo Press. It’s a longish book, but you will know exactly what a copyright is when you’re done. It would be a safe bet that you’d learn something new—something that contradicts what you believed for a long time—when you learn about what a copyright is and is not. For example, many new authors are convinced that copyrights cover ideas. They don’t—they only cover the execution of an idea, such as a finished book.

Take the time to learn how to be a professional writer and author. Not only will it help you avoid the pitfalls on your career path, but it will make your journey more enjoyable.

 

About the Author:DeMarco_Web-5963

Guy Anthony De Marco is a speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award®; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.
A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia, GuyAndTonya.com, and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.

Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods – Where Sci-Fi and Religion Meet

Marketing Mary Pletsch The Writing Life No Comments

The newest volume of the Aurora-Award winning Tesseracts series is available online today!

T-18-Cover-270x417-100dpi-C8Tesseracts 18:  Wrestling with Gods examines the intersection between speculative fiction and religion.  It’s my honour to be part of this prestigious series with a story entitled Burnt Offerings.

Corporal Pasharan was destined to spend the rest of his life in a military sanitarium were it not for his tale of a near-death experience with a god.  Now sanctified as a Shaman, he’s been equipped with cutting-edge technology and the freedom of cyberspace.  He can never dare admit that his tale was a fabrication, or that he remains unconvinced about the existence of any form of deity.  When a young soldier converts to another religion and risks the wrath of her theo-political superiors, Shaman Pasharan must find his own kind of faith to make a choice between truth and power.

The title of the anthology was a big inspiration:  Wrestling with Gods.  I knew I wanted to write about a character whose relationship with his faith wasn’t an easy one.  I started thinking:  what would it be like for an agnostic character in a ministerial job?  What if he didn’t have the luxury of resigning over his doubts, because he counted on that job not just for livelihood but survival?  That got me thinking about the intersection between faith and power; between privilege and faith; between speaking the truth and the fact that honesty can sometimes get people killed when the wrong folks are listening.

For the main character’s dependency on his job:  I had a hemiplegic migraine one day and decided to waste time on the internet.  A while later I realized:  here I am chatting to people who don’t even realize I’m sick.  Nobody notices facial droop or slurred words on the computer, and I had a lot of fun despite being in no fit shape to go anywhere.  I put that experience into my main character as well:  he’s disabled, but his role as Shaman to a technology god gives him this incredible power and authority in a virtual environment.  And yet all the time he’s very aware that his physical body makes him face pain, limitations, and dependency on others.
I’m a Wiccan with primarily Christian family and in-laws, and I have an amazing family that believes in respectful discussion and mutual understanding.  In the real world, I’ve seen cases of people horribly persecuted just for being Christian, and cases of people who call themselves Christian harassing and demonizing people of other faiths.  I think every faith is capable of having both immense good and immense evil done in its name, and I tried to represent this in my story.  The theo-political complex my main character lives under is a Pagan religion.  The Kin are my idea of what an organized, institutionalized, corrupt Paganism would look like, and they’re kind of a mixture of Asatru and Catholicism with a bit of eclectic Paganism thrown in.

You can get your own copy of Wrestling with Gods today on Amazon Kindle.  Paper copies will be available starting in March (Canada) and April (US).

I Am So SICK of This Manuscript, and That’s a Good Thing

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I recently finished a grueling slog through edits to my work-in-progress. It was a finale months in coming, not because it should have taken so long, per se, but because in between receiving the edits and finishing them, my wife and I bought and moved into our first house. As it turns out, I only thought I hated moving before. So I finished up the edits, months behind my personally imposed schedule, and then what do I do? I go right back to the beginning and start through again, because in fixing the manuscript before, I introduced a ton of continuity errors and some (lots of) typos.

Ugh. I am so SICK of this manuscript.

This year was supposed to go differently. I was supposed to be finishing up my beta-ready draft of the sequel, not still plugging away at edits on the first. The constant push to worry about what agents, editors and readers might want, what they’d find acceptable, was beginning to feel stifling. I wasn’t enjoying myself. Then I had a realization. It was okay that I was so far behind where I wanted to be. In paying for professional editorial help for my manuscript (thanks, Joshua!) I learned I didn’t really know how to edit before. I’d thought I did, but Joshua’s edits showed me the light. The painful, blinding, burning light. So this was a grueling but very necessary learning experience.

I am so sick of this manuscript, but I am in good company. Patrick Rothfuss has talked on his blog about how sick he gets of his manuscripts as his editing winds down. So when I started to feel the same way, I took it as a sign that it was finally nearing completion. This book (my third) is going to be my first to be published. I know that, not through some metaphysical sense of surety, but because if I can’t find an agent or editor who believes in it, I’m going to publish it myself. Because I believe in it. It’s finally good enough, finally ready. And that’s a pretty cool thing to consider.

In the meantime, I’ve made myself a promise. In addition to churning through the sequel in 2015, I’m going to work on a project in which I impose no restrictions on myself, creative or otherwise, a project never intended for publication. So this is me, getting an early start on goal-setting for the next year. One book published, two written. I’ll let you all know how it goes. 🙂