On Sharing

I went home this weekend. I saw my parents (which was nice) and shared a room with two yowling and traumatized cats (which wasn’t) and ate and visited and had a generally good time. Inevitably, the subject of my writing came up. My mom asked how it was going and was I through with my book yet? I tried to explain revising and querying and the critique group that went kaput, but in the end, Mom really just wanted to know when I was going to let her read what I’d written.

Nothing makes me more uncomfortable than someone I know, particularly someone I’m related to (by blood or marriage), asking if they can read what I wrote.

Is that weird?

I feel like that’s weird.

I’m pursuing publication. The dream is that one day my book will be read by many people I don’t know. Many complete strangers. And yet, I’m hesitant to hand a draft over to my family.

This is true in other areas of my life, too. Years and years and years ago I kept a blog. This was back before they were known as blogs and were mostly online confessionals. I spilled my hopes and dreams onto a public web site that about a hundred people checked into each day. My housemates didn’t know about it. My parents found it, but weren’t very interested in it. It felt very anonymous. Safe.

Years later, after that journal petered out and Livejournal became all the rage, I signed up for one of those and instantly connected with friends I saw weekly, monthly. I recorded my day. I moaned about my job. I talked about writing, or rather, wanting to write. But it wasn’t the same. My friends were reading it. I had an image of myself that I felt I had to maintain. There was always a part of me holding back.

Still is.

My fiction is different. It’s not confessional. There might be some things based on my life (isn’t there always?), but it’s not autobiographical.  But there is a part of my writing that almost feels to personal to share with some people. It’s odd who those people turn out to be. Critique partners? Let ‘em rip into it.  My best friend? I will hand a draft over to her in a minute. My mother. . . ?  Can read the book if it ever gets published. Or when it’s close to being published.

There are a handful of people who have offered to read this manuscript and I just can’t take them up on it. Is it because I’m afraid they will see themselves in my writing? Is it because they will see to much of me? I don’t know.

Who reads your stories? Who doesn’t?

‘Fess Up Friday: Grumble, Grumble

I’ve gotten so that I officially hate ‘Fess Up Fridays. It’s really just a set up for failure, isn’t it? Look at the title: ‘Fess Up. Doesn’t that just scream “I didn’t do jack this week?” Or, at the very least, “I fell far, far short of my goals because I’m a loser.”

I may be in a mood today.

I may be in a mood because my local crit group, to which I submitted my manuscript a month ago, disbanded without even mentioning what was to become of my manuscript. Actually, the email didn’t mention my manuscript at all, which hurt my feelings. I sent what I hope was a not-too-desperate, only-slightly-begging response asking for any notes from anyone who may have read any part of it for feedback, but I’m still bummed. It’s a bit like asking your boyfriend if he would call you more. You kind of feel like he should want to call you more and if you have to ask, well…

Writing is a lot like dating.

Anyway, I suppose this is for the best. I’ll give myself next week to clean up the multitude of typos other readers found and then look for one or two more people to swap with and then it’s time to move on with this manuscript and send it out into the world.

Okay. Happier things.

I have made some progress on the shiny new manuscript and each time I get to work on it, I’m giddy. (See? Dating.) It’s not as much work as I would like and I’m seriously doubting that I will make my 25,000 word goal this month, but whatever. I’m enjoying writing it.

Things I have been doing instead of writing:

• Training. I use the word loosely. Training, for me, has been to speed up my running pace before two 5ks I’m entering next month. Also, I somehow got it into my head that I want to run a half marathon and so I’ve been following a very modified amateur training program for that. Even though the first half marathon I’d even consider entering is seven months away, I’m going to need all the help I can get.
• Losing weight. All this running and exercising stuff started because in January I decided I wanted to lose 25 pounds. Losing weight is hard work. If it wasn’t no one would need to do it, right? We’d all just be like, “I want to get rid of these extra five pounds” and voila! It would be so. But alas, I’ve been planning meals, tracking what I’m eating, and all of that actually takes a lot of thought and energy. It’s getting easier, and even better, it’s working.
• Cleaning. Spring cleaning, to be specific. I’ve gotten rid of lots of old clothes. I’ve been a little brutal about my closet, convincing myself that if I haven’t worn it in 3 years, it needs to go. Even if I did look really hot in it when I was 25. (Note: I am no longer even in my 20s. That is how long I’ve been hoarding some of these outfits. It’s sad.) My bookshelves are next and then my office closet. I’m a woman on a mission.
• Trying to keep plants alive. Don’t laugh, it’s harder than it seems. I planted rosemary, mint, cilantro, and basil at the first sign of spring. So far, everything but the cilantro is still alive. The mint is thriving. In fact, send mint recipes because I have no idea what to do with all this stuff.

All in all, it’s not that I haven’t been productive, it’s that I’ve been productive on lots of things, none of which are writing.

Thanks for indulging my grump and humoring my non-writing activities. I will have less grumpy stuff to talk about in the near future.

Happy Friday!

Hey Jealousy

I’m sure I’m late to the party, but has everyone read this:

We are all savages inside

If you haven’t, please go now and read it. Go. Seriously. I’ll wait.

. . .

. . .

Done? Good. There is so much to say about this article. First of all, is there anyone who hasn’t felt like Awful Jealous Person a time or two? I have. Not so much over six-figure book deals, but there was a definite feeling of jealousy in the MFA program when any of my classmates got pubbed in a lit journal. One of my lowest moments came just after I completed my MFA when a blog acquaintance got a handsome book deal off her blog. I swear, at that point, I could have written Awful Jealous Person’s letter word-for-word. (Minus the prestigious universities stuff. State schools all the way, baby.) It was a dark place for me. I had a blog! I had an MFA! Why wasn’t I the chosen one?

We are all savages inside. Sigh…

I like what Sugar says about going deeper and looking at what truly bothers you about other people’s good news. My therapist was a big fan of this kind of exploration, especially when it came to anxiety or other icky feelings. What’s really going on? she liked to ask when I freaked my freak over having my first paid article due and experiencing insurmountable writer’s block.

For me, for a long time, I used to get the bitter taste of  jealousy at any mention of writing.  Whether a friend had just completed NaNoWriMo, or were editing a chapter they loved, or they carved out 15 minutes to draft a scene. Any of those would make me a little jealous.

You don’t have to look to deep to see what’s really going on there. I was jealous of my friends who were writing because I was not. I was jealous of classmates because they were subbing stories right and left while I sent out maybe 20 over the course of a year. In short, I wasn’t working hard enough and was jealous of people who were. This has often been the culprit behind my own jealous feelings. The bitter taste I get when I read about someone getting an offer of representation can be traced right back to the fact that I want to get my own query letter written and start subbing to agents. And it’s not just writing related. For a while it was a little hard for me to read weight loss success stories and even seeing my friends’ Facebook updates about going to the gym made me a little grumpy.

This all turns out to be very good news, actually. If my jealousy stems from watching someone do something I want to be doing, then I can go do it. Easier said than done, usually, but it works. When I’m carving out time to sit and write and working hard on my novel or query, I’m not grumpy when someone tweets about the awesome revision they just finished.

I’m kind of glad that Sugar pointed out Awful Jealous Person’s entitlement issues, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with believing you deserve something as long as you’re putting the sweat behind getting it. And I’m not saying that just because this is the root of my jealous feelings, it’s the root of everyone’s jealous feelings. I’m just saying, at least go look for the roots.

The Courage to Start

The miracle isn’t that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start. — John Bingham

Starting, for me, has never been a problem. I can dig into my old computer files and find hundreds of started novels from way back when. My knitting basket currently holds a half-finished sweater and a few squares of the baby blanket I was making my friend’s now-two year old. I must have done weeks one through three of the couch to 5k program at least five times. I’ve always been good at starting things, but just after starting them, there’s always something brighter, shinier on the horizon. Something I’m more motivated to work on. Starting has never been the problem; finishing is.

So, knowing this, it’s a little odd that I found myself so drawn to the above quote when I saw it on a t-shirt at the 10K expo. I mean, there I was, finally about to finish something and what’s really grabbing me is a saying about having the courage to start. I bought the t-shirt. I brought it home. I showed it to my husband and he laughed.

It wasn’t quite the reaction I was going for.

After some careful thought, I realized he had a point. Evidence suggested that I had the courage to start down pat and that the miracle, for me anyway, was finishing. I thought, okay, maybe this doesn’t really apply to me. I kept the t-shirt anyway.

I still love the quote. It makes me think of all the people who won’t start something because they’re afraid. How many people want to write a novel, but are blocked by fear? How many people admire marathoners but won’t dare train for one themselves? Starting takes guts. It’s uncomfortable. It means you’re doing something different, making a change. It means you might fail spectacularly.

I’m used to failing spectacularly. In all my starts and stops with various hobbies, I’ve become very accustomed to the idea that I just might not finish what I start. It’s almost a joke. Having recognized this, I now go into projects with the nagging voice of failure in the back of my head. “Sure, start this novel. It’ll just end up in your incomplete manuscripts folder.” “Okay, enjoy the first few weeks c25k… AGAIN.” “Oh, good, another cast on. This will go well.”

For some people, namely people like me, it’s not just about having the courage to start. It’s about having the courage to start even  when you’ve started the project five times before and never finished it. For those of us, starting doesn’t mean you might fail, it means you already have failed and you’re coming back for more. There’s something to be said for being able to face down a blank page, knowing that there are four other “Chapter 1s” in a file folder on your desktop. Or climbing up on that treadmill and doing week one all over again because you’ve never managed to make it further than week three.

I remember the first time I tried to write a novel. I was twenty. I had a gazillion pieces of story in different files on my mac. I had grand hopes of expanding on them, but I never really got it together. I worked on the novel for a year. I had a beginning and kind of an end, but very little middle to speak of. I finally put that one a way and worked on other things, eventually abandoning each of them as well until finally I just decided that I must not be a novel writer. They were too difficult to finish.

Don’t think that this didn’t haunt me when I signed up for my first NaNoWriMo. Oh, it haunted me. I was convinced I was not going to finish. I’d spent the past ten years telling everyone I was not a novel writer. To make matters worse, I’d just gotten married and in cleaning out my old condo to sell it, I’d just discovered an entire box full of story starts, ideas for books, my short story collection that had been collected, but never polished. All the evidence of my failure to finish. It kind of sucked.

But I signed up. Something clicked and I finished. And a year later I finished another and then another. This not-a-novel-writer now has three manuscripts in her pocket, one of which is just about ready to go off to agents. All because I had the courage to start… again. It’s kind of a miracle.

‘Fess Up Friday: …And don’t let the door hit you on your way out

March is over. Hooray!

That was the month of suck. I don’t want to express just how much suck as that’s pretty personal, and who wants to hear about the bad stuff anyway? There were some highlights to the month, which I’ll happily share.

Highlight #1: I finished the Couch to 5K training program. I have started and stopped this program more times than I can count. The furthest I have ever made it was to week five before losing interest. This time I actually made it through all nine weeks and all the way to that last 30 minute run. It was awesome.

Highlight #2: On the heels of finishing the c25k program, I ran my first 10k. I probably was not properly trained up for that, but somehow I managed to pull through. And it was awesome. I ran 6.2 miles in about an hour and 15 minutes. Not too shabby considering I have never run 6.2 miles before.

More about these in a future blog post.

For now, it’s time to get back to the desk and the writing and set down some goals for April so that I’ll have proper things to ‘fess up to in the next month.

Goal #1: Write something new. I’ve got my manuscript out with readers. Feedback is trickling back in. It’s time to set it aside for a while and focus on a new story. I’d like to have at least 25,000 words toward a new draft by the end of April.

Goal #2: Write the query already. I was supposed to do this last month, but it didn’t happen. By the end of April, I’d like to have one query letter ready to go.

I’ll start with that and whatever else happens is the icing on the cake.

Happy writing!