News and Notes from the Writing Desk: July Edition

I'd love to say that there are tons of things to tell you all about this month, but all of the projects I'm working on are going very slow. I'm persisting with them all, but that doesn't make the frustration of it all go away. I don't know if it is the usual distractions or a lack of inspiration. Either way, I found myself rereading some of my published work--something I rarely do. I think I just needed to remind myself that I am capable of getting these things done, and I can find my way back to productivity.

Pieces

This is officially back on the agenda. New pieces should be available on Patreon next week, and once I get 23 and 24 written and edited, you'll get to see these new pieces on Wattpad.

Latest Project

The still untitled set in the 70s story is slowly chugging along. I've snapped out of the heavy research phase, but I'm still only managing about half a page a day.

Submissions

I sent out two more poetry submissions out this week. I wanted to get back to sending short stories out again, but every time I find a good place to submit, I'm finding reading fees. Unless I'm at least 75% confident that it will take my work AND that it is a paying publication, I won't pay. I will say 75% confidence in my own work standing out from the crowd is rare, but it has happened before. I have better things to do with that money, including writing contests and pro coverage for my pilot script... if I ever get back to that project.

Those Extra Hours

Everyone wants to get a few extra hours out of each day. I seem to have found some, but I don't know if they are exactly productive hours. I've been seeing insomnia creeping into my life for about a week now. I usually get 7.5 hours a night, but over the course of a week, I'm down to about four. So far it isn't negatively impacting my daily life--there has been no grogginess, I don't tire out in the middle of the day. I'm not looking for places to nap. My brain is just always on, and I can't shut it off. But it is frustrating because now that I seem to have as much as three and a half extra hours, why am I not getting anything more done?

Even though there doesn't seem to be any physical changes due to less sleep, I still get that feeling that when it's the end of the day, I need to be winding down to relax for sleep. My routine is so strict that this feeling arrives at 7pm on the dot. Every single night. I know that the easiest solution is a vacation, but it's always the same story. People who can only see about ten percent of my daily life will inevitably ask, "What do YOU need a vacation from?" A lot. Trust me, a lot. My own brain included.

A vacation is a hard reset. I need to do this because my current routine has taken over my life, leaving me wildly frustrated when it's interrupted in the slightest. When this happens, I need to craft a new routine that works better than the old one, gives some flexibility that I threw out the window with the last routine, and opens up avenues for new opportunities to come in.

I don't even mind if it's a staycation, though that's difficult when I'm not great at convincing people to leave me alone for a set period of time. I just need a few days to break out of the old and march in the new. I'll use those extra hours to come up with some plan.

The Story of a Writer

The online writing community is amazing. Lately there has been a whole new crop of writers that want to know the ins and the outs of the business, who want validation, and who want to know how to break through without letting a rejection or two (or ten) break their spirit. So here's my contribution to the conversation—rejections, acceptances, and everything in between. 

 

The first time a piece of mine was published, I was eight years old. I was published again in the same publication at ten. This set the bar high for me from the beginning.  It was a publication that didn't really exist outside of elementary school libraries, but it did have a wide distribution to proud parents (and a bad habit of publishing plagiarized poems that kids somehow were able to get past the editorial staff). 

My next acceptance didn't come until my senior year of college when two of my short scripts were accepted into a collaborative project. Unfortunately, less scripts were needed than originally thought, so one was dropped, but the second one was used for the project. This happened at the same time multiple poems and short stories of mine were being rejected by the school's undergraduate literary magazine. A short story was accepted into a senior-level literary class project with a small number of print copies distributed, but so was everyone else's work from that class. It was a requirement to pass the class. 

One of my first pieces to be accepted outside of a school setting was “Life Obscured” for the Poetry of Yoga collection. It was rejected twice before that. It was a great moment, but I needed more once I got a taste of the idea that others could find my work as interesting as I did.

As with any part of life, there are those moments that seem unreal. I submitted “Second Shadow” to only one literary journal, and it was accepted. I don't know if this will ever happen again, but it's always a shocker to get a hole in one. 

 

Time went by and the rejections kept rolling in. But I had a way to feed my need for publication without all the rejection. I started using some now-defunct websites to publish all of my lesser works, those ones I wrote in high school or the ones that simply weren't right for high-caliber literary snobbery you can run into in this business. This was easy, getting by without being rejected, but there are many pieces I've lost because I thought they would exist on the world wide web forever.

“Tuesday Morning Hangover” was rejected twice. “Our Conversation in the Garden” was rejected six times before it found a home. These may seem like small numbers, but I have a handful of works that have been submitted and rejected a dozen times each and still haven't found the right match for publication, but I love them, so I think the effort is still worth it. 

 

I admit that at the beginning, independent publishing was just another way of getting by that inevitable rejection. Haiku is not something people seek out at a bookstore often, so I could justify putting Unfolding Life out there on my own. So why did I continue on the independent route for Seeing What Develops? I don't know if it was ego or simply the fact that I couldn't wait the potential years it could have taken to query agents, find one that believed in my work, then wait to see if any publisher gave it a second glance. And if no agent was interested? I don't know if I would have been able to write anything else for a long while.

I thought I was getting back on track, finding a way in that wasn't purely independent with my Kindle Worlds novellas. After all, these works had to be accepted before being published, and they were being published by the all-mighty Amazon. Reality set in when the first novella was initially rejected—the only reason it didn't make the cut was because the specific word “Callaway” was not included in the book's description. After that, I could see through the program, knowing that acceptance really just meant meeting word counts and having required keywords for the synopsis. Acceptance didn't guarantee that a real person had read it or thought that it was of a specific caliber. It wasn't a deal breaker though, because I did write and publish two more after that.

The latest poetry collection probably could have been selected for publication by a small poetry press. Although I'm the completely biased writer of said collection, I think it was good enough. There's just something about having total control of your own work that appeals to me. I know there are areas of the publishing process that I could be doing much better or be handing off to experts. What I don't like doing the most is giving myself the time to really take a look at my options. Out of everything I could have done differently for this collection, the only regret was not giving myself enough time to submit individual pieces to literary journals before I put it out there.

That leaves me with the here and now. I'm writing more consistently, with new pieces at least on a weekly basis. I'm riding the waves of the submission cycles, hoping that some of my oldest pieces will eventually be published, maybe even alongside the newer ones. I'm finally happy with the way I react to rejections—at the beginning of all this a rejection took me out for a week. I wouldn't write, edit, or submit because I was too defeated by the whole process. Eventually the gap closed. Five years ago a rejection would ruin the day. After the writing nightmare that was 2017 where nothing seemed to go right, a rejection may get as far as ruining my morning coffee or my afternoon writing session, but it takes only a little time now to recover from what is just a part of the process. A stinging one, but only a part.

Writing, especially the vein of creative writing, is not a straight line. Nor should it be. It is every cliché you can think of: roller coasters, off those beaten paths, hills and valleys, ups and downs, vicissitudes —you get the point. It takes a suit of armor that in every other aspect of my life I simply do not have, but when it comes to pouring myself onto the paper, I can stand up to anyone who's bold enough to say it's not for them and take it elsewhere. This is what it is like to be a writer. No journey looks the same, but we all get there eventually, wherever our “there” happens to be.

Dear NaNoWriMo: Middle of the Journey Edition

Dear NaNoWriMo,

As usual, you have bested me for the moment. I'm currently 13,935 into my 2018 NaNo journey with a lofty 58k-word goal. It's not looking good, but then again, a journey of 50k words always appears a bit messy.

I would love to say that you are not going to get the best of me, but who are we kidding? I've got a mass of side hustles that I've cobbled into a full-time job. I've got other commitments. I can't avoid all distractions. If I could, I would be the owner of as many as 25 completed first drafts by now, and that's just not the case.

Still, there is a tiny bit of hope out there. It's small and you may need a magnifying glass to spot it, but it's there and with every word added to my total towards this goal, that little speck of hope grows, illuminates a path, and let's us all believe in the power of determination once again.

That was pretty inspiring, wasn't it? I thought so too. So now I just have to actually follow through, and we'll all have a reason to celebrate on December 1.

Sincerely yours forever and ever,
Terri

Holiday Work Magnet

It never seems to fail -- as soon as I sit back and relax with, I don't know, a hot dog or whatever holiday-related goodies I have on hand, it happens. I get that ding on my phone telling me I have work to do. For the past year, I rarely get work on certain platforms (Fiverr, Guru, etc.) unless it is a holiday. You read that right. I seem to get loads of work almost exclusively on official U.S. holidays. If everyone else gets the day off, I'm at my computer typing away. I'm wondering if this happens to all freelancers, or is it just me?

I know that the biggest reason this happens is because I have many international clients. Don't think I'm complaining -- I love the fact that these clients trust me with this work, and if you have ever worked with Fiverr, you know that the world domination map on where you've sold a gig is kind of cool (I'm at 5% world domination so far). And there wasn't a big holiday in June, so I was waiting for an influx of work to come my way. I just find it curious that even for those who are outside this country, why would they choose to hire me on the day where it's likely, if I was a normal person with a normal job, I wouldn't be available? Am I just that awesome, or am I just really bad at hiding the fact that even if I did have the day off I wouldn't be doing anything different anyway? A riddle I must unravel...

Dear Literary Journals: You Can't Have it Both Ways

The writers today that are sticking to some of the tradition of the publishing industry by submitting poetry, short stories, and essays to literary journals know that the landscape is changing. Some literary journals have moved to an online-only format; some newer ones never had a print edition to begin with. More journals are moving from only accepting regional authors to accepting writers from around the world. But there's one shift that really getting on my nerves -- reading fees.

Don't get me wrong. I can sympathize with any publication that's barely hanging on financially to keep publishing the work that talented writers send in, but the fact that I spent hours yesterday looking for new places to submit and could find only a few without a submission fee is ridiculous. It's not the reading/submission fee that I oppose--what is making me want to pull my hair out in frustration is that almost all of these "please pay $2-$5 to submit your work" publications also do not pay writers they publish. Let me say it again: THEY DO NOT PAY WRITERS. You as the writer get to pay for the privilege to grace their publication. And I'm not the only one that sees this as a problem, as you can see (article is from 2015, but the problem is only getting worse).

The big, fat secret that's staring writers in the face on this topic? A writer could publish anything they want on their own platform (social media, blog, website) and with a good marketing strategy could get just as many views--without having to pay anyone a dime if they don't want to. Yes, you don't get to say "this was previously published in" but unless your audience is a bunch of fellow writers, is your audience really going to be that impressed that some other publication wanted it first?

All of the major names in the literary world still let you send in work for free, with the exception being contest entries, but those are often fair because of the chance at a large amount of prize money. Keeping these submissions free is a good thing, but writers know that the well-established publications want to see that you've made it into the smaller publications first. I know they'll say it doesn't matter if you've been published before, but no one really knows what's going on in the minds of any particular editor. I would say that it does matter to some of them.

Here's the thing, literary journals: I would gladly fork over $2 for you to read it if there was a chance at being paid for all my hard work. I'm not talking earth-shattering prizes, but $50 seems reasonable for publication. You give the sob story that you're barely holding on, and the only money you make is from these submission fees. So what counterargument are writers supposed to give? Well, here's our own sob story--no one values the written word as much as other professions, so we are constantly being told our work is not worth the money we ask for it. So, dear reading fee journals, it comes down to this: the prestige you try to portray is not worth the money you are asking for it. Go find some other poor sap to pay you for their next rejection letter.

A Strange Dilemma

Last night I ran into quite an interesting circumstance. After my latest rejection, I was looking for another publication to send my poetry to because I think the handful of poems I picked for the last one is still a solid body of work for submissions. So, I dug into my research and found a publication where my work would be a good fit. And as usual, I did one more sweep of the publication's website for any other research information I had missed that would help me tailor the submission.

There it was, staring me down on the About the Editors page: one of the poetry editors at this newly chosen publication happens to have another job--as a poetry editor at the publication I just received the rejection from. What now? This little surprise changes my whole perception of the world of literary publications. Does this happen often? How many times have I unknowingly sent the same submission into the hands of the same editor without knowing it? And seriously, when it is a non-paying publication and these are most likely volunteer positions... how does this person have time to be an editor at two of them??

Now I'm left with a decision that I have to make quickly, if I want to meet the deadline of this new publication. I could go ahead and still submit to this publication, knowing that there's a good chance it will be rejected once again (though I wouldn't send the same poems, like I had originally intended). Both publications work on a blind submission basis, so unless I have a truly distinct literary voice, they wouldn't be able to tell it was me. Both publications also have multiple editors listed for poetry, so there's a small chance that it would never end up in the hands of the overlapping editor. Then again, I don't know if it's a collaborative decision or first come, first reject.

Or, I could just move on and find another publication. It would make it easier for me to think I had a better shot at getting accepted, but it would take more time to find the right one to submit to.

The life of a writer is certainly full of plot twists!