Stepping Up My Game

Title taken from a Zen saying:
Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
I'd like to think it goes with the 'do the work' sentiment that the linked article discusses.

If you are a writer and you don't follow "Writer Unboxed," do not wait. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Go follow them now. Day in and day out, they post thought provoking, moving, and information-rich content for writers. (Full disclosure--I have guest blogged for them.)

Today's post by Porter Anderson hit me square between the eyes. "Social Media: Your Shadow Career?" put into words something that I've been struggling with for some time now. I *know* that a social media presence is essential for today's writer. I *know* that building a platform is crucial for the elusive discovery--how to have your novels pop out from the sea of books published and self-published every day. I *know* that building relationships across multiple social networks is the important, as the circles of twitter, g+, FB, and pinterest (to name a few) users have some but not full overlap.

So I maintain various degrees of active presence on Twitter, G+, FB, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. I also blog regularly and comment frequently on blogs I follow.

It's work. I'm fairly good at it--have built up some lovely relationships and have learned an enormous amount about the business of publishing in the process.

But is it *the* work I need to be doing?  Or is it my shadow career?

If I am honest with myself, I can admit that I fritter away hours a day interacting on social media sites. There is something seductive and addictive about looking for that notification icon that tells me I've been RT'ed, or mentioned, re-blogged, emailed, commented. It's almost worse if I check and there's nothing, because then I keep refreshing looking for the next hit.

If this sounds like a gambler feeding coins into a slot machine over and over again, after losing, well, it is.

I've never been a gambler and I don't have any kind of craving for drugs or alcohol, so I always had a secret sense of superiority about my 'lack of an addictive personality.'  Guess what? That's bullshit. I just hadn't found my personal 'crack.'

It's social media.

And the near-obsessive need to monitor it is something I need to work on.

Now, it's not as if I don't write. I've managed to write a book a year for the past 7+ years, working steadily and slowly with daily and weekly wordcount goals. I'm even on track to write the first draft of my latest in approx 4 months.

But here's the thing. I'm spending far many more hours a day with social media than I am actually writing. And that's backwards.

I can absolutely step up my game and write more, edit more, spend more time on craft than on platform. I've known for some time that I also need to spend time every day caring for my physical well being, meaning scheduled exercise. The dangerous byproduct of social media is that I sit for vast stretches each day. Both in the short run and the long run, this is a harmful practice.

To those who say that a writer needs to focus on platform in order to market books, I answer, yes, but. . . And here's why.

I've done all the right things to support my debut YA title, THE BETWEEN. I generated buzz before the launch on social media, I solicited and obtained reviews, did guest blogging, giveaways, interviews, contests. And it has generated some sales.

I also have a poetry collection (CHOP WOOD, CARRY WATER)  available at B&N and iTunes. I didn't actually place them for sale. That was accidental. Nearly 3 years ago, I put this collection together as a physical chapbook and eBook through Lulu press, essentially as gifts for family members. It was also for sale at the insistence of my online poetry community and sold a handful of copies. Well, sometime a year ago or so, Lulu must have sent out an email letting folks know they were adding digital copies to online booksellers, unless you opted out.

I never got that email.

I don't market the collection. I barely mention it, other than it exists as a link on the right hand blog sidebar. I never asked for a single review. I don't do contests, giveaways, or interviews about it.

And month in, month out, it sells a few copies.

I actually earn royalties on a book I never intended to sell.

Sure, THE BETWEEN sells more copies and earns more money than the poetry collection, but not anywhere near to difference I would expect given the difference in promotional efforts between them.

So this is what I think:

• Be active on social media at least a little bit because it's important as an author to have a public presence
• Moderate your activity and make sure it doesn't interfere with what you are building your platform *for*
• Stay as involved as you feel it's enjoyable and supports your work, not simply because it becomes your work
• Be honest with yourself, especially if you see evidence of growing addiction (and no, I don't use that term lightly)
• Find ways to look inside and nurture yourself. Everything I've read in the research literature speaks of the need for solitude and silence as part of the creative process

Anything to add? 

A Mansard, but not *My* Mansard

Edward Hopper's House by the Railroad, photo by unbearable lightness, used with attribution, CC license

"The House of Many Doors" is a book I wrote that centers in and around a 'haunted' brick mansard roofed house. I started writing the novel in early 2006 based only on a vague idea of a house whose rooms you could visit in dreams, where you would travel back in time to when the house was built.

That idea morphed and evolved into the present novel that I describe as 'A Wrinkle in Time' meets 'The Shining'. 

I didn't know what a mansard house was when I initially started this book. All I imagined when I thought of a haunted house was the house from the Adamms Family. When I did a little research, I discovered that house was called a mansard, or second empire house and that mansard houses look like the flat roofed beauty in Hopper's painting.

My dear NYC friend, Diane, told me that the NYTimes sunday magazine had a study of some of Hopper's houses, with images of the paintings and the photos of the houses as they stand now.

Hopper's famous Mansard Roof was painted in Gloucester, MA. But it looks a lot less like *my* house than the House by the Railroad seen above. The loneliness factor is just right, though the house from my book is brick.

That house actually exists, as if fully sprung from my own twisted imagination.

I found it 2 years ago when I visited Newark, NJ for the Geraldine R Dodge poetry festival. My writer-friend Sue took me through the Newark Museum and when we walked through the Ballantine House, which the museum is built around, I just about fell over. (If you follow the link, you will see black and white photos from the Nat'l register of historic places. This *is* the house Parker must challenge for his father's life and sanity.)

Someday, I would love to have a book release party there. Though I would be constantly looking over my shoulder for the ghosts.

:)

News, Views, and Reviews

A quick post to catch you up on the world of THE BETWEEN.

Lydia's story and struggles with the Fae have been getting some lovely and gracious reviews.  Here's some recent press:

Lydia is a complex, strongly-drawn character. Her reaction to the situation she finds herself in is not only completely understandable, but also utterly relatable. She is angry, frustrated, sad, confused–and also incredibly powerful, which makes for a fantastic fictional combination. I love reading strong female leads, and Lydia did not disappoint.--from Indie Author Book Reviews

 I kept looking for SOMETHING to pick on, but it’s just not there.  Cohen’s book is well written, well conceived, well plotted, well edited and well executed.  Everything about it is gorgeous.  From the use of Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania (which again, usually makes my eyes roll) to the pull of ingrained cultural fairy beliefs, Cohen managed to take what could have been an absolute laugh-fest for me and turn it into a beautifully written piece of literature that I read in 2 days.--From Pavarti K Tylor, Fighting Monkey Press

The Awesome Indies blog recently listed THE BETWEEN, among their books.

The aim of this site is to promote professional standard Indie published books. That is  those that are published independently of the traditional publishing system but come up to the same publishable standards, as evaluated by industry professionals. . . . all our authors are committed to the highest excellence in their craft. Here, you will find the new, the different and the exciting.

And a guest post on why I write Young Adult stories on Tracy Riva's Books and Reviews, along with a giveaway. "YA, Why Me?"

Derelict: Chapter 3 now live

I've been working hard on writing the first draft of my SF novel, Derelict and hit the 20K mark today. That's 20,000 words in just about 3 weeks.

There are tons of writers who can write first drafts that quickly, but I'm not usually one of them. For some reason, this story seems to be flying onto the page. I know that this pace is too good to last, but I'm enjoying the wild ride for now. I deliberately didn't start sharing it until I had a backlog of chapters because I know as sure as my dog will bark when the mail man comes to the door that I will hit snags and stops at some point in the middle.

That's another problem for another day.

For now, it's all about the story and getting the words on the page.

Four teens. Four reasons to escape Daedalus Station--the dead end outpost of an empire. One derelict ship. One mistake that propels them halfway across the galaxy. Learning to work together as a crew may be the easy part because if the ship doesn’t kill them, the universe will.

 If you'd like to travel on this journey with me, I'm posting a chapter a week every Friday on the Derelict blog. Chapter 3 is now live.

Enjoy!

dum. . . dum. . . dum. . . and nothing happened

Voice Over: (Michael Palin) June the 4th, 1973, was much like any other summer’s day in Peterborough, and Ralph Melish, a file clerk at an insurance company, was on his way to work as usual when… (da dum!) Nothing happened! (dum dum da dum) Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Ralph Melish looked down. But one glance confirmed his suspicions. Behind a bush, on the side of the road, there was *no* severed arm. No dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties. No head in a bag. Nothing.
–http://www.montypython.net/scripts/melish.php

I'm a huge Monty Python fan and this was one of my favorite little skits. So often, we forget that most of our days are utterly uneventful. So easy to get overwhelmed by the hype on the news.

I used this little epigraph to head my blog post over at Black Ink, White Paper. Hop on over to read about [[[gasp]]] me meeting people over the internet. . . 

Why I do this crazy thing

"Miss A Writes a Song" photo by mrsdkreps, cc license, used with attribution

 

 "Why couldn't I have wanted to do something easy, like brain surgery or theoretical physics? No, I had to be a writer. Sigh."

That was something I posted on twitter earlier this summer. I don't even remember what, if anything specific, triggered my frustration. Maybe it happened after staring at a blinking curser and a blank page for some time. Maybe I wrote it, taking a break from a difficult scene or edit. Regardless, I can tell you that writing has been both the hardest job I've ever done and the one I'm most passionate about.

It's not that my 25 year career as a physical therapist is chopped liver. I loved the work--it was rewarding, challenging, and ever-changing. I got paid to do something that helped people. Yes, as hokey as that sounds, it was one of my motivations--helping people.

But it wasn't my first love. No, that honor goes to fooling with words. For a long time, my father kept this faded piece of fat-lined paper kids use in elementary school in his wallet. My first story. I may have been in first or second grade and it was a story using homonyms. It was about my pet--a new gnu. He got a kick out of it and it may have been the first time I realized that I could use my words to entertain.

I'm not sure I've gone more than days without writing something since. Sometimes it was simply a line or two scribbled on the back of a napkin, others an entry in my journal, still others poems or story ideas. In fact, I wrote my first novel (or at least a few chapters of one) as a young teen in 1973 ish after having seen Star Wars about 12-zillion times that summer. It was (predictably) a perfectly dreadful fan-fic--my idea of where a sequel should have gone.

Alas, George Lucas didn't ask me and it got relegated to a banker's box that got filled with other scribbles, journals, poems, cards, and letters and got moved from place to place until it finally succumbed to our 2010 house fire. Trust me--it was likely a blessing.

So when did I decide 'hey, enough with this physical therapy thing, I want to make a living writing novels'?

Never.

I don't think I ever made that choice consciously.  I did return to writing stories after a long hiatus when my husband tossed a book he'd finished clear across the room (before kindles/ipads/smartphones, oh my) and said something like:

"You can write better than this. Why don't you write a book?"

So that year I did. And the next year, I wrote another. The year after that? A third. Somewhere along the line, I needed to dissolve my physical therapy practice for personal and family reasons. The next month, one of my queries bore 'fruit' and I was offered representation (:waves to Nephele Tempest!)

All in all, in the past 8 years, I have completed 7 1/2 novels.

And each one is as hard and as hard-fought as the one before it.

Perhaps I should take up theoretical physics next.

Today’s post was inspired by the topic “My earliest writing dreams (i.e., why I am a writer)”– July’s topic in the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour — an ongoing tour where you, the reader, travel around the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. If you want to get to know nearly twenty other writers and find out their thoughts on why they write, check out the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour group site where you can find links to all of the posts on the tour.

An experiment in public storytelling

Something new, something a little scary, something even possibly a little crazy.


My usual writing process is very private. I rarely even share my idea with someone. We writers are often superstitious (probably the only similarity I can claim with major league baseball players, LOL) and I know I have this sense that sharing the 'new shiny' will somehow tarnish it.

But from the very genesis of DERELICT--all of 2 weeks ago--I've been sharing the idea and some snippets of the story with my online community and have been enjoying the feedback and reactions of fellow writers and readers.

So I've decided to do something very different for this work: share the first draft process with interested readers, not as a way to get formal critique (though comments will be welcome) but more as a way to bring together a community of passionate readers and to have a conversation. Writing is often such a lonely process, with only the voices in my head for company. :)

I've created a blog for my current WIP (work in progress), DERELICT, a science fiction novel. If you want to follow along on the first draft journey with me, feel free to stop by. There are options to subscribe via email or via RSS.

Chapter 1 is posted.

My plan is to post a chapter a week, as I move through the novel.

The Importance of Silence

Found on the bike path, circa 2004, camera phone picture

I've spent the better part of the past year when I'm not writing, editing, or dealing with the real world stuff that makes up a life, working on enhancing my online presence.

Platform, for want of a better word.

Though, I feel that some see it as a soapbox, but that's a conversation for another time.

I have been fortunate to connect with some amazing, creative, and supportive people online through my various social media outlets--FB, Twitter, and Google + primarily. But there is a downside to the intense connectedness of our wired world.

This is not any sort of revelation to anyone out there, but just something I seem to have to keep discovering.

There is an incredible value in silence.

No necessarily the silence that is the absence of sound, but the silence that is a single mind focused on working through one task.

Yesterday evening, after spending too much time sitting at the computer and checking email, twitter feeds, FB pages, and G+ streams, I made an executive decision and enlisted my younger son to help me take the dogs out for a walk.

Often when I walk the dogs, I have my ipod and headphones plugged in, or I take the opportunity to return phone calls. But yesterday evening, I left my electronics home and spent a glorious 45 minutes with my 16 year old and the dogs, walking through the path that follows the Charles River at the end of our street. We found a few ripe black raspberries and the dogs enjoyed a change of 'sniffery'. (Like scenery, but through their noses.)

This morning, I decided that I could turn off my access to the internet for 30 minutes without risking withdrawal or the DT's. My goal was to write for that 30 minutes without interruption. But I had done a bad thing last night--I finished at the end of a chapter and had to face a completely blank page this morning with no idea where to go.

I squirmed in my chair, wrote and deleted a few words and looked longingly at the wireless button on the laptop. Typically this is when I would drift to social media and avoid the difficulty of the work I needed to do.  But not this morning. This morning I let myself sit with the discomfort, figuring that I could at least spend my half hour focusing on the story even if I didn't write any new words.

But something interesting happened.

I started laying down words and in a short time, had the bones of the next few scenes written. Utterly unexpected plot turn, but utterly inevitable looking back at it. It ramps up the conflict and ties one character's story line with another's in a way I had been struggling with.

All from 30 minutes of silence. Not only that, but I managed to add half my daily writing quota to the story.

Now to do some of the other things that need doing.

May you find your way out of clutter and into silence.