Last month I told you about the book launch, but what happens afterwards? Plan the next one.
Book sales have been pretty disappointing, but who writes for money... well, we do, but there's no point in giving up after the first attempt, especially when you're in this for the long haul.
At our first post launch meeting, the following evening as it happened, we took stock and decided what books we could finish off or write for June and who would provide them. So far we have six, a combination of two short story collections and four novels. We've also had a good idea for the launch that will not only save us money, but also increase our profile: launch through a school.
The idea is that we offer to publish a short story collection containing the winning entries in a competition the school runs. Just before the summer half-term break, around late May early June, we have a launch evening in the school hall.
Some of the kids will read their stories, the authors will read parts of theirs, the school gets all the proceeds from the sale of their book, we get a free hall hire and the PTFA get to run a snack bar and keep the money from that. We may also have some kids using school computers to show parents how to order an ebook via Amazon and how to use either a Kindle or the free Kindle software. Everyone wins.
And that's not all. By opening the project up to the whole school, we could get the art department involved in designing the covers, the computer department doing the book trailers, the music department composing/performing music for the book trailers etc. Some of the work could be used in the ongoing assessment that some of their courses require.
The beauty of it, from our perspective, is that as the parents will attend it means another audience for us, on top of which a lot of the promotion will be done through the school in their newsletters. That doesn't mean we can ignore our own promotion, like getting the local press involved and promoting the website, but it does make things easier.
Who knows, Amazon may even respond this time and attend.
We've already had a positive response from an English teacher at the school we've approached and are looking to start discussions about it in the new year. Watch this space.
As part of the debriefing session, it was also decided to create a style sheet for future books. The sheet is aimed to make the conversion process seamless... relatively seamless, by setting formatting standards when writing a piece of work.
The three main areas covered were paragraphs, new pages and point of view or scene changes. It may come as a surprise to find out that tabs do not translate well when converting to an electronic format and cause more problems than they solve.
For indenting the first line of a paragraph, the best way, and one that easily converts into ebook format, is to use the format/paragraph settings and indent the first line by a set amount. For a new page, such as a new chapter, people often hit the enter key until they get to a new page. I'll let you guess what happens to converted books that do this. The way to go is to use 'ctrl+enter', as this will take you to a new page and will keep it as a new page forever after. The scene changes are most easily shown by using extra lines.
What the style sheet does not do is impose a formatting style on the author. If they want to have paragraphs with no first line indent, but a blank line afterwards, that's fine, and if they want an indented paragraph with no blank line afterwards, that works too.
Next month, I'll let you know how we go about converting our work to an ebook. It should come as no surprise that it costs nothing to do a good job.
Martin Willoughby
Feel free to send questions and I'll try to
answer as many as possible next time.
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Self-Publishing: After the Launch by Martin Willoughby
A few months ago, I was having a catch with my younger son. It was a warm June night and we were throwing the ball back and forth on the driveway without talking much. My younger son is ten; he's usually pretty chatty. But this night, he was in a funk; his baseball team had just lost the second game of the playoffs. If they'd won, they would have made it to "Family Day," aka the end of season, Little League championship game. Making it to Family Day is as close to nirvana as a fourth grader gets in our small New Jersey town.
My son and I have been playing catch long enough that he knows I'm not good at catching pop-ups and if he throws the ball too hard, I wince. That night, the rhythm of our throws was steady and my mind started to wander. My son's team had lost a lot of games. Their fielding wasn't great and some of the kids kept striking out. My son is a big, strong kid and I knew he had it in him to get bigger hits so halfway into the season, I started to meditate a bit with him before his games. Not long marathon Dalai Lama type meditation sessions but just couple of minutes of telling him to close his eyes, clear his thoughts and imagine himself hitting that ball out of the park. It worked---for the next couple of games, he got more runs and RBI's.
One of the assistant coaches asked what I had done to him.
"We meditated before the game." I cringed. I figured the coach, a nice but tough guy from Brooklyn, would roll his eyes.
"Really?" he said. "Could you meditate with the kids before the next game?"
"Sure."
I learned to meditate in high school. I was supposed to keep my mantra a big, dark secret but I'll just tell you right now, my mantra was and still is "Ima." This is the Hebrew word for mother; it was also the name of the AFS student who was spending the year at our school. That was back in 1980. I haven't been meditating non-stop all these years but a year ago, I read Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and in it, she writes, "As artists, we are spiritual sharks. The ruthless truth is that if we don't keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die." In the same chapter, she writes of the Zen of sports and moving meditations. "The goal is to connect to a world outside of us, to lose the obsessive self-focus of self-exploration and, simply, explore." I started to think that if I wrote every morning just as I woke up and meditated once the kids went to school, my writing might improve. I started meditating for fifteen minutes every day after I took our dog for a run---not long enough to fall asleep but long enough to calm down and come up with a couple of new ideas for essays and short stories. Strangely, sitting still for a few minutes gives you creative energy that lasts for hours.
I don't know exactly what happens to the brain when you meditate, but something lovely and soothing does kick in. In her book, Secrets of Prayer: A Multi-Faith Guide to Creating Personal Prayer in Your Life, Nancy Corcoran writes: "During meditation, our brain shifts from beta waves (thirteen or more cycles per second) to alpha waves (eight to twelve cycles per second), a deep internal state of concentration." This meditative state leaves you feeling calm and purposeful.
It's ridiculously easy to meditate: Find a room to be alone in, shut the door, put a cushion or a pillow on the floor, sit down on it, set the timer, close your eyes, concentrate on your breath and repeat your mantra over and over for at least fifteen minutes. If you can't take fifteen minutes, take five, look up, check up the clock, then go back in. Even a minute or two of this focused rest does something magical to your brain.
Annie Dillard writes about this process in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. "The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy rivers, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance."
For four games, I "meditated" with my son's team. It was a little bit voodoo, a little bit therapy, and a little bit everything I'd ever read about writing thrown together into a five-minute pep talk, which ended with the kids meditating for a minute. The coaches would gather the kids in the dugout and I'd ask each of them to say his or her name out loud and talk about what they did in the last game that they were proud of. I asked them to articulate exactly what they wanted to achieve in the game they were about to play. Then they uncrossed their legs, closed their eyes, and let their minds wander as they meditated for a minute. I watched them as I timed them. Some squirmed, some seemed to doze off but their eyes stayed closed (mostly) and they sat still. At one game, I was late and couldn't meditate with them beforehand, so some of the kids came up individually and asked me to "meditate" them. I did; they won. In fact, they won three out of the four games that started with a meditation. The kids were ecstatic; I started to feel that everything I had learned about writing could also be applied to baseball. And vice versa.
Did they win because of the meditation? Who knows? (My younger son, who is standing next to me as I write this, says, "No.") But I think the meditation prompted them to think about what they wanted from themselves in the game. Most of the kids on the team were second and third children. They were used to being told what to do and they were used to being part of large group. How many times in life do you get to articulate what you want to do and then go and do it five minutes later? Second and third born kids rarely have this luxury. Plus, there was the whole "we're a team" dynamic to contend with. Baseball appears to be a team sport but so much of it is individual: Standing at bat, pitching, catching the ball, throwing it, running around the bases. You do all this alone. The meditation had each child each imagining what he or she could do, alone.
The last game was rained out and rescheduled for a day I teach in New York. I taught a three-hour writing workshop, raced to Penn Station so I could make an earlier train, missed the train anyway and made it to the game in time for an extremely rushed "meditation." I was distracted. I can't remember what the kids said or I did. We were playing a team we had beaten before. The final score was 4-3. If a couple of plays had gone differently, we would have won. Of course, meditation can't perform miracles; sometimes the other side is just luckier. Who knows? Maybe they had been meditating too.
This may all sound like hokum but meditation does tap into a mysterious part of your brain, a part that is generally ignored and yearns to be touched. Believers in God might argue that the Divine Spirit resides here. It could be. Meditating does summon something approaching bliss; just remembering that you meditated this morning will bring you a wave of peace this afternoon. Next time you prepare to do something that takes courage---writing, painting, acting, competing, performing---close your eyes, clear your mind and breathe in and out. Repeat your mantra. Keep a notebook nearby. When you're done, write down everything that flew in and out of your mind. This conscious resting is what your mind wants to be doing, and your brain will thank you by giving you a generous and unexpected gift: Inspiration.
_____
Laura Zinn Fromm is the author of the forthcoming How I Killed the Tooth Fairy and Other Tales of Flawed Mothering. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University and teaches fiction and creative non-fiction in the Columbia Artists/Teachers program. A former editor at Business Week magazine, she is the winner of the Clarion Award and the Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award for Labor Reporting. Visit her blog at flawedmom.blogspot.com. Click HERE to visit New York Writers Workshop
Meditate This by Laura Zinn Fromm
tips (tipz), Verb: To provide with a piece of confidential, advance, or inside information
news (n(y)oeoz), Noun: Newly received or noteworthy information, esp. about recent or important events
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First Monday of every month at the Felix Bar, Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, Melbourne
We are now bringing you the Melbourne off shoot of the Cold Reading Series. Therefore we are seeking script writers who have something they'd just love to hear read out loud. We're seeking scripts ranging from 10 - 20 pages and if you wish to submit anything longer that's no problem but just be aware we can't guarantee we'll read past the 20 page mark. The idea is that you will hear your words read live in front of an audience, so not only can you hear what is working and what isn't, but you'll also be able to get an idea what an audience thinks of it.
HOW TO SUBMIT A SCRIPT: To submit a script please email a pdf to crsmelbourne. Include a title page with your name, address, phone number and email address on it. Please let us know the format of the script (as in short film, feature, play...) and a short summary. Also we will require a character break down so casting can occur on the night before the audience arrives.
Without dark you would not recognize light. Without sorrow you would not celebrate joy. Without hatred you would not cherish love and without struggle you would not appreciate peace.
I remember as a young girl crying to my mother that I would never fall in love. I would meet a guy and within a very short period of time I would discover the 'fatal flaw.' That is the term I use for the thing that drives you crazy and you can't see past the behaviour, or trait, and the relationship ends. It could be something as simple as the way they say the word 'can't,' to the way they chew their food, or it could be more complicated like how they treat your friend's children, or the way they act when they get stressed. Whatever the flaw is ... it is fatal and you can't get away from them fast enough.
I like to think of this as a selective process of elimination. You are weeding out the guys you don't want to discover the guy you do want. Think of the power of attraction, the secret, manifesting your dreams ... uncovering what you don't want in life allows you to discern what exactly it is that you do want so you can focus and draw it toward you. Say you want a guy who is great with kids, chews with his mouth closed, has a soft Australian accent, and practices yoga when he gets stressed. How would you determine this is the ideal guy for you if you hadn't put the image through a thorough process of elimination?
This works the same for all aspects of our lives. When I was growing up, there were a few people who knew what they wanted. They knew with each fibre of their being that they wanted to be lawyers or veterinarians, or global peace makers. I believe they went through the same process of elimination, but came to their conclusions faster than others. For me, that process took decades. I finally reached the epiphany that I wanted to be a yoga teacher and writer by trying everything else. I took university courses, college courses; I jumped from job to job, all in an effort to discover what I was meant to do. I ended up with a very long list of what I didn't want to do with the rest of my life, but that list helped me focus and recognize what my true desires were.
The next logical step of course is accepting what you want to do and doing it. This is a hard one for most people. I speak a lot about the word 'but.' This little word gets in the way of so many of our dreams and desires. Essentially we talk ourselves out of it. "I know you want to be a writer, but you need to get paid; we have to eat after all." "Being a writer sounds great, but who's going to read your work?" "I know you want to, but seriously, what if your writing sucks?"
I love the ego. It will tell us exactly what we need to hear to stop us dead in our tracks toward fulfilling our inner most desires for happiness. Why does it do that? Because it is the ego! It doesn't want you running around following your whims. It has a real job, and social status, and operates on the expectations of others ... and it has spent years, in fact all of your life, developing itself. It doesn't need some desire or dream to throw all its hard work into confusion and chaos. So it distracts you, pulls you away from your 'misguided thinking,' and helps you get back to what you were doing before. It pulls you back into pain, unhappiness, and struggle.
The ego can be used for good, if we recognize that whenever we are unhappy or in pain, or struggling, it is providing us with a vision of what we don't want. And that little bit of awareness can help us perceive what it is we do want. Without unhappiness we would not treasure fulfillment. When you are struggling, or unfulfilled, search your heart for what you really want, and then take any and all steps, even baby steps toward that desire. Being happy is our birthright. Find what you want out of life, and embrace it!
Now, anyone know where I can find an Australian Yogi who chews with his mouth closed?
Marissa Campbell
Co-Author of the Powerful, Life Changing Book: LIFE: Living in Fulfillment Every Day
I am an ERYT Hatha Yoga Instructor and Studio Owner of Pure Intention Yoga in Brooklin, Ontario. I am also a Published Freelance Author with numerous articles in print. I have co-authored the powerful, spiritual, self-help book LIFE: Living in Fulfillment Every Day and am now working on an historical novel called Raven's Blood. When I am not writing, I am looking after my incredible children, hanging out with my wonderful husband, walking my two adorable dogs, dancing, laughing and having fun.
Discern What You Want Out Of Life And Embrace It!
Korean Echoes By Tom Sheehan
Synopsis: Rancho Santa Margarita, CA, September 5, 2011- The 45 poems that compose KOREAN ECHOES draw the reader into piecing together a puzzle, with each poem presenting a small measure of the Korean War soldier's world, a world wholly embedded in the deepest design at the heart of human experience, embedded as if words were shrapnel, steel moments of clarity rendered from language and pounded into consciousness through Tom Sheehan's craftsmanship, each poem a sharpened moment of awareness of all humanity can be, do, and endure, and still love life and living. KOREAN ECHOES, a poetic testament to the tenacity of the human spirit to survive the killing fields of war through time eternal, presents themes as well known to today's warrior as to the ancient warrior of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY: the battle to understand war, to achieve reconciliation, and to forgive the enemy and the self. Read an excerpt! KOREAN ECHOES is available for purchase at major eBook retailers and at the MilSpeak Books storefront. MilSpeak Books are distributed as electronic books by Smashwords.com and its partners throughout the US and the world. For other MB titles, visit Smashwords.com.
As if there isn't enough to worry about when one tries to be a writer, now apparently we need to be branded. I thought I had covered all my bases with my web presence, my blogginess, my own domain and my style signature. I webinar-ed on webs, tweets and wikis just to get myself up to speed, but soon found via an online survey I lacked social networking skills.
I do well on a BBQ with dips, chips and an ice bucket, and can hold my own at a dinner party, but I never dreamed I was a social misfit. I needed a profile fix and quick! My facebook account was a woeful state, and if I had any hope of pulling my socks up, I needed to network. But all this would be lost, the writing gurus advised, if I didn't brand myself. An absolutely vital tool for all writers' nirvana - publishing success.
If branding was something you could just buy, then I'd just go on line and order the damn thing; plus postage. Wikipedia wasn't any help either. Then I sort of surfed, googled, delicious-ed and asked Jeeves, and ended up joining a dating agency by mistake. Harry, Ted, Mark and Bryan all said they could help me, but I had to become a premium member first. Only seventy easy payments. Go cut and paste yourselves fellas. Unsubscribe is such a lovely word!
Then I found a writers forum. Ah, I thought, like-minded souls in the pursuit of writing excellence. Can anyone please tell me what 'accessible language poetry' really is? Or perhaps, esoteric cognition? I dropped off their RSS as fast as control/alt/delete.
With the world wide web at my fingertips I ning-ed, peeplo.com-ed and linked-in, but I felt an outcast. I didn't belong, and all because I wasn't branded. Not recognized. Not accessible with a meta tag or a spider bot. It was akin to cyber suicide. If I didn't do something soon I would be archived and forgotten.
So I bypassed the apps, the sponsored links, the 101 writer's top tips and unplugged. With only my e-reader for company my life flat-lined, and then I reached out and found a book. Not just any book, but a big fat book. A book that had everything a writer could want. A book that had all the answers.
I looked up branding in the dictionary.
Now my only decision is whether to get a butt brand or an ear tag.
So, I guess that's why authors are kept in stables.
Hettie Ashwin
As a writer I do my best. I write for magazines, radio and fun. I have a healthy ego, and a fertile imagination which combines with a robust work ethic to make me a well rounded individual. As the proud possessor of an enlarged funny bone I'm bound to say it has a marked influence on my writing style and my life in general. Catch me here hettieashwin.blogspot.com
Writer Branding by Hettie Ashwin
The Church of Tango: a Memoir By Cherie Magnus
Synopsis: The Church of Tango is a passionate memoir of tragedy and adventure, lust and music, romance and tango. It is a story of survival that cuts across death, cancer, Alzheimer's, loss of home and homeland and cherished heirlooms and possessions, loss of shared histories, of hope for one's children, of hope for the future, of love. But it's also about finding love and unexpected joy. And about listening to the music and dancing. For now it can only be ordered from createspace.com. Available also on Amazon.com a Kindle ebook.
I've always been an avid writer, writing from an early age and filling notebook after notebook of stories. I have always been drawn to the darker side of fiction and wrote short horror stories like it was going out of fashion. A little while ago, I decided to try my hand at a longer story and began writing about a favourite subject of mine, zombies. I wrote continuously for about a week and had, what I thought, was an awesome masterpiece in progress. Then I gave the story to my husband to read, and that's when it all fell apart.
I was having a particularly bad day when I gave it to him to read, probably not the best of ideas. So, he sat on the couch and read my tale of survival in a zombie infested world, while I paced in front of the couch, sighing intermittently. He put down the pages and started with "Well, it's a little all over the place". Well, that did it. I cried and pouted and didn't really give him a chance to tell me all the wonderful things that he did enjoy. I'll be honest, it crushed me. I had the wind taken out of my sails and I began to doubt everything I had ever written, along with my so-called talent. I obsessed about it for ages. My husband encouraged me to keep writing, but all he got for his troubles was a wounded look. I couldn't write. I sat in front of my laptop, with absolutely nothing to say. No ideas, no flicker of a story. I felt like I had lost my creative juices and I was bereft with the thought that I would never write again.
One day I decided that if I couldn't think of a story to write about, I would write about a man who was a writer yet had nothing to write about. I started with the story in the very same position I was in, sitting in front of a laptop with a blank screen mocking him. It went from there; I used his story to write about my own perceived failings as a writer. Eventually, I got my swing back and am now happily writing like I never doubted myself. It took time and I have learned not to take constructive criticism so hard and opinions are just opinions, but also that no one can ever tell you that you're not a writer. It comes from within you, a need to express yourself, so keep writing.
Kirsty Ferguson
I find writing is a wonderful outlet for my creative side. Watching the blank pages fill with my words and thoughts is a release of emotions, it clears my mind and reminds me why I love what I do. I have a beautiful son, a loving husband, a crazy dane and a sooky cat.
The Struggle to Write by Kirsty Ferguson
An Essay on Writing Time Management
I lead a very busy life. I am a graduate student who is starting to put his thesis together by collecting pieces of information. I am setting up interviews to talk with my subjects. I hold a day job that can be frustrating and exhausting, and I have other college courses to keep track of. I keep thinking, "I would love to write something but I just don't have the time!"
At least, that's what I thought one year ago.
Time is a valuable resource. People keep track of it, people can lose it, and people can gain it. I want to emphasize that people can keep track of time not just by looking at the clock but also by setting up times for activities such as lunches, conferences and most importantly, times to write.
One of my struggles was not figuring out what to write but when to write it. Of course, thinking there is not enough time in the world to write can go hand-in-hand of being confident of writing in general. There's a large idea of a stranger exploring a twisted city on an ice planet in my head, and that stranger has to contend with not only the hostile locals and a foreign occupying force that just sat its boots down on the planet, but also with a weird, shadowy force lurking around in the city. A few years ago, I was really busy with undergraduate classes when the idea came to me, but I could never sit down to write it as I feel so little time would not yield a good product. But then as I wrote more, I learned that good writing takes time. Good writing takes a lot of practice. Granted, I only have this story idea of a stranger visiting a twisted city in an ice world in outline format, but I take time for writing in other areas.
I keep a writing journal on my computer, as my handwriting tends to be serial killer based. Sometimes I write down the random stuff and ideas floating through my head, and other times I search out different writing sites' exercises (Like Writing Raw, ironically enough…) and try them out. And the thing is, I usually feel better at the end of the day not because I did not get a major writing project finished, but that I actually got some writing done.
Even if there is a short time limit, there is always still time to write. Writing is like getting a breath of oxygen. If I don't do it, I feel I am suffocating and all the ideas in my head come crashing down on me. And I've been suffocating for quite a while, all because I thought I did not have the time, or having the time to construct good ideas. But there is time, and even time spent on a smaller project can yield ideas for a bigger project.
Kristopher Miller
Kristopher Miller is a budding writer, blogger, and scholar who graduated Peru State College in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science in English. He is currently working on his masters-level program in technical communication, but until then, he is working to release his first novella in fall 2012 and scribbling drafts of other novella, short story, and poetry material to keep himself from going crazy. He has also reviewed for Adventure Classic Gaming and he is also a writer on Helium.com. Apart from being featured in Writing Raw, Kris is also featured in Peru State College's Sifting Sands 2008 magazine, Chadron State College's Tenth Street Miscellany 2008 magazine, and the April 2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine. You can visit his abode at The Catacomb's Bookshelf at http://catacombsbookshelf.blogspot.com
When the Hourglass Pours Faster than the Fingers Can Type by Kristopher Miller
Ticket to Ride By Philip Scott Wikel
Synopsis: Ticket to Ride is a timeless tale of two writers coming-of-age. While it's set in the late 70s Ticket to Ride is as universal in it's message as Homer's Odyssey. Enriched with allusions to literary and rock 'n roll classics, readers of Ticket to Ride will see Morgan and Livy moving from being innocent 17-year-olds to becoming fully realized adults and, like America, anxiously redefining the ideas of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Ticket to Ride is comprised of two parts, subtitled Just Another Day and Got to Get You into My Life. Got to get You into My Life is the story of Morgan Blake who struggles with the fear of becoming like his angry, alcoholic father. Yearning to find a greater sense of peace and freedom, authentic love and his own voice as a writer, Morgan sets off on an odyssey, both internal and external. The second part, Just Another Day is the story of young Olivia Tinsley, a poor girl from East Finchley/London and her determination to raise herself from poverty and become a successful, self-reliant, and outspoken writer. Her journey includes meetings with hippies in Spain, U2 in Ireland and feminists in the extreme. Order from Amazon.com.
No More Mulberries By Mary Smith
Synopsis: Miriam loves her life as a health worker in Afghanistan but her marriage to her Afghan husband, Dr Iqbal, is heading towards crisis. Ignoring his anger at her attending a teaching camp as a translator without him, she travels into a remote rural region hoping time apart will help her understand where their problems lie. As she undertakes a journey into her past, to confront the devastating loss of her first husband, Miriam realizes how her own actions has damaged her relationship with Iqbal. Set in the rugged grandeur of the Hindu Kush foothills, No More Mulberries is about love, commitment and divided loyalties. 'Her characters are complex with layered pasts (Iqbal's leprosy and the metaphorical and physical scars it has left behind - Miriam's lives in Scotland and with her previous husband) and uncertain futures… A lovely book which calls for attention.' - Janice Galloway. No More Mulberries can be bought from Amazon.com.
The alarm goes off every school morning at precisely 7 am. In life, as in writing, I'm a mess - I never have anything ready beforehand, so I'm up ironing clothes and preparing breakfast for two sleepy kids. At around 8.45 am, I am released from mothering duties for a blissful six and half hours.
This is my time for my writing. So, the kids leave and I have breakfast, do the dishes, clean the kitchen, look at the living room (where I do most of my writing) and consider cleaning it - usually it can go another day without.
Once I've eaten, I have a look at the news on TV, just in case something not related to the financial crisis has occurred. Usually at about ten thirty, I turn off the TV and turn on the computer. I used to write everything longhand before transferring it onto the computer, but I gave that up because my hand writing is appalling at top writing speed, and I had trouble reading it back. So, I'm at the computer and the writing day can begin, right?
Well, no actually, I have to check my email for any important news, maybe there's an acceptance of a piece or there's an offer to enhance the penis that I don't have, either way, it would be rude not to look at them. Email can take another half an hour off my time... and of course, now every writer worth their salt or not, has to be on a social networking site. So, I check Facebook for any momentous updates or ridiculous links to soppy Hallmark style quotes of the day. That could easily take another half an hour - more if I get into a debate, which happens.
My writing day actually begins at around eleven thirty. I'm working on editing my first novel; so naturally, I avoid that completely and start working on some poems. I'm not a natural poet, I'll never have the discipline to be a great poet but I like poetry, so for me, it has become the warm up before the work out. It usually takes an hour for heat to hit my fingers.
Then, its twelve thirty and time for lunch - I'm entitled, surely.
After lunch I start on the book, I re-read the re-writes and get annoyed at how long it's taken me to get this far. I stop. No point in writing angry, so I waste half an hour checking my email and looking at Facebook.
At around half two I am writing in earnest because I know the kids will be home soon.
At three o'clock I realize I haven't actually showered or changed out of my pajamas, oops.
Most of my writing doesn't get done during my allotted time, instead I'm up till the early hours, bleary eyed and slightly hacked off at my lack of organization. Tomorrow will be different, promise.
Lorraine H McGuire
Born and bred in Glasgow, mother of two, wife, pet owner - all these things hold their own horrors, but Lorraine has survived them all. She writes poetry, short stories and longer prose as a way to stay sane and has been published in several poetry anthologies in the UK.
A Day in the Writing Life by Lorraine H McGuire
"Self-Sabotage"
If there's one thing that bothers me it's when you see a very talented writer ruin their chances of ever getting an agent. And it's not because they're not talented enough, or not nice enough or hard-working enough. It's often because on some level, they're self-sabotaging their own success.
I ghost-write query letters for clients and I recently had an Asian-based client who did exactly that. He had a wonderful storyline and I encouraged him, before we sent the query letter out, to get his manuscript as ready as possible. If that meant having it professionally edited, so be it. I even had the name of editors who formally worked at major publishing houses who could do so for him HERE.
His response? He wanted to leave the manuscript as he put it, "raw so that literary agents can see my full-potential." Um, no.
No matter how much I gently encouraged him that maybe that wasn't the best route, he didn't want to listen. I told him that you only have one shot at these agents and you want to make a good first impression, yet he insisted he was right.
Here I am, dealing with literally hundreds of literary agencies a year. They tell me exactly what they're looking for, why they accept and reject clients and yet he insisted that he must know better.
It's just sad to me. His manuscript had tremendous potential but it needed more than a band-aid, it needed double-bypass surgery.
My point is, when you're talking to people who do this for a living, who engage with other publishing professionals' day in and day out, listen to them. They know what they're talking about. Do that, and you'll be one step closer to landing an agent.
Jeff Rivera
Jeff Rivera is the founder of HowtoWriteaQueryLetter.com. He and his works have been featured or mentioned in Publishers Weekly, GalleyCat, Mediabistro, Los Angeles Times, New York Observer, NPR and many other media outlets.
Why You Still Don't Have an Agent by Jeff Rivera