Celebrate your rejections. Really. Because getting rejections means that you’re completing stories and sending them out. Congratulations. If you’re getting rejections, you’re doing the job of a professional writer.

Still not convinced? Got the rejection blues? Tired of always being aspiring? DGLM’s Michael Bourret on enjoying the pre-published stage. And here’s a light-hearted look at the perks of being unpublished. Having seen books get savaged by Amazon reviewers, there are many days that I am grateful to be on this side of the Great Publishing Divide.

Here’s (upcoming) YA author Jodi Meadows on not giving up.

If you’re not interested in waiting for the Publishing Fairy to sprinkle you with gold dust, you can bypass all the gatekeepers, and go indie. There’s even a blog carnival for indie writers (via JA Marlow)!

Seth Godin on  hope and the magic lottery. I love this bit (which I think writers looking to build their fan base will appreciate):

If your business or your music or your art or your project is truly worth your energy and your passion, then don’t sell it short by putting its future into a lottery ticket.

Here’s another way to think about it: delight the audience you already have, amaze the customers you can already reach, dazzle the small investors who already trust you enough to listen to you. Take the permission you have and work your way up. Leaps look good in the movies, but in fact, success is mostly about finding a path and walking it one step at a time.

(Speaking of Seth Godin, here he is again talking about moving on from traditional publishing.)

Yes, folks, we’re having a heat wave of temps in the mid-90s up here in Vermont.

I’ll wait while all you Florida and Arizona and other southern state people stop laughing.

Remember, we have no central air conditioning (thank God I insisted we install ceiling fans in every bedroom!). Our house is designed to trap heat (we can thank our Vermont winters for that). Our kids have been going about with flushed cheeks and heat-induced hair-trigger sensitivity. The Baron’s curls have been plastered to his head with sweat all day. I’m seriously considering cutting them off, poor child!

And still I revised. Got a whole new scene written, despite my laptop overheating and dying right in the middle. I feel victorious, the writer who triumphed over the weather, who did her writerly thing under less than optimum conditions, instead of filling up the bathtub with ice cubes and lying in it and insisting that no human body come within ten feet of her.

My friend Jo also got creative over the last day or two so she, too, could write.

Have you ever had to take drastic measures in order to write? Written a novel in 30-minute increments on a library computer? Scribbled flash fiction on a burp cloth while nursing twins? Let us know. 

With no school routine to anchor us; with plenty of one-time playdates and field trips to juggle; with all these one-week trips and camps to prepare for and keep track of, I’m just having a hard time getting into a writing routine. Even blogging has slid (as you can tell) (but I’m revising more diligently than blogging, so yay?).

Then yesterday, I succumbed to my weakness for a good story and spent all Quiet Time and Post-Kids-Bedtime Time reading this awesome book I got for my birthday (thanks, Robin?). Yes, I am a full week ahead of where I thought I would be, but isn’t it a little too early to be resting on my laurels with more than half of Quartz still ahead of me?

Don’t answer that.

Okay, so now that I have flagellated myself with chocolate bar wrappers and the shredded remains of previous manuscripts, I can marshal all my troops for the next assault on Quartz.

Some of the weapons at my disposal are:

Mandatory Quiet Time and Strict Bedtime: Napping and non-napping children must have an hour and fifteen minutes of down time in the afternoon. They are to be separated and occupied with quiet activities and not allowed to disturb Mommy unless there is blood, breakage or burning. Also, bedtime is semi-strictly enforced (the olders come out at least two or three times afterward, ungh ).

A Timer: I use this online timer to write in 10, 20, 40 or whatever-minute sessions. If I have a short period of time and I’m in danger of frittering it away entirely because I’ll be gone in X minutes, I set the timer for 10 minutes (I can fix at least a couple of sentences in that time, right?). If I’m settling in for a long evening, I break the time into 40-minute sessions, giving me time to stretch, drink water, walk around, mull things over in my head.

Mundane Repetitive Housework: Washing dishes, sweeping, driving and folding laundry all keep my hands busy while giving me some headspace to think over my stories. Er, this would work better if I could focus only on Quartz and banish all the other ideas clamoring for my attention into the abyss.

External Motivation: The Sunday progress update posts on this blog and a small group board on the HTRYN forum both keep me from backsliding too much. Furthermore, I have given everyone permission to poke me every now and again.

So, how are you keeping motivated? Any tricks or tips you want to share?

Saturdays are often the worst days for those feelings. I put so many expectations on the weekends–I’m going to do everything I didn’t get to over the week, clean the house, run errands, pursue my various creative activities (ALL of them), read books, hang out with my family, do something fun and go some place new, and, oh, yes, take a nap. Ha!

Early this afternoon I was starting to get all panicky over how much I wanted to accomplish and how the day was half over and how I wasn’t going to get even a quarter of it done and ohgosh I’m such a lazy, unproductive… er, yeah. I cut myself off right there and instead focused on doing a few things. And enjoying them.

So, today I

• went out with Miss M. to buy food and plants (phlox, marigolds, black-eyed susans and onions to plant), and got some one-on-one time with my daughter, to boot!
• took lots and lots of pictures of flowers (I can’t help it, it’s an obsession!)
• wrote several hundred words on Secret Project X and wrote conflict arcs for several sub-plots in Quartz
• worked on my latest fiendishly difficult piano piece
• cooked two new-to-me recipes from scratch
• and watched the first half-hour of Fantasia with my family (I’ve never seen it before)

Not bad at all! I even remembered to throw a load of laundry into the washer, then the dryer. And I have plenty of leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

Little things make me happy.

How was your Saturday?

Why am I (and presumably hundreds of other writers) so prone to procrastination? Why is it that even though I want to write, I fail to, you know, actually do it? Why is it that when I sit down with my MS (after hours of anticipation), I would rather scrub the shower or organize my socks by color?

What is it about writing that makes it so easy to push on to the back burner?

Lack of deadlines. There are people who make a living from writing.

I’m not one of them.

Luckily for my family, we do not relying on my writing to pay the heating bill or buy groceries. Unluckily for my works-in-progress, it’s easier to goof off when not facing subzero temps inside my house or days of beans and rice.

Solution? Join writing groups and challenges (like NaNoWriMo) to help keep you on track. Get a good writing buddy to prod you every now and again. Get your spouse to block you from the Internet in the evenings–and refuse to give you that $#@!! password.

Lack of warmups. Sometimes, I’m writing along (lalalala) and all is well.

Then I hit a wall (shoulda seen that one coming!). A massive concrete monstrosity with barbed wire at the top and crude graffiti sneering at me. Unclimbable. Undrillable. Laughs at the stick of dynamite I’m waving at it

I’m stuck, the story is going nowhere. Every time I think about writing, I think about that wall. Why, yes, I’d rather play 87 games of Solitaire tonight, thanks.

Writing–as I do it–doesn’t have much in the way of warmups. When I have a difficult piece of music to work through, I usually don’t jump right into it. I’ll do scales for a while, work on easier songs, go back to the pieces I played a few months ago. After building up my confidence, I’m able to tackle the harder piece.

Solution? Begin writing sessions with ten minutes of freewriting. Create a novel journal for writing down all your anxieties and issues with the story. All story-related angsting goes here. Use this journal to brainstorm, cluster and talk your way out of story problems.

Lack of step-by-step instructions. When you knit, you follow a pattern (mostly). When you play music, you follow the music (mostly). When you act, you have a script.

Writing a novel doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Nobody tells you where you should start, when you bring in new characters, where those twists should go. It’s both liberating and paralyzing. There is nothing to gauge your work against. Nothing but that slowly sinking feeling in your stomach when something goes wrong.

Solution? This will be different for different people. Maybe planners need to ditch their outlines. Maybe pansters need to step back and work out one. I find that I need to have a strong premise, a sense of the ending and a handful of beginning scenes before I sit down to write a new novel.

Not tactile, not physical. Writing is a mostly a cerebral activity. Yes, there is the physical act of typing or writing longhand, but that is a very small component of a novelist’s skillset. And because writing mostly goes on in my head, it can be harder to make the leap to writing things down. With many other activities–you just do. Making up stories? That seems like a mystical process, one that cannot be corralled or controlled. One that does not produce something tangible or functional, unlike crocheting a warm blanket or harvesting lettuce for lunch.

Solution? Doing something physical–walking, washing dishes, gardening–often gives my brain a chance to tease out my story without my active interference. Seeking out new experiences, or just stopping to fully enjoy the ones I do have, store up a wealth of sensory detail for me to draw on when I am writing a story.

And, last of all, writing is hard work! We have so many leisure options available to us: movies, TV, Internet, video games, books, (let others do all the work), watching paint dry (just kidding!). After a long tiring day, all my brain and I want is to be entertained, not be entertaining.

What about you? If you’re a procrastinating writer, what makes it hard for you to get started?

What it all came down to was this: my twin desires to write and to be published were at war with one another. The drive to achieve one was strangling my love for the other. I pored over magazine and agent’s guidelines, and forced myself to work on projects that were the most marketable or near-enough complete so I could get them out faster (hint to self: don’t do that again. It doesn’t work. Any love you have for that project will fizzle out under such pressure).

At about the same time I persuaded D. that we should get a piano–for the kids! It took me a while to get someone out to tune it, but once it was in playable condition no one in my family could keep their mitts off of it. We even had minor arguments about who could play it when. I got a piano book (because that’s the kind of linear, orderly, rule-oriented person I am) and started working my way through it. Hit a brick wall and decided to find a piano teacher. Sir I. went along to that first lesson and was game to learn the piano, so now we’re both playing. And enjoying it.

When I play the piano, I play it for me. For my pleasure, not the pleasure of my family, my piano teacher, or my neighbors. I have no need to perform for others. It’s enough for me that I can train my fingers to move over the keys–confident, assured–and create music. Wow.

Totally different from how I’ve felt about writing.

It’s taken me time away, freewriting, mindmapping, angsting and conversation with a good writing buddy, to come back to the point where I can say, yet again, that writing is important to me. That creating compelling characters, twisty plots, gorgeous prose and bizarre worlds is what I enjoy doing. That I still love writing stories even if I’m not getting published often enough and fast to suit me. The desire for publication is still there, but it’s been put in its place as subordinate to the desire to just write for its own sake–for my own sake.

I ditched the marketable projects–abandoned a short story and a quarter-done novel revision–to work on the story that was really tugging at my heartstrings. I’m building up my writing muscles, aiming for 500 words a night, five times a week. And no beating myself up if I skip a night.

Writing is fun. And that’s how I want to keep it.

Oh, and I like playing the piano, too. Still. *wink*

Playing piano complements writing really well for me. I can’t write while the kids are around; I can’t play piano while they’re sleeping. Writing is hard mental work; playing is–well, I just sit down and make my fingers stumble over the keys in the hopes that I can build up the skill and strength and muscle memory it takes to play decently. And honestly, these days I feel more of a sense of accomplishment playing through a short piece of music than working on my writing. Maybe it’s because I’m a complete beginner at piano, so any progress feels like a huge leap to me.  My learning curve for writing, on the other hand, is currently a plateau. I’ve reached a certain level of competence and I’m stuck there. I can *see* where published work is better than what I’m writing, but not sure how to go about getting my stories across that invisible line.

And so, it’s just easier to go play the same measures of Sea Mist for the umpteenth time.

But, lest you think this is an entirely gloomy post, I have every confidence that once the weather cools down and we get into fall, my story-writing neurons will get all fired up to write. It’s weird, but cold weather makes a writer out of me. It’s as if I have a silicon brain, like the Discworld trolls.

How are your creative endeavors?

1. Got a total of 9K words on the new book
2. Revised and submitted a short
3. And am in the process of revising another short

My plan was revise and submit three shorts this month. One was to be the latest Elinor story, but I think I need to write a prequel first. The story I have just doesn’t have the high stakes and desperation that it should. I know, I can’t give Elinor a break. Things have to keep getting worse for her.

I went back into the vault and dug up a short I wrote a few years ago (titled Glider World: A Story; intriguing I know). I’ve always liked this story, but something about the way I resolved the plot bothered me. I thought up a fix, but that would mean gutting the story, changing the locale and throwing out most of the 7K words I’ve written on it. Worth it? I don’t know. I see short stories as one-shot things; either they work or they don’t, moving right along now.

My next contender I can’t find a good market for.

It’s not been the best writing month for me. My constant companion has been this niggling little voice whispering and whispering, “Why bother? There are so many better writers out there. Just sit back and enjoy their books. Why bother? There are so many books in the world already, more than anyone could possibly read. Why bother?” I’m ignoring it, but I’d be lying if I said that it hasn’t negatively affected my motivation.

This is not a very cheerful post, is it? How are you doing?

It’s not the lack of money more than it is the lack of readership that bothers me. My husband says that it’s a pride thing instead of an avarice thing for me. Darn right. If I’m spending all this time crafting and polishing my stories, I’d like to have lots of readers, please. Preferably tens of thousands of them.

That said, I got a thousand words on the last story of this month. So, despite my pessimism, I’m still planning on inflicting my work on the unsuspecting populace. Oh, and ALSO, I got my contributor copy of Neverlands and Otherwheres which includes my story Second Sight (written as R. A. Gale). I got a real kick out of watching my husband read my story in its published form. Hee.

The point of all this being that once upon a time my attitude was: if it can’t be done right, then it won’t be done at all.

Perfectionism is a beast I battle quite regularly in all areas of my life. It’s like a many-headed Hydra; if I chop one head off, it sprouts another as soon as my back is turned. Just this week I balked at actually starting any of the short stories spinning in my head on the pretext that they weren’t ready.

Well, the truth is that I wasn’t ready to write anything less than perfect.

Once I got to the root cause of my procrastination, I pulled out that trusty old Sword of Slaying and hacked off yet another head of the perfectionism beastie. Then I opened up Word and got a start on two of the stories.

Progress is miserably, painfully slow and I’m avoiding reading what little I’ve written, but at least it’s happening.

Oh, and today? The Firstborn got out a sticker book his grandfather gave him for his birthday and, aside from helping him find which stickers went with the pages he wanted to do, I did not watch him at all.

There’s hope for me yet.