The World Runs on Stories

The world runs on stories. Watch television. It could be the five o’ clock news, a sitcom, or a movie—they’re all stories. Listen to the radio. The lyrics to the songs, a Dj’s repartee, and the advertisements you’ll hear are all stories. Every single second you spend on social media, you’re bombarded with them—stories on which celebrity did what, on which team beat which team, or what juncture each of your friends are at in their life. Blogs, advice columns, rant rooms—there’s no escaping them. Even after you click off that electronic device, stories are everywhere—in jokes told, in gossip spread, in simple conversation, or even within our own minds. We are a world of many cultures united in the enjoyment a good story can bring.

And who brings all these stories to life? A writer, of course. Without writing, where would we be? Word of mouth is only trustworthy for so long before it stretches and bends into something else. History is only solid when it is written down. That story bouncing around in your head won’t stay there forever. It needs to be written.

While we, as people, crave stories as a world in whole, as individuals, we each seek out stories as diverse as we are. From fiction to nonfiction, romance to politics, fantasy to historical, there are all kinds of readers out there. So also, does there need to be writers ready to provide it them.

Still, most writers have doubted the sanity of writing at one point or another. Some question the worth and value of their works. Others routinely feel guilty about the time they spend scratching on paper or tapping keys. Then there are those who view the time they put into writing as self-indulgent. And, most writers worry that there are other, more important things they should be doing with their time.

Such drivel!

WRITING IS IMPORTANT!

YOUR WRITING IS IMPORTANT!

Writing matters because the world needs stories.

So, writers, do not doubt the worth of your work. When you find yourself questioning the sanity of spending hours on end putting down words, remember that the world runs on stories: big and small. Whether it’s happy, sad, fantastically bizarre, written to upset the status quo, funny, or comforting, your story will be written in the unique way that only you can write it.

(Photos from Bing images license: free to share and use)

Color Me Green: Illness, Love, Jealousy, and Permission

I'm feeling a little green around the gills. 

Strep throat is visiting me again. When I went to the doctor the yesterday he examined my throat and said it was not too red, but he would do a swab test just in case because I am high risk--I'm around elementary kids and one of my darlings coughed right in my face the other day.

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You know how you read all the signs, posters, and degrees on the wall in the little check up room while you wait?  All the posters were the same size, more like info-graphics than straight out 'read-me' text. They were laminated. The degrees told me this doctor finished up school in the last few years. While I waited he printed out and an organized OTC medicine guide he'd made himself. He even including herbal remedies. Somehow, it all reminded me of my classroom. He really made me chuckle when he came back in and told me my 'spidey-sense' was right--maybe because I had on a Daily Planet t-shirt and he thought it was the Daily Bugle?--and that I did indeed have strep throat.

Our love is evergreen.

My boys--son and hubby--each gave me a gift yesterday. Son came home from school to have lunch with me. We've been in a rough patch lately; he's sixteen, 'nough said. He made a cup of coffee for me, brought it to me at the kitchen table, and scooted his chair around to sit by me. I was Tweeting my pitches for #PitMad. We trolled the feed and laughed at some, wondered why some were getting likes, and he pointed out a very select few he thought were interesting. At one point I realized this was the least tense I'd felt with him in a while--it was kinda bitter sweet.

Hubby knows I love Pho and that the best in town is made by the mother of our Club member, Lan. Unable to get his hands on that, he stopped at the next best place and brought home hot soup for my poor throat.  He even asked for extra Hoisin sauce. He's my hero.

I'm controlling my green-eyed monster.

I know the literary world is competitive--at that is part of the rush of voluntarily putting myself on the chopping block by entering competitions like #PitMad or #PitchSlam. Unlike other writing competitions in which we send our pages off to some journal or organization, and then waiting to hear back in a month or two, these competitions tease the bejezzers out of us because of the Twitter feeds.

I admit I was glad for the commiseration of my son yesterday when we searched the feeds for entries similar to mine, and found one or two which got 'likes' from agents requesting pages--while mine did not.

Honestly, I don't think the pitches were any stronger than mine, nor did my green-eyed monster. So what made the difference for the agents? Did they see the other posts first? Had they met the author(s) at conferences? Is the universe sending me a message?

How the heck do I know!

I just have to remember the words of wisdom I have heard so often lately, 'it's all subjective'.

I am giving myself the green light.

My plan is to keep moving forward. The long and short of it is to use what I've learned to polish my pages--again--and then start the querying process. 

In the meantime, I have a historical romance in the planning stages and a sci-fi MS I can pick up again. A few short story competitions are on the horizon and I have a great local writing group to keep working and celebrating with! My network is spreading on-line, I have new CPs, and I am inspired by the perseverance and encouragement I find from these connections.

There is work to do.

The Rejection Letter Blues: Reading Is Subjective.

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The other day, I received another rejection letter, but it came with some very kind words. What stuck in my head were the words 'reading is subjective'. It got me thinking about my time in culinary school.

On this particular day, the assignment was surf and turf. My shrimp and steak were cooked to perfection but the instructor didn't like the fact I sliced the corn on the cob into pin wheels, thinking it would be easier to eat. He said it would have been better if I scraped the corn off and mixed it into the rice. So, I received a 99 on the dish.

          Needless to say, I was a little upset. I was a bit of a perfectionist when it came to my dishes. (Okay, maybe more than just a bit). Not only did my food have to make your taste buds do the happy dance but it also had to be pleasing to the eye. So, I thought to myself, you're really going to knock a point off cause you would have preferred the corn mixed in the rice. From that point on, every time I brought a dish to an instructor to grade, I had to remember to cook my food my way and not worry to much if he was going to like it.

          I thought about how similar this is to sending out queries to agents. Maybe my manuscript won't make said agent's brain and heart do the happy dance, or be pleasing to his or her eyes. That's okay. Because I know, one day, I will find that one agent who will love my manuscript no matter how much I 'slice' it.

          When you get the next rejection letter and it says something like this: "I couldn't connect with the material" or "I couldn't get emotionally connected to the characters," remember it's said agent's no and someone else's yes. 

Believe in yourself and your writing, and always continue to write, write, write and read, read, read.

Mindgames and Mindsets

When it comes to writing contests and making submissions, I've had both success and ... not success. Both required patience while waiting for results. Neither gave me the head trip I've been on this last week after submitting to #Pitchwars.

What is Pitch Wars? It's a fantastic opportunity to gain a professional literary business mentor who will help you whip your full manuscript into shape with the goal of presenting your query and first page to an online gathering of agents. In past years, about half the participating mentees walked away with agents.

Unlike other submissions, this one comes with a full on, engaged Twitter community. Which is great-really. The mentors and the mentee hopefuls are kind and uplifting. They are endlessly supportive and giving. They are also a group of relentless teasers. (Which, to be honest, is half the fun.)

Literally, as in #PWTeasers.
Thus, the mindgames.

I've been following the Twitter feed for a week now-a habit I never had before. I'm pulled in by the hope, the slight (yes, 1% chance this year) promise my manuscript will get picked for mentorship.

I started trolling the feeds. Searching for teasers about my MS. Scanning for hints a mentor read, liked, and will maybe pick my submission. I laugh at the wit and banter and tell myself to stay strong, knowing a hint about my MS is bound to pop up.

Now, I am trying to keep my game face on. The one that does not let the slow, creepy crazy show through. Did I enter the correct email address on the sub form? Did the file really upload correctly? I think one mentor got it-so does that mean the others did too? I read there were a few upload glitches-what if mine was one and I never find out? I could miss my chance. So many doubts.

Reading the #Pitchwars and #PWTeaser posts from so many upbeat people reminds me a lot of Growth Mindset.

Growth Mindset is a huge buzz word/phrase in education, but is applicable anywhere.
Basically, if you believe you can make positive changes and continued growth, then you can.

The human brain is remarkable. You've heard of dendrites and synapses, those parts of the brain which carry electrical impulses and information? You can make more of them and then connect them together to create a sort of superhighway for information transfer.

The brain can also shut down, or at least parts will not function at their fullest potential if you have deficits. Deficits can come in many forms, like self doubt.

These lead toward Fixed Mindsets, or the idea that you cannot get any better than you are right now.

Though they do not know it, the people of Pitch Wars are reminding me to keep my Growth Mindset and 'stick-to-it-iveness'. I may not get a mentorship. I may not even get my current manuscript published. But I believe I have the guts to continue and the will to learn more.

Success is in my future!

Once again, the writing community is teaching me a lesson.

Could You Be a Situational Procrastinator?

I might be a situational procrastinator. 

What do you think?

-I knew I was getting an ear infection, but wanted to finish The Last Kingdom on Netflix, so I put off going to the doctor until after regular hours and had to go to the urgent clinic. (I guess this is a weird king of Kuddos to the show.)

RESULT: My ear is killing me despite the meds and I wish I had gone sooner.

-My son is nearly ready for college application time. I wanted some bonding-time with him this summer, so jumped right in and planned a trip for the two us. 

RESULT: Seven days, five states and three schools later, we learned a bit about each other and it was a great experience. 

-I go back to teacher schedule on Monday. For two weeks my teacher inbox has been pinging with meeting and training announcement. There are two I am to complete from home and that I am avoiding, one for a new district wide tech program and one that comprises of six hours of online video torture followed by a repeated testing salt wash.

RESULT: TBD. Truthfully, I'm not a rule breaker and I hate to miss deadlines, so I will get these done. But you can bet I won't start the tech training until the day before it's due and the other doesn't HAVE TO be done until October, so....

-With school starting back I should not have been surprised when I got the call to go move my classroom (its a yearly ordeal). I thought I was smart by asking about this problem at the end of last year (was told I would not move and thus packed the cupboards full instead of sticking everything in easily transportable boxes), but alas...

RESULT: I got my butt up there and moved my stuff and got the basic setup of the new room done. Why? Because this work effected other people. If I did not do my part, others could not do theirs.

-Weeding. Sucks. I am way more interested in sleeping in while I can than getting up early (so not to die of heat stoke) just so I can pull weeds from a 120 ft long rock garden. Especially since hubby already bought this grass/weed killer easy pump thingy for me and I haven't use it. Yeah.

RESULT: I weeded. I sprayed. I left the pulled weeds in the grass planning to ask my son to take the mowing over them to pick them up. I didn't ask or he didn't hear and they stayed for a week. The weeds dried up nicely in the sun, got watered by the irrigation system and now I have MORE weeds.

-At the start of summer I sat down and made a spreadsheet of upcoming writing competitions. It is a great sheet, in order by date and then alphabetized with all kinds of handy columns. I then picked two I thought I was nearly ready for.

RESULT: I was overzealous. No, I could not meet the deadline for a travel article because honestly, I couldn't decide if my ideas or trips were article worthy next to the other already published articles. I did start taking notes for a short story idea but decided not to enter because the idea is too big for a short story (I'm not abandoning it, though. It's on the slow burner for now.)

-Scanning through Twitter last week, I came across the #PitchWars writing competition. I emailed my writing group buddies who have manuscripts completed, agonized over my query and synopsis, and edited my 1st chapter for the 123rd-130th times.

RESULT: I made my submission yesterday. Two days before the end of the sub window. 

Is this kind situational procrastination normal?

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Yes. We all avoid situations which we find disheartening and wind up finding our happy place instead-my ear infection being a prime example. 

It's also a matter of motivation. Looking over my list, I found I am more motivated by close deadlines and taking action when other people are counting on me.

"Chronic procrastinators have perpetual problems finishing tasks, while situational ones delay based on the task itself." (source)

I take heart in this statement. I am not a chronic procrastinator. I finish many tasks and finish them well, thank you.

But I do have this problem...

“You know what you ought to do and you’re not able to bring yourself to do it. It’s that gap between intention and action.”

This quote below seems reasonable to me. As a busy person, one must learn to prioritize. Sometimes work wins, sometimes home life, sometimes massages and pedicures win.

"...procrastinators calculate the fluctuating utility of certain activities: pleasurable ones have more value early on, and tough tasks become more important as a deadline approaches. 

The more I read of the source article, the more I believe I am not the typical procrastinator who never completes a task, or makes lists of jobs to do, does one, shuffles the list, and does one more.

Maybe I am not a procrastinator. 

I don't fit anything on the list from Psychology Today.

After reading, this article (which I plan to share with my students), I think what I need to focus on is my attitude towards tasks-make myself find the positives and just get started. Again, looking at my list above, I can see how I've done this for the items I started on right away.

How to find the positive?

Here is a compounded list of steps from the Positivity Blog which I plan to take.

1. Find the optimistic viewpoint in a negative situation.

4. Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.

6. Add value and positivity to someone else’s life.

7. Exercise regularly and eat and sleep well.

11. Mindfully move through your day.

Self-Doubt: The Poison Ivy of the Mind

A few weeks ago, we made our annual summer migration to central Minnesota. There are lots of little chores that accompany getting settled in our new place, most of which my husband and I share equally. There's one job that I do all by myself, though.


Our neighborhood, like many wooded areas in Minnesota, is overrun with poison ivy. When I say overrun, I mean it's the predominant foliage anywhere it isn't actively destroyed. Our yard is mostly free of the stuff, thanks to the diligent care of the previous owners, but when we arrive each summer, I'm tasked with eradicating any adventuring sprouts.

I grew up in northern Minnesota, running wild through the woods whenever weather permitted, and I have never once reacted to poison ivy. I suspect I am immune to its toxins, although I won't be rolling around in woods to test that theory any time soon. My husband, born and raised in southern California, is allergic to everything. He attracts mosquitoes, ticks, and pollen like squirrels to a birdfeeder, and his immune system overreacts to it all. He's never come in contact with poison ivy, but I honestly fear what would happen if he did. We're talking hospital stays and IV meds. As a precaution, I fight the poison ivy that constantly threatens to overrun our yard alone.

As I sprayed the other day, I fretted about my recent lack of writing. June was a blur of vacation, packing, migrating, unpacking, and celebrating major life events with people I love. Alone, each of these is enough to derail my process for a few days. Back-to-back, like they were this year, they've erased much of the year's progress toward accountability and motivation.

Confidence is like the cyclamen, one of my favorite flowering houseplants. With the right attention and care, it improves your writing with its vibrant energy. Turn your back and it keels right over and dies.

The beautiful, flowering bed of confidence I so carefully built on my successes in April has wilted from neglect, overrun once again by the poison ivy of the mind, self-doubt. How dare I call myself a writer if I'm not writing? What if there are no more ideas? Why would anyone want to read what I've written?

The noxious weeds of self-doubt are many and they are hearty. They thrive on neglect. Just as I am the only one who can deal with the poison ivy in our yard, I'm the only one who can weed out the self-doubt spreading through my mind.

My husband's safety and health are very important to me. I go after poison ivy aggressively and without hesitation because I know how dangerous it could be for him. Self-doubt is just as dangerous to my own mental health and productivity. I need to apply the same enthusiasm to eliminating it. If only it were as easy as finding the right poison to spray.

I've been doing some reading on self-doubt and how to overcome it recently, and I've found several articles that proves helpful.

• Here's a brief summary of self-doubt, how it develops and some of the ways it can manifest. 
• Although I generally mistrust anything that claims personal growth is "simple", these 7 Simple Steps are clear and reasonable.
• This article discusses why self-doubt can be so convincing and shares 11 Ways to fight it.

My research also led me to information on Impostor Syndrome.

• This article explains what Impostor Syndrome is and what it looks like.
• Here, the author talks about why Impostor Syndrome isn't actually a syndrome at all and how it's even more common than most people think.
• The end of this article about Impostor Syndrome outlines some coping strategies.
• If you experience Impostor Syndrome, you're in good company. Many very successful people struggle to accept their own success.

The poison ivy around my yard is turning brown and withering away. Perhaps, if I apply these tips liberally, my self-doubt will begin to do the same.

Do you struggle with self-doubt or Impostor Syndrome? Care your tips and strategies in the comments below! 

Measures of Success

Like everyone, I came into this life with a specific set of natural strengths. Unlike many, my natural strengths - organization, reading comprehension, attention to detail, intuition - dovetail nicely with the established norms of our public education system. As a result, I put very little effort into learning as a child. I listened to the teacher, did what was asked of me in class and scored very well on assessments (excepting math). I did very little studying or practicing.

Over the years, I occasionally came across challenges outside the realm of my natural talent: organized sports, foreign languages, musical instruments, the aforementioned maths. My experience with these tasks all followed a very predictable pattern. At first, I would feel excited and confident, sure I was about to join the ranks of the other natural athletes or musicians I knew. For the first month or so, I’d gather information and learn the basics. Things would progress nicely as I learned the details and organization of the task. Then, I’d hit a wall. Suddenly, I’d reach the steep incline in the learning curve, the point where you have to take all the rules of the task and practice them over and over until they become automatic (perfect example of this, check out this you-tube video about Collin Burns, Rubix Cube single-solve champion). Unless you are born with an innate skill for the task at hand, you must fail repeatedly so your brain can differentiate between the right way and the wrong ways to do it.

Because I learned so many things quickly during the first decade of my life, I had very little experience with failure. I didn’t know how to respond to my own lack of ability. When you’re an infant, failure is the norm, a necessary and oft-repeated step toward success. But when you forget that failure is a form of progress, or worse, convince yourself that the lessons inherent in failure are unnecessary for you, it morphs into something different. Failure becomes a trauma to be avoided.

To avoid the embarrassment and frustration connected to the trauma of failure, I learned to quickly walk away from activities if I couldn’t scale the steepest parts of the learning curve effortlessly. I didn’t play softball or volleyball with my classmates. I quit piano after a combination of overconfident song selection and reliance on last minute practice resulted in a horrific recital experience (there were public tears … I still can’t think about it without flushing in embarrassment). I learned the letters and basic vocabulary of the Russian language quickly, but gave up when I couldn’t immediately formulate fluent conversations with them. Most disappointingly (and having the most lasting effect on my future), I developed psychosomatic symptoms - headaches, stomach aches, hot flashes - whenever I walked into a math class.

Instead of facing these challenges head-on, I ran from them, hiding my insecurities behind the facade of my natural abilities. I barely passed my math classes in high school, but nobody seemed to notice or care because my natural talent for reading, writing, and intuitive test taking allowed me to shine in all my other classes.

Fast-forward to my adult life and you can see the same patterns emerging. Fortunately for me, intuition and a talent for language arts often fool people into thinking you know more than you really do. They also form the foundation for my chosen profession, teaching. (I’ll never know if I was drawn to teaching because it came so easily to me or if teaching was easy because I was so motivated to do it well.) Life progressed for a number of years.

Then, life changed, as life has a habit of doing, and I found myself looking for a new calling. Given my penchant for reading and writing, I’ve always toyed with the idea of being a writer. Here was the opportunity. Writing well enough to be successful in life and writing well enough to be successful as a writer are two very different things, however. It wasn’t long before I found myself face to face with a learning curve so steep it looked like a wall.

So I stopped. I dabbled in other things. I lounged around. I watched Grey’s Anatomy in its entirety. Twice. I spent a lot of time thinking about how much I wished I could be a writer. But when I actually wrote, I saw an impossible chasm between my ability and my desire. Ira Glass describes this perfectly:

The thing is, I’ve slowly realized that I need to write. There is a catharsis in writing that helps me recognize and confront the demons of my life, past and present. Just as I felt called to teach in my earlier years, I feel drawn to write, to express myself, to shape my thoughts into a specific pattern of words and commit them to paper.

It’s been five years since I first decided to try writing “for real”. I’ve spent more time avoiding writing than I have actually writing. Whole years have passed without me writing anything because “I’m busy” and “I have responsibilities” but mostly because I’m terrified of failing at something I want so desperately.

My periods of focus and progress have gradually lengthened. More importantly, my periods of paralyzed inactivity have gotten shorter. Life continues to present obstacles and distractions. My family’s needs loom -- more important, or simply more insistent, than my own -- sometimes for weeks. Once the external interruptions have passed, though, I return to the work. Internal barriers no longer intimidate me in the way they once did. I face the agony of sitting in front of a blank screen until the dam breaks and the words flow.

I am learning to see failure as a learning experience instead of a trauma.

The Joy of Rejection

"By the time I was fourteen ... the nail on my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing." ~ Stephen King, On Writing

I received another rejection letter the other day.

I have a self-imposed submission schedule that requires me to put at least one story out there into the big, bad world each month. Last month, I entered three short story contests and completed one conference application that require a writing sample. This month, I've already entered three contests and I have plans for at least one more.

I make each submission assuming it will result in a politely worded "thanks, but no thanks." As a new writer, I think I'm at an advantage when it comes to handling rejection. Although my loved ones assure me that I have talent, I've never gotten that kind of feedback from someone who wouldn't have to make eye contact with me across the Thanksgiving table or didn't have to worry about me unfriending them on FaceBook. I'm confident enough in my own writing to be willing to share it with others, but not so confident that I expect any of those others to pay me for the privilege of sharing it with more people.

When I receive a rejection letter, it becomes a badge of honor. "You took a risk!" it says. "You did something hard and scary and even though the worst possible thing happened, it didn't kill you!" The letter goes in my binder so I can pull it out to remind myself of these things the next time I'm hyperventilating over the terror of hitting "Submit".

I've survived enough rejection letters that my heart barely skitters at all when I see the name of a magazine or writing contest in my email or mailbox. (That's a lie ... my heart skips all over the place. But I don't get that vision-blackening rush of blood to my head anymore.) A rejection is a rejection is a rejection, right?

Wrong!

This time, while still rejecting my submission politely, the letter also included the following:

"We want you to know that we considered your entry to be in the top 15% of entries for this particular contest. We don't rank stories past the top ten, so we can't tell you exactly where your story would have placed, but your story was definitely one of the more successful entries. "

Cue the whooshing of blood rushing to my head. It still makes me feel a little dizzy just to re-read it. They want me to know that they liked my story! An actual professional with no emotional tie to me said something encouraging to me!

This is my favorite rejection letter so far. I can't wait for the next one to show up.