Tag Archives: Motivation

Publishing’s Rocky Road Continues – How to Keep Traveling On

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Publishing’s Rocky Road Continues. You’ve completed your manuscript, revised it, polished it. You’ve followed the advice in my last post, Literary Agent Search Savvy. You’ve submitted to the right agents for you, not exclusively, but no more than six at a time. Now, as if out of bright blue nowhere, the anxiously awaited call or email has arrived. An agent is seriously interested in your work, maybe even a topnotch agent. Hallelujah!You think you have exited Publishing’s Rocky Road. Think again. Don’t get me wrong. A momentous thing has happened in your writing life. You have captured the attention of an agent, not an easy thing to do. Good agents don’t waste their short supply of time requesting work that has not genuinely attracted them. But this doesn’t mean you’re off Publishing’s Rocky Road. You have detoured onto its unmarked byway, the Wait-Wait-Wait Highway.

“I’ve already been here,” you exclaim. You have most likely traveled through a pile of submissions and a pile of rejections too, wait-wait-waiting what felt like eternities in between. The current view beyond your windshield may feel and look a lot the same, anxious and skimpy on roadside attractions. The order of the day is once again to Wait-Wait-Wait, and waiting periods are trying, in civilian life and in author life.

Console yourself first with this reality. You have already traveled the hardest leg of this adventure. You have conceived and created an entire book. A book that is attracting positive attention in the land of the publishing professionals. Do not ever underestimate that accomplishment. It is the foundation of everything to come, and it hasn’t crumbled so far.

So, why do you not feel consoled? No matter how far out of control you felt in your initial agent search submission phase, this new phase somehow feels more out of your control than ever. During that initial period, you dropped your work into multiple black holes, expected rejections and, when one came, made another drop into the next black hole on your list. It was something to do. Now there is only a single repository and nothing to do but, you guessed it, wait-wait-wait.

So, how do you keep from losing your mind? Right here, I’m going to say something that sounds so lame, so Pollyannaish you will want to climb through the screen and wring my neck. To jeopardize my neck even further, I must preface that something by agreeing with you. This phase of your struggle to become published feels so far out of your control because it is. And, here comes the I-get-throttled part. You must simply let go and travel on.

What did she say? I said you must let go of longing for control and let your work find its way. Harder still, you must have confidence that it will. While you attempt, however imperfectly, to build this confidence, turn to your first powerful resource, the rest of us, your writer friends in your writers’ community. We are your shoulders to lean and/or cry upon. Whether you need a strategy session, a consult, or just a boost in the spirits-up department, we are here.

Next, get back to work. If you’ve not already done so, dive deep-down into your next book or continue your series. Professional authors are forever moving on to the next project, which keeps us from bogging down with anxiety over the one that’s out there in the publishing world ozone. It also guarantees we will have a continuing career, bent upon producing a shelf load of books eventually. Disciplined forward momentum prevents, or at least lessens the severity of, running out of fuel along Publishing’s Rocky Road.

Never forget that you are tenacious. You have traversed this far on an obstacle-strewn path. From that process, you have forged your own personal template for doing so again and again with each new project. Have faith that will be the case, and take my word as well. I have watched it happen with countless authors, including myself.

In the meantime, there is the joy of the doing. The joy of the writing work, at every stage of its challenging course. You are on that course, moving along it, as well as deeper into it. Publishing’s Rocky Road Continues, but you, with fire in your belly, are ready for the ride. Bon voyage.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

A Wrong Way Home – Alice Orr’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 1 – is a FREE eBook HERE. Enjoy!A Wrong Way Home

Alice’s latest novel – A Time of Fear & Loving– Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE. Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving. “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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How to Manage Your Writing Time by Managing Your Writer Psyche

Writers Life

Time Management imageQuestion: What is my biggest writing time management problem? Answer: Me.

If you’d asked me this question last month or maybe even last week I’d have said this. “My biggest problem with managing my time to write is all of the demands made on my hours and my energy and my spirit too. So there!”

Reassessment tells me this is not the true answer to the question. Why not? Because it leaves Me totally out of the equation. As if the power in my life to live my life and parcel out my time somehow resides outside of myself in other people and other circumstances.

The true answer has been banging on my head for a while now. Often from the advice wise friends have tried without success to give me. Also from my own observation of other – or the same – friends. Even from my priest who’s been talking a lot about self-care lately.

My biggest problem with managing to find time to write is the same problem I have with managing too much of my life in general. I simply do not know where to put myself in the lineup of my priorities. As one of those wise friends of mine put it – I don’t put myself at the center of my life.

I’ve been long conditioned for this behavior. My mother used to tell me I wanted to be at the center of things. As if that wasn’t at all where I belonged. Even my sainted grandmother raised me to believe that if I wasn’t making the world a better place I shouldn’t be here.

All of which I interpreted as a clear admonition to put everybody else first. To do everything I could for everybody else whenever possible. And most pointedly – at least in my hearing of it and therefore in my head – that doing for myself or taking care of myself was a bad thing.

BTW both of those women followed their own advice. One of them did so with teeth gritted and resentment in her heart. Happenstance didn’t happen well for her. The other did so with love and kindness in her heart and she fared better. But not as well as she deserved to or should have.

Meanwhile I carried on the family tradition by leaping straight into the helping professions in first one form then others. Schoolteacher. Community organizer. Social worker. Book editor. Literary agent. That last requiring perhaps the most outpouring of self of all.

Guess where most of my time was spent through all of that. On other people’s needs. And where it was not spent. “You have a right to have your own needs satisfied.” That was another wise friend talking to me. My response was to stare at her as if she were speaking a language from an alien galaxy.

I’m telling this story first because I need to tell it. But even more so because almost every writer I know – maybe almost every person I know especially if she’s a woman – needs to hear it. Because so few of us put ourselves solidly at the center of our own lives.

In particular we don’t put ourselves at the center of our writing lives. Ask almost any writer what she’d do if she were truly taking care of herself. If she were truly satisfying her own needs. That writer at her most honest would say this. “I would spend more of my time writing. But I don’t.”

We need to change that. Specifically we need to change our minds about that and our hearts too. Otherwise we will never be able to manage our time or our energy. We will never be able to give our hungry spirits what they require to be satisfied. The opportunity to express themselves.

Not to mention we won’t be able to manage our writing careers either. So there!

 Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com                    http://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter                    http://www.twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks 

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A Villain for Vanessa ECover (1) 100 x 150px - 14.6KB - SmallA Villain for Vanessa – coming soon – will be Book 4 of Alice Orr’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense series featuring the Kalli family and the Miller family in stories of Romance and Danger. A Wrong Way Home – Book 1 – is a FREE eBook at Amazon and other online retailers. All of Alice’s books are available at her Amazon Author Page http://www.amazon.com/Alice-Orr/e/B000APC22E/

 

Writers’ Resolution Number One

Writers Blog, Writing Tips, ,

Idea LampThis is a picture of what I call my Idea Lamp. Things I most need to remind myself about my work are taped and pinned and clamped to the shade and even to the shaft.

The boldest print is allotted to the reminder I need most of all. Though sticky notes encroach nonetheless. “SPEND MORE TIME WRITING” it reads in solid caps and purple Sharpie ink underlined five times.

Those words require that much force of emphasis for me. Especially right now for two reasons. The first is obvious. “At this time of the rolling year…” Charles Dickens would begin. I continue “… I catapult myself into everything BUT writing.

I tell myself I’m doing it for family or for the sake of the season and its spirit or simply because I enjoy the leap. All of these are true but they don’t tell the entire tale or warble more than a few verses of the entire carol.

I’m on vacation to be sure. Vacation from what? Vacation from the problems that writing never fails to impose. Those problems are the second reason I need a resolution with the power of a well-aimed boot behind it to catapult me back to SPENDING MORE TIME WRITING.

My current challenges involve the in-progress fourth novel in my ongoing series. The new story is titled A Villain for Vanessa and it poses special problems. As special as your problems with your current project whatever it may be.

These are the boulders that make up my particular roadblock. We each have our own boulders and our own roadblocks. You and I and everyone else who has ever written down words we hope will be read – from Bob Cratchit’s pen nib to now.

We each have a story of what our individual boulders may be and how formidably they’ve been stacked in our personal path. The common element among us is that all of our boulder blockades are cemented together by doubt.

We doubt that we know what to do or how to do it or even if we can do it at all. Doubt is a killer disease and for us there is only one cure. SPEND MORE TIME WRITING. Write up one boulder and over the next and through the fissures between when we find them.

Write so furiously forward the doubts can’t overtake us – and when they inevitably do – write straight past them and beyond.

Meanwhile keep your Idea Lamp burning bright at this and every other time of the rolling year. I resolve to do the same. Happy New 2016.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

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A Vacancy at the Inn is Alice’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 3 – A Holiday Season Novella. Just 95 cents. The Best New Year’s Bargain Ever at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B017RZFGWC.