This Writing Moment

NaNoWriMo Screen Shot, Nov. 15, 2019.

It is possible that I’ve never been this far behind. I just clocked 16,077 words. I’m supposed to have over 25,000 words.  I am 9,000 words behind.  I can get stuck on the behind part. 

But, I’ve written over 16,000 words.  Words that did not exist on Oct. 31.  Beautiful words, awful words, wrong words, right words, misspelled words, typos, beautiful similes, forgotten vocabulary that has shown up in my character's mouth.  Words.  

I’m not even counting the poems I’ve written, the postcards I’ve written, the posts I’ve written.  

Here, in this writing moment, I’m creating a new world, a character I love with a wicked sense of humor that I think is actually showing up on the page (I don’t often write funny though that’s been a goal of mine).  I’m just showing up to write every day and letting the words come. 

It will be a mess.  

But there is so much joy in this writing moment. In getting these words on the page, in the morning, in the evening, in between chores, in between renovations, in between grief and rage.  

That is all there is--this moment, today, to write.  I do not have to worry about tomorrow or November 30. I’m just focusing on showing up today and learning more about my characters by throwing obstacles in front of them.  

And today, I’ve had a very good writing day. 

New Year, New Habits

My Digital Commonplace and Bullet Journal. Image © Lori Gravley

One of my big struggle as a writer has been seeing everything I do to forward my writing as writing work. 

I was just lying on the couch with a blanket over my feet when my husband walked in, sat down, and started talking to me.  We conversed for a while, and then he said, “What are you up to today, just chillin’?”

           

And I (somewhat defensively) said, “No, I’m working.” He raised an eyebrow.

“I’m a writer,” I said (perhaps still a bit defensively), “part of what I have to do for work is reading.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, “I wasn’t being critical.  Just chillin’ is okay.”

I apologized for being defensive. 

But I’ve been working on this over the last year, learning to credit my research, craft reading, and genre reading time as actual work time.  Obviously, I have some more work to do.

I recently read the advice (again) to stay off social media and email until I’d finished my daily writing goals.  And really, that seemed to me to be an invitation to look again at what my work was and what it wasn’t, to draw clear lines between work and socializing, between work and leisure. 

As a writer, those lines are often blurred.  So I’m test driving two new practices in my writing life. 

The first is a bullet journal, a physical journal in which I keep my datebook, my goals, my yearly calendar, and records of my intentions and my progress.  The small calendar I’ve used for years has served me well for a long time, but as my organizational development work has increased, it’s become more difficult to see my year as a whole and sometimes the days get filled up.  Also, there wasn’t enough space to track daily intentions the way I’ve been longing to do.

The next is a digital commonplace book.  I love commonplace books, and I’ve kept one in bits and pieces throughout the years, but physical commonplace books are a problem for me since I can’t read my own handwriting.  So, this year, to help track of my ideas for future projects, my research for smaller projects, my poetry starts, and quotes that move and inspire me, I’ve begun (I started in December) to keep a digital commonplace book on my desktop.  So far I have thirteen pages, and I haven’t quite figured out how to label and organize it, but I love having a place to keep my ideas.

I’ll write more about these new habits (and older ones) in January, but for now, I’m excited to be off to a great start on what look to be promising tools to remind me about all that do to advance my writing career even when it looks like I'm just chillin'.

That Space Between Waking and Sleep

Image © Lori Gravley

I’m not always good at waking myself in that threshold consciousness, between sleeping and waking, that's supposed to be so good for tapping the unconscious.  But I do notice that space in the middle of the night when I wake up to go to the bathroom.  I’ll stumble to the loo, eyes barely open.  Then on the way back to bed, my feet will hit a rhythm and a line or two will rise in my head.

Usually, I just nod back off to sleep and forget I even had an idea, but on good nights, I’ll pull out my phone and record an audio note or even pull out the iPad and type a line or two.

I know, I'm supposed to keep a pen and pad by my bed, and I’ve done that, but the next day, I can’t read what I wrote.  At least my electronic notes are legible. 

I’ve been working on a new book of connected poems for children, this time on a subject not a person, and last night, when I woke up, two lines from two separate poems rose up.  I lay down and said them over to myself a few times.  I’ll remember them, I tried to convince myself.  But I knew that was a lie. 

So I rolled over.  I’m in a hotel, and it was too much to try and convince Siri to connect to the internet.  I just tapped the lines into a note on my phone.  Tonight, when I sat down to write, they were waiting there.

It’s so easy to beat myself up for all the things I don’t do, and such a joy to do what I know I should.  Those two lines became two separate poems tonight.  Maybe the lines won’t even make it into the final drafts, but they were little gifts waiting for me at the end of a long day, gifts I sent to myself. 

Tonight, I’ll try to have patience with myself when I wake up, whether I write the words bubbling up from sleep or not.   

Yes and No

I know I recently used this, but I should have saved it for this post.  Image © Lori Gravley.

“Everything will be okay in the end, if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

This week, I got some great news.  A poem I submitted earned a first place prize which included a writer’s conference scholarship and publication.  An anthology that included five of my poems was accepted for publication.  My CSA asked to use on of my pictures from last year for their cookbook. 

I also got some disappointing news.  I wasn’t chosen for a mentorship I applied to, and one of the agents who had a full of my poetic memoir declined to represent me.  Her note was lovely and she had high praise for my work, but she felt she was representing too many verse novelists.  So, the answer was no.

Guess which bits of news I thought of more often.

This writer’s life is full of yesses and nos.  I understand that, but I hate no.  I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere in my childhood, I learned to hate it.  In fact, I stopped asking for things because the answer was so often no. 

It’s normal to dislike no, but I have such a strong aversion to it that for a long time I didn’t ask for people to read and accept my work.  I’ve been working with that aversion. 

But I’ve been wondering, recently, what other effects this aversion to no has had on my life.  How much do I avoid asking for things when the answer might be no? How often do I do it myself instead of asking someone who might say no?

I started a practice of sending out my work, knowing sometimes the answer would be no, but it’s a practice fraught with anxiety.  I wonder if I need some new mantra to repeat to myself.  The quote at the beginning of the post attributed seems to be a good place to start. 

My work and my writing life will find their right place in the end.  If they haven’t found a home, it’s not the end. 

Now, to move that mantra into my heart. 

Impossible Things

Photo Credit: Amanda Patterson http://amandaonwriting.tumblr.co

Last year, at the end of every month, whether they wanted it or not, I sent a list of my accomplishments for the month to my tribe.  This practice wasn’t for them. They usually read the emails, but that wasn’t the point.  The point was to take note of the things I was doing to forward my work as a writer.  To treat myself with the same seriousness in the career I chose as I did in my other work where I regularly had to write weekly or monthly status reports or training reports. 

It’s always nice to have an audience, so I think I might have worked a little harder some months knowing that my friends would be reading the work I’d done for the month.  I called these my “Six Impossible Things.”  And six things was what I was aiming for though I frequently produced more. 

Halfway through the year, I realized that the list of things was much more important to me than it was to my friends.  Go figure.  There was power in keeping track.  There was power in noticing the ways that I had turned this self chosen career that I hadn’t been paid much for (I made $100 on my writing last year) was something worth being attentive to, was something worth noticing.

So I paid attention.  I noticed the work.  Something amazing happened.

I began to think of the work I do as work not just a hobby.  I began to defend it and the time I spent doing it.  I began to take myself seriously as a writer. 

So, how can you take note of the work you do for you--whether you’re a fiber artist, a writer, a poet, or a dancer?  How can you keep track of your work in ways that show that the work holds meaning for you?  How can you do the work so that it’s easy to show its meaning to others? It’s only April.  Most of the year is before you.  How can you honor your passion?  Do it.

Why I Want an Agent

Photo ©  Lori Gravley.  

I have my writer’s group.  Over five years, almost 52 weeks a year, we’ve met, growing only large enough to fit at a single table, though sometimes I notice others join us and write along. Not for four hours like we do and not at 7 AM, like we do.  So, I’ve got my writing group.  Sometimes, I meet them other days and we gossip and complain and plan and cajole and support and then we write.  We always write.

And I’ve got my critique group.  We all have a practice that works.  And we practice and we read and we share what we read and we share the work and look at the work from angles, finding its facets and trying to make it shine a little brighter.

And I’ve got old friends and students.  We email and message and like and smile at each other from a distance. 

I’ve got my presence.  I post a blog a week now, and three or four encouraging messages on my author feed.  I post photographs to Instagram, sometimes incessantly.  Beauty is everywhere.  And I’ve got my website, and every time someone puts one of my words online, I share it there.  And tinker here and there and grow my friends.  And I read poems I love on the radio at WYSO Public Radio in Yellow Springs, OH, not all the time, but a couple of times a month.  And really, I don’t want to do much more than that because all that leaves just enough time to show up for work, everyday.  And I do.  Two hours or more each day, including weekends.  During the week, I aim for six-hour days, but no matter what (even when I'm traveling around the world for the work that pays the bills), two hours.

What I don’t have, and what I desperately want is an advocate, an adviser, someone to help me grow my career, someone to run my too many ideas by and help me parse out which ones might sell.  Someone who lives inside that publishing world I’ve danced around for so long who can show my work to people who will love it.  I want another pair of trained eyes to look at my work and ask me just the right questions.  I want someone who will believe in me when I can’t quite muster that belief and who will allow me to work knowing that my work might just find the right readers. 

I want a midwife and a doula.  Fifteen percent of what I earn seems a reasonable fee for someone who will do my work in the world so that I can work in the worlds I’ve made in my head. 

I could publish things on my own, and I might.  The historical projects I’m working on may not be saleable.  Or maybe the contemporaries with their little edge of paranormal will have missed the shining paranormal moment in publishing as a reader last year said.  In that case, with these projects I love, I’m willing to work on my own and even pay to get them out in the world.  Someone out there needs those books, and they can’t find them on my hard drive. 

I can publish things on my own.  I’m a poet.  I write a lot of poems that I have to send out (220 last year, thanks Duotrope), so it’s not that I’m afraid to do the hard work of sending things out.

But even with all the opportunities to publish on my own, I want someone on my side.  Someone who will take those saleable concepts and sell them, or at least try.

I want an agent.