Stuck?? Push!

 Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is what to do when you're stuck. Stuck writing, I presume, since other kinds of stuck aren't really what we're about here.

I'm sure there will be lots of great advice this week from all the contributors on the various tricks and techniques for getting unstuck while writing. Mine is going to be at the far end of the spectrum at Tough Love. 

When I get stuck? I push.

I'm a believer in chipping away at that block and smashing a hole through it. Inevitably there's juicy stuff on the other side. I think the universe sometimes makes us work for it, and that's what I do.

Now, I will caveat this advice by saying that I absolutely don't advise anyone beating themselves brainless against a brick wall. Use your head, and not as a battering ram! There are tools for this process; use them. This is where craft comes in and skill, where having a well-cultivated imagination will fuel the process, where having excellent work habits allows for focused attention. 

Push through those sticking places - but use your words, not your fists. 

Jeffe's Five Effective Work Habits for Writing Productivity

My series rebrand of the six-book epic romantic fantasy saga, Sorcerous Moons, is complete! Book One, LONEN'S WAR, releases Friday in Kindle Unlimited (KU), with each subsequent book releasing one/day for the following week. 

This is my first (and possibly last!) real test of whether my books can be successful in KU. I've run A/B tests before and I've always made 2-3x as much money in sales on Amazon alone than via page reads in KU. But we shall see! Tell your KU-loving friends. :D 

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is The Write Stuff: What five effective work habits make a professional writer the most successful? I can only tell you mine and that's defining "success" as being productive. The other kind of success - fame, money, adulation, awards - depends hugely on timing and serendipity. But we're focusing on work habits, so here are mine:

1. Consistency

You don't have to write every day, at the same time every day - though I do extoll that as THE single most effective method for building a consistent writing habit - but consistency is key. I build my schedule around protecting my writing time and that habit carries me through all sorts of difficulties.

2. Persistence

The other piece of building a writing habit is keeping it going. So many writers give up without finishing a book - or finishing multiple books! - or they give up after a few books. Or, when attempting to write consistently, they take time off, change their minds, prioritize something else. Persistence is what gets words on the page.

3. Focus

Shut out the world, ignore the new shinies and frolicking plot bunnies. Close the office door, put in the noise-cancelling ear buds, disconnect the internet and silence the phone. Focus on the writing and only on the writing for the time that you're doing it. Think about the story and only that. All other considerations come later.

4. Integrity

Write what you believe in and write it your way. Don't chase trends or try to make your stories a clone of someone else's. This may not seem like an effective work habit, but it is! Keeping to the integrity of the story YOU are telling allows you to focus on that and not the market, or whatever the loud voices are currently shouting about.

5. Flexibility

The previous four have all been about ritual and drawing firm lines, but with those come a need for flexibility. Be ready to change up what you're doing if you have to. Reinvent yourself regularly. Try rebranding series and putting it in Kindle Unlimited. (See what I did there?) The world changes, sometimes rapidly, and we have to be ready to change with it. 

 

Persistence On My Mind

On my mind today: this gal on the right who turned 19 on Thursday. She is the picture of persistence. She ached to be the queen of the household for so many years of her life. I honestly didn't know if she'd ever get to rule the roost. Erie held the position for most of Cuillean's life. When Erie died, Hatshepsut inherited the crown. Then Hatshepsut ceded her rulership to Cuillean just before dying unexpectedly. Cuillean is the undisputed queen of her domain at long last. Even if she's deaf as a post and drags one fore leg when she walks. Hobbles. Whatever. She keeps on. 

I'm doing my best to learn from her example. 

The other thing occupying my mind is a meme someone posted to a Facebook group. It hits kinda hard and I haven't gotten it out of my head for a few days, so I'm going to install it in yours and you can ponder (or wonder why humans are so intrinsically broken - whatever works) with me.

 

You can't write through your Achilles' heel when it's depression.

 I don’t want to write this blog post. I mean, I do, but I honestly really don’t. But I feel that I need to, even if this only reaches one person that needs to hear it. So, if you’re facing writer’s block, that Achilles' heel that you can’t seem to write through, and you’re empty and have lost all joy, this post is for you.

Success Doldrums

Success and the secrets thereto. I have few of one and the other - well - let's call it a work in progress. You can probably guess which is which.

I do have a vision of what success means to me - a benchmark, if you will. It has yet to be met. In truth, it has yet to get past my second mark (a specific amount earned.) But that's okay. Because while I recognize that I am currently in the doldrums Jeffe described in her post (doldrums she has navigated clear of) I also recognize that getting free of them is up to me.

I told you last week that Dad had a heart attack. The day after I mentioned it, he suffered another. We really thought we'd ended an era there. It was a sucky weekend that culminated in me moving off the boat with my cats and moving into my parents house because my miraculously recovering father cannot be left alone just now.

Dad is the one who fostered and fed my love of science fiction. He's the one who taught me to problem solve - which might not actually be a good thing because engineer and there's always an exquisitely complicated (but fun!) way to accomplish something in weeks what would take normal people a day to do. He'd hike me into the desert and up mountains just so we could break open rocks and see what was inside. He taught me to sail and once I got married to a landlubber, he helped me convert that landlubber into a sailing addict.

At the moment, writing is lost in the honor of being trusted to help him. We manage the ebb and flow of medications. Encouraging Dad to eat just a little bit more. Going for several 7 minute walks a day with my arm tucked through his to provide him a modicum of stability.

Getting to provide for my parents in this way was never on my success radar. It should have been, because it meshes so closely with one of my writing success goals - being able to support my family with writing. So while my writing 'success' is, indeed, very much a work in progress and I freely admit to being really sad right now because I'm SO CLOSE to the end of a novel that I cannot finish on schedule, there will be no giving up. If ever I am to meet my goals it will be solely because I am too stubborn and spiteful to quit.

If you want to win contests, you have to enter. If you want to publish books, you have to write them. If you fall down, you have to get back up again. And you know, if it is possible to develop super powers, that's the one I'm working on - the getting back up part. Over. And over. The novel will get finished. So will the next one. And then the one after that. And maybe somewhere in there, I'll cross another marker on my way to career success.

The Secret of My Success

This week's SFF7 topic is The Secret to My Success – defining success and how to get there. For me, this post is going to be strikingly similar to last week's on writers I've known who gave up.

First, let me note that the photo above is six and a half years old. The enterprising zoomer will be able to see that the cover letter is dated May 13, 2010. The document on that (obsolete) laptop is a different book, one none of you will recognize.

I took this photo then to make a point - and for a blog post on Taking the Leap.

I was all hopefully sending off that novel, called OBSIDIAN, for consideration at DAW books. If you did zoom in, you'll see I name dropped Catherine Asaro, who was wonderfully generous in reading and encouraging me. All of you sharp-eyed readers will be no doubt saying, "Hey, Jeffe - you don't have a book with that title!"

Indeed I don't.

But I do have a book titled ROGUE'S PAWN. Published not by DAW, who actually never replied to me (at least, I can't find any record of it if they did), but by Carina Press in July of 2012. More than two years after this wrenchingly hopeful post.

I'm telling you folks - it's emotional for me to look back on that post. I don't know how it reads to you, but it clicks me right back to how I felt then. My first book, an essay collection called WYOMING TRUCKS, TRUE LOVE AND THE WEATHER CHANNEL, had come out in 2004. While I'd been publishing essays and stories in various magazines and anthologies since then, my writing career felt entirely stalled. I'd been traveling one to two weeks out of every month for the day job and had no good habits for producing work. When I sent this manuscript, we had been in Santa Fe, NM, for about nine months, after over twenty years in Wyoming. I'd even written a blog post right after we moved in called Now, Where Did I Pack My Writing Career?

I sound pretty blue in that post, don't I?

So, I took that photo above, partly in celebration that I'd managed to get something done. A big something. When I uploaded the photo - I remember this quite clearly - it linked me back to years before, when I first decided I wanted to be a writer instead of a scientist. Sometime around 1996.

We lived in this tiny house and my stepchildren were still kids, living with us part time. David helped me (really, I assisted him) convert the old coal bin into an office so I could have a quiet space to write. (We blew black snot out of noses for a week - nasty stuff.) And wow, that makes me a little teary, too, thinking of how enthusiastically he did that for me. We ripped out the "insulation," which was mainly newspapers dating back to 1913 when the house was built. We had a heating duct extended to the room and an electrician install outlets. We put in real fiberglass insulation, drywall and carpet. I have a lot of nostalgia for that little room and my desk there.

We were big into creative visualizations - picturing the success you want. But I didn't know how to picture success as an author. Should I imagine books on shelves, winning awards, being feted by fans? (I always think of that scene in Bedazzled, when Brendan Fraser as a writer arrives at the party.) All of those things felt tangential, and largely about ego. Besides, how did I know what my books would look like, to picture them. So, I settled on visualizing the manuscript, a big stack of paper filled with words, ready to send off.

Exactly like the one above.

And, hell, it only took fourteen years!

Thus, My Secret: Persistence. It takes as long as it takes. KEEP GOING.