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.

Cautionary Tale or Two

I'm going to talk about two things. The first incident occurred early on in my career at the day job (but I believe it's applicable to any professional situation so please bear with me). I was assigned to a cross functional team drawn from all areas of the institution, and we were charged with implementing a new financial system that was going to change literally everything about how the business side of the house ran. Or so we thought anyway! As it turned out, we did "pave a lot of cow paths", by which I mean we forced alterations and workarounds and customizations with a big C onto the vanilla software. But that isn't what I want  to discuss.

So there were meetings. Ton of meetings. Hundreds of meetings. By the time I was assigned to the effort, along with many of my peers, it was a done deal that the institution WAS going ahead with this effort. We were supposed to make it work. (No, Tim Gunn was not involved.) Maybe we grumbled, maybe we were apprehensive or excited, maybe a lot of things. But WE were not the deciders. That was above our pay grade. A long and comprehensive study had been made by very senior management before the path was chosen. We were on the team to co-ordinate our business siloes.

One woman - let's call her Imogene because that's not remotely her name - was the constant voice of doom. At every meeting. She took positive pleasure in telling us why  this wouldn't work and that wouldn't work, and why the whole thing was a dumb decision. She was deeply invested in the old system, knew all of its ins and outs and was NOT willing to change.<= Now we're getting to the core of my cautionary tale. I think she really felt that if she just kept arguing (at our relatively lowly level), she could reverse the sweep of change and/or be hailed as a heroine.

Senior management occasionally sat in our meetings. Imogene would rant and rail and interrupt. It was clear to me that her comments weren't welcomed. The institute was changing and we'd all been invited to change with it, not try to turn the clock back.

It was not clear to her. I think she felt invulnerable because she was such a longtime employee and regarded herself as indispensable. I think she may even have said in so many words that SHE was going to keep doing business the old way and the system could just work around her. Which obviously it couldn't because this was a fully integrated system. Maybe my memory is being overly dramatic.

Guess what?

There was a layoff, which at that time was extremely rare and unheard of and Imogene was gone. Poof.

Now to bring the discussion back to writing. The publishing world is constantly changing right now, along with all the tools and associated sparkly things. Social media, self publishing, the way we read...you name it, could have changed again this morning. Change is CONSTANT.  Maybe an author can sit in their cozy spot and continue to sell to their loyal readers in the ways that have always worked for them, and everything will be fine. I wish that were so! But I have a feeling we'd better all be flexible, open to change AND realize we can't turn back time.

I'll be more concise about the second thing. I'm on many author loops and Facebook groups, so this isn't directed at any one group or loop. People, please remember if you're in an author group on Facebook or an author loop on e mail, and you know there are hundreds or maybe even 1000+ members, don't forget that the 20 or 30 or 40 people you see post all the time are not the only people out there! You don't know who is out there frankly. So, for example, if you want to rant about someone or something, or trash someone or something, do it in private, with the friends you do know. Because I'll bet you, in a group of 1000+ people, someone will have the opposite opinion, or will know the person you're fired up about.

I'm not saying don't share your experience if you feel strongly. I'm saying there are professional ways to handle providing negative feedback of that nature, in a private message, one on one, with whoever needs to know.

And I can't leave without saying: one week left to buy Pets In Space and have a portion of the royalties go to Hero Dogs, Inc., which is a very worthy charity that provides service dogs to veterans. and if you already have a copy THANK YOU!!!

Even an alien needs a pet…

Join the adventure as nine pet loving sci-fi romance authors take you out of this world and pull you into their action-packed stories filled with suspense, laughter, and romance. The alien pets have an agenda that will capture the hearts of those they touch. Follow along as they work side by side to help stop a genetically-engineered creature from destroying the Earth to finding a lost dragon; life is never the same after their pets decide to get involved. Can the animals win the day or will the stars shine just a little less brightly?
New York Times, USA TODAY, Award Winning, and Best selling authors have eight original, never-released stories and one expanded story giving readers nine amazing adventures that will capture your imagination and help a worthy charity. Come join us as we take you on nine amazing adventures that will change the way you look at your pet!

My story in the collection: STAR CRUISE: STOWAWAY By Veronica Scott

Cargo Master Owen Embersson is shocked when the Nebula Zephyr’s ship’s cat and her alien sidekick, Midorri, alert him to the presence of a stowaway. He has no idea of the dangerous complications to come – nor does he anticipate falling hard for the woman whose life he now holds in his hands. Life aboard the Nebula Zephyr has just become more interesting – and deadly.

Buy Links:

iBooks    Amazon    ARe     Nook      GooglePlay     Kobo

Cautionary Tales and Cloud Whales

My Great Cautionary Tale: Summed up it goes like this - don't take your success (if you should be so fortunate) for granted.

We all know someone who wants to be a star, right? Maybe we all want that - if only for a little while. In the writing world, these are the people who's very first novel goes to auction. Sizeable checks follow. Accolades. Maybe awards. Praise. It's amazing stuff. And addictive as hell. After a time of hearing that you're brilliant (not the writing - you) it's easy to start absorbing that. Internalizing it. Investing your self worth in it. But success and such praise is as ephemeral as that cloud that looks like a whale in the photo above. (Yeah, yeah. Water vapor and sunlight. Humor me.)

What happens when the editor who went to bat for your amazing advance leaves? Or maybe, the books don't earn out that sizeable check? Or you break your wrist? Or . . .

Everything ends. Good and bad. If you define yourself by the stories that are told when you're riding high, how are you going to handle the inevitable disappointments that are a part of the business? How will you pick yourself up and start over when a critic pans one of your stories? Yes. I can name any number of people who've had their faces rubbed in this lesson - a couple crit partners deal with it. They had early success and their books did very well. They believed they'd done it. They had it made. And then imprints folded. A house went under. And a decade later, neither has published anything further. The joy of the writing process had been pressed right out of them. They still write, but there are a lot of excuses for NOT writing. So time slips away from them like it does from all of us.

Hell, I fall into that trap sometimes myself. On Monday, my father had a heart attack. (He's getting to okay, thanks. Also? Sleeping on hospital floors sucks.) Do you think I've written a word of my NaNo commitment? Well, I did. I'm way behind, but that's not the point. Even sitting listening to my father's telemetry, tracking the steady beep, beep, beep of his heart still beating, I wrote a few words. Writing is my refuge, NOT my definition of myself. It is a hard won lesson that I had to learn myself and from watching others. Enjoy what success comes, revel in it even, but make certain you appreciate it while you have it. Things change. And if you are unlucky enough to get knocked down for any reason, you won't have your vision of yourself shattered when you fall.

Perils of the Writer: Serving As A Warning

Happy November!  Some of you out there are doing NaNoWriMo things, and while I don't advocate it as a great way to write a novel, I do think it's an excellent way to learn about how you write a novel.  You learn your methods, and you make your mistakes.  

Here's the simple truth when it comes to a writing career: you're going to mess up.  You're going to point to the fences, swing with everything you've got, and knock yourself in the face.  And that's excellent.

 Make your mistakes.  Love them and learn from them.  And watch other people, because they will make mistakes you can learn from as well.

And that's a great thing.  It really is.  Mistakes are how we get better.  Mistakes come from taking chances.  

This includes the, "This might get me in trouble" or "This might upset some people" kind of mistakes.  Those are sometimes the best ones to make-- as long as when you look back you ask yourself, honestly, "Now, how can I do it better?"  Every book I've written is full of things I can do better, things my readers ping me with, and things I learn from.

This business WILL knock you down.  Get up, dust yourself off, and get back in it.  Hopefully smarter.

See you down in the word mines.

Linda's World Fantasy Convention Post-Con Report

First- Congrats to Marshall and Jeffe who have releases this week!!! (See KAK's post from yesterday.)

I have no idea what to write this week. My favorite cautionary tale for authors? Blank.

But I had a great time at World Fantasy Convention this past weekend. It was not heavily attended, and there seemed to be reports of panel kerfluffles pre-con, but the panel I was on was a-FRICKIN-mazing. Fantasy and Music was the title and each panelist brought something interesting and fun to the discussion, of course with Misty Lackey on the panel, it has to be good, yes? (She sat beside me! Fangirl moment!)

Outside the one panel I was on, and aside from Bartender Tony who tolerated my bad jokes like a trooper, the convention proper was a HUGE success for me. Maybe it had some to do with the fact that I am disproportionately familiar with that venue (Columbus Convention Center) as I've been to a dozen+ conventions there, but whereas I normally need some down-time from all the people, I was 100% on this year.

I didn't want to be in the room. I didn't want to crack open the computer and do a bit of work. Good god, no.

There were people over there--people I hadn't met yet who were there for WFC like me and I can't just meet and chat with like-minded folks anytime. I can write anytime at home. So I met people. People who introduced me to other people there, like writers, editors, convention chairs, etc. I put my handshake on 'em, traded business cards and did the whole networking thing.

I had such a good time.

So if I'm going to find a cautionary tale in that, it's this: get off your ass and meet your peers, your betters, and the newbies hoping to be as good as you someday. Find the editors, the agents, the publishers, the voice talent, cover artists, freelancers and the convention organizers. Meet these people and make a good impression. Find opportunities. That is what the convention is for.

Double Release Day: An Import of Intrigue & The Tides of Bara

There's a lot of celebrating happening here at SFF Seven this week. TWO of our crew have released new books! ~breaks out the champagne~ First up, our Thursday helmsman Marshall sends us back to the Maradaine Constabulary in...

AN IMPORT OF INTRIGUE

This second novel in the Maradaine Constabulary series blends high fantasy, murder mystery, and gritty urban magic...

The neighborhood of the Little East is a collision of cultures, languages, and traditions, hidden away in the city of Maradaine. A set of streets to be avoided or ignored. When a foreign dignitary is murdered, solving the crime falls to the most unpopular inspectors in the Maradaine Constabulary: exposed fraud Satrine Rainey, and Uncircled mage Minox Welling.

With a murder scene deliberately constructed to point blame toward the rival groups resident in this exotic section of Maradaine, Rainey is forced to confront her former life, while Welling’s ignorance of his own power threatens to consume him. And the conflicts erupting in the Little East will spark a citywide war unless the Constabulary solves the case quickly.

BUY IT NOW:  Amazon  |   B&N   |   BAM!   |   IndieBound

_________________________________________________________

Then our Sunday captain Jeffe drops the third book in her Fantasy Romance Sorcerous Moons series:

THE TIDES OF BARA

A Narrow Escape
With her secrets uncovered and her power-mad brother bent on her execution, Princess Oria has no sanctuary left. Her bid to make herself and her new barbarian husband rulers of walled Bára has failed. She and Lonen have no choice but to flee through the leagues of brutal desert between her home and his—certain death for a sorceress, and only a bit slower than the blade.

A Race Against Time
At the mercy of a husband barely more than a stranger, Oria must war with her fears and her desires. Wild desert magic buffets her; her husband’s touch allures and burns. Lonen is pushed to the brink, sure he’s doomed his proud bride and all too aware of the restless, ruthless pursuit that follows…

A Danger Beyond Death…
Can Oria trust a savage warrior, now that her strength has vanished? Can Lonen choose her against the future of his people? Alone together in the wastes, Lonen and Oria must forge a bond based on more than lust and power, or neither will survive the test…

BUY IT NOW:     Amazon   |   Google Play   |   Kobo   |   Smashwords   |   iBooks

Happy Halloween!

Here's a fairly simple fact about the wonderful world of writing. It's a juggling act. You work on Project Four. That's in the first draft stage. You edit Project Two: That's in the First Round Edit stage.  Not quite ready to send out, but you do what needs to be done so it can be submitted. You have to take care of Project Three: The editor and House X wants a new proposal and the first five chapters to peruse.Then there's the SUDDEN DEATH ROUND: Your publisher would like the line edits corrected on the final draft (you were late on that, no more excuses and it's time to earn some brownie points) of the manuscript that's coming out as a book much sooner than you thought it was. They'd like the entire 140,000 word MS with massive red lines and a few hundred editorial notes back in ten days. There can be no mistaking the note of Don't-Screw-This-Up-Again in your editor's email.

It can be overwhelming.

Add in a little daily family drama. Mom and her sister Lorraine are at it AGAIN. It's almost inevitable. they holidays are coming up and the debate about where the multiple family feast will take place who will cook what and whether or not to invite Uncle Wilber (He-Who-Drinks-Too-Much) is still a bone of contention. You aren't SUPPOSED to be the mediator, but they always come to you.

Bob still isn't speaking to Cousin Emily. No one really knows why, but that's going to come up soon.

That job you got to pay for this year's holidays? Yeah, that's rapidly becoming real work. Supposed to be ten or fifteen hours behind the counter and now they're asking if you could just cover for everyone who decided they couldn't actually spend the time. That's only an additional 30 hours a week (no overtime, please!) and you don't mind, do you?

Here's that thing you need to do: focus.

Set aside the time you need for your writing CAREER. A lot of times people don't want to remember that the thing you do where you're sitting at the computer every day in your fuzzy slippers with your oversized cup of coffee or tea, where you forgot to brush your hair and MAYBE even to change out of your pajamas is actually a career.

The books and short stories, those write and edit themselves, right? You were just playing around on Facebook again. It can wait until AFTER the crisis of the week, can't it?

Perception be damned it's still YOUR career and life.

Side note: Yes, I know kids make everything different, They are children and need attention and love and care. They also need down time. Or a good school to attend. And if you're the breadwinner in the family, they also need the roof over your head that your writing helps provide. Naps. Naps are good. And babysitters cane be very useful.

My point is, focus. No excuses (Understand that I consider an excuse MOST of the scenarios above. A day job is not an excuse. but if your writing is your career and the other is a job, focus first and foremost on your career. Children ARE an excuse, but if you have kids and barring unforseens and emergencies, they are a factor you can control. Focus. Find the schedule that works to make your day work for YOU, not the world around you. Set your priorities. yes, family IS important. but no rule says you always have to be the one stuck in the middle of the local family squabble.

Focus. It's hard to do sometimes, but it lets you keep all those plates spinning in the air with a minimum of broken ceramic.

The Ones Who Gave Up: Great Cautionary Tales

At last, the much-anticipated next installment in the Sorcerous Moons series, THE TIDES OF BÁRA is out! About and Buy Links at the bottom of the page.

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "My favorite great cautionary tale in the writing world."

This might even have been my suggestion, because I think it's really important to pay attention to the cautionary tales. Sure, there's an aspect of rubbernecking to these, or schadenfreude (or Franzenfreude, for a specifically literary metaphor). The key, however, is not to exult in the failures of others - because there but for the grace of the blessings of the universe go we - but to learn from them.

That's why they're Great Cautionary Tales. Don't cry wolf, don't be unnecessarily unkind, don't lose your soul to material possessions. Our core stories tend to be cautionary tales. It's up to us to take those cautions to heart and live by them.

There are many Great Cautionary Tales in the literary world, even more so with the internet ruthlessly detailing each to the miserable deaths of the final squirming pieces. I write a lot of them down and have been since I was a very newbie writer. In fact, lately I've been doing this enormous cleaning of my writing office, including files, and I found a set of notes I made back in 2000, when a writing teacher of mine won a prestigious statewide fellowship. We'd all applied, with shining puppy eyes, as we did every year. She won (deservedly), but showed up only for the awards ceremony rather than the associated conference, wearing scruffy jeans and called the honor "neat." My note says "Always remember to honor the honors you're given. Even if they seem small to you, they might be lofty goals for someone else."

When I finally received that same fellowship in 2006, I made sure to honor it.

But let's take a look at that. Six years between the disappointment of not winning -  yet again - and when I finally did. Ten years since I first applied for it.

I could cite a lot of Great Cautionary Tales, but with NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month) on the horizon, I'm going to pick this one: Don't Give Up.

Or, put positively, Keep Going!

I'm thinking back to those days of my crit group, the starry eyed aspiring writers who all applied for that fellowship. There were twelve of us, more than half who went on to publish in some fashion (from literary magazines to novels), a third of whom won that selfsame fellowship and a quarter of whom are now dead. None of them were old women, either.

But one of them, who I'll call Diana, lingers on in my mind. She was older than me then, but I'm thinking she must have been about the age I am now. A professor's wife who'd spent most of her life raising a family, she wrote these incredible stories about the passive/aggressive rage in women who gave up their ambitions. Her stories were deftly told, lyrical, and explosive. When I read Meg Wolitzer's The Wife, I thought immediately of Diana. Of all of us, I thought she was the most talented writer.

I still do.

And she never published anything, that I know of. No, she's not one who died, that I know of.

She moved away when her husband retired and we fell out of touch. She has a common enough name that Googling her would be very nearly futile. Oddly resonant, that.

The reason she never published was not because of the gatekeepers, because she was rejected too many times, because she didn't want to learn to self-publish (which back then was highly suspect anyway). She didn't publish because she never submitted anything to anyone. We were the only people who read her work. When we encouraged her to send in a story, she'd demur and say it wasn't ready. Once she confided in me that she couldn't bear for it to be scrutinized and rejected, that it was enough for her to write it.

I tried to respect that, but I think of her from time to time with a sense of great regret. When last I heard from her, she said that, with her husband retired, she'd given up spending time and energy on writing.

She gave up.

I know a lot of writers who have. It's a difficult business, fraught with challenges and opportunities to throw in the towel. It's frighteningly easy to let a small break become a hiatus that becomes a sabbatical that - years later - turns out to be quitting. It doesn't get easier, either. Many writers give up after having multiple books published by Big 5 publishers.

I'm asking you not to be one of them. Because the writers I know who are successful are the ones who kept going no matter what. Not the most talented. Not even the most prolific. Just who kept going.

This is the great lesson of NaNoWriMo, as far as I'm concerned. Writing 50K in the 30 days of November teaches you to build a writing habit, yes - but it also teaches you to keep going. To "win" - to reach the goal - requires that you don't let anything get in the way of completing those words.

It's the most necessary skill for being a writer.

So I'm urging you all: KEEP GOING. If you want to write, WRITE. Let nothing get in the way. Never surrender.

KEEP GOING.

******************

A Narrow Escape 

With her secrets uncovered and her power-mad brother bent on her execution, Princess Oria has no sanctuary left. Her bid to make herself and her new barbarian husband rulers of walled Bára has failed. She and Lonen have no choice but to flee through the leagues of brutal desert between her home and his—certain death for a sorceress, and only a bit slower than the blade.

A Race Against Time 

At the mercy of a husband barely more than a stranger, Oria must war with her fears and her desires. Wild desert magic buffets her; her husband’s touch allures and burns. Lonen is pushed to the brink, sure he’s doomed his proud bride and all too aware of the restless, ruthless pursuit that follows…

A Danger Beyond Death… 

Can Oria trust a savage warrior, now that her strength has vanished? Can Lonen choose her against the future of his people? Alone together in the wastes, Lonen and Oria must forge a bond based on more than lust and power, or neither will survive the test…

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