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Tag Archives: decisions


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Being like our characters- finding courage to go for our dreams


Photo by oktavianim

So, I quit the Day Job.

I gave them four months notice, so I’m still acting professionally and not leaving anyone in the merde. I’ll save as much as I can in that time for an extra financial cushion. I have a story all planned out, ready to start writing, a novella I want to get written and published fast in the hope of having a trickle of money coming in before I leave.

Now of course the fear kicks in, the fear I won’t be able to write it as well as I envision the story. And of course, I won’t.  Nowhere near it in first draft, but it will get closer to the story I see with each successive draft, until I know it’s close enough and ready to send out to the world.

I still feel the terror though. Of not being good enough. Of being found out to be a fraud, I write so much about writing, yet I can’t write. Of truly finishing something and putting it out there to be judged and criticised.  Of failing at this grand big plan to have it all, damaging one dream (the house in Australia, the reson for my savings) for the sake of another (being a full-time writer).

That’s the risk I take. I did a process of thinking what my “brand” will be as a writer. Basically, what my stories will be about. What the consistent themes are readers can expect from my books. This wasn’t actually for me as Autumn, this was for another pseudonym I’ll be using for my hotter stories. It’s all about my heroines growing their confidence. Owning their power. Overcoming the fears and limitations that have run their lives.

I realise, these are the themes of ALL my stories, possibly all good stories by any writer. In the erotica written under the pseudonym, it will be an extraordinary sexual encounter that catalyses her change. In my stories as Autumn, it will be the demands of the developing relationship. To have the relationship, she needs to change what holds her back.

Yet all these things are what I need to do too. I’m still letting fear and limitation run my life.

I don’t think I’ll be having any unusual sexual experiences, or a new relationship. But I still need to change. I need to find that strength in myself. I need to find the courage to overcome my fears. I need to stop giving away my power, and use it like a battle axe to slash through the wall of limitations I’ve surrounded myself with.

Making chance is big and scary and risky. Last week I had the high of making the decision and acting on it. This week, I have the crash, the dealing with the consequences.

I still know I’ve made the right decision. I need to take this chance now. Playing it safe in the Day Job was keeping me small, giving me excuses to not be all I could be. It’s time to go for it, but pay the price. The price is needing to face this fear. Needing to face the insecurity. Needing to face that it might all go wrong, spectacularly crash-and-burn wrong or quiet whimpering wrong.

Also, needing to face that it might all go right. Fear of success is just as big an issue as fear of failure. The only truly safe thing is to never try. Or to say I’m trying, but procrastinate. Waste time. Write about writing instead of actually writing. Sub stuff far too early as a safety mechanism.

It’s time to stop all that. Time to stop playing it safe. Time to take the risk and do the work. Time to stop being a wannabe and a couldabeen. I’ve “tried” to work at my writing. But Yoda was right. there is no try. Only do, or do not.  It’s time to do. The fear will always be there. It never goes away, according to my multi-publisher author friends.

But we can still do it anyway. No lucky charms needed. Just enough courage to get started and keep going.


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The writing shed, day 2. And another writing decision.


Photo by timsnell

I’m exhausted, and I’ve done no writing today. Lots of thinking.

I worked in the shed all day today. Doing work I hadn’t planned on, caulking all the gaps between every single board, between the walls and the floor and the walls and the roof, down the corners where the wall panels meet, and that 10mm (3/8″) gap under the windows the wind howled through. It took three tubes of gap filler! Worth it, I think, even though time-consuming. It should make a big difference to how weatherproof the shed is. I didn’t take any photos as there are only so many photos of an empty shed anyone will want to see. Just imagine three huge tubes worth of white lines across the last photo!

I’ll be back at the Day Job tomorrow, but Thursday I can start putting up the foam insulation panels.

And hopefully start work on the rewrite of the Christmas story.

I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’m glad I left it a few more days to start. I need that extra distance. before I change anything.

Though I’ve made a big decision. I’m going for an idea I had early on in the development phase of the story, and was strongly tempted by but ultimately rejected as less suited for the particular Call for Submissions I wrote the story for. I’m making the hero and heroine much older. Late fifties or even early sixties instead of twenties.

It works far better for me that way. I just like it. I think it will add more poignancy, too.

It will mean more of a total rewrite. It also means it won’t really be a category type romance any more. It will be a feel-good Christmas story that also happens to be a love story with a happy ever after. So I’ve pondered the differences between single title and category romance.

How to know- this idea is category, this idea is single title? What’s the dividing line between category-style romance, an ST romance, and an ST with strong romantic elements? How does the  writer’s mindset need to change when approaching the story?

I’m guessing it’s the tropes, the focus on the relationship, the need for secondary characters, just how big a canvas the story needs to be told the way the calls for. Discussion with my CPs suggest that ST can get away with more humour, less of a black moment.  Many of the romantic ST’s I’ve read have been fairly light and fluffy, a kind of grey moment and not the real black BM needed for category. More feel-goodish. But there still needs to be some sort of ”all is lost” moment, or there’s no story. The sh*t hits the fan moment (the nursing meaning of BM!).

So, I’ll be writing the story as a single title, with older protagonist. It will be unsaleable, of course, but at least it will be unsaleable as the story I wanted to write, not the story I thought I ought to write!

A lesson I need to learn.

Still waiting to do the post on my CP’s wonderful debut. Launch is delayed a couple of days. My next post… fingers crossed.

Oh, and the photo has no relevance at all to the post! I couldn’t find one I liked that did, and I love this one.


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Fear of beginning a big scary story- or fear of subbing?


Photo by verityatthedisco

I’m feeling stuck- conflicted about what I should write what’s best for me to write.

A few days ago I did a post on starting a new story, and committing to finishing it. I need that so much! I am a serial starter. New story ideas come to me easily, I get excited, do a bit of planning, start the story, and give up after a few chapters. Or i finish first draft and never edit it. Or I get as far as editing a partial enough to submit, get a rejection, and again the story languishes, because I’m off with the next exciting new story.

If I took the same approach to my love life, I’d have gone through about forty-something boyfriends in the last ten years, instead of being happily looking forward to our tenth wedding anniversary in Paris next April!

I’m running through my list of unfinished stories since I started writing fiction again in January 2008.

It’s worrying.

I haven’t properly completed a single story. Ever.

By “completed” I mean not just first drafted but edited and rewritten and made as good as I possibly could.

I thought I had with one, the novella I wrote last December, but I was wrong. All I really did was tidy up and gently tweak the first draft, when it needed some serious cutting and rewriting in parts. I saw that straight away when I re-read it a few months later. So much that was wrong with it became obvious. It’s a wonder I got such a kind rejection! “Let a story sit as long as you can before re-reading it” is my favourite advice for self-editing. I was totally blind to all that needed editing when I’d only just finished first drafting it, on a deadline and needing to submit fast.

That one hasn’t been finished yet. I saw I could take it two ways, rewrite as a longer story and go broader and deeper, or cut it in half for an even shorter novella. I started the longer rewrite, but stopped after two chapters, enticed away by a new story idea.

My story files are a clutter. I’ve got four other first drafts through to “The End”. One of those, I’ve edited the partial for submission, got a nice rejection, and started a complete rewrite. I’ve got another three or four stories around a third to half-way first drafted. There are more that are just two or three chapters that were abandoned. I’ve got a lot of first chapters, written for contests or just because I had a new story idea, that I didn’t take any further. Then there’s the big folder full of story ideas I haven’t started yet, just jotted a page or two on, but I don’t make myself feel any guilt about that.

It’s all the unfinished stories that I’m guilty about.

I publicly committed to completing the next story I start. I have to get in the habit of finishing what I start, if I want my writing to ever be more than a hobby. So I’m developing the story now. The problem is, it’s going to be huge. far bigger, both in word count and complexity, than anything I’ve ever written before. My guess is this story will take around a year just to first draft. Probably as much again to edit. It does scare me. It scares me silly.

But in a comment on that previous post Mike perceptively suggested I may be using the big story as a way of hiding from another fear.

If you fear rejection, then embarking on a brand new, multi-year writing project might not be the best thing to pursue at this time. A shorter, more quickly completed story will force you to tackle that submission fear of yours sooner rather than later.

Then you can send out the short work while writing the longer one.

Initially, my reaction was “No, course not” but now I’m wondering if maybe he is right. Am I using the big story as a way to avoid more rejection?

Possibly.

It’s interesting that when I looked at the editing last thing I subbed, the rejected novella, I chose to go for the longer rewritten version and not the shorter easier fix. Part of that was because I wanted to enter it into a first chapter contest, and the longer story is a better fit for the publisher’s submission guidelines. (In the end, I missed that deadline anyway.) Now I’m also considering if I didn’t want to do the shorter version out of fear of needing to sub again so soon.

I can see how the 22k novella could be a different, much stronger story as the 10k version. Doing that wouldn’t stop me still rewriting it as the longer 50k version if I wanted to, because so much needed changing for that it would be a complete rewrite anyway. I’m thinking, while I slowly develop the very big 100 k story idea, which will need a lot of prewriting planning, maybe I should do the 10k  rewrite of the rejected novella.

It was so clear on re-reading that the story could have ended around 10k. That’s when the emotional issues
actually resolved. The other 10k was a sex scene and a lot around resolving the external block.

Yes, I had it totally back to front!

In romance, the characters really do have to resolve the external issues BEFORE the internal emotional ones. That’s because the main story question is always ”How do these two very different people overcome all the blocks in the way of them committing to a truly loving relationship?” not “How do they solve the external problem?”

I do want to write this story. I think it could be good.

Now I’m feeling torn. I know I’m scared to start the big story. I’m afraid it’s way beyond my ability to write. I want to do it anyway. I don’t want to run away from this.  I also have this contradictory desire to be writing shorter stuff and subbing. But I don’t want to use editing the novella as an excuse, a cop-out, an escape from taking on the big  scary project.

I’m going to have a go at doing both. I’ll do the development work on the fantasy story, in parallel to editing the novella.

Wish me luck!

And tell me, how do you juggle working on two different writing projects at once?


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How real is real?


Photo by RedTulipPhoto

My purpose this year is to live more authentically, more creatively, more how I want to live. Today I’m wondering, how much can I fake before I stop living an authentic life?

In the middle of colouring my hair this afternoon, the thought jumped in my head that if I truly want to live as real and as authentically as I can, maybe I should stop dyeing my hair every month or so.

I really don’t want to stop yet, so I’m hoping the answer is that I no more need to stop colouring my hair to live a real life than I need to stop wearing clothes! But I’m not sure. If I let little bits of fakery be okay, will I start letting bigger things be okay too?

I don’t think me wanting to dye my hair is a denial of aging thing so much. Once my hair is properly white, I’ll definitely stop colouring it. The problem is this in between stage, where it’s not one thing or the other. My natural red has faded and the grey is coming in, making my hair colour dull and dingy. I first started colouring it in my thirties, not to cover grey but to brighten the colour back to what it used to be. Putting the red back. Then in my forties, I tried going without colouring it for a while, to see what my real colour had become. I didn’t want the hassle of dyeing it. Chemicals. Smells. Roots showing if I didn’t get around to doing it soon enough. Difficulty finding a hair colour that wasn’t tested on animals, something that’s important to me.

I hated it.

I just didn’t feel like myself. I looked in the mirror and saw a stranger. Back to colouring. I found a brand that is reasonably priced and not animal tested. Nothing offending my ethical values or frugality. I started toning down the red a bit, so now it’s more light brown with a touch or red, more appropriate for a woman in her fifties. Nothing to shock my conservative work environment, or my mother-in-law.

But now I’m wondering.

There’s a girl I see on the train sometimes who has truly awesome hair. Multicoloured, usually orange, pink and purple, though the colours change. Her hair is a work of art, painted as carefully as any watercolour. I’m more than a bit envious.

Not so much of the hair, I’m not sure it would suit me, but of her courage to be herself. It feels as if I’m always toning myself down, like I have with my hair colour. Making myself fit in with other people’s idea of how I should be. Being a quieter, faded version of myself. Dimming my light, such as it is, so I don’t risk offending anyone by shining.

I do it with my writing too.

I read this wonderful post yesterday, by Robin LaFevers, on Writer Unboxed. She spoke about how by writing what she wanted rather than what she thought she should write , by coming from a deep personal place, she revitalised her writing career.

She wrote-  

The thing is, once we have reached a certain mastery of craft, craft is no longer the issue. In order to take our writing to the next level we must embrace our strange, unique, and often embarrassing selves and write about the things that really matter to us. We need to be willing to peel our own layers back until we reach that tender, raw, voiceless place—the place where our crunchiest stories come from. We need to get some skin in the game. It should cost us something emotionally to tell our stories. But many of us who come to writing do so because they were voiceless at some point in their lives, so doing that can be the most terrifying risk of all.

Just as we must dance as if no one is watching, we must write as if no one is reading.

Sometimes the only way we can get to a place where we can do that is when everything else we’ve tried hasn’t worked, or has worked minimally. Years of encouraging “great writing but I’m just not passionate about it” type rejection letters. Languishing in the mid-list. Or having a career tank altogether. Sometimes, when you have nothing left to lose is when you finally have the courage to stop holding back.

I look at the first few stories I wrote when I first came back to writing four years ago. Badly written, with no grasp of story structure or character arc or point of view or scene and sequel or any of that stuff. The pacing is terrible. Yet it had something my more polished writing now lacks. A fire. A passion. A quirkiness that’s what made it mine, my unique voice. I was writing for myself, not to meet what I thought the publisher I targeted with my later stories wanted.

Somehow, I need to find a way to marry the two, the craft skills I’ve developed over these years with the story that’s real for me. I want to find the characters who don’t just speak to me, they sing to me. I don’t have anything to lose. Now is the time to start being real with my writing again. Now the time to get passionate about it. Now’s the time to remember why I used to love storytelling so much, because I could make anything happen. Anything.

As for my hair, maybe the most real thing is to make it the colour I want, not the colour that’s “appropriate”, whether that’s brown or letting it be grey. Next time I dye it, I’m putting more red back in.

What about you? How are you limiting yourself to fit in with other people’s ideas of how you should be?

A cross post with the group blog, Seven Sassy Sisters. Except there are eight of us!


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Beating the clock


Photo by pOOfkAt

I’ve been feeling time pressured this week and beating myself up for not getting enough done. The Day Job has been more demanding than usual, and I can’t wait until I get to drop back to working two days a week.

I need to change the counter in my sidebar that counts down to a date I’d set for quitting the Day Job. It’s not happening. 

Leaving work altogether would have felt great for the first few months, but then those money worries would kick in.

Darn it! It’s the grown up decision, but a part of me still wonders what would happen if I’d chosen differently when instead of letting me resign, my employers offered me the option to stay on part-time, to kick in as soon as someone new to replace those work days started.

Initially, I resisted, but now I feel it’s the wisest choice. Played right, it could offer me the ideal combination. Enough time to write and do the other things I want to do like gardening and sewing, but no financial worries to distract me. It feels a better choice to have less free time and less money worries. Once I actually start making some money from writing, I’d choose differently, but right now I have too many responsibilities to be reckless.

We should get by on half my current salary. Just. It won’t be easy. Things will be tight, but doable if we are careful.

Added to that is still getting the stimulation of going to London twice a week. Seeing people. Being in different situations. Hearing other stories. Walking along Oxford Street and seeing what colours and shapes and accessories the shops are promoting and people are actually wearing this season. Seeing people on the Tube with interesting faces. Getting a small dose of the big city buzz as well as our country town slowness.

What worries me is that I will be less focused on my days off. Already, I’m feeling I’ll have so much time I don’t need to worry. But I know how easy it is to fill days with doing things yet get nothing done on my real goals. If I still am not writing when I have five days a week to do it in, there is a biiiiiig problem with my attitude and my motivation. Having no income and needing to get submissions out there to have any chance of getting any cash coming in would work as a powerful motivator! I’m concerned having enough to get by on will make me lazy, complacent, less driven.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing, too. Maybe I need less pressure, not more. Space to relax and let my creative self stretch out and find her own pace.

But I want to make sure I don’t fritter away as much of my time on silly stuff as I do now. Ebay. Mindless blog hopping. Sometimes it feels like the equivalent of channel hopping on TV. Though that’s not always a waste of time. I learn some good stuff and find some interesting people that way.

I think (hope) I’m actually spending more time on that now than I will when I’m going out to work less. I come home from the Day Job brain fried and feeling a need to relax with something completely undemanding.

Of course, it’s equally possible that coming home and diving into my current story would be just as relaxing, with the added sense of achieving something! But then I wouldn’t be able to talk to my husband and do other things while I’m messing around on the laptop.

Maybe it isn’t as much of a waste of time as I think. Maybe I can stop beating myself up for this one. Maybe I can be with what is and just observe what I’m doing without judging it.

I do very much want to set up good habits for when I do drop my work hours. The concept of “spending” time is a good one. Time may not actually be money, but just like money, I only have so much time so I want to make sure I use it wisely. Which isn’t always the same as sensibly.

Sometimes goofing off and having fun is the best use of time possible. I need to read another chapter in The Artist’s Way
and add in the concept of artist dates. Time doing something just for the creative self to enjoy, to be nourished, to fill the well.

Busy busy busy doesn’t do that. Ever. No matter how much it tries to tell me it will help.

Unlike money, I can’t make any more time. I want to be sure to spend it in the ways that are best for my authentic self. Which just possibly might not be the constant “doing” my inner slave driver demands of me.


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Disappearing days- and new decisions


Photo by Amulon Photography

 

Disappearing. That’s what’s happened to the last few weeks, they have, quite literally disappeared, with not much to show for them.

 

After the see saw ride of a week while Mum was in hospital, and all the will I- won’t I about whether I should go, a phone call from my sister three Saturday’s ago decided me. I had to go, and I was on a flight to Australia that evening.

 

I stayed over two weeks, came back to the UK, and straight back to work, still jetlagged, so no time to blog.

 

No internet connection while I was there, either, only crazily expensive access via my mobile to send an email or two a day to my husband, who I missed a lot.

 

I’m very glad I went, I know me being there helped everyone. A big, unexpected expense, but worth it. Going was far less stressful than staying here and trying to keep working, and supporting my sister over the phone and email, and worrying about Mum and Dad would have been.

 

Being there wasn’t stressful. Emotional, yes, especially seeing how much memory my father has lost and how it affecting him. Challenging at times, especially the first few days. After that, it felt like a strange sort of holiday, an interlude out of time. I cooked and shopped for them. I did some patient education around managing their health conditions. I tried to get Dad to see his doctor and talk honestly about his problem. I went for little walks with them, as far as they could manage. I went with Mum to her cardiologist. I supported them in getting some home help set up. I helped my brother understand what was going on.

 

I also did my morning pages. I wrote some more on my Wrong Brother story, which is morphing into something very different to what I first thought it was. I read a lot. I enjoyed being back home in Sydney, my real home, not just the place I live. I heard a lot of stories about when my parents first met and their early married life before I was born.

 

Taking that time to be with them was a gift to me as well as them.

 

Then I came back to England. Went back to work. Caught up with my internet writing buddies again. A week after I got back, that time out feels almost like a dream, lost time, time that didn’t really exist, that just disappeared.

 

Yet it changed things.

 

It deepened my relationship with my parents. A true adult relationship, untainted by past hurts. My husband seems to appreciate me more. He missed me, the first time we’ve been apart for over 24 hours since we married. The Day Job seems to have missed me too. I planned to give notice in mid May, give them time to get my replacement in place before I left in Mid September. Instead, my boss is offering me part-time work, a job share. The thing I asked for first, before I decided to resign, and they told me couldn’t be done!

 

I felt so strongly about needing to leave. Giving myself time to explore writing full-time, really focus on that. Though the finances worried me. The fact that unless I sold straight away, and maybe even then, I knew I couldn’t afford more than six months of full-time writing before I’d need to find at least part-time work. Also, being back home and seeing how things were with my parents had got me knowing that I need have enough money to go back twice a year, if possible. And I would love to buy a little doer-upper house in a country town, to have a foot on the ground in Australia.

 

I’d asked for that in my Morning Pages the last full day I was there. Then I had this offer. It felt like an answer.

 

So, I’ve made a decision. I’ll take the part-time position, and delay giving myself what I’ve dreamed of, writing full-time. It’s a dream, and a good one, but I’m not ready for it yet. I need to develop my writing further first. I need to be more ready. I need to be in a better position financially.

 

I’m not giving up, by any means, just modifying my goals. Doing it more gradually, a staged withdrawal from the Day Job. I’ll only need to go two days a week. Yes, they’ll be two very long days, and I’ll still have the commute, but it’s only two days a week. That means I have five days not at the Day Job. The balance has totally shifted. If I can’t write more with five days off a week, I won’t in seven days, either. I can’t use the Day Job as an excuse once I drop my hours. And I will still be earning enough to support the household, just. No money for many luxuries, but just enough to get by on.

 

Maybe even enough for the one luxury I really want- that little house in a small New South Wales country town I like a lot, about four hours drive from my parents. It will need to be cheap. It will need to be rented out to help pay the mortgage. But there are a couple of possibles I want to look at when Arthur and I go back again next month on our planned holiday (tickets paid from by last year’s Qantas cancellation debacle!).

 

In the meantime, I have a new writing goal. There’s a new story idea that keeps nagging me, but I promised I’d finish at leat one of my older stories before I start anything new. Time to stop adding to the long string of unfinished stories I’m trailing behind me. The truth is, I’ve never truly “finished” a story. I’ve only finished first drafts, and I’ve started far more of those than I’ve seen through to The End. I’ve never edited and polished an entire story, only partials. That needs to change.  

 

So, I decided.

 

I’m rewriting a previously rejected story entirely, taking on board the advice I’ve had about what needs doing with it. It was quite rightly rejected. In effect, I subbed first draft. It’s quite nice first draft, I edited as I went for language. But it’s still hardly better than cleaned up first draft. What I left out fixing was story structure. And good old Goal Motivation and Conflict. I had relationship blocks, but not convincing ones. My heroine had no reason for doing any of what she was doing. No reason to keep rejecting the hero. The start was too slow moving, the pacing too leisurely, the emotions just not deep enough.

 

I do believe in the story and the characters though. I know they deserve better. So, I have a goal. To rewrite and polish polish polish the first chapter, do a synopsis, and send it off for the Harlequin Romance Fast Track, by April 23.

 

I need to get moving on that!

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