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| Well, isn't that calming? |
Now that I have less work time, I'll use what I do have for real work.
And now that I've shut down the blog for a while, I feel that I have so much time for other things. Which is almost certainly a delusion, but I'm enjoying it now.
See you on the other side.
Pressures and emotional angst of all sorts come with writing. Time pressure and angst are particularly grim, because it occurs at every stage of writers' careers. Many people think they've got the time issue under control, so much so that they can throw together some ideas and get it published. This stuff is all over the Internet, magazines, and bookstores.
You're reading some right now.
Five o'clock in the morning is not the only time to write.
How much time do people gain getting up at 5 in the morning, anyway? An hour or two before they need to shift to their nonwriting life. We're not talking Michel de Montaigne, here, who back in the sixteenth century took to the tower at his chateau and spent a couple of decades writing and rewriting some essays. We're talking a pretty small piece of time, and those of us who can't deal with the whole 5 AM thing can look for small pieces of time elsewhere in our day.
Remember, many time management authorities suggest working in short units or segments of time, anyway, because our efficiency starts to dwindle after that. They suggest taking a break after forty-five minutes--or even twenty--and then going back to do another twenty or forty-five minutes of work. Eventually, the work done in these short spans of time adds up.
Mother-writers could serve as time models. In The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer at Literary Hub Olivia Campbell quotes author Alison Stine:
"You can't be precious about writing if you have kids. You can't be fastidious or fussy. You can't always write at the cool coffee shop. I applied for a NEA grant at Burger King: They had free wifi and an indoor children's playground...I wrote my most recent novel draft during my son's remote school Zoom meetings. My first novel, Road Out Of Water, I wrote at the local skatepark, where my son belonged to the skate club."
Note that she doesn't say anything about getting up at 5 A.M. to write.
In case you don't know, by "precious" Stine means being concerned about things like the correct time to be writing. I'm going to argue that mother-writers aren't the only writers who can't be precious, fastidious, or fussy about writing at the correct time of day or in the correct place. Or anything at all.
Unless we are very successful writers with plenty of income so we don't have to hold day jobs and can pay for childcare, we're going to have to squeeze writing moments out of our personal time.
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Read all of The New One by Mike Birbiglia Also watched one of his Netflix stand-up specials. More to come on this.
The Mustache by Robert Cormier. This was part of a group of short stories listed as epiphanies, and the only one of them I've read so far. Turns out, I recognized it. I'd read it before. Here is my personal Robert Cormier story. Many years ago, I stumbled upon a website list of well-known Franco-Americans. Cormier was listed as something like "Our leading Franco-American writer." Shortly thereafter he died, and I thought, "The position of leading Franco-American writer is open!" I don't know who got it, but it wasn't me.
Hana Sushi by Anita Lo I liked this a lot. I just realized that it's about eating, something I like to write about. I read this as part of researching Smokelong Quarterly.
Kaleidescope by Lizzie Lawson This is a supernatural story that feels normal. I think its flash format serves it well. It's complete. I don't want more.
Pin Me Pink by Lizzie Lawson I cannot recall how I found Lizzie Lawson or thought I should read her work, but this is another piece I think works well as flash. Also, there's an incongruity here that I like that has nothing to do with it being flash.
Likely Ways I Might Appear In A True-Crime Documentary by Sara K. Runnels Part of my New Yorker humor reading. I liked this even though I don't watch true-crime documentaries. That is an issue when you're writing humor. Will everyone get the humor or just the circle of people who know what I'm writing about? Oh, no! Sara K. Runnels has published a lot of humor and essays that I now feel compelled to read! I have to add her page to my reading list. Soon I will have so many reading links on my iPad, to say nothing of my ebooks, that I won't be able to lift it!
Yesterday afternoon I read a number of articles on Tay-Sachs Disease among French Canadians for the writing project I'm not supposed to be working on. I was falling asleep and this reading revived me, which is very odd because my understanding of the workings of DNA is extremely shallow and limited.
Last spring I wrote about trying to use a Swedish event, Gokotta, that occurs between what are two temporal landmarks, at least for them, Ascension Day and midsommer. Gokotta involves getting up early with the birds to experience nature. My plan was to get up early for that period and instead of experiencing nature, work.
No, that didn't work for me at all. It lasted two or three days. I can't even recall what time I was getting up then or a single thing I did.
But that was then and this is now, right? I think that's a Zen saying.
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| Waiting at bus stop, first day of school |
Quite honestly, I hated it when my kids got to the morning torture period of their education, when they had to be up at the buttcrack of dawn to catch a bus that drove up the street before many adults living here left for work. Getting up with them was a horror show for me, and I continued to do it, right up until they graduated, even though they were old enough and capable enough to get themselves up and out of the house themselves. I felt they shouldn't have to do something I wouldn't do.
Parents dread having their kids leave for college, but they get over it in about 48 hours because once the kids are out of the house, the parents can almost certainly sleep later. Even if they have jobs, they probably don't have to get up as early for those as high school kids do for school.
Unless they're teachers, of course. Then they're slaves to the academic schedule and calendar for their entire working lives. As a graduate of a school of education, I know for a fact that no one warns you about that.
Two local not necessarily literary events included/will include local authors in examples of thinking outside the box for book promotion. They are also examples of reaching readers who don't necessarily find their books through the traditional bookstore and library route.
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| One group of porchfest musicians |
The porchfest we attended was along a main street and the musicians were set up in front of stores and restaurants, creating a porchlike atmosphere, and performing at different times. Big variety of types of music. This porchfest also had businesses and artisans set up in the street, which had been closed to foot traffic.
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| P. Jo Anne Burgh |
An interesting part of the Jo Anne/Porchfest/Gail story: She posted at a Connecticut Authors Facebook group we both belong to that she would be at Porchfest Wethersfield. I didn't know her, and I hadn't heard of this porchfest thing, though I live maybe 20 to 30 minutes away from where it was being held. I googled Porchfest Wethersfield and decided I wanted to go. I met Jo Anne, bought her book, had a great morning, have been talking about porchfests with family members ever since.
My point being, this is an example of social media marketing working. I don't know that it works as well or as often as the publishing world hoped when it latched onto it. I don't know that it works in big ways very often. Book titles going viral are probably pretty rare, and I don't know that viral Internet attention for a book necessarily leads to big sales. But I do believe it works in small ways like this.
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| A lot of authors over 2 days |
Goal 4. Submit Adult Books To Agents
The Guncle by Steven Rowley. More to come on that when I finish.
A Peach by Any Other Name Is Just as Gross: My Terrible Fear of Fruit by Sheila Jackson at Serious Eats I'm continuing to check out Serious Eats as a potential market for my eating essays, and I was delighted to see that this one was written by someone who is not an award-winning food writer. I was also interested in this particular essay because I have a number of family members with fear of food, including fruit.
The Incredible Super Power of Flash by Dinty W. Moore at the Brevity blog. Moore, who is a big name in flash nonfiction writing, covers compression in this post, which I had heard of but forgotten about, and layering, which I hadn't heard of. I am reminded of how much work I need to do.
How-to at Medium: I read a couple of pieces by a guy giving advice on how to do well writing on the Medium platform. They were not very good. Medium is a very different writing world. Years ago, I read that there are two kinds of writers--writers who write to support themselves and publish through the New York City publishing world and writers who write to support their academic careers and publish outside the New York City publishing world. I think an argument can be made now that there is a third kind of writer, who writes and publishes on-line, where content about personal experience is king and craft takes second place. IMHO. I've also been reading up on Medium's boost program. You don't want to know.
Reading for a new project: Though I said earlier this year that I'm through with book-length projects, I'm toying with taking a shot at a mystery set in the late nineteenth century. I've read a bunch over the years. So now I'm reading up on things like attitudes toward French Canadians in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century, the craze for bicycling in the 1890s, and women's corsets. There were cycling corsets back then. Like sports bras but bigger.