Friday Done List August 21

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Finished two Seeking Time essays, one of which I've published. I'll publish the other tomorrow morning. I want to go over it one more time, and I suspect evening isn't the best time to publish on-line. 
• Promoted the first Seeking Time essay.
• Have the subject matter for the next two Seeking Time essays planned.
• It's going to be difficult to get them both done, because I have family events going from Wednesday through Saturday next week. I'm hopeful about one of them, at least.
• There's nothing like a rejection to make me feel I'm working, and I got one of those this week.
• I also registered for a Zoom workshop with the Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop. It's happening tomorrow morning, and I just saw an email they sent me sometime today indicating there are ten of us registered. Yikes! The Off Campus Writers Workshop workshops I attend can have 70, 80 or more people attending so it's easy to get comfortably lost in the crowd and just take notes. This one I feel I'm sticking my neck out. Well, isn't that special? It's a possibility to network with adult writers instead of children's writers. I guess I better fix my hair, huh? What am I going to wear? What if my equipment doesn't work? I know it works with OCWW. This is far, far worse than, What if the other kids don't like me? Wait, wait. I just remembered. I did a couple of Thurber House Zoom workshop a few years ago, and that went fine. Or was there a sound problem with one of them? But that was definitely them. And I did Zoom writers' workshops during the pandemic. Calm-toi, Gail.
• Oh, and I spent a little time working on my market research spreadsheet for short-form writing. I found another place I can submit something when it opens in October.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• The big news is the new website that went up last weekend. We had to work some kinks out relating to posting links to it on Facebook. Facebook would show only a part of the preview. 
• Did one blog post and, you guessed it, it was about the website.

Goal 4. Begin Some Writing on the 19th Century Novel Idea

• Tomorrow's workshop is about developing a novel, and I'm taking it to help with developing this novel idea. Though I am primarily a short-form writer these days. 

A New Website for Gail. And, of Course, There's a Story Behind It.

A total reworking of my website ended up being a summer project for my computer guy and me. It is my sixth website. The last one was six years old.

Author websites are like kitchens and bathrooms. They need to be updated regularly. Plus, I am now a minimalist. The last website had four layers and thirty-nine pages. This one has 2 layers and 4 pages. That will probably be more meaningful for people who make websites. What it means practically speaking is that it is much quicker for readers to get around. You can learn the basics about all my books on one page, instead of having to go to eight individual pages to get the whole picture. This website will also be a lot less effort to maintain. 

It is also a major rebrand for me, something I've been thinking about doing for a long time. I've rebranded as a short story, essay, and humor writer. 

Why? And why now?

I Haven't Been a Children's Writer for a Long Time

My last children's book was published eighteen years ago. That means the last time I had one accepted for publication was a few years earlier. It's probably been fifteen years or more since an agent or editor showed any interest in one of my submitted children's manuscripts. I suspect that the longer I go without a new children's book publishing, the less desirable I am to agents and editors specializing in that field. 

On the other hand, I have over the last six years made some progress writing short-form work for adults. A website that presents me, to myself, as a short-story writer and essayist not only marks acceptance that my career as a children's writer is over, it gives me some enthusiasm and energy to focus on the kind of work I am interested in now. 

You may have heard that we should all dress for the job we want, not the job we have. My website now dresses me for the job as adult short-story writer and essayist that I want, not for the job as children's writer that I used to have. That could mean something to journal editors checking me out after receiving a submission from me.

The Connecticut Childlit Community Has Evaporated, So I'm Not Leaving Anyone

The University of Connecticut is the home of the Northeast Children's Literature Collection, the largest children's collection in the, well, northeast.  Speakers used to appear there occasionally. I heard the children's literature historian and critic Leonard Marcus speak there. That was a big deal. Back when the UConn bookstore was a Co-op, it co-sponsored the Connecticut Children's Book Fair, a fundraiser for the Literature Collection, bringing over two hundred writers and illustrators to eastern Connecticut over the years and, at least one year I was told, a couple of thousand visitors to campus. The Fair supported Connecticut authors (I was featured there twice) but also brought in nationally known people. Tomie dePaola came a number of times. I met Suzanne Collins there before The Hunger Games. After Barnes & Noble took over the bookstore, the Fair petered out and then disappeared. We're not talking a pandemic issue. The handwriting was on the wall for the Fair well before Covid arrived in Connecticut. 

I mentioned recently that I met Jane Yolen at UConn. I met M.T. Anderson at Eastern Connecticut State University, just up the road, where there was a children's lit course that brought authors in from time to time. I haven't heard about anything going on there in years.

All this activity is gone. Even my NESCBWI writers' group is gone. It's not as if I'm leaving anything locally, because there's nothing left here to leave. 

The On-line Childlit Writing Community Seems to Have Changed

The explosion on social media regarding Mac Barnett and his book of essays earlier this year was the end of the road for me. I had never heard of that man before everything hit the fan, and now that I've read a few of his books, I can't say I'm all that fond of them. None of that changes the fact that the way he was treated by some members of the childlit community was shockingly ugly and unprofessional. 

I noticed that children's lit people I had known for years on-line or through conferences didn't get very involved in that mess. They had very little to say, if they said anything at all. This leads me to speculate that perhaps we are members of an old guard, one that is still interested in legitimate criticism, and there is a new guard that is interested in something else. 

I am not a good fit for the childlit world anymore. And that's okay.

I Never Set Out to be a Children's Writer

When I was getting started writing, I was just interested in writing. I was interested in any kind of writing, none of which I knew much about. Children's writing was not some kind of dream. 

However, when I stumbled into it, I thought I had found my material. I was committed. Though I was still interested in trying other kinds of writing, I would have stuck with being a midlist children's writer indefinitely. 

Nonetheless, I am not broken-hearted about not considering myself a children's writer anymore. I am what I started out to be, a writer. And I am excited about at last committing to other kinds of work. 

Friday Done List August 14

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Submitted the humor piece I wrote last week.
• Submitted a flash fiction.
• Have a plan to submit a flash fiction next month when a publication opens for submissions.
• Did some work on my marketing spreadsheet.
• Only wrote one Seeking Time essay this week.
• But I published that essay!
• Have a few Seeking Time essays started. Barely started.
• Did some tinkering on some things.
• Figured out how to record ideas on to my phone and am trying to use that and transcribe every evening.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Have finished a complete and total redo of the website! Will try to upload it this weekend. We would have done it today, but I wanted to send a link to the present website to Facebook and a few family members so people would have a chance to see how huge this change is. And not just because now I have long hair.
• Managed one blog post, but it was a History Reading Project post, and that's important.

The Reading History Project: Is it Popular History? Is it Creative Nonfiction? Is it Historical Fiction?

Once again, I am going to begin by referring to Sarah Maza's Thinking About History. In her chapter How is History Produced? she says that in the twentieth century "writings about the past increasingly fell into distinct categories of "academic" and "popular."" Popular history can still be written by academics but stylistically it is written with "vivid, elegant prose, and a subject framed in a way that makes it accessible to nonspecialists by assuming no prior knowledge of the field." The subject matter "tends to be more traditional than that of academic history." The motivation for writing and reading it is often curiosity. She also says popular history includes stories, if they are not actually written as stories themselves.

I think Mill by David Macaulay may fall into the popular history category. Or perhaps it could be considered creative nonfiction. Or maybe it's historical fiction. I'm really at a loss on how to describe this. 

The concept behind this beautifully illustrated book is a little difficult for me to grasp. It deals with mills inspired by those in the Blackstone historic area of Rhode Island, but instead of using the actual mills that are known to have been there, Macaulay created fictional ones with fictional people running them. The owners and other people whose journals and letters Macaulay "quotes" never existed. This is all fiction, though the journals, letters, and narrative are fiction that reflects events of the time period, such as the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, and the arrival of French Canadians to work there. 

The depth of technical detail in the narrative describing these mills presumably is correct. Macaulay must have designed these imaginary mills that he then writes about and illustrates. So. there is fact involved with that? 

After having written all the above, I'm going to describe Mill as historical fiction. However, Goodreads classifies it as nonfiction.

Macauley is an award-winning author illustrator who may be best known for The Way Things Work. He won the Caldecott Medal in 1991, and Mill may be considered a children's book. Certainly YA. I mention this because I found the reading rough going. But I will also offer right now that a family member who is a civil engineer read it in a few hours and said, "It's a real page turner." 

I often hear that the publishing world likes books it can pigeonhole and market. I wonder if a book like this, and I think Macauley wrote a number of them, would be an easy sell these days.

What Were You Doing Reading a Book About Mills, Gail?

Well...

For some reason, I am interested in mills. I have an unsold book in which mill history plays a prominent role. If I write another book, a mill will figure in that one. I walk in the woods in Connecticut. You cannot spit without hitting an old dam or mill ruin here.

I own Mill. I asked for it for Christmas, because of my mill interest. I didn't realize the connection between the book and the Blackstone River Valley National Historic until I started reading the book just before we took off for a trip to the Blackstone area. Imagine my surprise!

We had a very hot few days in Rhode Island, so much so that we have put off a trip to another National Historic Site until next month. But we survived it.

And, yes, reading Mill while I was there, amongst the mills that inspired it, enhanced the experience.

Friday Done List August 7

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Having technical difficulties with a submission. Should be able to get that out this weekend.
• Published one Seeking Time essay. The second for this week should go out this weekend.
• Knocked off a journal entry, most of which could end up being a flash piece to submit somewhere.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Published two blog posts.
• Promoted them as well as the Seeking Time essay.
• Watched a workshop video about how AI searches for books differently than Google used to.
• Spent a lot of time working on a new website. Does that need to be done now, Gail? How do you justify this use of time? Well, I am rebranding, and I hope to do more submissions relating to the rebrand. Perhaps it would be a good thing if my website reflected the kinds of writing I'm doing. Just maybe.

A"Seeking Time" Series on Medium

No, you haven't seen much about Seeking Time here recently. When I cut back on writing for the blog earlier this year, I cut back on publishing Seeking Time essays here. But I didn't cut back on writing them. I spent close to a couple of months writing five Seeking Time essays, which I published the week before last on the Medium platform. One a day. Last week I published two more. I'll try to do that for the next few weeks.

Essays are an objective for my short-form writing for adults' goal, by the way. I wasn't just going off on a tangent here. The whole Seeking Time thing is a new objective for that goal.

I think of them as meditations on time.

Why, Gail? Why?

• I've written here before about repurposing blog material to be published in other ways. I'm very interested in doing that, and this is one more attempt.
• I've thought for a long time that if I ever did something different with my time management content, I would do so in some kind of memoir/personal essay-type way rather than setting myself up as a time management specialist, which anyone can see I am not. Publishing this series of essays at Medium gives me an opportunity to do that.
• I'm also trying to grow my Medium readership, if that is even possible. Something happened on Medium a couple of years ago, no one seems to know what, and readership and income tanked for many writers. While some people have said they didn't lose readership, their income just started evaporating, others of us saw both go down. One publication editor I've dealt with has discussed that the work he submits for the boost program (which provides extra promotion) is not being selected anymore, so his writers aren't getting as much readership as he'd like. Some publications have closed down, for whatever reasons. The readership thing wasn't always the issue for them. Nonetheless, stuff happens there.
• I was never a big noise on Medium. But instead of at least maintaining where I was, I have gone backwards. I have already cut back on my humor writing there, in part because I've been spending so much time on the Reading History Project and researching markets and submitting elsewhere. But with readership at Medium so low, there's not a lot of reason to make submitting there first a priority. 

What's the Plan, Gail? You Gotta Plan?

My impression from reading articles about Medium published on Medium is that:

• Readers there like self-help and technology. The Seeking Time essays can be promoted as self-help.
• Writers who publish frequently are able to build more of a following than writers who publish less. One writer whose work I liked used to publish in excess of 20 pieces a month. This is why I published 5 essays the first week and will try to do 2 a week for a while. That's going to be tough. I'm set for this week, but have to dig down for the next essays. I'm very aware that while I'm writing these essays for this publishing experiment, I'm not writing other things I could be submitting elsewhere. But that's writing for you!

Conventional Medium wisdom states that if you can have work accepted by Medium publications, your chances of readership improve because it will be seen by all the publications' followers as well as yours. However, I have been published there by publications with big followings and just didn't see readers coming from them. I've done better with a couple of the smaller sites.

As a result, I'm publishing Seeking Time directly myself, because that means I can control the timing. That's why I was able to get work out every day the first week and twice last week. I didn't have to wait for acceptance and publication on someone else's schedule.

Seeking Time Essays to Date

Reading and Writing About Time Made Me Feel Optimistic

"I Came Up with a Work Schedule So Good I'll Be Able to Use it the Rest of My Life!"

The Life Changing Magic of Goals and Objectives

The Unit System

I Can Always Begin Again

Transitioning Between Work and Life

Seeking Time Around the House

And How's It Going, Gail?

I follow a few writers on Medium who both publish directly themselves and with publications. They write and publish regularly and seem to have decent followings. What I see with them leads me to believe theirs is a workable model.

Not so far for me, though. I assume that if this attempt is successful, it will take some time. I'm just not sure how much to give it, when there are so many other things I could be writing and places I could be submitting to. I should try to keep this up until mid-August, anyway, or maybe until the end of summer.

More to come! 

 

Proof That I Met Jane Yolen

In mid-June I hunted high and low for my photo with Jane Yolen, taken at an event at which I formally
met her. The event was at UConn, though I can't remember what it was about. Back in the day children's literature things happened there.

Well, on Friday I was hunting for other photos on another computer and, of course, I didn't find them. But what did I stumble upon but my Jane Yolen picture? Which is now safely filed away on my laptop.

As God is my witness, I thought I was dressed up. In case you're looking at this picture and wondering.

I think this was in 2013 or thereabouts. I'd have to go look on that other computer again to be sure, and that's not going to happen tonight.