Brightness of hope

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It’s been a rough year – I lost my mom a few months ago, and that’s just one of those challenges that makes you wonder how we humans walk around with ragged holes in our hearts. Add to that extra craziness at the day job, stressful medical news of my own, etc. etc. etc.

But I’m still in my MFA program – I’ve got all kinds of projects in the works and with a little bit of summer break headed my way (thank you academia!) I’m feeling brighter and more creative by the minute. So here’s a hopeful little haiku.

Brightness of Hope
Dark, on ink, on black
Still, shadow suggests the morn
Squint, pray, wait, pray – dawn

Index Card Inbox

Creativity, Getting It Done, WritingWrite a comment

I did this last night as part of my effort to better stay motivated on my writing goals this month.

This is a trick that a lot of writers use – I’ve even done it using Post-It Notes on the wall, but in this case I wanted my tasks to be a little more portable. I tend to need this when I’m in the middle of a novel trying to work my way out, and trying to manage both new scenes I need to write and revisions I’m going to need in what is already written.

You take your cards or your sticky notes and you write down scenes you need to write or problems you need to solve – in my experience aiming for tasks that should take you about 30 minutes or less is ideal. Then when you have time to write you don’t have to stress about what to work on – you just pick a card and get to work. I think this trick is especially good for those of us who don’t necessarily like to work on our novels or other big projects in any kind of strict order. The cards not only serve as a To Do list, but as a method of organizing the chaos.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts

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I love the idea of National Novel Writing Month. Love the idea of clear goals and a deep commitment to finishing a project and working every day. The organization it’s attached to is so encouraging and has awesome resources – the whole concept of it makes me feel a sort of sunbeams and chocolate and Disney Princess style happy. But…

I’ve never done it.

Part of it is the timing – for a person whose day job is connected to the academic calendar November is never going to be an easy month for giant projects, add that to nap inducing shorter days, a semi-stressful travel heavy holiday, and …well, you get the idea.

Plus, every time NaNoWriMo has come along and I have been wholly in writer mode I’m always in the middle of some other project. As tempting as it might be to play with a shiny new toy I have the companion novel to Rell to finish, MFA class assignments to write, and a whole other novel that’s finished, but needs a lot of edits before it’s ready to go anywhere.

So maybe I need to make this month National Novel Finishing Month – or at least National Minimal Procrastination on My Writing Goals Month – which doesn’t have the same ring to it, but may be just as important for me.

Short Story Contest

Getting It Done, WritingWrite a comment

Wow! I can’t believe it’s been July since I posted last – the one downside to full time job, plus grad school, plus life is that it doesn’t leave a lot of time for extras like the blog. I’d like to promise to do better, but I hate breaking promises.

This last week I’ve been working on an entry for SNHU’s Fall Fiction Contest. The prizes for the winners include SNHU scholarships, so for a person paying for their degree out of pocket it seemed like something I needed to participate in. The trick for me is that I struggle with short stories. Luckily, I had worked on a very short story (less than 800) words over the summer as a writing challenge to myself and so I decided to polish it up and enter it. I’m really grateful for my husband, my cousin (the Queen of Short Stories), and a helpful work friend for helping me in that effort.

My biggest goal in entering the contest, knowing it might be read by professors at SNHU was not to embarrass myself. I think that I at least reached that goal. If nothing else, I like the story, which is important. In previous writing classes I’ve submitted things just to have something to submit, and it’s always hard when you aren’t even excited about your work.

I should know by late November how things worked out with the contest – it’s open to the public so I have no doubt the competition will be fierce. I’m trying not to worry to much about what happens from here. I’ve done my part – the best thing to do is move on to the next project. And thanks to my homework for my MFA classes, there is always a next project 🙂

One class down….

Getting It Done, WritingWrite a comment

So I’ve just started on my second MFA class – Advanced Studies in Literature. I was able to finish my first class with an A and it’s nice to know that a decade out of my last degree I can still pull this thing off.

My favorite thing about that first intro class was that it asked us to take ourselves seriously as writers and to look toward what kind of career we wanted and how the program could help us. I have a day job I love, but writing is still intrinsic to who I am and one wish I had for enrolling in an MFA program was that it would help me focus in on that. Not only did I keep up with the coursework but I’m over 130 pages into the follow up novel for Rell after being stalled out for quite a while, which is exciting.

Here’s hoping I can keep up the pace!

Surviving Negative Feedback: An Affirmation

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So joining an MFA program has, no surprise, sucked up a lot of my time in the last couple of months, but I think I’m going to try to start sharing out some of what I’m doing in my classes to the blog. This wasn’t technically an assignment, but we’re talking a lot about workshopping and feedback in my class, and I’m also starting to get feedback on my self-published novel. Sometimes, I find myself so nervous about how people will react that I almost start to wonder if I should be publishing – which is nonsense. So I decided to write up a little affirmation/manifesto to help myself deal with the reactions to my work and I thought I’d share it here.

So here it goes….

Most people are not going to be interested in or love your work. That is fine and normal and is not a judgement on whether or not you should do the work. It is also not a judgement on your talent, potential, or worth as a human. (It’s not a judgement on them either.)

Think about the things you enjoy, and that are wildly popular, like Star Wars or Harry Potter or Shakespeare’s sonnets, and remember that even in those cases there are millions of people who don’t care about them, or think they are flawed, or even think they are garbage.

Unless you’ve been hurtful, someone having a negative, or indifferent, reaction to your work only matters when it can serve to make your work better. In fact, your work can’t get better unless you know where you need to improve. So again, the only reason negative feedback should matter to you is to use it to improve what you do – beyond that, ignore it, it genuinely does not matter.

How I Read 200+ Books a Year

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When I tell people that one of my yearly goals is to read 200 books a year, I tend to get a lot of astonished reactions. Granted, reading is my #1 hobby, part of my day job, and I’m blessed to be a very fast reader, but I also think that there’s a number of things that I do that help me reach this goal, so I thought I’d share.

  1. Audiobooks. I’ve mentioned this before but I read multiple books at one time, and one of them is always an audiobook. I get them free through the library. While I read faster in print than listening to an audiobook, audiobooks let me listen to books while cooking dinner, running errands, painting etc.
  2. Children’s Picture Books. A couple of years ago I decided to read the award winners in the various children’s book categories and I realized I’d been missing out on a whole selection of books with my ageist snobbery 🙂 Now when I’m lagging a little in my goal, or when I get in a reading lull I pick out a pile of children’s picture books, find a comfy library chair and dig in. The art and distilled stories are often a breath of fresh air.
  3. Having the next book ready. I try to have my next audiobook already downloaded, my next library book checked out, and even a basic plan for the next few books I’m going to read. In fact, if I have time, I’ll often start a book, even just the first few pages, immediately after finishing the previous book. That way I’m set up to keep moving forward.
  4. I avoid mindless internet surfing and playing with my phone. It’s remarkable how much time you can get back in your day by limiting social media and random scrolling. If I catch myself doing that I try to stop myself and pick up a book instead. It’s not that I don’t check Facebook and Instagram, I do, I just don’t need to do it 12 times a day.
  5. I mix up “want to reads” and “should reads” with emphasis on the former. Yes there are classics, and history books, and the latest greatest literary phenomenon that I probably should read, and I do work some of those in, but mostly I read whatever I’m in the mood for – I love well written fluff and I’m not ashamed of that.
  6. I have set times when I read each day, even if it’s just a few pages. On most days I sneak a few pages in on my lunchbreak at work, and I always try to read a chapter before I go to bed at night. That keeps things moving.

So here’s to a year of reading!

MFA Bound

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I was accepted into the MFA in Creative Writing program at Southern New Hampshire University – my classes start April 17th! I very excited about this program for several reasons:

  1. It focuses on writing popular fiction novels. When I wrote out a list of what I wanted in an MFA program this was at the top of my list. While I think the whole literary fiction v. popular fiction thing is a little odd anyway, I wanted a program that would let me work on the kinds of books I write. SNHU has tracks in contemporary, romance, YA, and speculative fiction. The only hard part is choosing which one to go with since contemporary, YA, and speculative fiction are all applicable (I have love stories too, but I don’t think in modern genre language they are “romances”) My current plan is the speculative fiction track, but I have some time before I have to make that choice.
  2. There is a built in certificate in teaching writing online. This has made the program a better sell to my current job and is something I’m interested in doing in the future so, yay!
  3. It’s a fully online program. I think it would be great to do a low-residency program, but it just wasn’t practical for me, and looking at those made me hesitant to jump in. The fully online program is something I can make fit with my life (I hope anyway!) and made me much more confident in my ability to be successful.
  4. Less academic hoop jumping! I already have two graduate degrees and one of the most difficult parts of those degrees was the thesis/dissertation process. It put a lot on students to form committees, work out how they were supposed to get approval, spend a lot of time coordinating the schedules of very busy (though awesome) faculty members, it was just a massive stressful hassle. At SNHU the thesis process is built in to the coursework – not a separate part of the program, so I’m very happy about that.

The only hard part now is waiting until April 17th!

What I want out of an MFA Program

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I recently completed my application to an online MFA program in Creative Writing. I’m a history professor with a PhD in my other life, so it’s meant explaining to others, as well as myself why I’d pursue another graduate degree in a different field. I also know that a person can become a successful writer without an MFA so again, I’ve had to think about what exactly makes me want to take on this new endeavor.

  1. I love learning and I love taking college classes. This might be the single most important reason for me. I’m one of those weird people who’d be in college classes all the time if they were free. So if I’m going to work on something it might as well be my love of writing.
  2. I want a structured way to develop my writing. Some kind of outside accountability and plan for how to progress is good for me.
  3. I want to teach creative writing. I love teaching history and I think being able to teach creative writing, my other love, would be a great opportunity. It’s probably even something I’d be able to do as an extension of my current job, so that’s a bonus as well.
  4. More tools in the toolkit. Other than one disastrous undergrad course, every time I’ve taken a writing class, I’ve come out with new ways to make my writing better.
  5. To have a writing community. Living in coastal Washington is great – but I haven’t found my writer community here, so being in a program would help me to have other people to talk with and work on writing with.

So that’s the quick version of my main reasons. There are others, but I look forward to seeing if I’m accepted to the program and to find a way forward with this new goal.