Taking a Spin Around the World of Writing

In Robert Lee Brewer’s blog My Name Is Not Bob for his Author’s Platform Challenge this morning, he gave a simple task, something that all of us with blogs do on a regular basis. He asked us to write a blog post, at the end of which we were to put a “call to action” on the part of the reader.

He explained that a “call to action” was merely a direction given the reader. For instance, a shared link that the writer urges the reader to explore, or a post from the past that has relevance at the moment. It seems a simple, straightforward task, doesn’t it?

I thought so, too, until I began it. What should I use for my call to action, I asked myself. I thought about the sites I’d been to in the past couple of days, the blog posts I’d made elsewhere, the past posts I’d made here and on Claudsy’s Blog. Perhaps, I could pinpoint one of the blogs that I follow on a regular basis, with/without my personal comments. Choices circled my head until I was dizzy.

The unhappy/happy result was that I chickened out and did a bit of all of them. Yes, I admit, I had to make it much more complicated than it was. I know that I always—well, almost always—end a post with at least a question, which is a call to action. You do think about an answer, don’t you, when faced with a question? See there. You did it again.

Each of the following is pertinent to the writer, or reader for that matter. Some ask questions. Others impart information. All can be used for some purpose. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be listed. Enjoy the choices and let me know how you did with them, what you learned, and if any of them helped in any way during your day.

·       http://claudsy.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/surviving-the-status-shuffle/

·       http://robertleebrewer.blogspot.com/2012/03/lets-write-together-use-collaborative.html

·       http://www.besteveryou.com/write-for-best-ever-you.htm

·       http://www.marketlist.com/qwf-(quality-women's-fiction)/dt/2717/

·       https://plus.google.com/u/0/106973816132524083338/posts

·       http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=96543791&locale=en_US&trk=tab_pro

If you managed to get through all of that, you merit a medal of persistence.

Have fun, above all. 


Until later,

Claudsy

Life Is Full of Challenges

I’ve filled Claudsy’s Blog with poetry for this month’s challenges, but I haven’t really done anything with the Author’s Platform Development Challenge. I mention in passing on Wordpress and BlogHer but don’t discuss it.

Calliope will work well for periodic posts to keep me motivated to develop a “professional” brand, platform, persona, what-have-you.

Robert Brewer, of “No Name is Not Bob” fame and Poetic Asides, has been working to train writers on the development of a professional author’s platform for some time. He chose to do this challenge to get writers fired up and engaged in their own futures. Additional articles and reading recommendations extend the background material, which encourages the writer to step out and march forth into her chosen future.

The challenge is four days in and I’ve managed to have all of them done before dinner of the fourth day. Below are the first two days’ worth of tasks: defining myself as a writer and setting goals for segments of the next year.

Day 1: Platform Challenge – Define Yourself

Name: Claudette J. Young

Position: Freelance writer—multiple genres, retired teacher

Skills: Freelance writing—no current clients have me on retainer, though I have other contracts completed, poetry—published, fiction—published, non-fiction—published, travel writing—published, part-time writing coach, blogging, research, book review writing, interviews, newsletter writing, problem solving, idea generation, story development brainstorming, logistics detailing

Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Wordpress (2), Blogger, LinkedIn, Branch Out, She Writes, BlogHer, Jacketflap, Google +, Twitter

URL’s: http://claudsy.wordpress.com/

              http://claudsy.blogspot.com/

               http://trailinginspirations.com/

Accomplishments: Published poetry in two anthologies—2009 & 2011, published poetry in four online mags, published poetry on numerous websites, published writer’s articles (4) in ICL Newsletter, published travel articles for Assoc. Content and on Trailing Inspirations, published op-ed work for Associated Content, did contract work for both Assoc. Content and Yahoo News, published children’s fiction for British publisher and online Catholic children’s mag, supplied educational materials for SuperTeacher Worksheets, Completed ICL Basic Writing Course through ICL, ready to finish writing course for Great Courses, took travel writing course through AWAI, Graduated from BSU with two Bachelor’s degrees and two Master’s, taught at both college and elementary level successfully, survived non-stop corporate work for IBM in FSD, and managed to become a senior citizen without feeling old until I got there.

Interests: Writing, travel, learning, friends and family, developing into the best human being I can be, crocheting, beading, camping

In one sentence, who am I? I, Claudette J. Young, am a writer who almost waited too long to take her desire and her words seriously; a person who yearns to learn all that time and patience will allow; a person whose gypsy spirit never settles in one place before moving on to a new possibility; a woman who’s always traveled life without a partner or offspring; a woman who could neer be happy living a conventional life; one who would travel continuously if she was financially able; and a woman with emotions that run so deep they overtake her, at times, upon seeing a simple commercial.

Immediate Goals Today:

1.     Complete poems for challenges—PA, PB, and BlogHer. DONE

2.     Post each resulting poem to appropriate Websites and blogs DONE

3.     Begin rewrite on “Moon Sees All” after checking to make sure of format DONE

4.     Complete workout this afternoon DONE

Goals for This Week:

1.     Do each day’s challenges from poetry sites and post them all.

2.     Work min. one hour each day on “Failures to Blessings”

3.     Work min. one hour each day on “Moon Sees All” revision

4.     Work min. one hour each day on course work—either online or BGS

5.     Take at least one hour to relax with a good book each day.

6.     Talk to Peg

7.     Finish going through boxes and organizing office—use one hour per day

Goals for This Month:

1.     Complete all challenge’s for poetry and platform development

2.     Complete BGS course and set aside

3.     Get good handle on Lisle course

4.     Develop work schedule that allows for rewriting mss and writing poetry

5.     Get Cookbook layout completed, recipes placed and formatted

6.     Create Budget for the month to allow for what we need and money for next month

1.     Finish rewrite and submission process for “The Moon Sees All.”--Knopf?

Goals for 2012:

2.     Get Cookbook finished and to publisher/self-publish

3.     Lose at least 60 pounds

4.     Get more fit so that I won’t need a knee replacement

5.     From April through Dec. submit at least two short stories/articles each month to print/online publishers

6.     Finish and submit “Failures to Blessings” to Hay House and two other publishers by Sept.

7.     Finish and submit “Dreamie’s Box to print publisher/MuseItUp

8.     Finish and submit “Forest Primeval” to publisher—Knopf?

9.     Successfully conclude the first nine months of writing course.

Goals to Accomplish Before I Die:

1.     Visit Europe on extended vacation

2.     Publish at least three books in both fiction and non-fiction

3.     Produce a steady stream of published articles, stories, essays, and poetry

4.     Find a place where I can be content for more than a few years

5.     Become the person I know I can be

6.     Have enough continuous income that I don’t feel concern when a bill arrives

7.     Get rid of both properties that are weighing me down.

8.     Learn to sail

9.     Go to Disney World and Epcot Center

10.  Experience all of the National Parks in the country

11.  Enjoy good health and vitality for a long while before death.

The tasks for Days 3 and 4 had already been done. I already have a Facebook account and profile, along with having it on the new Timeline format, and I already have a Twitter account and profile. Although, I do need to refresh the Twitter profile. I haven’t done that in over a year.

Throughout April, posts will appear here every few days, outlining my progress through this challenge to attain a professional standing within the writing business. Check back in each week to see how my journey progresses. Feel free to comment on any post, give advice, cheer me on, but no raspberries. Those are for the table.

Relatively Speaking

An old adage says “Everything is relative.”

Everyone stumbles across this one truth at some point in their lives. That is, if they’re paying attention.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll remember that to walk into a house heated to 65 degrees from an outside temperature of 32 or less feels like you’re walking into a hot house. Give yourself a couple of hours and the inside temps won’t seem so warm.

Place that same scene in the dog days of summer with outside temps of 100 degrees and walk into that same house set at 65 degrees. Suddenly one has walked into a meat locker.

Someone has undoubtedly thought of the analogy of “How do you boil a live frog?”

The power of relativity has come to bear on our lives so often that we seldom pay attention to it. We make our statements about conditions around us and move on to another distraction. It’s not something that seems terribly pertinent.

Why am I talking about such a petty little observation? Isn’t it the petty little observations to which writers must pay attention?

Whether a writer is dealing in fiction or non-fiction, it’s the details that will either set you free or bury you. If you’re working in non-fiction and you present one of those little observations of relativity incorrectly, credibility will be tainted. Precision of detail is critical in non-fiction. The writer cannot afford to allow relativity to color those details too much. Even memoir has its limits concerning relativity.

If the writer works in fiction, the relativity displayed by character and situation makes or breaks the reality of the story presented. If you have a character who hates feeling cold, who lives in the desert for that reason, for instance, her air conditioning unit won’t be set at 65 degrees in the summer. The character would never stand for a temperature setting that low. Yet, such a situation can be successfully used to further define the character’s individual needs, tastes, backstory, etc.

Some people call this perspective since relativity is reserved for a physics theorem. Regardless, writers deal with the continual relativity/perspective factor every day. Many times we do it unconsciously. Somewhere, on an intuitive level, we understand how critical it is that we appear authentic and accurate.

The genre dictates how we use this factor, as well. Children’s writers must write as adults. Their presentation of material or story, on the other hand, must be from the perspective of the readers’ age for fiction and use appropriate language level, etc. In non-fiction children’s age-appropriate language also holds hands with concept understanding and developmental stages. Targeting the proper age market for one’s work is crucial to success in that genre.

The same holds true for marketing any piece of writing to any audience. Relativity/perspective demands proper marketing for success. The writer of technical journals, for instance, targets only those who need that particular information, written at specific levels of expertise.

As you can see, everything is relative. From the content to the marketing the writer juggles accuracy with approximation every time she sits down at her computer, regardless of what she’s writing.

Maybe that’s a large part of why this industry is so fascinating and frustrating at one and the same time. If anyone has another take on this subject, let me know.  I’m always up for discussion.

Until later,

Claudsy

Driving Focus Needs the Right Schedule

Spinning one’s wheels without forward movement is a true exercise in frustration. Putting more on one’s plate than can be eaten in a meal is gluttony. And writing without a plan of action is just plan insane.

We all know these truths. If we haven’t learned them within the first few experiences, we don’t deserve to call ourselves intelligent.

I bring all of this up to preface my new beginning. I’ve been stacking so much on my writer’s plate that even Hercules couldn’t have lifted it without a forklift. There are just so many marvelous projects that I must stick my fingers into right now. I know that I have four-ten other projects sitting in the wings looking for a finale. I understand that a new project needs extra time for development, which eliminates time slated for other work.

Yeah, I get it.

Addiction is a terrible thing. This addiction on mine to constantly find new, more fascinating projects to tinker with has got to stop. That’s why I’ve taken today to develop a work schedule for myself that is rigid enough to keep me focused and flexible enough to allow for movement between projects and chores outside of writing.

I’ve done scheduling before without success, I think because too much rigidity and I don’t get along well. We tend to go to war. Blame that on my need for flexibility.

With this new attempt, I’ve built in those non-writing tasks that always stole time I didn’t feel I had before. I built in time for email and social media twice a day. I built in time for reading for review and for pleasure. I built in specific timeframes for writing on different projects on different days of the week.

I even built in time each day for personal home tasks and half an hour of exercise. Believe me, that’s definitely new.

Each week’s schedule will shift just a bit as administration tasks are completed and others take their place. Now I can go to my day’s calendar and see just those things that need my focus, without having to think about those that will come on a different day.

Down the line further, I will build in all of the deadlines for submissions. I’ve already allowed for a few hours each week for marketing research and submissions.

I’m going to try, with determination and focus, to get this new attempt to work for me. Every other one has failed so far in the last two years. I’ve learned a bit about myself since then.

Wish me luck and check in on Monday to see how the work proceeds and how my newest project is coming along. What is that project, you ask. It’s a women’s fiction novel titled “Dreamie’s Box.” I’ve completed the first two chapters and moving forward.

Until next time,

Claudsy

Re-examining One's Direction

For the past few days I’ve been taking some classes through Trissa Tismal’s Author’s Summer School Program. These were simul-cast over telephone/web.

The majority of the information given to the students was geared toward non-fiction, but easily converted over for fiction. Both traditional publishing and e-publishing were addressed in easy to digest ways to ensure that everyone would come away with valuable tools for their publishing future.

Much of the emphasis was that writing—if you want to do it for something other than a hobby—is a business and must be approached that way.

I have to admit that anyone writing--whether for books, articles, essays, etc.—this is especially true. Any writer who wants to make a living at writing through copy writing or book production must change their thinking processes to allow for office mentality.

It came as a big shock to me over a year ago when I came face to face with that reality. Every time I turned around, I was hearing the same thing. I heard it from fiction writers, screenwriters, essayists, journalists, travel writers, and copywriters. There was no escaping the reasoning behind that truth. There was no lark singing sweet songs for the Muse that may or may not bestow creative genius while I sat at the computer trying to decide what to write for the day.

I still don’t have to like that reality. I just have to find a way to live with it and organize my writing life in a way that makes use of it in the most efficient way possible.

That’s one of the big problems for me. I have enough projects on the boards to keep me very busy for the next year without developing any new ones. Each of them takes time to write, edit, polish, and market.

Hiding in the corners of the mind sits a wee concern called enjoyment. How does the writer gain enjoyment from the work while still viewing it as a business with schedules to meet, plans to develop, schmoozing to do on social media sites, etc.?  Can there be enjoyment within the process alongside all of the demands from the business?

As I sat listening to the experts talk about how much social media and its uses were necessary for a working writer, I pondered my ability to do what was necessary. I wondered if I had what it took to be the writer I want to be without having to become a slave to the changing face of the publishing world.

I can tell you that being an eclectic isn’t going to make the situation any easier. Each writer needs a platform. That’s been drilled into us all. When you write travel pieces, children’s stories/articles and hopefully books, along with social commentaries, op-ed pieces, memoir and essays, plus adult fiction, what kind of platform can you build that will work? Drop poetry into the mix and you have disaster waiting to claim the world.

Like everyone else, I want a life outside of writing. It might not happen, but one can hope. I want to be able to read books for enjoyment besides those I will do for reviews. I want to be able to do interviews for my Wordpress blog. On top of all that, I want to go out of the house on occasion to see if the rest of the world still exists and has something to show me that I can write about.

There you have my dilemma. How crowded does my daily schedule have to be to get everything into it? How much time do I have to shave off this hour or that one to allow for laundry (I can do poetry or reading then, too, during the drying cycle)? Can I make an outing a time for jotting down notes for that YA fantasy on the back burner?

If anyone has any suggestions for me on how to make scheduling work better than it’s been so far, let me know. If you have a way to cram more into a day without feeling as if deprivation of spirit is just around the corner, please, I implore you, tell me what it is. I’m counting on suggestions here, peeps. My present scheduling system isn’t working at all well anymore.

Do I really have to scale back what I want to be writing on in order to get the rest done?

Load me up with suggestions, sure-fire ways to excel, anything you have on hand will help. In return I will loan you my sure-fire ways to overload your desk while skipping joyfully down a path toward writing overload. Hey, fair is fair.

Until later,

Claudsy

Pleasure vs. Work

I’ve never really looked into what a writing coach does. It never crossed my mind to inquire. A couple of years ago when I got really serious about writing, I had a well-published writer with whom I was acquainted tell me that I should be a coach.

That was the first time I heard of such a position and I certainly didn’t feel qualified for it. I’d just started in this crazy business that so many of us struggle with. I couldn’t believe that what I’d been doing during our association was anything other than friendly encouragement and suggestions.

I'm one of those who gets a high from brainstorming some one's plot, or creating characters from thin air, or floating ideas that may never come to fruition, but sound  good in that moment. Let my imagination run wild and I'm a happy camper.

And no, I haven’t taken the title of Writing Coach for the shingle hanging outside my office.

I guess what I’m feeling my way toward is the fact that what seems only common courtesy and helpful information sharing also seems to be the activities that designate an actual professional job.

Case in point: when I’m looking at markets for possible sales for my own work, I carry with me a mental image of those writers whose work I know and whose talents I admire. These are writers whom I’ve been associated with for a few years; some may still be struggling toward publication, others may have sold numerous pieces.

If I come across a market that could mean a sale for one of these other writers, I take note of the link and the market needs and send the writer an email to that effect. Most of the writers I converse with on a regular basis are children’s writers. Sometimes finding a market can be devilishly difficult in a shrinking marketplace and it helps to have more than one pair of eyes scanning submission guidelines for possible matches.

It always takes me aback when the recipient of my email replies with profuse thanks as to my thoughtfulness. It makes me wonder if I’m the only one who does this. I’m not a fairy godmother dispensing markets to starving writers willy-nilly. I’m passing on information to friends who might be able to use it.

It makes me feel good to be appreciated, but that appreciation wasn’t my motivation. I just can’t understand why anyone would squirrel away a market in hopes no other writer will come across it and thereby elevate her own chances of making a sale. That is simple greed to my thinking.

I suppose I got spoiled when I began writing in earnest because my first pond of endeavor was children’s writing. And those I came to respect, appreciate, and associate with as friends were children’s writers. The group I fell in with, at ICL’s Writer’s Retreat, holds some of the most generous and caring individuals I’ve ever had the privilege of spending time with.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to play on the Retreat right now. I have too many projects in flames, on burners, drowning, or otherwise needing my attention. It’s all I can do to find some concentration time to create new poetry, which has become another passion for me.

Those dear friends of near every age and experience level over at the Retreat still sit in the background of my days. I can hear their imaginary conversations and satirical asides as I work at the keyboard. I smile when I think of the family they’ve created at that little café along Main Street in a small town that floats on the dreams and aspirations of its patrons.

Writing coach? I don’t think so. I don’t feel I’ve been in the business long enough to really have that much to contribute to such a position. Encouraging writing friend? You betcha. If I can help, I take time for it. If I have information, I pass it on to someone who might be able to use it.

And there you have my writing philosophy for today. It’s as simple as: if you’re willing to allow others to read your words, you should also be willing to help others get their words out. One person’s view makes for a very narrow and lifeless picture. Help create the biggest picture you can.

Until later, peeps,

Claudsy