Lacey Louwagie's Blog, page 18

Rumpled: It’s Kind of Like Getting Married

It’s official — I have a release date set for Rumpled, my novella retelling the story of Rumplestiltskin, and most everything is in place for it–except, perhaps, my nerves.

Rumpled will be available to the public on March 3 (my birthday — early downloads would be a great present!), and right now I’m sending out review copies. I have a few blogs lined up to do features and some pre-release reviews in the works.

When I first started getting responses from my group of beta readers, I should have been elated. I am blessed to have some very supportive fairy-tale lovers in my life. But instead, I felt incredibly raw, vulnerable, and … terrified. Making my intentions public made them more real than they had been before. For a moment, I thought I couldn’t remember ever being so scared.

That’s not true, of course. The feeling was actually quite familiar.

It’s the same way I felt in the weeks leading up to moving away from home to go to college.

It’s the way I felt when I accepted my first post-college job, which took me even further from my family than college had.

It’s the way I felt as I prepared to get married.

All of these were dividing lines in my life, leaps of faith I had to make praying that I could either fly or that at least there would be a soft landing. Each of these experiences has brought me infinite growth and blessings, enriching my life story like the world’s best compost.

And that’s why I think this fear is a good thing.

It means I’m doing something that matters.

It means I’m taking the step, at last, from something that is part of my dreams to something that is part of my reality, making the move from “in my mind” (where I spend too much time) to “in the world.” I don’t know what lies on the other side of that publication line on March 3, but I do know I’ve never regretted moving forward despite my fears (and I have a lot of fears.)

I also realize that much of the uncertainty and vulnerability I feel comes from this being my first self-published work. When I’ve published in anthologies and with a small press, it was always under the protection of someone else. The editors. The publisher. I was just one small piece, and if the public didn’t like it, at least someone besides me had believed in it to get it to that point.

But I guess me and a few beta readers believing in it is as good a place as any to start.

Some Thoughts on Money and Writing

In November, I clipped this piece of writing advice from Writer’s Digest (my apologies that I didn’t also clip the issue date — if anyone recognizes it, I’m happy to attribute.)

I listened to my mom. She once told me to always live a little outside of my wage bracket–not dangerously so, but just enough to remain “hungry” so I’m always compelled to strive toward my highest standards.

I applied this to my writing career: I found a part-time, work-at-home position that paid my bills and nothing more. I created a comfortable discomfort for myself. I was no longer distracted by nightmares of living on a park bench for the sake of my art, nor was I distracted by the biggest excuse of all: not having time to write.

Within a year, I cracked the women’s magazine market. If I want to buy new furniture, take a trip, purchase a thank-you gift for Mom–I have to sell an article in order to do it.

Don’t give yourself any option but to become a writer. You’ve created the lifestyle that’s standing in your way; therefore, you’re capable of creating one that won’t. – Krissy Brady

This struck me because it’s so similar to my own reasons for leaving my full-time staff position six years ago to become a full-time freelancer. I wanted to put my writing first in my life, and I thought that depending on it for income was a good way to do that.

This might have worked for Krissy Brady, but it was totally wrong for me.

I love to write, and I love that doing freelance work allows me more flexibility about when, where, and how I do it. I feel that I’ve only continued to grow and diversify as a writer since I decided to stop working full-time for one company, and I’ve had some publishing successes during that time, too, not the least of which was co-editing Hungering and Thirsting for Justice for ACTA Publications. I’ve written two novels and one novella, kept this blog going, remained a regular contributor and editor on Young Adult Catholics, published an essay and half a dozen articles, and filled hundreds of journal pages. Now I’m preparing to launch my first ebook.

Most of these accomplishments were unpaid. That doesn’t mean I did them without reward, though: I had the opportunity to write about things that mattered deeply to me, and to share that writing with the wider world. I could have made a lot more money with my writing if I had focused on markets that pay well, but all writing comes from the same creative font within me, and all writing is, to a certain extent, draining. If I spent more time writing for pay, I’d spend less time writing about what matters to me. My writing might put food on the table, but it would stop nourishing my soul.

So my solution has been diametrically opposite to Krissy’s. I came to see simplicity as a spiritual path as well as a necessary one, and I lived with less so that I could write more. In the beginning, I made so little money freelancing that I was working 10-hour days, and all that worry about money was not good for my writing. I made it my goal to continue “trading up” on my freelance assignments so that, ultimately, I could make more money for fewer hours of work, and rather than increase my lifestyle as my earning capacity rose, I would increase the time I devoted to writing, learning, and spiritual exploration. Now, I’m able to meet my income goals in about 25 – 35 hours a week rather than 40 – 60, allowing me more space to truly sink into my writing practice. Since I recently “traded up” from one part-time gig to another that paid twice as much, I’ve seen the sheer volume of my writing increase dramatically.

I’ve opted to work with reliable clients long-term rather than chasing down occasional lucrative gigs. If I make a little money off something I’ve written from my soul, that is a tremendous perk. But writing with a sell in mind lends a certain desperation to my internal state that suffocates my creativity. It’s just too stressful for me not to know exactly where my income is coming from, and I’m willing to trade higher wages for the added security of knowing work will be there. And the work I do writing, editing, and consulting for my clients is different enough from my personal writing that it doesn’t draw too much from that well — but it’s similar enough that it continues to feed that skill set, and I continue to find it enjoyable and challenging.

All said, living simply and having a reliable revenue stream has done far more for my writing than living “just outside my means” possibly could. I’m glad Krissy’s path worked for her. And I’m equally glad that I’ve found one that works for me.

A Year in the Life, Week 40: First You Have to Teach a Lesson

This week’s writing exercise in A Year in the Life prompted me to write about a time that “learning a lesson” was somehow connected to a secret that you kept. I wrote about learning to play guitar when I was 22.

Perhaps I wanted to learn guitar since those nights when I was four years old, lying on the floor of my dad’s band room and feeling the vibration of its music against my cheek. But I remember really recognizing the desire when I was older, the way my heart sort of trembled in response to the jangle of an acoustic guitar–how I wanted to be a person who felt a guitar pressed against my body, and found a way to tell all my secrets that way. I could always write, but music could do something, express something, that words never could or would.

I saw the ad for guitar and violin lessons at Chester Creek Cafe when I went for grounds and grace. I don’t remember what actually pushed me to call it, but I know I left a message. And then I was scared–because I thought I couldn’t afford it, or that I was too old to learn. But Sara kept calling me back, until I finally agreed to lessons out of guilt.

I had Jessica’s old acoustic guitar, which hadn’t been played in maybe 15 years. I remember that first lesson, how Sara tuned it and remarked that it didn’t sound that bad. She taught me G and C and Am. I don’t know if we learned any songs. She gave me the “standard” strumming pattern that I still use all the time.

That was July. I practiced every day, or nearly. I was so lonely, up in my bedroom in that empty house, the breeze from Lake Superior wafting through the window.

Those first couple weeks, I was astounded at how my fingers burned, as if I’d held them on a hot stove. Then I was equally astounded when the callouses developed and the pain went away. I think that was the first step in really feeling like a guitar player.

And suddenly one day, I was moving between chords without pausing to look at the cheat sheet, or to painstakingly move my fingers. They seemed to magically leap between the chords, and now all that strumming was beginning to sound like a song. And when the movement of my fingers on the fretboard started feeling totally natural and effortless, then I began to sing along.

That was when it really started to get rewarding. I surfed the Internet looking for songs I could play, feeling a rush of elation when what I played sounded like what I heard on my CDs. I played tons of Kasey Chambers and Dar Williams and “Vincent Black Lightning, 1952.” I tried to play “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in honor of Matt, but I never could get that one right.

My guitar went with me everywhere, and I didn’t feel so lonely anymore. I had a new companion. I had discovery and elation to fill the long hours alone. I had interaction with a real person, someone my own age, once a week–Sara, my guitar teacher, in the practice room in the old school converted into artists’ apartments that I would end up living in later for six years.

I took my guitar out to Montana when I visited Katrina there, and it was playing in her presence that I felt the confirmation of what I was beginning to suspect–I was making real music. After I got back to my room in Duluth, groggy from the drive that followed an overnight Amtrak ride, I started playing a sequence of chords and setting my own lyrics to them. Frantically, I scribbled verses into my “Misfits” journal, hardly believing what I was doing — I was writing a song.

Playing one of my songs at a coffee shop

I had been playing for only two months, and I was astounded at how quickly I’d reached this dream that had felt unattainable for so many years. I wasn’t a “musical” person, had no natural sense of rhythm or “ear” for music–but somehow, I was writing songs anyway.

It was about my best friend from childhood, and it carried the ache that I still felt at somehow having lost her, or having her leave me. I wrote about how much I loved her, and how angry I was at the rampant homophobia that made us afraid to show each other even the most casual physical affection. When I played it for Sara, I know she thought it was a coming-out song. But it wasn’t, not yet.

That came later, when I started listening to tapes of my lessons just so I could hear her voice as I drifted to sleep. And then, the way I noticed the shape of her neck as she sang at the coffeeshop down the road from the house I lived in. “And I first loved you for the shape of your throat,” I wrote, in a song a played for her much, much later, because it was vague enough that she wouldn’t know.

That wasn’t my “coming out” song, either. My “coming out” song was called, “The Song You’ll Never Hear,” and I wrote it the day after I had watched her sing at the coffee-shop, and things just fell into place in my mind.

After that, I stood outside her door with butterflies in my belly every time I waited for the lesson before me to finish. I wrote probably a dozen songs about her, none of which I think are much good now.

Still, good or not, they were crucial in my breakthrough that year, in helping me embrace what I had been running from since I was 13 –

it was okay to want a woman.

It was beautiful, in fact.

I swore at the time that I was in love with her, but I don’t count her among the “true” loves of my life (two women, two men, it doesn’t get much more split down the middle than that). I was merely infatuated with her but deeply in love with the possibility I glimpsed through her — the possibility that I could be a musician, the possibility that I could enjoy attraction no matter who it was attached to, the possibility that I could finally, finally, be my whole self.

She never knew it, but she led me across that bridge, between who I thought I was and who I really was; she and that guitar came into my life at a time when I thought I would go crazy with loneliness. But I didn’t go crazy. Instead, I learned to play guitar.

 

 

On Breastfeeding in Church

My latest post is up at Young Adult Catholics, this one about Pope Francis’ most recent soundbyte (or mild implication) that it’s OK to breastfeed in church!

Writing, Feedback, and Kindness on New Moon Girls

Below is a guest post I wrote for Luna’s blog over at New Moon Girls. (And, by the way, if you know or love a girl between the ages of 8-14, definitely consider getting her a membership. And if you don’t, consider donating a membership to a school, library, or girls’ group.)

Last week, a school librarian invited me to talk to her middle school classes about the New Moon Girls community, especially how to write for the magazine. You can see our full writers guidelines here, but here are a few things you might not have known about how we choose what gets published in the magazine.

Giving a talk about New Moon to middle schoolers

Did you know that if we get similar submissions from a girl and from an adult, we will ALWAYS give the piece written by a girl priority? At least 80% of New Moon Girls magazine is written by girls, and we feel passionate about keeping it that way.
You can click an option to submit something to New Moon Girls magazine when you upload it to Your Stuff, but our Girls Editorial Board members also let us know when they find something really great on the site. That means anything you upload to Your Stuff has a chance of getting published in the magazine. That’s why it’s important to always have your email updated, and to check it regularly. We use email to get in touch if we want to publish something you’ve created.
Many other publications want to see proof that you have experience writing or that you’ve had something published before. But at New Moon Girls, we like to publish as many voices as possible. So if you’re a new member or have never had anything published before, that won’t hurt your chances of getting into New Moon Girls magazine.

After I finished talking to the group, about a dozen girls came up to get more information. At the end of the line was a girl who was hesitant to go back to class because she said things weren’t going so well for her at school, or at home. With tears in her eyes, she told me that she really liked to write, but that when she shared what she had written, nobody ever liked it. She said it was hard for her to keep writing when she never got any good feedback.

Chatting with girls after my talk.

My heart went out to her, and the conversation reminded me how important communities like New Moon Girls are. We all need a place we can go where we feel certain that people will respond to what we share with kindness. After all, it takes a lot of courage to post your work for others to see!

Sometimes, it can be hard to give or to take feedback on creative work. Everyone loves encouragement, but many people also like feedback about what they can improve. Maybe the people who read stories by the girl above thought they were being helpful by giving her critical feedback. But it can be hurtful not to receive good feedback when you share something for the first time. Here are some tips for giving feedback in a way that is helpful rather than discouraging.

DO comment on what you like about something before you comment about something you don’t like. It’s just as important for creators to hear what they’re doing right as what they could improve.
DO end your comment with something positive about the piece. If you want to mention something that could be improved, always “sandwich” it between two nice things. Here’s an example: “This story really made me laugh–I loved the part about the rubber duck collection. I got a little confused in the middle about whether Maddy’s mom or aunt was talking. The ending left me with a happy feeling, though. I hope you will write more!”
DO read your comment before you post, and ask yourself, “If I got this comment, would it hurt my feelings?”
DO ask what kind of feedback a girl would like. Some girls want critical feedback because they like to revise; other girls just want to share their work and to get encouragement to keep creating. If you know what kind of feedback a girl wants, you’re less likely to hurt her feelings.
DO be kind, no matter what you have to say, and
DO remember that every girl is unique, and so are her creations. You may come across creative work that’s not really your style, but that’s okay. It might be just right for someone else, and the creator probably worked hard and had a lot of fun making it.

What kind of feedback do you like to receive when you post your work online? Are you ever nervous about sharing what you create? I’d love to hear your thoughts and tips!

Love,

Lacey,

New Moon Girls Contributing Editor

A Year in the Life, Week 39: Self-Reflection Week

This week’s A Year in the Life Exercise was another … self-reflection week! Man, this is the last time I take a job where I have to undergo a performance review every three months. This one went better than the others, though. The exercise instructed me to start with my letter, not my supervisor’s, which was a nice change.

Dear Ms. VenOsdel:

Another quarter flown by! I just looked over my entries since my last review (October), and I have to say that I’ve been pleased with my work. I’ve really delved into a lot of the prompts these last few weeks, revisiting memories and conjuring new thoughts that remain deeply integral to my sense of self–namely, I’ve pulled from the prompts the best of what I imagined such prompts could be, and sometimes I think I even came away with some really beautiful writing. I shared the ones I felt comfortable sharing online, and I had some great discussions with my mom when I shared with her the links. Although I didn’t do extensions–and we were honest about that last time–I did do several of the “writing for special occasions” exercises in the back of the book–Thanksgiving and New Year’s. I wish I’d found the time to do Christmas because Christmas was lovely this year–but I was just too busy living it to pull myself away for writing.

The New Year’s entry continues to be illuminating, though–it prompted me to write five resolutions. I was hesitant to come up with more than three, a la The Power of Less, and I take resolutions so seriously that usually I only make (and keep) one. So although I’m not going to stress about keeping all those resolutions, I find that they have made me more conscious of what I should be paying attention to and where I should be putting my energy.

And although I always want to write more, I was pleased to see how often I wrote between prompts this last quarter. For a while I thought these prompts would make me write less day-to-day because there would “always” be the chance to write on Friday or Saturday–sort of like a friend told me she thinks NaNoWriMo prevents her from writing for the rest of the year. But that wasn’t the case, at least this quarter. It helps that I’m “between” big writing projects and have a little more energy and inclination to write reflectively. My new job also affords me more leisure and reflective time, so I have very little resentment for the time I write for you. It’s become a treat again rather than just another obligation–and that’s definitely something I hope to bring with us into our final quarter. I have to admit, though, that I’m getting antsy to finally pull another book off my writing shelf!

I’ve also totally abandoned my attempt to write in the morning, after Ivan goes to work and before I start my day’s work. The idea was to set that time aside so I would journal more, since it’s harder to write before bed now that I’m married. But I found the idea of writing first thing in the morning to be so daunting that I usually just went back to sleep for another half-hour, which usually turned into 45 minutes or an hour, and then I felt bad about my lack of productivity and the lost time. So I gave that ambition up much as I gave up the ambition to pursue more “extensions,” and I spend the first half hour of the day reading instead. That is my favorite part of the whole day, which keeps me from going back to bed, which makes me more productive and ultimately clears more time for writing. Not bad, right?

So I guess I’m saying that I think this journey is finally starting to bear some fruit–not just in pages filled or memories captured, but in a deeper understanding of myself and my needs, which leads to greater contentment with my everyday life. What could be a better outcome than that?

Thanks for giving me this opportunity.

Love,

Lacey

 

Dear Lacey,

I couldn’t agree more. Keep up the good work.

Ms. VenOsdel

P.S. Even your reflection on your performance has become more meaningful! I’ll be sorry to see you go after this last quarter.

The Main Reason I Write

Some Thoughts After a Writing Retreat

I’m back from a three-day weekend spent at a cabin in the Black Hills on a little “writing retreat.” I got two full days of writing in, and discovered … that two full days wasn’t big enough for my ambitions.

I so rarely get the chance to get away from all other responsibilities and focus on my writing, so I think I had superhuman expectations of what might happen the first time I tried it. Still, I managed to do some journaling, a critique for my writers group, some website admin work, some editing for a friend, and a bit of related reading from Publishing e-Books for Dummies.

I spent most of my time preparing my novella, Rumpled, for release as an ebook. I’ve rewritten, edited, and proofread the manuscript dozens of times over about three years, so I thought it was in pretty good shape. Before this weekend, I hadn’t looked at it in months. I worked on some formatting issues and then decided to do a read-through just to make sure the formatting was clean throughout. That “read-through” ended up swallowing most of my weekend.

I cut one whole scene, I rearranged paragraphs, I deleted sentences and hundreds of words. And just, generally, felt a little dismayed that after all my work and all the readers I’ve shared it with, I still found so much to change. It reminds me of that quote about writing never being finished, just abandoned. I guess for most writers, getting a piece published serves as the ultimate permission to abandon it. But with self-publishing, that line is no longer so clear.

The weekend also overwhelmed me with the realization that I will never have enough time to do all the writing that I want, to perfect all the writing I’ve done, to learn everything I yearn to about the craft. Here, for the first time in my life, I set aside a whole weekend for my writing, literally left the rest of my life behind, and still came out with a “to-do” list that is barely shorter than when I went in. Yet, I also left with the realization that I want to keep striving to find that time, and understanding that this feeling that there will never be enough time in the world to do all the writing I want to do affirms that this really is a spiritual path for me, a lifelong journey, something that I am rather than something I do, with or without any outward signs of success. Now, if only that pesky need to make a living could be somehow dealt with …

I’m going to leave you with a quote by Gish Jen that I have hanging above my desk:

There is never enough time for writing; it is a parallel universe where the days, inconveniently, are also 24 hours long. Every moment spent in one’s real life is a moment missed in one’s writing life, and vice versa.

To write is to understand why Keats writes of living ”under an everlasting restraint, never relieved except when I am composing.” It is to recognize Kafka’s longing to be locked in the innermost room of a basement, with food anonymously left for him. It is to know why Alice Munro describes the face of the artist as unfriendly; and it is to envy Philip Roth, who, rumor has it, has sequestered himself in a cabin in the Berkshires. He is writing, writing, people say, writing without distractions, only writing. To which the news part of us asks: Is that a life? Can you really call that a life? That is our sanity speaking. But another part, the writer part, answers, yes.

Amen.

Catholic Spiritual Journals

Just posted my latest entry over at Young Adult Catholics about Catholic spiritual journals. Any that you recommend?

Write the Thing You Aren’t Ready For

The January/February issue of Horn Book magazine contains a great editorial called Books for the Ages. In it, Roger Sutton argues that:

“Nobody ever became a better reader by sticking with books they were ready for.”

It reminded me of something one of my creative writing teachers said when I was a senior in college. He challenged us to write the thing we wanted to write now, and not to wait until we were “ready” for it.

I kept that piece of advice in mind as I started to write my first post-apocalyptic novel with religious themes a year after I graduated. I didn’t think I was ready, and I wasn’t. I scoured the library bookshelves for Marian theology and read “How to Survive a Nuclear Attack” (which made my best friend comment that she would come find me if we were ever attacked; unfortunately, the book ended up not being very relevant to my story and I don’t remember anything from it.) A few years after I wrote it, I wrote a sequel, which I also wasn’t ready to write. The sequel took me about three times as long to write. But it was probably three times better, too.

In 2004, I was between projects and itching to write again when a friend told me about NaNoWriMo. And although I wanted to be writing, I didn’t think I was ready to write a whole novel in a month. But I said yes, anyway — and that became my first of five completed NaNoWriMo novels — one of which I should get back to revising very soon.

Even if I’m not ready for it.