Kate Larking's Blog: Anxiety Ink, page 56

Rereading

Unless you’re a genius who gets the story publish-perfect on your first draft (in which case, I hate you just a little), you do reread your work at some point. For revision, if nothing else.

But what about reading your work for fun?

Some writers never do. The story is over and done. Why dwell on all the things you might have done differently and can no longer change? Why think about typos and awkward phrasings? And maybe by now you’re wholly sick of it.

Confession: I reread for fun sometimes. Not to edit, but for fun.

I write what I want to read (ever have the feeling you know what you want to read – the shape and texture of it – but can’t find anything like that on your bookshelves? That happens all the time to me) and I’m the type who likes to curl up with a familiar book. I love to read my favorites over and over again. It’s like rediscovering old friends, though it does make whittling down the to-read piles more difficult.

Why does it feel egotistical to admit I enjoy reading my own stories? Right now, I’m fighting the urge to apologize for it. Which is ridiculous. But I don’t have enough space in this post to analyze that.

So where do you fall on the spectrum? Would you or do you reread your stories for fun?

The post Rereading appeared first on Anxiety Ink.

Being Authentic

Today I want to tackle a topic I’ve never touched upon because there are two factors in my life that are making it apropos. Before you get worried this will be a very serious topic I shall reveal that it is about writers on Twitter. You may unfurl your brows now.

I’m near the end of Kate’s book Novel Marking and she’s on the topic of social media presence for authors. For the record, if you’ve noticed that it’s taking me a long time to read the book, I read my non-fiction notoriously slow. I like to savour it and think about it in a way I don’t with fiction. They are two entirely different avenues of experience. But I digress.

The biggest golden nugget to be found in Novel Marking, in my opinion, is the stress on being authentic no matter what platform you use for marketing. The more of the real you you reveal to the masses the more they will connect with you as an artist.

Logical, right? For most of us, yes.

I can prove that it actually works. For myself as a reader, anyway. I’m still beta testing as a writer. I’ve been active on Twitter for just over a year now and I’ve seen each of the types of users referred to in Novel Marketing. I’ve got the people who constantly post: “GET MY FREE EBOOK ON AMAZON….;” “THIS AWESOME THING WAS SAID ABOUT MY FREE BOOK ON AMAZON;” “READ MY BOOK;” “BUY MY BOOK;” blah blah blah. I don’t like these people. I unfollow these people because I’m spammed enough by the advertisements on the margins of my internet pages.

Then there are the retweeters. I don’t dislike these people as much as the spammers but I don’t like them very much. A lot of them retweet reviews of their work, mentions, or random tidbits out of the Twittersphere –usually pieces written by other retweeters or spammers. They’re boring. I’ll just say it.

Yes, social media is impersonal by nature but it doesn’t have to dull you to tears. My favourite users are those that post opinions, retweet comics, factoids, jokes –really anything that connects to them as a person. Jokes are subjective but it’s nice to see people actually have senses of humour.

My hands down favourites are those who have perfected the witty banter. The ones whose tweets make you stop or laugh out loud. The ones that don’t pander to the masses and are totally themselves. I’m a creature of sarcasm so wit and dry humour are two things I connect with instantly. I’m also dorky so random things make me snort.

I actually followed a writer when I first got on Twitter and was immediately drawn to their tweets. I’d never heard of him and have no idea how I initially stumbled upon him. Maybe he followed me first? Either way, @BrianRathbone chiselled his way through my skepticism with his ridiculous tweets. These are all recent but they’re standard form for him:

A year later, after favouriting many of his tweets, one came up on my feed in which he linked to his free e-books. I hemmed for a minute and went and emailed it to myself. The tone of his tweets are consistent, his presence on Twitter is solid, and he responds to people like a normal human being. I was more than willing to try out his fantasy. Since then I’ve read the first book in his series and have downloaded the second. Was Call of the Herald perfect? Nope. I say the same thing about most first works of fiction for any writer published by any publishing house you can name. Very few strike lightening. I wouldn’t expect otherwise from someone who self-publishes.

That’s my success story for you. I do my best to be authentic on Twitter with my handle @evoday; I’m opinionated, I’m cat crazy, I’m occasionally frustrated, I retweet and favourite things that catch my attention, I reply to real comments and messages from people, and I tweet quotes from or about my work. I don’t do this to gain as many followers as I can, I do this because that’s my personality type and it’s natural for me.

That’s what I want out of Twitter so that’s what I try to give. What has your experience been like on Twitter or any other social media platform?

The post Being Authentic appeared first on Anxiety Ink.

I’m backkk!

So, yeah. Brain injuries are the worst. Mine was thankfully fairly mild, but it was complicated by my pesky vertigo issues. Hence why you’ve had one post from me since October 16, when it happened. (I wasn’t ahead on my queuing, okay?)

Unfortunately, mild though it was, I have had to quit my job editing at Samhain. Cos if I try editing all day like I used to, my head feels like a soda can. Being crushed in a trash compactor. So! While that should resolve (soon! we hope!), it made editing untenable because of things like deadlines.

I’m incredibly sad to leave my wonderful authors and I job I enjoyed (and working from home without pants on), it is time to move on from there. I’ll still be doing Ask an Editor, because just because I no longer have the job doesn’t mean I lost the skillz.

I am glad to focus on writing again, so that’s a silver lining. I am currently working on a project that I haven’t talked about because, though I’m not superstitious, I didn’t want to jinx it. But after discussing it with my super enthusiastic agent, I have a deadline to get it to her by the end of February. I have around 25k to go on it. (Does anyone want a sprinting buddy? Please? Help me.)

Currently titled GIRL, REALIZED, the book was a lightning strike for me. You know, the idea that hits you almost fully formed and you don’t have to struggle to get an outline down or anything? I had this lightning strike in September and developed it quickly with Kate’s help. I fast-drafted the first 30,000 words until my concussion and then it, like the rest of my life, got put on hold while I recovered.

This book means A LOT to me. It’s an LGBT story, the kind I want to see. (That is, it’s YA but not a romance. SHOCK.) It asks a lot of questions about who we are and why we are and what we’re doing, and yesterday when I reread the ending I had already written after being away from it since my fall, I cried. It was good.

And that’s where I pick myself back up, dust myself off, and know it’s time to get back to work. I know this post has no real point besides being an update, but I felt weird just posting something writerly out of the blue again, So consider it my re-introduction.

The post I’m backkk! appeared first on Anxiety Ink.

Raise the Stakes: When the Stakes are Too High

“Raise the stakes for your characters.”

“Raise the stakes for your plot.”

You hear it a lot. Raise the stakes to keep your story moving forward. I follow it, to a point. But often my characters are entering a story with the goal of changing the world. The stakes for the plot? Already up there. The stakes for the character? Pretty sure my revolutionary is going to die if she fails, which will destroy a lot of other things, too. The sky-high stakes are riding the clouds.

Honestly? They are too high to start with.

Source

When I first start writing, developing a story idea, my plot is huge. My characters goal, even if it starts small, is decided. The world is going to change.

Slowly, I have been moving my perspective on story-writing over to series writing. And I’ve realized something: the stakes are too high, too immediate, too grand at the beginning. I’m at the point that I don’t know where to go if my character does surmount this war. The goal is there and I have a calculated cycle of trials, with both successes and defeats, at my disposal to get there. But the goal is so high that I feel I can’t spread my journey too wide. My characters don’t have enough room for growth to have the personal stakes high enough for every journey that the character needs to complete.

At times, I wonder if the problem I have for this comes from my own personal issues. I’m a perfectionist. I aim high and can’t view a goal as a series of tiny steps. I can only view the BIG, only value the BIG upon completion. As a result, I sputter and stop. I try to focus on the small, but the BIG gives me a shove, telling me I’m not getting very far.

A lot of what I will be focusing on with my new stories is taking my stakes back a notch and letting them grow into something larger, not letting them be humungous from the get-go.

The post Raise the Stakes: When the Stakes are Too High appeared first on Anxiety Ink.

Intimidation & Motivation

Reading stories that overwhelm me with awe both intimidate and motivate me. Intimidate because that’s a level of skill I aspire to and have not reached; motivate because the only way I may someday get there is by writing my ass off.

Stories like that, I sometimes piggyback ideas from. Working my way through an amazing anthology (Magic City Recent Spells, edited by Paula Guran, for anyone who’s interested – and trust me, you’re interested) has made my creative brain come alive. Ideas and concepts flying at me left, right, and center.

My writer brain hasn’t bee this happy-active in a long while.

Breathtaking stories do this to me. They’re a kind of challenge, and I have trouble backing down from a challenge.

The motivation, thankfully, outweighs the intimidation. I want to surround myself with great stories. There’s the maxim to write what you want to read, but the inverse of that tends also to be true: read what you want to write.

And plenty else, besides. Of course.

So this anthology is my first book recommendation of the year, for anyone who enjoys urban fantasy. What have you read and fallen in love with lately?

The post Intimidation & Motivation appeared first on Anxiety Ink.

Happy New Year! Hello, 2015 Goals

Happy 2015 everyone! Are we all excited to leave 2014 behind us? For me it’s bittersweet. First, the bitter: I didn’t cross off nearly as many goals as I would have liked this year and I fell behind not only in my writing but more horrifying (for me) in my reading. Now, the sweet: I jumped out of my comfort zone and traveled to Oregon/Washington and got to know Kate a little more and I learned a lot about not being a student.

There was far more bitter and far more sweet moments but I’m focusing on the future and not the past here.

I’m more than ready to set some new goals for myself. And I’m ready to apply the knowledge about write/life/balance that I gained this year. Like I’ve said before, I love setting goals but I’m not as great at actualizing them. I have the best intentions when I challenge myself but life has a tendency to get in my way. All. The. Time.

This year is promising more stability, however, so I am hopeful. I wrote in January of 2014 that I need to learn how to take baby steps instead of diving head first into arctic water. Looking back, my goals seemed completely attainable on January 1st 2014. On December 31st 2014, after seeing how the year panned out, I feel like I asked myself to swim the English Channel after only ever practicing in a kiddie pool.

Live and learn, right?

In certain respects I’ve grow this year and feel more confident in my ability to make attainable goals that I can realistically cross of my list. So here goes, in no particular order:

Write. As often as possible. Fill in all the pages of my word tracker
Shop “Brew Disaster” around until it’s picked up
Research and then write my story for the next anthology I’ve been invited to participate in
For every 4 “new” books I read I want to pick up an “old” book off my TBR shelf
At MINIMUM I want to double the amount of books I read in 2014
Continue going strong with Anxiety Ink, I have so many plans in the back of my mind…
Take time to go outside and breathe a few times a day
Walk/bike/exercise more for better energy and health
Make dinner twice a week
Be accountable: put everything on the calendar, make time, and budget accordingly
Don’t take on more than I can handle but push my limits comfortably
Be POSITIVE
Shop my literary stories around
Participate in NaNoWriM0 2015
Get my current WIP done by the end of the year and continue work on others!
Get the personal writer website going
Show more presence at ARWA: get to more meetings and continue working on the newsletter

I’m more than happy with these goals and can’t wait to get cracking! I’m amused that Kate and I both learned about quantitative goals in 2014 and are each taking a smarter approach. What does everyone else want to accomplish this year?

The post Happy New Year! Hello, 2015 Goals appeared first on Anxiety Ink.

Writing Goals for 2015

When I lined up my writing goals last year, I did so in a pretty unorganized manner. And my writing goals evolved over the course of the year based on what I was doing.

A lot of the evolution came from the fact I had so much variability in my life (job situation, writing situation, life situation) that I had to maintain that flexibility. Going into the New Year, I am facing a lot of the same difficulties. There are lots of plans in my life for this year, ranging from running 10Ks, possible child, graduations, and—of course—lots of writing.

So, for this year, I have taken a look at a few goal-setting blog posts from various sources (and wrote my own for marketing planning at ArtIsMyBusiness.com) to guide my decisions for 2015.

Writing Goal—Non-fiction: Write, edit, and publish my planned Street Teams edition of Novel Marketing for August 2015. The outline and research were done in 2014 so the bulk of the formation of the book have been completed. The rest is just execution.
Writing Goal—Fiction: Create, write, edit, and publish at least one edition of my space serial. I’m going to just bite the bullet and make my fiction happen. I’m excited and terrified.
Writing Goal—Development: Take a writing course. I have one planned for the first part of the year.
Writing Goal—Conferences: Attend two writing conferences. I have already picked up When Words Collide in Calgary and Sirens in Denver, CO. If there is an opportunity to attend a third, I will. With conferences, I will work to present at least once at each conference.
Writing Goal—Blogging: Continue to establish my new partnership, ArtIsMyBusiness.com (I post Mondays! Marketing Mondays!), as well as maintaining Anxiety Ink (every Wednesday).

This list is probably the most confident I have ever been in a New Years’ Resolution list. It just seems to make sense. There are timelines involved for the ones that need it. No day-to-day micromanagement built in throughout the year. No word counts. Just end products, end goals. I think this structure will help me feel more confident going forward and not that I have blown my entire year based on my first week off-kilter.

It’s a bit of a change, really, the way these goals are scheduled. I have personal goals, too. I mean, I have a 10K in May that I’m registered for—I somehow have to make it through to the end of that and running it would be easier than struggling and huffing and puffing, lol. I have many many books on my to-be-read shelves that I need to crack into (I’m thinking if I set a goal like 12 TBR books in the year, I’ll at least motivate myself to make a dent in the very imposing shelves). I just need to make things happen.

The post Writing Goals for 2015 appeared first on Anxiety Ink.

2015 Goal Making

In case you can’t tell, I enjoy setting goals. Now that I’ve found a decent balance with reality, that is.

So with another new year rolling around, I’m making a new set of goals for myself!

Travel (because there will always and forever be travel goals of some sort): New York City and World Fantasy Con in upstate NY. These will be two separate trips. Once again, I don’t know if I’ll make it to ReaderCon, but I do definitely want to get in some Boston-area visiting.

I want to change my hair color, start learning Korean, and do home-y/nesting type things like build a deck and paint some rooms. There’s a recipe I want to learn and an art class I want to take with my grandmother. I want to have enough sewing lessons with my grandmother that I’m comfortable making simple clothing.

This year, I want to make more gifts than I buy.

I plan to audition for at least two shows and to create a spreadsheet to track which stories I’ve sent out for submission where. 2014 I focused on writing output with finishing drafts of two novels and three short stories. In 2015, I’m focusing on the next part of the process: submissions. The goal is to submit three stories to at least two publications each (response times permitting).

Six submissions may not sound like a lot, but for me it is. 2014 was my most submission-heavy year so far with four. I do not count my story in the What Follows anthology or the story that went in The Word Count Podcast, since those were closer to solicitations.

Also: READ MORE. My reading list for the year is less than impressive.

Beyond that, I’ll see where this year takes me! Do you have any plans or goals for 2015?

The post 2015 Goal Making appeared first on Anxiety Ink.

Tradition

Yesterday, December 25th, has to mark one of the biggest days for tradition on my continent. Even this general time of year boasts a ton of holidays around the world.

A few weeks ago I was talking about Christmas with my boss. She was telling me about her holiday traditions and asked me about mine. I brushed it off saying my family doesn’t do anything. We used to do big extended family dinners on my mom’s side to see everyone, those shifted to Christmas parties, but we haven’t had a big get together in years. There are reasons. I will spare you the details. On my dad’s side we’d go to my grandparents for dinner. We haven’t done that since I was little.

As far as I was concerned time had eroded our Christmas traditions, proving to me that the magic of Christmas can only be achieved during childhood.

Monday we were back on the holiday topic. I made a comment in passing about some chopped peppers a co-worker had given me. Ones my mom was saving for our Christmas Eve nachos because we only ever have snack and finger food before the big meal on Christmas Day.

Can you spot the lightbulb moment?

Holidays, especially the granddaddy of them all, stress me out. I am an anxious soul who has seen too many Christmas dramas to sail through the season. Thankfully, this was one of the best Christmas’s I’ve had in a long time –no one even got testy this year! Anyway, until the day was nearly upon me I didn’t think about the little things my mom always prepares.

My mom and I watch Scrooge every year. We can say the lines along with the cast but that is irrelevant. We still howl with laughter at Marley and Scrooge when he flashes his maid trying to stand on his head.

This year we cracked open a bottle of wine, a true rarity in our house, but my brother, mother, and I drink out of the festive wineglasses each year even if they’re full of juice. They set the mood.

We always open our gifts together. Which means everyone has to be awake. I am notorious for being the last one out of bed and annoying the household Christmas lovers who have been up for hours. Once everyone has had caffeine the presents are divvied and torn open. Stockings are done last.

Finally, after everyone has shown each other their stuff, thanks have been said, and the living room is returned to some semblance of order, my brother, my dad, and I get out of mom’s way as she gets dinner going. The cranberry sauce is traditionally my cooking addition. I help at the end with setting out food and whatever little thing I’m asked to do.

I’ll stop listing things now so I can actually get to a relevant point. All of these little things are foundational for my family’s Christmas celebration. They’re small but I couldn’t imagine the past two days without them. This of course got me thinking about characters. We talk about backstory all the time and I believe that traditions and rituals for every season mark people. I don’t know if I think about that when I’m learning about my characters.

Holidays are inevitably about family, either those you’re born with, those you assemble, or a mix of both. What my characters do on these days and why is an important question –a really revealing question–, and one I will have to ponder into the New Year as I think about stories.

Merry Christmas!

The post Tradition appeared first on Anxiety Ink.

Goal Wrap-Up for 2014

Goals from 2014

Revise interWIRED and query – I tried. I did. But the book’s foundation shifted on my twice and I simply don’t think this book is ready. As a result, I’m moving forward with new ideas to keep motivated. I want to come back to Griffin and company, but it may be a while yet while I develop more fo my style.
Write 6 days a week – Overall, this one worked out for the first 9 months of the year. But once my employment resumed, it struggled.
Walk or Work Out 6 days a week – If I really counted walking to the bus, then, yay! If not, fail. I’m turning around my fail-trend eyeing another 10K in 2015, though.
Submit a short story/freelance article a month – Counting freelance articles with my short stories, this was actually a success…but it wasn’t exactly paced throughout the year.
Minimize book and magazine purchases – I did well to minimize purchases… but I still didn’t read much, forcing all of my free time to be about writing. When it comes to making goals for next year, I need to have more balance.

2014 was a very interesting year for me. There was no status quo, no baseline, no normal. Stress came in massive fluctuations that threatened my goals in all-or-nothing kinds of ways.

I managed to nail my Camp NaNo goals twice, but fell short on traditional NaNoWriMo. I self-published a book (Novel Marketing) I hadn’t anticipated writing at the beginning of the year. I freelanced. I took time to reevaluate myself and what I considered to be success.

I’m working on my list of goals for the New Year and I can’t help but be glad to be free of these goals and setting new ones. I found them to be a bit of a burden, set at a time where I was struggling and held lofty ideas of where I would go in 2014. This doesn’t mean that I feel I failed but I didn’t necessarily succeed against my standards of my stressed-out, mentally-recovering, early-2014 self.

The post Goal Wrap-Up for 2014 appeared first on Anxiety Ink.