Healthy Writers - Not My Mother's Vegetables

Today marks my debut as a columnist on the Healthy Writer Blog.

If you're not familiar with the blog, I hope you'll drop by and check it out.

Healthy Writer was started about a year ago by writer Trish Milburn to chronicle her efforts to live a healthier lifestyle. Writing may be a sedentary career, but it doesn't have to be an unhealthy one!

Over the year the blog expanded with Michelle Butler, Tawny Weber, Keri Mikulski and Rachel Kleinsorge each taking a day and focusing on a different aspect of living a healthier life. Today I join them with a Saturday column on vegetables.

My post today is called Not My Mother's Vegetables and the vegetable du jour is the amazing superfood Kale.

I hope you'll come by and check out some of the videos and recipes.

WriteonCon

A week or more ago we were talking about all the people heading off to various conferences and what it felt like to be the ones left at home.

Well this week, all that changed. If you haven't discovered it yet, head on over to WriteonCon, an awesome online FREE conference. The conference is aimed at writers for the Kidlit market but the advice being offered is applicable across genres and the entire idea is extremely cool.

For example, if you're in need of motivation or validation, try this presentation by HarperCollins editor Molly O'Neill - Give Yourself Permission

Last night I participated in/really just observed an online video chat with agent/former editor Mark McVeigh - Working with Agents and Editors

Today there is a workshop on Plot and Pacing that I'm looking forward to spending time on.

There are also upcoming live video chats on querying, building an online presence and the revision process from both the author and editor perspective.

Be sure to check out the schedule of events. It's mind-boggling.

The conference actually started on Tuesday but almost all of the sessions are available as blogs or transcripts on the site.

Huge KUDOS to the organizers of this event. It's absolutely amazing.

Visiting Day

I've had too much time with my own words lately. I'm spending today visiting around other blogs. let me know if you've got one I should see!

The Long View or No Quick Fixes

We live in a world that rewards our need for instant gratification. That's not news, but it is the topic of the next chapter in Writing from the Inside Out by Dennis Palumbo.

He starts this chapter with a thought-provoking description of a commercial he saw - a guy in some sort of new age looking head phones with the headline "You'll be meditating like a Buddha in thirty minutes." (p. 91)

Think about it.

And then wonder - are we like that in our writing?

Do we expect it to be something we can learn in a week? A year? Ten years?

One of my favorite tweets from RWA was this:

Definition of "hope" = just met an author who shopped manuscripts for 15 YEARS! This year - sold nine books.

I'm going to think of this the next time I feel overwhelmed by how long I've been at this and the difficulty of breaking in to publishing.


But back to the chapter - so much wisdom, so much to think about.

Take this quote -

Being a writer - with all its successes and failures, raptures and rejections - is a life long endeavor. Less a career choice than a calling, its rewards are often so private and ambiguous as to be inexpressible. It's as much a perspective on things, a way of organizing one's experience as it is a job. (p. 92)

He goes on to quote from John Fowles about whole sight and summarizes that

Seeing things whole, having the long view, is the only way to live the writer's life. It's committing yourself to a concept of writing as an integral, ongoing part of your life, omstead of ust a series of external events - good or bad reviews. deals made or lost, great or awful days at the keyboard. It's seeing your writing life as though it stretched to the horizons - all the ups and downs, hills and valleys, smoothing out from this lengthened perspective. (p. 93)

Finally, Palumbo advises to listen to your instincts; take a workshop when you feel you need one, write feverishly when the impulse is there, but do it with a view to expanding your writer's life, not in a frantic chase after the hot technique or genre.


What particularly speaks to me about this is that it seems to allow for those burnt out times when you need to pull back. Fill the well, if you will, so as to have something to write about.

I had to back up and live life for a number of years because writing had depleted me. It was a chore that I dreaded rather than the life I wanted to live.

As I type that, I'm struck by the apparent contrast of this wisdom with what I've heard quoted from the keynote address Nora Roberts gave at RWA10. I don't have the exact words but the common paraphrasing I heard was that writing is hard, sweaty work that you just have to do.

I agree with Nora (after all, who am I to argue?), but I have to wonder what she'd think about Palumbo's long view.

What do you think?

Best blogs from RWA

As I read around the various blogs reporting from RWA and SCBWI, my mind is quickly going on overload. There's so much good information that I don't want to forget. Most of it is important no matter what genre you write, so please take a look.

It does seem that there are fewer blog updates this year because everyone is tweeting their thoughts. If you want to follow that - the hashtag is #RWA10 although some are also using #RWA2010.

If you run across a blog I haven't mentioned, please let me know in the comments. I'll be adding to the list as the weekend continues:

But first a bit of fun and a tribute to RWA which has been raising funds for literacy for so many years now.

This was shot and posted by Sarah Wendell, SmartBitchesTrashyBooks




The list (Check back; it's building):

From RWA -

1. Just for fun - the RWA hashalbum - Twitter's feed of everyone's photos.

2. Scott Eagan - Remember your Theme

Scott also blogged that he's now accepting agency queries for Love Inspired books.

3. Barbara Vey - On Librarian/Bookseller Day
Barbara Vey - Workshops and Parties

4. The Misadventures of Super Librarian

RU at RWA romanceuniversity

6. Happy Endings Blog - Daily updates


From SCBWI Conference -

1. The Official SCBWI Conference Blog Be sure to scroll down and check the archives because they've been doing pre-conference blogs as well as blogs during the conference.

2. Susan Kaye Quinn's Inkspells with updates

Myths, Fairy Tales, Woody Allen and RWA

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this post. I got inspired. Mega-inspired.

Seriously, the thing I'm most envious of the people in Orlando is how they'll all come home inspired and eager to get to work. I remember that rush. It's very cool! But thanks to the magic of cyberworld - FB and Twitter - I'm coming away with that same inspiration.

That's a good thing because envy can make us crazy.

In the opening passage of the chapter entitled Myths, Fairy Tales and Woody Allen, Palumbo shows that envy with a description of the opening scene in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories.

A glum Woody Allen sits in a dark, dingy car with other lost souls. Looking out the window he sees another train car - shining, brightly lit. Inside, beautiful men and women laugh and drink champagne...Woody despairs. Why isn't he in the sparkling car with all the sparkling people?

I'll link the Youtube clip for anyone who wants to watch it themselves, but I also wanted to talk about what it means for writers. It's easy to make the comparison between all the sparkly people at conferences and those of us left behind. But is it all sparkly at conferences? Be honest, have you ever felt just a little less sparkly even when there because either you weren't published yet or you are but you're midlist so your sparkly people are the NYTimes bestsellers? Is sparkly relative?

I think in the end, we're all in charge of our own sparkly feelings. I sparkle when my story is flowing, when I know that writing gives me a high like nothing else. So rather than think about the sparkly people at RWA, let's talk about us.

How do you sparkle?

From Stardust Memories

I Guess That's Why They Call it the Blues

WARNING: I'm suffering a mild case of the I'm Not at Conference Blues so this post isn't as upbeat as usual. Probably more because I'm getting bored blogging about the same book every day. :) But blues fits the topic and there's definitely something to learn.

To be honest, I'm getting a little impatient with these chapters in Writing from the Inside Out. They cover different stumbling blocks but the advice is the same. Good, but the same. Today's chapter is Fear and the advice is the same; we have to mine our fears to make our writing stronger.

Point taken and on to the next chapter. Really more of the same. The chapter is The Judge and the focus is our inner critic. I'm sure I don't have to tell you anything about inner critics. We know them all too well. To quote Palumbo, "You're a writer. Which means you're your own worst critic. Join the club." (p. 81) I guess the only advice is work with your inner critic to improve but don't let it stifle you.

Moving right along - Double-Barreled Blues. Honestly, this chapter is depressing. But that's the point I guess, of a chapter with that title. According to Palumbo, writers face two truths - first that the only advice we can follow is - to do the same thing - write, query, network, write some more, query some more, network some more - ad infinitum or until someone buys your work and then you do it again for the next one. That he says, also meets the definition of crazy (doing the same thing over and over without success). How depressing. Yes, I'm hearing some blues. But now comes the second barrel - that writing is the one field where the "belief, nurtured from childhood and reinforced in everyday life, in the validity of cause and effect," doesn't hold. (p. 83) Study and you'll do better on tests. Work hard and you'll get a raise. "Eat your spinach, you'll grow up big and strong." (p. 83)

I'm not sure I buy that it's all really that easy in the real world. Tell that to someone who has worked hard all their life only to lose a job when the company fails or the people whose savings were lost due to some unscrupulous person.

Still, though it's true that no matter how much you write, there's no golden promise that you'll sell, it's also true that if you stop, you'll never sell.

I read a wonderful blog this morning that's proof of that. Anna Standiszewski's blog on Writing The One" over on Adventures in Children's Publishing. It's a fabulous blog on the power of perseverance. Check it out.

Tomorrow's chapter is fun - Myths, Fairy Tales and Woody Allen, so be sure to come back.

And now, because I love to share music here and because a lot of people are feeling the I'm not at conference blues -





So how about you? Suffering not at conference blues or happy to be home and productive? What do you think about the advice I've been sharing?