Tag: sometimes I’m dumb

Writing–Writing With a Day Job 2: The Revenge

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

My initial enthusiasm for the challenge of writing with a day job, essentially working two jobs, lasted all of a few days.  Everything went downhill pretty quickly after that.

In short, February was a disaster.

I didn’t edit one chapter of The World Saving Series. I had a list of short stories that needed work.  After struggling with rewrites on “The Guinea Pig” for a week in order to meet a deadline, I gave up when I finally realized that story just wasn’t going to do what I needed it to do. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t spent the week before that struggling with rewrites on another story that I ended up not rewriting.  Three short stories that I needed to review/revise got pushed into March, therefore really pushing the deadlines on those pieces.

February led me to question whether or not I really was committed to being a writer. With some of the urgency gone now that I have stable income, I was left to wonder if I was just writing for the money and now that I’m getting the money, would I eventually stop writing.

Maybe it’s just me wanting to believe the best in myself (which is pretty unlikely), but I don’t think that’s the case.

After all, I started this crusade in earnest when I was still working at my last job. I wrote for about six months while working part-time in retail with little trouble. The difference was the situation. Then I was working part-time and had only a few short stories that I was writing and revising. Now I’m working full time and I have probably a dozen short stories in the mix and at least three novels in various stages (that haven’t been lost to the two computer crashes that happened a year apart). The motive and goal is still the same: to establish a successful writing career. The situation is the only thing that’s changed.

I think it’s going to take some trial and error to find out what the right work load is now that I’m working full time. I’m also going to have to work smarter. I can’t spend so much time battling one story with no payoff. And I’m going to have to accept that I’m going to be tired sometimes after a long day in the cube and just get my writing done anyway. A little progress is better than no progress and I need all the progress I can get.

But the key is going to be the workload. I can’t keep scheduling my months like I’m not spending forty hours a week doing something else.

I need to meet myself half-way.

Stories By The Numbers

Submitted: 3 (just sent out “Another Deadly Weapon”; “Summer Rot” and “Such a Pretty Face” are still out)
Ready: 4 (“Husband and Wife”, “Elevator”, “Bigger Than a Squirrel”, and now “Erin Go Bragh”)
Rejected: 1 (“Spillway”)

Writing–Deadlines: Making Them

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I like deadlines. Deadlines keep me motivated and they keep me honest. I don’t like missing them. Self-imposed or someone else’s, they do me good.

I don’t like missing deadlines. Even if they’re important to no one else but me, I don’t like to miss them. I don’t like to make that adjustment on my day planner. If I write it down, it’s set in stone.

I’m also a dedicated procrastinator. I’m excellent at putting off, which conflicts with my need to meet deadlines.

I’ve gotten better at managing my time and making myself get started. With my self-imposed deadlines, I’ve recognized that I’m better off giving myself a little more time than I think I’ll need. If I set a specific goal in mind for a given day, that helps, too. It’s like a mini-deadline. I need to have this done before I go to sleep. A few of those and the overall deadline is met without much effort.

There are times when this doesn’t work out, of course. For whatever reason, the motivation isn’t there. It’s too much effort to open the file, let alone read the words on the screen. I can’t think of how to phrase what I want to say or change what needs to be changed. The “I don’t feel like it” refrain echoes through my brain.

Which means that when the deadline is looming, the fire gets lit under my butt. The focus might not always be there, but the dedication is and I do whatever it takes to get the job done. Sometimes this means struggling late into the night. Other times, it means I find an hour’s worth of focus, get the job done, and feel like a complete moron for not just doing it sooner so I could have had the whole thing accomplished and off of my plate sooner.

I try to seize the real productive moments whenever I have them. There are sometimes when I’m just in a demolishing mood and I try to get as much done as possible. For example, this past weekend I was hitting all cylinders and as such, I knocked out six blog posts in two days. It was nice to be done with them all with hours to spare before bedtime.

Of course, this came after I spent all week struggling to make revisions on “Phobias Are How Rumors Get Started”, having major trouble getting started, only to find that what I really needed to do took me about half an hour.

But I met my deadline.

“Phobias Are How Rumors Get Started” is now posted. It’ll be up for the next six weeks. Enjoy.

Writing–Social Anxiety Network

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

A big part of a writing career these days is networking. Getting to know fellow writers, making connections with them that could lead to making connections with other people in the business, other writers, agents, publishers, editors.

Networking is also how writers today build a fanbase and attract attention. Through Twitter and Facebook and other fabulous internet socializing tools, writers can sell themselves and their work to the readers they’re hoping to attract.

This is all well and good. It’s a great way to connect with readers and it’s a great way to connect with others in the writing business. It brings down walls and makes the writing feel less lonely. Many writers, even the most shy ones, thrive doing this sort of thing.

However, I am not one of these people.

As ridiculous as it sounds (particularly if you follow me on Twitter), I have social anxiety on the Internet. For most people, the anonymity of the Internet allows them to be more outspoken, more bold. While that does apply to me in certain situations (again, Twitter), that anonymity doesn’t cover them all.

For example, other blogs. I read other blogs, but unless I know the person, I rarely comment. Even if I do know the person, that doesn’t mean I’ll comment. Sometimes I have nothing to say and I really don’t want to force something just for the sake of conversation. Most of the time, I don’t feel comfortable with commenting. I don’t feel smart enough, established enough, or legit enough to share my two cents. I feel awkward coming out of lurkerdom to comment as there is no established rapport. I’m just a stranger stopping by and saying a few words without introduction.

Which is just silly because I don’t feel that way about people who comment on my blog (or reply or retweet me on Twitter). Once I get over the shock that people are actually reading and not everything I babble just disappears into a void, I’m cool with it. I don’t know why I’d feel differently with the roles switched.

It takes me a while to warm up, I suppose.

I’m focusing on blogs because I’m a little more vocal on Twitter, but there’s still a certain amount of anxiety and awkwardness in following people and responding to certain people’s tweets. As much as I’d like to be one of the cool kids, I never have been, never will be, and I still get nervous, even on the Internet, when it comes to talking to them.

It’s a silly little thing, but it’s one that’s holding me back and is going to continue holding me back unless I overcome it. Naturally, that’s what I intend to do.

I prefer to have making an ass of myself on Twitter be my biggest social problem.

Stories By The Numbers

Stories Submitted: 3
Stories Ready: 3
Acceptances/Rejections: 0

No (Good With) Time

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I’ve got a wall calendar hanging on my closet door. I’ve got a day planner on my dressr. I’ve got a montly schedule written out on a whiteboard. The date appears in the lower right-hand corner of my laptop’s screen.

Now go ahead…ask me what day it is?

Odds are, with all of those dately things, I have no idea. I’d like to blame that on the lack of a regular job to help keep my days in check, but even when I had one, I might know the day of the week, but not the number of the month.

Not that knowing what day it is helps me in the grand scheme of things anyway because I have no concept of time. You hear people all the time say how events sneak up on them and how they didn’t realize it was so close. It’s usually because they’re busy. They’ve got their heads down, doing their thing, and when they look up, holy cow, it’s here.

For me, it’s a fact of my existence. I have no concept of time.

I can look at a date on the calendar. I can count the days from one date to another. But those days in between have no meaning for me. I have no concept of that distance.

For example, my credit card bill is due the same time of every month. I know this. When the first of the month comes around, I look at that due date and think I have plenty of time to scrape together all of the change I can dig out of couches and pick up out of gutters to pay the bill. In reality, it’s only about two weeks. And I’m ace at neglecting the timing of things like money transfers and deposits after three being processed the next day and other banking matters. I’ve cut it more than close on many occasions because I cannot grasp the fact that two weeks really isn’t that much time.

And I do it every single month.

For whatever reason, my brain will not learn this fact. It cannot process time any other way.

I say that I don’t remember birthdays and anniversaries, but the truth is, I do. I just can’t remember them in relation to the real world.

My stepdad’s birthday is December 7th. I know that. Ask me and I’ll tell you. I bought him a card. But that date means nothing to me on December 1st. I think I still have time to send him the card. Which is why I don’t mail the card until December 5th and it’s late. It’s why I hate sending cards. I have no concept of timing it so that it arrives in a timely fashion, not too early, not late.

Or I might know the date, but if I don’t know what day it is, there’s no way I can “remember” it. More than once I’ve been caught off guard by a birthday because I didn’t know the date.

My lack of skill with time has consistently caused me trouble. I’m better off not waiting on a deadling. The sooner I get something finished, the less likely I have the opportunity to screw it up. This is ONE thing that my brain has thankfully learned through repeated near-misses during my early school days. I’m sure it seemed nerdy and suck-upish by the time I hit college and I was getting my research papers done well before the deadline, but I didn’t go to college to be hip.

The approach works for academics. I can get it to work for writing, for the most part. It doesn’t work as well for buying Christmas presents or mailing things because for whatever reason, my brain insists that I have time.

It’s a constant struggle and it’s something I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to overcome or fix, and not for lack of trying either.

So until I can get the concept of time to click in this beat up brain of mine, I’m going to continue to be that guy that disappoints people with my late cards and cutting things far too close.

Sorry.

Happy birthday!

There. I’m not late.

Writing–Writing Around December

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Stephen King has said he writes every day, even on Christmas. I only wish I was as gifted. I don’t write every day. I tried, I failed, I found a schedule that works for me.

I’ve got a whiteboard in which I put a monthly schedule, four months at a stretch. For every month, I write down what I want to accomplish in that month. From there, I organize my projects further by writing in my day planner what I want to work on for a given day. Sometimes I can do this all at once at the beginning of the month; sometimes I go week by week. Either way, my projects get scheduled and I stick to that schedule (mostly). When it comes to short stories, I sometimes have a lot of things going on in one month. This helps keep me organized. I thrive on organization. It makes up for my declining memory.

The goal of this monthly system is to get things done and get a few days off. If I get everything done in a timely fashion, then I have a few days off at the end of the month to let my brain rest. The more efficiently I get my work done, the more time I have for resting and working on goof projects (projects that are purely for pleasure). The more I slack during the month, the less time off I have, if I get any at all.

For the most part, this scheduling system works out very well for me. December, however, is the notable exception. It’s the busiest leg of the Holiday Gauntlet and I always think I can manage my time better than I’m actually capable of and end up overscheduling myself, much to my disappointment. It’s no way to end a year.

This year I managed to wise up and gave myself a reduced schedule. So far, it’s working out very well. I’m accomplishing things without getting overwhelmed and stressed. Finally! The brains kick in and I do something smart!

With only one more item to go on my monthly writing to-do list, I’m taking this week off to enjoy the holiday and I’m doing it without guilt. Well, writing guilt, anyway.

Maybe one day I can work up to the writing stamina Stephen King has, but for now, I’m looking to end this year on a feel-good note and I’m good with that.

Stories By the Numbers

Ready: 3
Sent Out: 2
Rejected: 1 (“Erin Go Bragh”; the Universe wanted to prove the point I made in last weeks Writing Wednesday by sending me a “It’s not you, it’s me” rejection)

Writing–Rejection Subjective

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

One of my biggest obstacles to changing my writing from hobby to job was the fear of rejection. I don’t do well with failure. Even as a kid it gave me serious anxiety. I’d be so afraid of failing or making a mistake that I’d just freeze and wouldn’t do anything. Then once I was forced to actually do it and found out that even if I did make a mistake or fail, it wasn’t the end of the world and then I had no troubles.

Writing was no different. The idea of being rejected (and therefore, not good enough) stopped me cold in my tracks. It was the combination of entering contests (because in my head that’s not being rejected, it’s just not winning, and I can handle not winning) and reading Stephen King‘s On Writing that helped me get past my rejection fear.

The first story that ever brought me any kind of validation that I might be good writing was “Such a Pretty Face”. It won 10th place in the Genre category of a Writer’s Digest story contest. It got me 25 bucks, but didn’t get the story published (I did get to see my name in print in a magazine, though, and that was pretty cool). I was really proud of the acoomplishment and proud of the story. I then decided to try to get “Such a Pretty Face” published.

And that’s when I learned a valuable lesson in rejection. It’s a subjective thing.

Despite placing in the contest, “Such a Pretty Face” has been rejected six times since then. SIX! You’d think that 10th place showing would count for something. It’s a GOOD story. Someone told me so. I’ve got a certificate to show for it.

It was very frustrating to have one person say the story was worthy of a ribbon, but everyone else not think it was worthy of being read.

Of all the rejections I’ve received for “Such a Pretty Face”, only one suggested I make any changes to it. The changes he suggested made me realize that he totally missed the point of the story. And that made me realize that I was forgetting the human element of the submission process.

Not every rejection I get is because the story was bad. Sure, I’ve sent out stories I shouldn’t have and they were rejected for very good reasons. But some rejections left me scratching my head. Now I realize that maybe those form looking rejections might not have all been form rejections and maybe they meant it when they said these weren’t the stories that they were looking for.

It seems silly, but up until that point it didn’t occur to me that someone just might not like my story. I never thought that maybe it might not what they were looking for or they’d already seen too many similar stories lately or they didn’ t think the story fit with the publication as well as I did. Yes, until that point, I didn’t realize that rejection might not have anything to do with the quality of the story.

If you’ve read any of my other blog posts, it should be no suprise that I am this slow on the uptake.

So  my attitude towards rejection has changed a bit. It’s still disappointing, but now that I know that it doesn’t automatically mean that my story is shit, the sting doesn’t linger quite as long. Getting back on that horse is quicker and easier.

And if it’s the last thing I do, I will see “Such a Pretty Face” published.

Stories By the Numbers

Ready: 3
Submitted: 3

Late Bloomer Blues II

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I wrote my first word at three and my first story at six, but I was twenty-eight before I fully committed myself to being a writer.

Oh, I’d thought about it over the years because I always wrote, stories, plays, and poems. But, I had a bit of ADD when it came to trying to figure out what I was going to spend the rest of my life doing because so many things have caught my interest over the years. Marine biology, meterology, acting, psychology, medicine, sociology. At one point, I considered them all. And I think the thing that frustrated my family the most was that I could have done all of them (though I don’t think I would have been the most successful actress because of my looks, or lack thereof) because I was smart enough to do any of it; I just didn’t have the attention span or the follow through.

My senior year of high school was the first time I actually made an attempt to be serious about my writing in the sense that I took a correspondence course on creative writing. It took a little over a year for me to complete and I got a nice shiny certificate in creative writing from it not long after I got my high school diploma, but I didn’t feel like I learned very much aside from the very important lesson that plot is a good thing and my stories could use it.

My first round of community college, I intended to major in English to work towards a degree in creative writing because that seemed logical. I’m a logical person and I think there must be logical steps to take to achieve goals and if I can find them, I’ll take them. Sometimes I’m terrible at finding them.

Majoring in English lasted one semester because instead of going back to school, I went to work. The next time I went to school, I was intending on majoring in sociology. The last time I went to school, I took every psyhcology course I could find.

It was the psychology courses that reawakened my desire to write (which had been squashed by a battle with depression and was slow to come back as I got my life back on track) because studying about these quirks of humanity made me want to write about them.

I started making time to write, started writing with the purpose to get published, started submitting my stories to contests and to publications. I got my first victory in 2008 when my story placed 10th in its category in a contest. That was the first time I really felt like maybe I had what it took to make a career out of writing.

And ever since then I’ve been kicking myself in the butt for not realizing it sooner. I feel like I’ve wasted time, especially when I see people much younger than I am land publishing deals or hear about some writers who’d been submitting their work since they were in their teens. I feel like starting my career at 28 puts me miles behind everyone else and miles behind where I should be.

Now every rejection feels like a setback that I should have suffered years ago and I’m too old to be dealing with it now. It’s like going through puberty years after all of my classmates. I feel so behind and I can’t catch up because in order for that to happen I’d need a DeLorien and a flux capacitor.

So until Santa brings me those things, I just keep plugging away, hoping to make up for lost time.

The late bloomer blues strike again.

Lost: Adventurous Spirit

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

According to science, your brain finishes developing in your late 20’s. That last little bit deals with rationality and impulse control and anticipating consequences to actions. It’s a good thing, in the long run.

Unfortunately for me, that final development seems to have just killed my spirit of adventure. The iron curtain came down and separated it from the rest of me.

In my early 20’s, when I was friends with people involved in the independent professional wrestling circuit in Chicago, it was nothing for me to get off of work at noon on Saturday (after getting up at five in the morning), drive to the Chicago suburbs for a show and not get home until two in the morning. There a few times when I’d find myself driving home as the sun rose after having spent several hours after the show wandering the streets of Chicago, being up a full twenty-four hours. I don’t recommend doing that.

I didn’t say that my adventures were necessarily smart. I once drove through a tornado to go to a bar to watch a group of friends put on a wrestling show that nobody came to see because there was a tornado. To be fair, I didn’t know I was driving through the tornado at the time. I heard the warnings as I was driving, but I wasn’t familiar with the counties in that area of the state, so I wasn’t sure exactly where they were warning. And those cars that pulled over to the side were wimps. Wimps!

Around that time, it was beyond me to drive eight hours to Arkansas to visit a friend for a weekend. Or fly to Philly to visit another friend for a weekend. Or drive to Arkansas, spend the night, drive to Memphis, catch a flight to Philly, spend the night in Delaware, spend another night in New Jersey, fly back to Memphis, drive back to Arkansas, spend the night, and then drive home.

Once, I took the train with one friend to Chicago, met two other friends up there. We spent two nights in a hostel. The bathroom was communal. The showers had curtains, but most of the bathroom stalls didn’t have doors. Our first night there, we spent three hours talking to a guy named Dylan whose entire side of the conversation amounted to a pick-up line. We spent an entire day at Six Flags. We went to Navy Pier. We got lost in Chicago and were mistaken for prostitutes (we weren’t directly solicited, but why else would the same car slowly pass us five times as we stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out how to get back to the hostel?). We missed our train home because we just had to go back to My PI for lunch and we tipped our waiter for being cute.

Did I mention that I did all of this in a three day weekend after working seven days straight, four of those days working twelve hours a day at a store in Indiana, and before going back to work for another ten day stretch?

I was crazy, but I was also fearless. I wouldn’t think twice. I lost quite a bit of that between twenty-five and thirty.

Oh, I’ve had adventures since then. I went to three Chicago Comicons (back in my day they were called Wizard Worlds) and two DragonCons. But those adventures were better planned out in comparison to my earlier trips. They reflected the growing awareness that not everything could be winged and some things were better with a little foresight.

But, I realized this past summer that my adventurous spirit was off in an old folks home somewhere. My mother surprised me with tickets to a Cubs game as an early Christmas present. My first thought after “YAY! CUBS GAME! THANKS, MOM!” was “Wow, I’m going to have to find someone to go with me who will drive because I don’t want to”. Now, I’ve never liked to drive, but ten years ago that wouldn’t have stopped me; I’d have just driven if I couldn’t have found someone else to do it.

I need to get some of that adventurous spirit back. Some of the fearlessness, not necessarily the stupidity. I’ve still got some stupidity to spare.  But, adventures are what make life fun and interesting and I need to get back into the habit of having those.

I need to raise that iron curtain in my brain and let a little of that spirit back out.

And I need to get some money to make having those adventures possible. But that’s a post for another day.