Tag Archives: Motivation

Writers Conference Kickstart Time

Writers Life, ,

Writers Conference Kickstart Time. Spring into summer is conference time. Small retreats and huge gatherings punctuate this period of the year for many of us. We pack up our notebooks and our hopes and head for a convocation of scribes.

Most of us want to find a kickstart to getting our work published or better published. But I do not believe that is the most important thing we gain from these gatherings, whether they take place in a grand hotel or a modest cabin or somewhere in between.

The most important thing we find is each other. We make the most of a writers’ conference by maximizing that discovery. We writers are natural allies. That is so deeply true because we understand one another from inside our own writers’ lives and souls.

We understand… what it’s like to labor in the formidable publishing marketplace… what a struggle it is to get our work published and keep it published… how it feels to suffer rejection and disappointment… and the joy of our accomplishments, whether they be large or small.

Every writer needs support in these hard struggles we have chosen. We know this because we need the same support ourselves. With this knowledge comes the obligation to reach out and offer encouragement to our writer friends, the old friends we reunion with at these gatherings, and the about-to-become new friend in the hotel lobby chair next to ours.

A few sentences of kindness can be another kind of kickstart. They can be exactly what a writer colleague requires at a downbeat moment of her career, while requiring little more on our part than a few upbeat moments of being nice.

Our success dreams make us nice to the max to attending agents, editors and instructors. We line up to pitch our projects. We take copious, almost worshipful notes at their presentations. We long to recruit them as our allies on the inside of the publishing world.

In the meantime, we mustn’t forget to nurture our allies inside the writing world. Give what you can. A word of advice, an attentive ear, a shared laugh, a hug. As you scurry to workshops and appointments, take a moment to touch an author ally with a bit of being nice. My guess is you will experience a lot of feeling good in return. That good feeling is the true essence of Writers Conference Kickstart Time.

Note: The photos in this post are from conferences I was blessed to attend 1994 – 2018.  Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

A Wrong Way Home – Alice Orr’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 1 – is a FREE eBook HERE. Enjoy!

A Wrong Way Home

Alice’s latest novel – A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE.

Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving: “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”

Find all of Alice’s books HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/alibettewrites/
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/

Publishing’s Rocky Road Continues – How to Keep Traveling On

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Publishing’s Rocky Road Continues. You’ve completed your manuscript, revised it, polished it. You’ve followed the advice in my last post, Literary Agent Search Savvy. You’ve submitted to the right agents for you, not exclusively, but no more than six at a time. Now, as if out of bright blue nowhere, the anxiously awaited call or email has arrived. An agent is seriously interested in your work, maybe even a topnotch agent. Hallelujah!You think you have exited Publishing’s Rocky Road. Think again. Don’t get me wrong. A momentous thing has happened in your writing life. You have captured the attention of an agent, not an easy thing to do. Good agents don’t waste their short supply of time requesting work that has not genuinely attracted them. But this doesn’t mean you’re off Publishing’s Rocky Road. You have detoured onto its unmarked byway, the Wait-Wait-Wait Highway.

“I’ve already been here,” you exclaim. You have most likely traveled through a pile of submissions and a pile of rejections too, wait-wait-waiting what felt like eternities in between. The current view beyond your windshield may feel and look a lot the same, anxious and skimpy on roadside attractions. The order of the day is once again to Wait-Wait-Wait, and waiting periods are trying, in civilian life and in author life.

Console yourself first with this reality. You have already traveled the hardest leg of this adventure. You have conceived and created an entire book. A book that is attracting positive attention in the land of the publishing professionals. Do not ever underestimate that accomplishment. It is the foundation of everything to come, and it hasn’t crumbled so far.

So, why do you not feel consoled? No matter how far out of control you felt in your initial agent search submission phase, this new phase somehow feels more out of your control than ever. During that initial period, you dropped your work into multiple black holes, expected rejections and, when one came, made another drop into the next black hole on your list. It was something to do. Now there is only a single repository and nothing to do but, you guessed it, wait-wait-wait.

So, how do you keep from losing your mind? Right here, I’m going to say something that sounds so lame, so Pollyannaish you will want to climb through the screen and wring my neck. To jeopardize my neck even further, I must preface that something by agreeing with you. This phase of your struggle to become published feels so far out of your control because it is. And, here comes the I-get-throttled part. You must simply let go and travel on.

What did she say? I said you must let go of longing for control and let your work find its way. Harder still, you must have confidence that it will. While you attempt, however imperfectly, to build this confidence, turn to your first powerful resource, the rest of us, your writer friends in your writers’ community. We are your shoulders to lean and/or cry upon. Whether you need a strategy session, a consult, or just a boost in the spirits-up department, we are here.

Next, get back to work. If you’ve not already done so, dive deep-down into your next book or continue your series. Professional authors are forever moving on to the next project, which keeps us from bogging down with anxiety over the one that’s out there in the publishing world ozone. It also guarantees we will have a continuing career, bent upon producing a shelf load of books eventually. Disciplined forward momentum prevents, or at least lessens the severity of, running out of fuel along Publishing’s Rocky Road.

Never forget that you are tenacious. You have traversed this far on an obstacle-strewn path. From that process, you have forged your own personal template for doing so again and again with each new project. Have faith that will be the case, and take my word as well. I have watched it happen with countless authors, including myself.

In the meantime, there is the joy of the doing. The joy of the writing work, at every stage of its challenging course. You are on that course, moving along it, as well as deeper into it. Publishing’s Rocky Road Continues, but you, with fire in your belly, are ready for the ride. Bon voyage.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

A Wrong Way Home – Alice Orr’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 1 – is a FREE eBook HERE. Enjoy!A Wrong Way Home

Alice’s latest novel – A Time of Fear & Loving– Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE. Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving. “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/alibettewrites/
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/

How to Manage Your Writing Time by Managing Your Writer Psyche

Writers Life

Time Management imageQuestion: What is my biggest writing time management problem? Answer: Me.

If you’d asked me this question last month or maybe even last week I’d have said this. “My biggest problem with managing my time to write is all of the demands made on my hours and my energy and my spirit too. So there!”

Reassessment tells me this is not the true answer to the question. Why not? Because it leaves Me totally out of the equation. As if the power in my life to live my life and parcel out my time somehow resides outside of myself in other people and other circumstances.

The true answer has been banging on my head for a while now. Often from the advice wise friends have tried without success to give me. Also from my own observation of other – or the same – friends. Even from my priest who’s been talking a lot about self-care lately.

My biggest problem with managing to find time to write is the same problem I have with managing too much of my life in general. I simply do not know where to put myself in the lineup of my priorities. As one of those wise friends of mine put it – I don’t put myself at the center of my life.

I’ve been long conditioned for this behavior. My mother used to tell me I wanted to be at the center of things. As if that wasn’t at all where I belonged. Even my sainted grandmother raised me to believe that if I wasn’t making the world a better place I shouldn’t be here.

All of which I interpreted as a clear admonition to put everybody else first. To do everything I could for everybody else whenever possible. And most pointedly – at least in my hearing of it and therefore in my head – that doing for myself or taking care of myself was a bad thing.

BTW both of those women followed their own advice. One of them did so with teeth gritted and resentment in her heart. Happenstance didn’t happen well for her. The other did so with love and kindness in her heart and she fared better. But not as well as she deserved to or should have.

Meanwhile I carried on the family tradition by leaping straight into the helping professions in first one form then others. Schoolteacher. Community organizer. Social worker. Book editor. Literary agent. That last requiring perhaps the most outpouring of self of all.

Guess where most of my time was spent through all of that. On other people’s needs. And where it was not spent. “You have a right to have your own needs satisfied.” That was another wise friend talking to me. My response was to stare at her as if she were speaking a language from an alien galaxy.

I’m telling this story first because I need to tell it. But even more so because almost every writer I know – maybe almost every person I know especially if she’s a woman – needs to hear it. Because so few of us put ourselves solidly at the center of our own lives.

In particular we don’t put ourselves at the center of our writing lives. Ask almost any writer what she’d do if she were truly taking care of herself. If she were truly satisfying her own needs. That writer at her most honest would say this. “I would spend more of my time writing. But I don’t.”

We need to change that. Specifically we need to change our minds about that and our hearts too. Otherwise we will never be able to manage our time or our energy. We will never be able to give our hungry spirits what they require to be satisfied. The opportunity to express themselves.

Not to mention we won’t be able to manage our writing careers either. So there!

 Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com                    http://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter                    http://www.twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks 

RR

A Villain for Vanessa ECover (1) 100 x 150px - 14.6KB - SmallA Villain for Vanessa – coming soon – will be Book 4 of Alice Orr’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense series featuring the Kalli family and the Miller family in stories of Romance and Danger. A Wrong Way Home – Book 1 – is a FREE eBook at Amazon and other online retailers. All of Alice’s books are available at her Amazon Author Page http://www.amazon.com/Alice-Orr/e/B000APC22E/