The Writing Life Archives - Page 34 of 62

Literary Senioritis

October 1, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

When I was in high school, people would talk about experiencing “senioritis” in the last year of school—that feeling that high school is dragging on too long and you are eager for the next stage of your life to begin.

I didn’t really understand what they were talking about until the middle of my junior year—my senioritis struck early. Suddenly, I felt “done” with high school. Not that there weren’t more facts and skills to be learned in school, but emotionally I had finished—I wanted to move on. With me restless and daydreaming, the next year and a half seemed very long.

Oddly, this is not the only time in my life that I have felt senioritis. In college and in every job I have had, there has come a moment where I am “done.” Not that I didn’t still enjoy my work, but a feeling that I had learned all I could in that place and it was time to move on. As if my personal growth required a change to keep me from stagnating. I never ignored that feeling.

I am experiencing senioritis again now. As my debut novel nears release, the familiar “ants-in-the-pants” sensation keeps me pacing the floor. All the knowledge about the business and the marketing I have accrued over the years is building inside of me, waiting for the dam to breach and let the flood go. I know I have more to learn, but it cannot be learned at this stage—I need to graduate to the next stage to continue to grow.

And so I sit here with anticipation tingling my skin, waiting for the launch sequence to commence in earnest. I alternately daydream of the perfect launch party and have nightmares about book signing disasters. I am as ready as I can be for the next chapter of my career, but still riddled with the anxiety of the unknown.

Literary senioritis: an uncomfortable sensation of feeling confined by my current writer cocoon yet feeling anxious about emerging as an author and learning to fly.

Do you ever feel that push-pull of wanting to stay where you are yet also yearning to be more than you are now?

Book Fair!

September 24, 2015 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

Library at the De La Salle College of Saint Benilde. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You already know that I believe libraries are magical places. The sense of awe and wonder I felt as a child has never left me, and entering any library—even one I’ve never been in before—feels like coming home.

Book fairs give me that same giddy feeling.

My daughter had her first book fair this week. Until I walked in and saw the stacks of books, I had forgotten all about book fairs. But the moment I entered the library at her school, it all came rushing back. The books—sleek, shiny, new. The covers calling out, “Pick me! Pick me!” The overwhelming desire to plop down on the floor and read forever.

Ahhhh…

I picked the books for my daughter this year—largely because she, like me, would want EVERY BOOK THERE. Next year I will let her pick her own. By then I hope to have taught her how to read the book jacket and the first page to see if she would really want it. This year, I told her to write down the books she was interested in, and we would get them out of the library to read.

Aside from the sheer magic of the book fair, all the money raised goes to support the school library. It is a major part of their budget, so when you buy a little magic, you enable the library to buy some more magic for their permanent shelves. Buy books to buy more books! It’s like a magic spell all of its own.

Libraries are magic.

Book fairs are magic.

Words are magic.

Go make some magic.

Introverts, Extroverts, and Social Pain

September 17, 2015 By Kerry Gans 3 Comments

My daughter and I share an artistic bent, but we are also very different. The main difference is that she is a shining extrovert and I am a textbook introvert. At age five, she will walk up to any kid on the playground and ask to play with them, while I practice invisibility spells when people try to talk to me. (So far I have not found one that works.)

Most of the time, my daughter’s outgoing nature wins the day and she happily joins in the other kids’ games. The other day, though, she was deliberately excluded from joining with other girls. She came to me and told me they wouldn’t play with her.

I had no idea what to tell her.

You see, as a child I was often on the outside looking in–but it never bothered me. Some of you might think I am remembering with rose-colored glasses, glossing over the hurt of being excluded. But I honestly don’t think I am. I cannot ever remember crying over not being included in social stuff. I cried when my one-time best friend slapped me across the face in a culmination of bullying in grade school. The semester I was bullied in high school, I dreaded going to school and seethed with anger. But I never once remember crying over exclusion.

I rarely sought kids out to play with, so I guess I didn’t have many chances to get rejected. And I preferred my own company, so when I was excluded, it was often more of a relief than anything else. Exclusion and rejection didn’t draw tears from me—at most, I was puzzled by the urge to be mean to someone for no apparent reason. (I am no saint—I understood quite well the urge to be mean to someone in retaliation.) And I would shrug and go back to my books.

But when my daughter came to me and said they wouldn’t play with her, I saw something besides puzzlement in her face. I saw pain. She was hurt. It broke my heart. Telling her to ignore it, to go play by herself, to play with a different toy, etc., just didn’t cut it for her. It wasn’t the toys she wanted—it was the company.

She’s an extrovert, and she experienced a social pain I have never felt.

So I got to wondering if social pain is more acute among extroverts than introverts. In the case of my daughter and myself, the answer seems to be yes. This makes me worry for the future. My daughter will walk a minefield I never did—the minefield of caring too much what others think. Of trying to fit in and be accepted. At what cost? And most of all, I see my sensitive little girl open to a world of hurt from the mean kids in a way I never experienced.

What do I say to her? How do I comfort her? How do I make her see that what mean kids think doesn’t matter, and that the kids who would purposely exclude her are not the kids she should want to be with anyway? I’m already at a loss and she is only five. What happens in those angst-ridden teenage year? In college?

I don’t know how it will all play out. Only time will tell. Do you think extroverts and introverts feel the social pain of exclusion differently? Do you have any advice for this introverted mom and her extroverted child?

My Writing Season Has Begun

September 10, 2015 By Kerry Gans 3 Comments

My daughter went back to school last week—full day for the first time ever. I did exactly what I had planned to do her first two days back—whatever I wanted! I napped, I read, I just relaxed.

Now, however, it’s time to get some work done.

I’d like to set some sort of schedule for the school day, a schedule that incorporates exercise, work, and what I call personal projects. Personal projects are things like photo albums or listening to music or doing genealogy—things that are necessary, that build up over time, and slowly become overwhelming if not attended to.

I have often lamented the inherent imbalance in my life since my child was born. I would either spend all my free time writing, thus getting behind on my personal projects, or divert to some of the personal projects, which then allowed my writing to languish. So I am hoping, with 6+ hours of child-free time 5 days a week, I can now find some sort of schedule where I can move both sets of projects forward at the same time, and thereby not feel the pressure of having so much undone work staring at me.

So one of my goals this week is to sketch out a weekly schedule and see how that works. I know things will come up that derail it from time to time, but I am a person of routine. I like my routines. I think that’s one reason this past summer was so wearing on my nerves—I had no routine for my work.

I purposely left my schedule as loose as possible because I wanted my daughter to have a “free” summer. We had karate and swimming, but the rest of the time was unstructured play or trips to various play places or to the park or play dates. It was great for her, not so great for me!

Now school is here and we are all routinized again. I look forward to my writing season and can’t wait to see where it takes me!

Do you have a writing season, or is your routine the same all year round?

My Daughter: My Most Important Work-In-Progress

September 3, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

If all goes as planned, I am currently sitting in a quiet house. My daughter will be in school for the first time this school year. And unlike the last three years, this is full day!

So I am likely reveling in the silence and pondering a nap.

I am also thinking of this wonderful child who is such a mystery to me. She is full of contradictions:

She loves to go barefooted all the time, yet loves to dress up in pretty dresses.

She is fearless on the jungle gyms, yet scared of toothpaste.

She is confident enough to walk up to any kid on the playground and ask to play with them, yet fragile enough to sometimes cry because her art is not good enough.

She will remember a fact from a book we read 4 months ago, but cannot remember what she did this morning.

She is stubborn and unshakable, yet brimming with empathy and love.

This is the child who I walked to her first day of Kindergarten today. Who is equal parts excited and nervous. Who is simultaneously certain she knows it all, while fretting that she doesn’t know enough.

My child, who has grown up so much in the past year. She is no longer the baby who first went to preschool 3 years ago. She is not even the same child who entered preschool last year.

She is her own person, her own self.

She is my most important work-in-progress and the greatest enigma in my life.

This child I know so well—yet not at all.

I love her more than words can say and am so proud of the person my daughter is becoming.

And now, for that nap.

Summer Wind Down

August 27, 2015 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

For those of us with children, the beginning of summer meant a huge shift in our schedules and more demands on our time. Which translates to less writing time—and often more frustration.

Now the end of August is here–the summer wind down. In some places, school has already begun. This time next week I will be luxuriating in the quiet of my home as my daughter has her first day of school. This is also her first year of full-day school, so it will be strange and exciting for both of us.

I know I will spend the first few days of school “wasting” those precious 6 hours of quiet time. I will do things I want to do, like photo projects, genealogy, reading, and maybe even napping. I know because I have done that every year for the past 3 years of preschool. After those first few days, however, I will set up a schedule so I can use that time to the fullest.

During this last week of summer, however, things are winding down. My daughter’s last swim lesson is this morning. Our final vacation is in the books. Lazy days are ending as the school ramp-up begins—forms to fill out, lunch accounts to be opened, school supplies to be bought, first-day-of-school clothes to be chosen.

While the return to school means a return to schedules, the start of September also brings a gear-up in writing. After an (unintentionally long) summer hiatus of my critique group, we finally met again this week. What a pleasure it was to see all the comments peppering my manuscript! To talk shop with others as thirsty for camaraderie as I.

And maybe now I can finally shake the last of the summer doldrums that grip me every June. With no more lazy morning lie-ins, no more redolent hot afternoons, and no more sitting by the ocean (even if it’s only in my head), my mind should snap back into focus and get back into top writing shape.

I feel the way I always did as a kid—I loved summer when it started, but was always eager for school come September!

Does September mark a shift for you? Or are you past the point where you experience a summer wind down?

The Night Owl and the Alarm Clock

August 20, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I am a night owl. Some people are sun worshippers, but I love the moon. I find a healing and peace in moonlight I can never find in the light of day. I love the quiet of the night. No phones ringing, few cars driving, no people talking. There’s something about the night that lets my soul relax and frees my mind.

Unfortunately, school is upon us. And while I am looking forward to having my daughter in all-day school for the first time, it also means getting up earlier than I like. This entire last year of preschool, my daughter was in the afternoon class, so most mornings were late-rising, slow-moving affairs. Now we will have to rush through the mornings to get to school.

I realize that rising at 7 AM is not really that early by most people’s standards. My mother rises at 5:45 AM. I have a friend who gets up at 4 AM. When I worked in corporate America, I got up at 6 AM. So 7 AM is not too bad.

Except that I am a night owl and anything before 8 AM seems obscene to my body clock.

My mother insists that a night owl can become a morning person—she claims she did it. I have a 5-year-old, so I have (until this year) been getting up early and at odd times through the infant stage, the toddler stage, and the 2 years of preschool before this one. I can tell you with authority that my body has rebelled every step of the way. There is no morning person emerging.

We are slowly moving Kinder-girl’s bedtime back so she will wake up easier and earlier in the morning. It is having the desired effect—she is waking up earlier. However, I as her mother have not been smart enough to move MY bedtime back yet, so I am suffering the consequences.

This is because my best creative juices flow at night. When the world goes to bed, my brain wakes up. My focus is better and I can fall into my imagination more easily. Perhaps it is because of the closeness of sleep at that time, but I am less inhibited and my inner editor tends to be quieter.

Maybe it’s because night time is for dreaming, and writing is but a waking dream.

Any other night owls out there? How do you cope with living in a morning-person world?

Are Landscapes You Love Coded in Your DNA?

August 13, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Human beings vary in the environments they love. Sure, we are adaptable to live wherever we choose, but everyone has that one type of environment that makes their heart swell—a landscape that feels like home even if you’ve never been there before.

People vary widely in the environments that speak to them. My mom loves the mountains. My dad loves the beach. Others love lakes, while some prefer deserts. Forests or jungles.

Me, I love water. The ocean more than lakes, although I won’t say no to a beautiful lake view. Something about the scent in the air, the murmur of the waves, the breeze, just makes all my muscles relax and my cares slip away. Wild, stormy weather at the ocean is exhilarating!

There is no reason I should react this way—no episode in my past that would explain my affinity for the seaside environment. Sure, we spent a lot of summer vacations at the shore, but we spent vacations in the mountains, too. The eight months I spent living on Chincoteague Island were a little slice of heaven for me—the sea breeze always in my hair, and water only a few minutes in any direction.

I have a theory that our ancestry influences the type of natural environments we prefer. I know it probably sounds crazy, but with the new findings that your ancestors’ experiences can impact the way your DNA expresses itself today (epigenetics), maybe the idea that your ancestor’s countryside is embedded in our very cells is not so far-fetched after all.

Many of my ancestors are from the British Isles—Ireland, Wales, England, and Scotland. Could explain the love of water and the ocean landscapes. And whenever I see photos from Scotland or Ireland, I could swear I have been there, even though I never have. Looking at those photos makes me say, “Ahh.”

Most of my ancestors came from the wild, stormy North Sea area. The photos of Durness and the surrounding area are the ones that speak to me the most—the landscapes that resonate in my DNA.

Have you ever responded strongly to a photo or landscape for no reason? Have you ever felt completely at home in a place you had never been?

The Black Belt Writer

August 6, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Writing can be terribly subjective. One reader loves your every word; another reader wants to use your book as kindling. Sometimes I wish writing came with an objective measurement to see how you’re advancing—like Karate.

My daughter took up Karate this summer, and I’ve found myself having conversations with her that I have with other writers. Most recently, we had the “don’t compare yourself to others, just to your own progress” talk. She was worried that she would always be a white belt, because others were better and farther advanced than she.

We writers go through similar feelings. Heck, it’s hard not to compare yourself with other writers, especially when these are other writers that you know personally. It’s easy to think that you’re not succeeding, that you’re never going to get “there” (wherever “there” is for you). That you will be a white belt forever. So the only way not to drive yourself crazy is to stop comparing yourself to other people, and mark your progress against your own past. Is this writing better than what I wrote last week? Last month? Last year?

But how do you mark your career progress in this subjective field? In Karate, moving up to the next belt has two components: physical and mental. It’s not enough to learn the techniques of the moves—you also have to display the right attitude, with discipline, focus, and respect being high on the list.

The same is true of writing. We learn the techniques (save the cat, hero’s journey, kill your darlings, etc.) and work to improve them. We practice and practice until each clumsy new technique becomes a subconscious movement in our work. But that’s not enough to climb the belt ladder. We need to have the right attitude, too. We won’t get far without discipline and focus to get work done and respect for the people we work with—most of all, for our future readers.

So we all start out as white belt writers, and we work and work and finally we feel like we’ve got the craft under control and the attitude is right where it should be. So we’re black belts, right?

Not so much. I’m thinking maybe purple belts—about half way to black.

Because now all the publishing stuff enters into the equation. Now we have a whole new set of techniques to learn (many of them at odds with our temperaments) and a whole new attitude to adjust.

So we dive into marketing and publicity and meeting the public and social media and, oh, yeah, we’re still supposed to be writing somehow, and didn’t I leave my family laying around here somewhere? But slowly we learn the ropes of our new existence, and we adjust our attitude to the professionalism needed to work with agents, publishers, movie/TV producers, other authors, booksellers, and, of course, our readers.

Okay, we’ve done that. So now we’re black belt? Maybe. I’ll leave that up to you. I might consider a true black belt writer to be one who not only lives on their writing but is able to write what they truly want to write. You might choose to award a black belt at publication, or a certain number of books sold, or even when you have written a book that finally matches the vision in your head whether it gets published or not. The definition of success, like so much in the writing world, is personal.

And that is as it should be.

Do you ever wish there was a visible way to tell where you were in your writing career? How do you measure your success?

The Rusty Merry-Go-Round: Switching between projects

July 23, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Last weekend I met my friend and fellow writer Nancy Keim Comley for a “writer’s play date.” We both needed a break from “summer mommy brain” and a chance to get reacquainted with our writing. We had fun, and it felt good to immerse myself in my fiction for a few hours.

A mere six years ago, it wouldn’t have been unusual to find me working on multiple novels at one time—and having the time to immerse myself in all of them. After my daughter came, however, I have been much more single-minded. I’ve worked on one story at a time because if I didn’t nothing would ever get finished.

So when I started up the novel merry-go-round again this week, I found my skills a bit rusty. My current full-throttle work-in-progress is a YA science fiction called Veritas—and talking to Nancy showed me just how much work I have yet to do on it. (Daunting. So I will pretend I don’t know how high the mountain is and just keep climbing.)

However, I also have my debut novel, The Witch of Zal, coming out soon. While I am not actively writing for that, the marketing requires me to delve back into my story world—or at least remember what the heck I wrote. So that story is floating around in my head, popping up at odd moments to say hello.

Also, I’ve been collaborating on a middle grade historical action-adventure novel, The Curse of the Pharaoh’s Stone, and the latest 10 chapters have just landed back in my lap. I’m reading them as if I’ve never seen them before—good for editing, bad for getting back into that novel’s headspace.

To make things even more interesting, I’ve got a YA contemporary fantasy, The Oracle of Delphi, Kansas, that needs to be looked at again before I send it back out for another round of queries. So that’s on a back burner of my brain, too.

Earlier in my life, juggling all these would not have been a problem. In fact, I relished having multiple projects going at once because it eliminated writer’s block and boredom. Whenever I got stuck or burned out on a particular story, I could jump to another one and give my subconscious a chance to chew on the problem. It always worked for me.

This time around, I’m finding it hard to switch from project to project. Part of it is lack of practice, of course—writing skills are like any other skills, you have to use them to keep them sharp. My brain is also not as sharp as it was, largely due to perpetual under-sleeping. And I’m six years older—maybe my brain is more reluctant to leave the groove it’s in and move to something different.

I think the biggest problem is my fragmented time. I have spoken before about how my fragmented writing time has negatively impacted my writing, and I think it plays a large role here. I don’t have concentrated hours of time a day to write. This has made it harder for me to slip into the world of my story. Now mix in more than one fictional world. Synaptic chaos.

The only way I have found to combat the fragmentation is to always have my current work-in-progress running in the back of my mind. Simmering, as I like to call it. You can think of it as having the movie of my story playing in the background on my mental TV all the time. So when I have time to get back to it, I waste less time getting my mind back into the story.

There’s no way I can keep 5 stories simmering at usable levels. My brain would explode. I may have to assign specific days to specific stories, so I can have my brain set to the correct channel all day. That’s my plan, at any rate. We’ll see what happens!

If you have merry-go-round projects, how do you keep your headspace straight? Have you ever had trouble jumping from one world to the next?

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