Darkwood

A place for those wandering the dark wood of life, writing, and spirituality

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Epic Fail

It’s good for you, you know. Losing in a big way is necessary to living a full life. If you don’t lose big, then you never took a real chance on anything.

I’m keeping this short; sometimes the message is nothing more than a single line to remind you that nobody said life was easy or one sided. Learning to accept loss while continuing to try is a huge part of life.

I’m a firm believer in law of attraction. As in ‘you get what you are willing to fight for’. If you want it for free, while sitting on your couch doing nothing, I have some bad news for you.

Learning to lose once in a while makes you more stable. It makes you appreciate what you have. And it means you never take your wins for granted.

None of us like losing and I’m not going to tell you to try. Don’t just accept it without question, either. An epic fail is only a lesson, so long as you don’t surrender to despair. Never give up. Change your path, your mind, your method, but do not ever think giving up is the answer.

When you are young, especially, you may change your mind as often as your change your clothes. Presumably, at a later age, you have at least some idea of where you intend to go, but that does not mean you have to keep beating yourself against walls that you don’t really want to bring down. It is still okay to change your mind. It is never too late; we are all searching for happiness. But you can only find it within you and it is directly linked to the things which make you feel at home.

Find your happy place and the things that give you joy. That is the meaning of life. If you needed someone to give you permission, you have it. If you need a kick in the pants, then this is it. Get up and get moving.

Reading Myself

I have mountains of notebooks. I am not exaggerating. There was a time when I wrote a notebook a month. There was also a time when I would read what I’d written on a regular basis. This is necessary; you can’t get better if you don’t read your own work. The problem is, if you are too determined to judge yourself, you won’t get a real understanding of your writing.

Ordinarily, you’d want to take a step back. Wait long enough that you forget writing it. But there are cases where that isn’t enough. I discovered that this evening.

I picked up a random notebook from the piles. Most of which need badly to be burnt, if you ask me. Now, the truth about writing practice is that there will be a lot of crap. There may be entire notebooks of it. This is not a bad thing; there is a lot of bad writing in your pen that has to get out before you can write anything good.

I was afraid of my bad writing and I stopped reading my notebooks because I didn’t want to see it. I just wanted to write and not worry about if it was good or not. At some point,I started sounding pretentious and I went on for hundreds of pages about things that gave me a proper eye roll. Rather than face that, I just left the notebooks behind and tried to keep going without looking to see how I could improve.

Reading this notebook has honestly produced a good number of eye rolls. This is both good and bad; if you can roll your eyes at your own work (when it is deserved) then you can get past that moment of thinking you are a genius, then you can get to the point where you are truly good. However, it is sometimes difficult to tell if you are rolling your eyes because it is bad or because it is yours. I promise you, the notebook in question is terrible, but it has taken years to learn how to judge my own work.

This is about learning to be honest. With yourself and in your writing. This is me being honest. That notebook I picked up was horrendous. I went on for pages and pages about a book I was writing, sometimes writing small chunks of the actual book, which was little more than a bad Stephen King knockoff. It had none of the fire or rage of my later ghost story, Getting Thin. It was just bad. Bad plot, bad writing, and paper thin characters that sounded like they were in auditions for a musical Hamlet (off, off, off Broadway). The dialogue was so full of itself that it is a shock the page wasn’t swollen up three times bigger than the whole notebook. The kid that wrote those pages was just that. A kid.

I thought I knew so much. That I was such a grownup. And I look back at that and realize this is more than half the reason I spent so long not writing; I wanted to get better, but I couldn’t bear to read what I’d written because I could not bear to admit that I was a child. Which meant that I was trapped in a vicious cycle. I wasn’t getting better. I was stagnant. Eventually, because I couldn’t defeat my fear, I fell into a place of not being able to write at all except for those rare moments when I thought that, just maybe, I could finally jump the fence (without doing the uncomfortable work, of course).

You have to read your practice. You don’t have to like it or see the value of it. Reading what you’ve written may not, at first, bring any clarity at all. It may feel unnatural and create a sense of wrongness and doubt. The point is to learn to distance yourself from yourself so that you are neither full of your own brilliance or telling yourself that you are terrible. You cannot judge something if you are standing that close to it. Over time, the real benefit begins to show up; you get better because you learn what not to do.

Read your own notebooks. It will hurt at first. You’ll wonder why you ever thought you could do this. But that is okay. Give yourself permission to be terrible; you have to get the bad writing out. There is a learning curve. You grow and expand and it takes time, if you are doing it right. Like I have said before, it is all a journey. The joy is in knowing there is no end to this; if there is always something new waiting, then it is never any danger of getting bored.

I have spent the last fifteen years avoiding my personal mountains. There was no learning, just trying to get past my issues without facing myself. Don’t be like me. Learn from my mistakes. Do writing practice, then, by god, suck it up (drink a little liquid courage if you must) and read those notebooks before they turn into mountains.

Write Now

Everybody Has Talent, But Ability Takes Hard Work

-Michael Jordon

Every writer – actually, every human – suffers blocks. You are going along, everything is great, then something comes along that knocks you off balance. This is life. The question is not how to avoid it; you are going to experience days like this and there is no way to avoid it every time.

How do we get past it? How do we ensure that one day being blocked does not turn into a week? A month? Years? This is a question I’ve had to answer a hundred times or more in my own life, to the point where writer’s block has become the thing I am constantly working to overcome. And these are the tricks that work best.

Practice

Yes. Practice. This goes for anything in your life that you want to do well. Getting in that zone where you can let go of yourself and just flow requires knowing how to open the door.

There was a time in my life where I questioned the value of practice writing. Shouldn’t I be spending my time writing something I could sell? Shouldn’t everything I wrote have some value? Was I even a writer if most of what I wrote was aimless babbling in a notebook? This is the curse of being creative. There is no-one to tell you that not every single thing you do has to be a public property. Not everything you write, draw, or build is for anyone else. When people ask what you are working on, they expect to hear about your next book or painting or symphony. They do not want to hear that you spend an hour every morning just writing about nothing in particular.

Here’s the thing. Would it surprise you to learn that Michael Jordon spent more time in practice than he ever did playing for the public? What about your favorite quarterback? Think he just goes out on the field and wings it? Actors have rehearsals. So do bands. Practice is an integral part of all these careers. And so it is that writers need practice too.

I got to a point in my life where I would write maybe two days a week. Sometimes less. I could never quite let it go, but I couldn’t seem to get myself to the page, either. I knew something had to change. Either I had to let go of writing entirely or I had to come up with something that would let me write more regular.

In the beginning, that was my only intent. I let go of the idea that I needed to be writing books. I stopped pressuring myself to write meaningful, sellable product. Instead, I told myself that I just needed to get back to that place where I could write every single day without argument. Once it was part of my routine, I could move to the next step. At that moment, I didn’t even know what the next step was and I didn’t care. All I wanted was to stop feeling like a failure when someone asked me when I wrote last.

Writers spend more time wishing they were writing or planning to write than they actually do writing. If you’ve been around the writing groups on Facebook, you have seen that meme and, if you are like me, you laughed at it while feeling a sinking in the pit of your stomach; why is it so hard just to sit down and write.

The answer is practice. Not to write better, exactly. What you are really practicing when you show up to write every day is facing off with resistance.

This is not my idea, full disclosure. This came from one of the many, many books and blogs I read in an attempt to regain my writing balance. The Artist’s Way is a book I suggest to everyone who is feeling that sense of being totally lost and not sure how to get back.

So here’s the deal. I get up extra early every morning. Save the ‘I’m not a morning person’ answer. I like to sleep in. But I like writing more. I want to write. I want to face resistance and win so that when it comes to writing actual books, I have the ability to keep going even when I want to quit. So I get up. The science behind this is sound; in the morning, especially in the first half hour or so after waking up, you are unguarded. The little voice that whines about not wanting to do this or that or finding time later is not fully active.

Second, when you get up specifically to write, there is no ‘I’ll do it later’; this is the whole reason for getting up early. I make my coffee, feed my dogs and let them out, then sit down at my desk with a notebook and pen. I write as fast as I can and the deal I made with myself is that it does not matter what I write, only that I get three whole pages every single morning. I have been doing that for long enough that I can’t actually remember what it was like not to write in the morning.

I will not lie to you and tell you that there aren’t mornings when I want to just roll over and do it later. But every morning I ask myself two questions: Am I ready to give up writing completely? Do I really want to spoil this streak? Then I get my butt up out of bed and, before it is time for me to leave for work, I have written those three pages. Even if all I could think to write was ‘I don’t know what to write’. 

The Bad Days

They happen. I will never tell you that every day is going to be golden. I used to beat myself up over them. I used to hit that wall in the middle of a story or book and think ‘Who do I even think that I am kidding? I’m no writer’. These days, I’m taking a different track. I’ve noticed that all writers get to this place. No matter who they are or what they write, all of us have days of feeling like we are never going to write the way we want to. Letting go of that, accepting those bad days as just a passing mood, has kept me from doing what I normally do, which is throw in the towel at the first sign of trouble.

If you are expecting this to be a walk in the park every day, then you are still either very young or you have never seen the wall. That is good and I hope you can keep going. For the rest of us, it is a question of mindset.

It is so easy to believe, when we hit a block, that it will always be there. It feels hopeless. In running, we call this hitting the wall. It is that moment when it feels like you aren’t getting anywhere, there is just too far to go and you don’t have any gas left in the tank. It is an illusion almost every single time. The only way past the wall is through. If you stop and turn around, the wall will only be there waiting the next time you run. If you let it beat you, it will keep beating you. But this is only in your mind. You decide the wall is insurmountable, and so it is. What you believe you make true.

In writing, this equates to putting down the pen (or laptop) and walking away, hoping that, tomorrow, it will be okay again. Sometimes it is, but that doesn’t mean the wall is gone. It just means the next time you have to face it, it is that much harder to overcome because now you are scared of it. Resistance is part of creativity. Is part of the job and it is never not going to be there in some form.

What do you do about it? How do you change your mindset when it feels so certain that you are just kidding yourself?

Start with a deep breath. Accept that these days are going to happen because they happen to every single person on earth in some form or another. Then close your eyes and visualize. Don’t picture a best selling novel – at least not at first. Just visualize finishing your writing for the day. Try to feel how you will feel once you’ve finished your pages. Feel the triumph of winning out against the gremlins and continuing. Feel how it would be if you put your pen to the page once more and everything just flowed out of you. Don’t even worry if it is great or if it has meaning; practice is not about showing off, it is about getting your muscles to remember how to do something. Visualize the final word or sentence and standing up, wholly accomplished because you not only wrote, but you walked right through that imaginary wall and kept going. Let yourself get excited about this. Really embrace it. Once you are smiling and feeling truly thrilled, open your eyes and just start writing.

I like to use music in these situations. I will listen to Eminem or shamanic drumming because it is the beat that matters more than anything. I will start letting random words get written. If I am listening to something with lyrics, I’ll riff off those. The most important part of this exercise isn’t what you write. It is about letting yourself get in a groove, to feel the rhythm and really let it take you over. I will loosen my grip on what I want and become wholly unattached to the outcome; all that matters is that I am writing, not what I’m writing.

Think of this like a singer doing scales to warm up their vocal cords. At first, every note sounds a little flat. Off key. But, as the singer continues, working over old material, focusing on the notes rather than the content of a song, they become stronger. The same can be said of writing. There is a place I go when I am writing hot. I am no longer thinking about the story, it is just flowing through me as I watch (sometimes hear) it play out in my head. Getting here was easy for me in the beginning, but now I have to put myself into that mindset and that requires plenty of practice.

New Spaces

Finally, beating writer’s block may require a change of venue. At home, the dishes are waiting to be washed. You need to vacuum. Your kid can’t remember where he left his phone. There are things that need to be done and sitting down to write feels like stealing time. So leave.

I am lucky enough to still have a Barnes and Nobles nearby. There is a Starbucks (that isn’t really like Starbucks) inside and all the baristas know me by my first name. They know that, in winter, I am going to order a hot chocolate (do NOT hold the whipped cream) and, in summer, a strawberry cheesecake frappe with a shot of chocolate (highly recommend). Then I sit down and I get to work.

Sometimes, just the shock of someplace new is enough. I have to be careful; the siren song of books will sometimes sidetrack me at the door and this becomes me finding something better to do than write. If I am still hesitating to write, still fighting for words, I do something that always makes me feel a little strange (I was taught not to eavesdrop) and start listening to the conversations around me. Listening and writing the things that catch at my attention. Or I will just write about the people I see, trying to describe them.

The point of this is to notice something that triggers me. It isn’t enough to write about someone’s green coat. I try to remember every one I have ever known who wore a green coat. If I have a memory of a green coat I owned, I chase that. I don’t try to get fancy. I don’t pull out my inner thesaurus. I write in simple sentences. While doing this, I remind myself that I intend to write simple. I’m doing a Hemingway practice and trying to find the most plain way to write it. This isn’t about poetry. This is just scales. One of my own practices is below.

There is a man in a green coat. It is puffy and the color of the shamrock Notre Dame has on their logo. I once had a green coat that wasn’t really mine. It belonged to my father in law when he was in the military and it was not such a bright green, but a dusty, darker color they used to call olive. He was a field medic and his last name was stitched on the left breast. I was wearing the day my boyfriend and I decided to get in the car and drive to St. Louis. We were in Union station and I wanted to feed the fish. They had dispensers that gave out a handful of dog food for a quarter and you could throw it into the pond. There were so many pigeons, though and I started feeding them instead. When I didn’t give the food fast enough, one of the pigeons flew up to perch on my hand and each from my palm. My ex husband, only my boyfriend, then, paused to get a picture of me, wholly delighted, with this pigeon perched upon my hand as though he was a pet.

When I look at that picture now, I remember that my ex husband and I used to be friends and we used to be in love. I remember that I left that green coat in the closet when I left because it was never really mine. I miss the coat more than I miss the man, but thinking of that moment makes me miss the people we used to be, before we grew up. It reminds me of the pigeons I helped raise when I was younger and how they would fly away every fall then return in the spring, the flock growing until… what? I don’t remember what happened to those pigeons and anyone I might ask is gone.

This is an example of the type of writing I use to get myself warmed up. It is not great writing. Perhaps it isn’t even good writing. But that does not matter. All that matters is that I wrote something, connected to it, and got warm.

Any athlete will tell you that getting warmed up is sometimes easy and then there are days when you just never really loosen up. Writing is like this. This is why it is so important to make writing an every day thing; what makes you a writer is the writing. Doing it every day is what makes you better.

This may not be true for everyone. Anne Rice once addressed this by saying that she tried writing every day and it actually felt like it hurt her writing. However, if you aren’t the author of one of the biggest vampire series to ever hit the shelves, you would probably do well to try and pick up that pen every single day. While it may have messed with the queen’s flow, the point is she knew how her writing worked. She wasn’t blocked when she wasn’t writing. She wasn’t avoiding her writing. She was simply waiting for her story to ripen. If that works for you, wonderful. But, if you are reading this post, I’m going to go ahead and assume you are seeking help to get you past a bad time in your own writing. I could pat you gently on the head and tell you this will pass without any effort on your part. But I don’t want to lie to you. Getting past the wall, illusion or not, is work. If you want to write, you have to do that work.

Nobody else can do this for you. Get up early. Write. Stop promising you will do it tomorrow. Get one of those daily planners and note every single day that you’ve done your morning pages. See how long you can go before you break your streak. Don’t count the days for a while. Just see how long you can do this. If you want it bad enough, you will get up out of bed, you will do this thing. I promise, do it long enough, and it will be worth it.

Save Yourself First

I know how that sounds. Like I’m trying to give you permission to be selfish. I am. Actually, this is, like all things, your choice. But listen to the foundation. You do not go to a fat junk food junkie to learn about nutrition. You don’t learn to ride from a man who has never been on a horse (or a lot of the ones who have). It is always the master you want. Not the one who claims to know the science while failing to produce the actual thing.

Save yourself. Do it for all the people you want to save. Find what works for you. Build the life you want. Then, rather than giving it to another, teach another to build it for themselves. Because then they don’t need you to support them and they can teach someone else.

I have spent the last six years learning. Growing. And I see that I don’t want to keep doing the same old thing over and over. I want to keep moving upward, improving my situation and becoming a better version of myself.

I see in my writing the visible shift between who I used to be and who I’m becoming. My biggest goal is to give that moment to other people. To teach others to get past the idea of a block, that romanticized – and unlivable – version of an artist to be the creator they truly want to be. But getting there required that I stopped caring about how others saw me. I had to let go of the ideals others hold up as the normal way of life. Even when they told me I was crazy and called me names.

Maybe I’m not all the way there, yet. But I am moving in that direction. And I am okay if it takes some time to get there. Like I have said before, this is not about getting somewhere. This is about building a life I love. If I am encouraging you to do anything, it is to remember that, sometimes, in order to give to others, you have to first give to yourself.

Write Motivation: The Final Write

Once upon a time – yeah, seems like a fairy tale now – I could drop into my writing mind at any time. I had incredible focus and I never really had to struggle to get inspired; I was always there. That was before smart phones and Netflix. There are days when I love all the technology surrounding us. At other times I’d really like a sun flare to put an end to my cell phone and the myriad of distractions it presents.

There Is Always Something

Life has become noisy and writing mind doesn’t like noisy. Here, in this last week, I’m going to tell you the biggest secret of all. There really is no such thing as writer’s block. I know what I said before, but it isn’t real, my dears. It is a smoke screen developed by our brains to hide the truth. There are distractions. There are excuses. And there is the constant noise of being an adult under the crushing weight of things that must be done even though the laws of physics and time say it just isn’t going to happen. The thing is, though it isn’t always easy, you can choose to ignore all of it.

The words are always there. I know it is easier to believe that your muse has gone off elsewhere. I used to believe that mine had taken her pasty, vampire self to Hawaii and left me holding an empty notebook. The truth is much more painful. The muse is you and you choose what is important and what is not. If you put off your writing, then the voice simply stops talking. It requires exercise. You have to carve out the time – and the quiet – which you dedicate to hearing the words within.

The First Step Is The Hardest

I know it isn’t easy. You don’t have to convince me. I know that it is so much more tempting to blame the writing gods and say ‘this just isn’t for me’. That is the swiftest way to put the guilt firmly elsewhere. After all, if you aren’t meant to write, then there is no sense feeling guilty about it, is there?

Except, if you really want to do this, it won’t go away. You will keep coming back and coming back. If you let the excuses become too strong, you’ll keep running this circle around writing, wanting to do it, getting to the desk, finding no words waiting for you, embrace whatever excuse you’ve given the most weight, go do something else (and be miserable the rest of the day). Wash, rinse, repeat.

There is only one way out of this cycle. It may depress you a little, but, in the end, it is the answer you’ve been looking for. You write.

No Try. Only Do.

Yes, yes. I know. That is exactly the thing you’ve been trying to do. Only, this time, you are going to do it. Not try. If you’ve been working through the last twelve weeks, you have already begun. The act of doing the very thing you’ve been avoiding has a lot of power. That is one of the biggest things I learned in adulthood. Yes it will suck. Yes it will feel like every single word has to be pried out of you and every one will be wrong. So what. Keep going.

I began my daily pages as a desperate person. I wanted to write and just could not make anything stick. It hurt. I came up with excuses (that I’d decided to ignore and did). I tried to distract myself and that was a trip because any time I did not focus on my intention, I’d end up catching myself halfway to something else. Like vacuuming at four in the morning. Now, moving closer and closer to my two year anniversary of daily writing, things have changed.

What began as a chore has become a foundation to my day. I need it to keep my balance. Every day that I do it is a small win and that has turned into a lot of wins. Now, I am working on a consistent basis and doing so in a sane way. No more trying to write a whole book in a single night. No more fear that, tomorrow, I won’t get around to writing at all, that the words will vanish like morning mist from the fields. It will be there in the morning and even if I don’t write another word the rest of the day, I will have those morning pages. Though it is rare day, anymore, that I don’t write in the evening as well.

The Exercise

So here we are. The final week. The final exercise. Get your timer. If you have gotten through all twelve weeks, let me congratulate you here. This is just the beginning, though. Keep going. Go check out The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and anything by Natalie Goldberg. The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield is excellent as well and the perfect answer if you are ready to face your resistance without any self deception left in the mix.

This exercise is something of a nod to Natalie Goldberg. She got me started. When I don’t know what to write about, I begin with one of Natalie Goldberg’s writing books. She specializes in train of thought that is gently guided and that is what we are doing here today.

Begin with where you are and how you came to be here. There are few things closer to our hearts than the places where we live. Everything we love lives here. Or maybe it doesn’t for you. If it isn’t, then write about that. How did you come to live here? Do you live alone? How many pets do you have? Just start letting yourself explore your space on paper, if something pulls you in, follow it. Let your thoughts just spill out on the page. If you get two lines in and your inner voice starts running off with the boy you spent all of tenth grade falling in love with only to get your heart broken when he asked out your best friend, great. Follow it. There is no limit, here. Chase whatever wants to be there. Ten minutes. Go!

Find all twelve weeks of Write Motivation Here

Unicorns, Pipe Dreams, and Reposts

This is a repost from 2019. I’ve come a long way from this post and maybe not very far at all. But one thing about it still holds water. Plenty of people are going to tell their own story about you. It is your job not to allow them to define you, no matter what they say.

August 2019

You know one of my favorite things about being an author? Besides starting conversations with extremely sarcastic questions? People who think they need to stop others from trying to reach their dreams.

Learning that most of the world not only lacks imagination, but seems to take it as an insult when someone dares to take a step down a path they think is wrong was one of the most confusing moments in my life. The saying ‘misery loves company’ is easiest to see when you are trying to step beyond what others have decided is possible. They reach out and try to keep you back with them, all in the name of kindness and they don’t even need to know you to start spouting off warnings about how wrong your choice is. I think my favorites are the ones that assume I write because I want the easy job. Um, yeah, quite the opposite, really.

I have been called childish. Selfish. Insane. I have had to justify what I do even though I work two jobs and do my writing on my own time and the person demanding I see their version of reason has not read a single sentence I’ve written. And, well, you could say that I’m getting sick and tired of having to juggle both bills and people looking down their nose at me while self righteously explaining to me how I’ll never get anywhere. More than that, I’m sick and tired of hearing people say it to other, much younger, much less resilient writers. That last bit is selfish; I’m a reader first.

So let’s get this clear. If you are a writer, you are going to have to face this. People who know you exactly enough to call you Mr, Ms, Mrs whateveryournameis, are going to hear the words ‘I’m a writer’ and suddenly become your career counselor, parent, and financial advisor. No matter what you do, this is going to happen and it is your absolute duty to look them dead in the eye and tell them to mind their own business… but you don’t have to be that polite. AND if you happen to be a writer who says these things to other writers, you have my permission to go slap yourself.

I’m not really angry. This is not a rant about the evil old world trying to stop me – like that’s gonna happen. In fact, these sorts of things make you stronger and it is my suggestion to get used to this behavior because you can’t change other people. But you can change how you react to them. You do not have to be polite. I fully encourage you to get used to looking at these people and telling them to pay a little more attention to their own life and less to yours. You may also like to develop the habit of not caring about what other people think, at least not those whose only answer to a creative career is to proclaim ‘you will never make it as a writer/artist/musician/actor. What they really mean is they convinced themselves that they would never make it, gave up on their dreams, and moved on. That is their story, not yours. Remember that.

I figured, before we start the next story tomorrow, that it is one of those times when I tell the truth. Mostly, to other writers, especially the new ones. This isn’t the easy path. It isn’t even the middle path. Hell, this isn’t even the hard path. You know that difficulty level on video games which basically equals ‘You are going to die every two steps and have to restart the level at least four times before beating it’? There you go, that is what a writing career is. Some of us are dialed in from the first second, writing and selling our work and living like queens or kings off of it. Then there are the rest of us. Some quit. Some run away and talk about being writers without actually writing and insist that nobody could even possibly understand them or that the world doesn’t deserve them. And some of us hold down two jobs, have months (or years) where we are barely paying the bills, and ask ourselves every day whether we ought to just quit and knowing we can’t.

I refuse to lie to you. Just like playing the video game, it is going to have stages that feel like sheer madness. You will start to wonder if you aren’t good enough to play this difficulty. There will be moments when the word impossible crosses your mind. If you are like me, you’ll get one too many bills in the mail and go hide in a corner to have a little cry once in a while. That’s okay. There is no shame is crying as long as you don’t quit. I swear, you might one day hear that bit about falling down seven times, standing up eight, and consider learning the art of hacking just so you can erase those stupid motivational memes from all of internet existence. I had a whole afternoon where I became the meme killer and ran around smacking motivational quotes set against inspirational backgrounds with a code hammer. Don’t you judge me.

Yes. You will take a lot of wrong steps. You will curse yourself and tell yourself you are being stupid. You will hear those people that tell you why you ought to give up and wonder if they are right. But, if you want this enough, you will keep going anyway. You will keep fighting. Because this isn’t about your talent. If you have talent, great, but you still need to go to school and hone that. You still need to get better at using it. If you don’t have talent, well… who says you don’t just need to find that thing which sets you on fire? My so called talent seems to fluctuate based on whether or not I want to write AND, fun fact, I spend a lot of time questioning if it even exists. Even when someone is telling me some story I wrote is perfect (and always wonder if I’m, like, the first thing they’ve ever read). Talent, in fact, is usually gauged on what is popular at the time. And we all know how much that changes.

What this life is really about is your ability to persist. Everyone talks about Stephen King’s success. They never seem to remember how hard he fought for it. They don’t remember how little he had, how much he struggled, or how much he sacrificed to have that first, big break. Overnight is never overnight. It is just what the rest of the world sees and remembers. Ask Micheal Jordon how many hours he spent practicing putting one little ball through one little hoop. Ask any artist how many hours they spent drawing eyes or trees or happy little mountains before they created something that was all them. It takes time to even know what you are doing. It takes faith to believe it will take you somewhere. So be strong and have belief and just keep trying. There is no such thing as easy in this business. Be glad for that.

I always tell people, be it in video games, at work, or when they want to write. Easy is not as great as it sounds. Never take the easy option. We live in a world that loves to balance things. Easy on one side usually equals painfully hard on the other. Which side would you like your troubles to come on? The beginning? Or the end.

Keep writing. Keep trying. Will you face mountains? Damn straight you will. But take a good look at people to whom life (writing or otherwise) has been gentle. They seem pretty happy, I mean, they never have to worry about anything. But what about when things go wrong? What talent do they have for dealing with challenges? None. They never learned what to do when things went wrong. When a writer who has never had writer’s block hits it for the first time, it can stop them for months, even years (personal experience). What about when they are already successful and expected to produce, silly mental block be damned? The world is never kind when you have already given them reason to expect great things and you let them down. When you deal with a creative life, things go wrong. Writer’s block, your plot fell apart, no original ideas, self sabotage, oh yeah. You’re going to face a lot of hurdles. The more resilient you are, the better chance you have of surviving. And resiliency is learned by falling down. A lot.

So that story didn’t work out or you didn’t win that contest. I’m going to give you some gamer logic here, brace yourself. Get the hell up. Get better. Do it again. And again. AND AGAIN. I am still struggling. Maybe I’ll make it. Maybe I won’t. That no longer matters; writing makes me happy and I’m going to keep doing it. I may not be some fabulously famous author, but so what? I’m not here to offer you money. I’m here to give you a kick in the pants. That’s easier when I don’t have to climb down from a castle to do it.

There is no ‘correct path’ in writing. You gotta do what is right for you. Learning what that is takes time. Sometimes it takes years. There is this whole list of things you need to be a writer and very few of them are physical, all of them are learned, and the writing is only part of it. Being a writer means being strong enough to keep going when every single person around you says you should quit. Believing in yourself is the best armor you can put on around here. But, sometimes, that just doesn’t feel like enough.

This is where I tell you to go find another writer. Writers need to support each other. We don’t, always. There are some that think they need to put other writers down and stop them. Yeah, if you do that, feel free to slap yourself again. And stop it. Don’t try to stop another writer just because you haven’t gotten where you want to be or, worse, actually believe no-one else could be good enough or might get in your way. Especially never say those words ‘but you’ll never make it as a writer’. Just don’t do it. There are enough nay sayers in this world. We don’t need more. Give each other honest reviews – if someone needs to work on their sentence structure or their plot, tell them – but save the snark. In a world where new, better, exciting, and fast are the key words, writers are often shuffled to the back and forgotten about until they, through their own persistence, get that ‘overnight’ success. The fun fact here is that, when one writer gets really popular, more books in general sell. Everyone reads Harry Potter and starts desperately looking for something similar because, big surprise, decent books aren’t written in a month, but most readers can rip through them in less than that. So, ya know. The last thing any one of us needs to be doing is trying to thin the herd.

Finally, I want you to walk away with this. There is this wall between us and the rest of the world. Nobody ever thinks they know someone who can write a whole novel because it is damned hard. When very few people know your name, it is easy to tell you that you are crazy. But just imagine, for a moment, someone walking up to Stephen King without knowing who he is and telling him that he’ll never make it as a writer. Imagine the good laugh he’d get out of that now. Do you really think nobody ever said that to him when he was unknown? Usually people who hadn’t even bothered to read anything he’d written, I imagine.

Yes, this does feel a bit nuts, sometimes. Like, how often do I need to run into this wall before I stop hurting myself or it falls over? But the thing is, hit enough times in the right spot, the wall will crack. It isn’t nearly as sturdy as it looks. Keep going. As my favorite of all Disney quotes (I know, bite me) says, ‘Keep Moving Forward’. If you are having a moment of desperation and need a little pat on the back or just someone sympathetic, feel free to message me.

Cozy, Isn’t It?

I love cozy mysteries. This isn’t so much a book review as a review of a whole genre and a list of suggestions for anyone who wants to get started.

This Genre varies a lot. There are the straight mysteries – the ones that have no supernatural elements and limited romance. Then there are my favorite, which are the paranormal cozy mysteries. These usually involve a ghost, a psychic, of some sort, and plenty of side romance, though not enough to get in the way of the actual story.

Elementary, My Dear

I bet you didn’t know Sherlock Holmes could be considered a cozy. Neither did I. I am a big fan of the famous sleuth (and the Enola Holmes movies). There is plenty of work for your brain and the unraveling of the mystery is always fun. I have a deep love for Sherlock’s non paranormal talents for observations. He grates on the nerves a little, at first, but there is a charm to him that comes out the longer you read.

Curiosity And The Cat

Next up, The Cat Who series. I am not even going to try to spell the name of the main protaganist. One of the longest running mystery series out there, running right up until Lilian Braun’s death. This is always fun and a generally quick read. While Braun sometimes dips into the supernatural in her shorter stories, the closest she gets otherwise is the Siamese cat owned by her main character. Having owned Siamese, I can confirm there is nothing unbelievable here. This series is full of twists and turns. I enjoy rereading it fairly often. A must have if you love cats.

A Haunting Series

A big favorite of mine is Victoria Laurie’s Ghost Hunter series. This one is pure fun with her main character, M.J. As the sort of character I like best. She’s no damsel in distress, though she gets into plenty of trouble, and she travels the world, investigating ghosts and getting into all sorts of different cultures. The first book in this series, What’s a Ghoul to Do? Is pure fun and I still re-read this one when I need something comforting that makes me feel good.

Strange Magic

Finally, I’m bringing you Danielle Garrett. Yes, a whole author. When I first began her series, The Beechwood Harbor Magic Mysteries, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this author. The books were fun, the main character mostly likable, but I wasn’t real sure how I felt about the stories. However, the books grew on me. They grew on me to the point I began listening to her other series as well.

Danielle Garrett has a steady hand and builds communities of characters you actually like with the odd one sprinkled in that is likable in one series only to be unlikable in another series. 

I want to harp just a second on what that means. Because it isn’t that the author is dropping the ball. She is actually capable of switching alliances. A character that is friends with her main M.C. In one series doesn’t get along with the one in another series. And it is clear because the characters make it clear. Even better, I felt my own alliances shift when I went from one series to the next.

This is an author that is damn good at her job and I am absolutely going to push everyone who likes this genre to give her a try.

Thrift Stores Rule

The final series is one I’ve only had the pleasure of reading the first book, but I throughly enjoyed it. Secondhand Spirits by Juliette Blackwell is the first book in her Witchcraft Mysteries. I’m going to be listening to the next book in the series as soon as I finish a few already in my Audible list – yes, I do believe in getting my books any way that I can and, for me, listening is not all that different from reading it myself.

Hopefully, you’ve got a few ideas for your next fun read from this list. I have plenty more where this came from in a few other genres, so I may make this a regular thing.

Pushing Beyond

I know that you are tired. I know you want to just get a little bit of rest. Every single day we get up and we push. Through pain, through exhaustion, through all those things that weigh us down. We do it because we have to; there are kids/animals/friends that look to us for support and help. There is no laying down. So when it comes to the things you want to do, it doesn’t feel like there is any gas left in the tank.

Ordinarily, I’d tell you to take a break, that your brain isn’t any good to you if you have nothing to give. However, there has to come a time when you stop letting being tired get in the way of your dreams.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been tired for, oh, I don’t know. The last decade? It hasn’t gotten better. No matter how much I sleep, the exhaustion is untouched; my tired is mental, no physical. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is born of the natural misery of not doing what your passion leads you to.

I cannot imagine being this tired if I was getting up every day to write. Not to dream of writing, but to actually do it. If this was how I made my living, if my routine was to get up and do it, then no. I cannot imagine being unhappy, even on my worst day of writing.

So maybe the answer is this. We have to work in spite of the exhaustion. Will it be our best work? Probably not. But, then, when do any of us think that anyway? My short message to you, tonight, is this. Just do it. Your bed will still be there in ten minutes, half an hour, or a week from now. I believe this is actually part of the journey. We have to face the times when it is damn near impossible to chase our dreams; then we will always remember later.

If you don’t forget what it was like to pass up your bed in favor of your dreams. When you remember having to work around the edges of your day job, you will not take it for granted when you have it every moment of every day. So embrace your exhaustion. Embrace it and accept that you are going to stay tired, nap or not, and then get to work.

Chocolate And Caramel

Describe your dream chocolate bar.

Lots of milk chocolate and caramel is my favorite. I would create something with smaller pieces, ones you can let melt in your mouth, with really high end ingredients. Now. If you’ll excuse me, I need chocolate 🤣

Stubborn Is A Superpower

I didn’t want to get up this morning. I did not want to write. I wanted to curl up with the dogs and go back to sleep. I’m pretty sure you can guess – if you’ve been reading my blog – that I did not go back to sleep. I got up. I went into my office, and I wrote my three pages.

Stubborn Works

All my life I’ve been told that being stubborn is not a good thing. I have been told to sit down and be quiet, that I am pushing too hard, that I need to learn to let go of things. To be fair, this is sometimes true; I don’t know how to drop things and, sometimes, that means I keep going when the healthy thing would be to stop.

However. There are times when being stubborn serves me very well. This morning was one of those times. I got out of bed and I wrote my three pages. I didn’t even have to argue with myself too much.

The thing is, once you start putting in the real effort, I mean, the real effort of the sort that gets you up every day, you start to get stronger. Some of us are born with the stubborn factor built in. Giving up just isn’t part of the code. Even when we give up, we don’t give up for good. We just keep coming back, unable to stop.

Vision Boards

Others are not so lucky to be born with this determination to annoy everyone (seriously, in the beginning, there isn’t a whole lot of good in it). If you happen to be one of those who lack that stubborn streak, don’t worry. It can be built. This is not one of those things you have to naturally have. Fortitude and resilience can be made.

It begins with knowing what you want. Long game goals are the necessary to getting started; they get you excited and ready for the next steps. This is where I suggest things like vision boards. Make them while you are excited; sometimes, seeing the pictures and ideas can remind you when you can’t find the thoughts in your head. Think of a vision board as a way to visually map out your goals so that, when you are feeling down and tired, you can look at them and remember that this is important to you.

Obviously, that isn’t enough, though. If you are like me, those goals are so wonderful and you want them. But today is today. You have sick kids, a negative bank balance, and no energy left for dreaming about a finished book.

Personal Triggers

This is where you need to understand that the big goals get you going, but it is the small things that will keep you on the path. Small things, in my world, are achievements. I’m a gamer, as I’ve said before, and part of why I game is the achievements.

It took me a long time to understand those achievements were, however meaningless outside the gaming world, gave me the exact same feeling as a real world win. This is not just me, either. There is a reason so many children are hooked on games. The achievements aren’t exactly easy to get. Some of them are damn near as hard as anything you will do in the real world. The difference is those game achievements come with a little fanfare. Even the smallest of them bring a congratulatory message. For ongoing versions, this is something you build, bit by bit and, as you get higher on that ladder, you get more determined to keep going.

Using What You Know

This actually can be connected to what I’m talking about today. I am using a combination of planners and actual achievements to help give myself that extra push on mornings like today. I learned this from games. If there is an ongoing climb to the top, if I have already invested weeks, months, years to this, then, even on the days when my big goals hold less weight than my comfy bed, that investment will get me moving; I’m too stubborn to let it go.

The same can be true of you. There are sites, like Word Press, that have achievement counters. Every day that I post, my count goes up. At some point, I get throughly attached to that number. So here I am, up at five, sitting at my desk, coffee in hand, toothpicks holding my eyelids open.

You have to figure out the things that make you get up. Do you have dogs? What about kids? If you figure out things like I have – game achievements trigger my obsession – you realize you have the answers already. Once you understand your own triggers, even the ones you might think are bad, you can then pull them out and use them to your advantage.

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