New Year, New Writer!

This is one of those blog posts that will probably hold more interest for me than anyone who regularly reads this blog. It calls into question why I'm posting it here, but I've come to realize that in the absence of a more traditional journal, this blog has taken the place of that for me. In fact, I've got a few pages of unpublished posts that are either too messy, too raw or too boring to make the cut as public posts, but they live on in my drafts folder as reminders of earlier ideas or thought processes. You could say I've hit that point in nerd evolution, where all my deep, personal thoughts come out as long form essays, but I digress.

Today, I want to talk about goal setting! New Years is one of my favorite holidays, even if I'm not doing anything for it. (I've got nothing but attending church planned for New Year's Eve this year. Woopwoop!) Mostly, it's because I'm a chronic goal setter, and I love that blank slate feel that a new year gives.

Further, I'm a firm believer that if you want to get anything done as a writer, you need to have some system for setting and fulfilling goals.

Making Time and Reason for Writing

When you are like me - unagented and unpublished, but striving to reach both those milestones - it can be very difficult to make time for writing, due to the absence of any external pressure to do those things. Currently, my income is not derived from my writing. Writing does not make my house any cleaner, feed my cats or fulfill my church assignments. It takes me away from my friends, and as we speak, writing this blog post is keeping me up past midnight. Whoops.

My passion for writing is my primary motivator that keeps me coming back. I love stories. I love creating. I would do some form of writing and creating no matter what in my life. But due to the other demands on my time, it's downright impossible to get anything substantial done in my writing without some coordinated effort. Those other things distract me and destroy my productivity, unless I  hit back.

To me, goals are the names we give our dreams. If I want to achieve those big picture dreams I have, like selling books and using that money to buy cat food, I need to give a name to each brush stroke of that picture. So today, I'm doing that.

Feel free to comment with some of your own New Year Resolutions! Like I said, I love this holiday, and when people tell me their goals, I feel like I'm learning what they named their little, baby dreams.

First, The Year in Review

Let's look at some of the things I achieved or learned this year! YES!

• Joined an online writing group. Got my revision game back on. All the love to you, my Oddballs.
• Attended the Storymakers Conference, where I:
• Met some of the people in my online writing group. HEY GUYS!!!
• Got my first page onto the First Impressions agent critique panel
• Pitched an agent after said panel, didn't die, and got a request for pages
• Subbed two stories to the first chapter contest
• Finally understood what is meant by Deep 3rd Person POV 
• Learned what a beat sheet is
• Wrote about insulation, and was complimented on it by Allie Condie. Guys, I may never get over this one.
• Endured the loss of Tuula Mantta and Miranda Leavitt, when they had the nerve to move away.
• Resolved to make more friends. Forced people to watch Planet Earth II with me.
• Took trips to Kelowna and Calgary, where I got to see Tuula and Miranda, keeping summer awesome. YES!
• Realized my friends were a terrible influence on my writing habits. Sat down, and finally...

The SWEET PEE timeline

• Started drafting a new manuscript, titled SWEET PEE - and yes, that's spelled correctly - for NaNoWriMo in November 2016. Got about 20,000 words in by November 9th.
• On November 9th, started a new job, which destroyed my brain and productivity. Put the manuscript on the backburner until the New Year.
• Wrote large amounts of the first draft on the bus, to and from work, due to time constraints. Learned the value of a light, small laptop.
• Resolved to make more friends in April/May. Got terribly distracted. Failed to finish last 4th of book for several months.
• Realized the deadline for the Pitch Wars writing contest was coming, and remembered that I wanted to enter. Banged out the last 4th of the first draft in the first week of August, and submitted to Pitch Wars August 4th.
• Got into Pitch Wars August 24th! Spent the next two months revising the book with the help of my amazing mentor, Lianne Oelke. Check her out here!
• Completed the polished manuscript in time for the October 31st deadline, making it almost exactly a year from sloppy, first words to query ready manuscript. Fastest turn around I've had on a manuscript to date!

And back to other lessons learned...

• Realized during revisions that there is DEFINITELY such a thing as biting off more than you can chew.
• Learned some things about comma placement and compound sentences that would likely make my poor Master's Thesis advisors weep for joy, knowing I've finally... improved. Slightly.
• Started listening to the Writing Excuses podcast.
• Bought some awesome Christmas decorations.

Whew! I honestly didn't expect the list to be that long when I started, but it's kind of nice to see the year captured like that. Of course, I'll be the first to admit that this version of events glosses over some of the angst and messiness that goes on behind the scenes, but this is New Years and it's a frickin' holiday, and I reserve the right to have a party. GO ME!!!

This Year's Goals

• Complete another first draft of a manuscript - this might not seem very ambitious in light of the turn around on my last book, but I am "between ideas" right now, and so it's hard to commit to getting something all the way past the editing stage when nothing is on the page yet. I'm between several different ideas, all appealing in different ways. We'll see where I go.
• Draft 10,000 words in January - Again, I could be more ambitious in terms of word count, but the real goal lurking here is PICK AN IDEA AND WRITE ABOUT IT!!!
• Send 100 query letters during the year - or get an agent. One can hope.
• Send 20 query letters in January - right now I'm itching to do this, so it shouldn't be too hard.
• Read more books - while I got a LOT of writing done in 2017, my reading suffered a bit. I'm trying to make up lost time right now while I'm between ideas. Still settling on a realistic yearly/monthly reading goal. 
• Attend Storymakers again and maybe a second conference/writing retreat - anything additional will depend on finances, but I am SO STOKED for Storymakers! Anyone who writes and can get to Provo, Utah in May should absolutely check it out.
• Start a Bullet Journal - guys, I am so excited about this. I've been reading up on them, and I think it could be really useful for me. I've been feeling like I want to a) do more journaling again b) start using a sketch book again and c) try and make a day planner work. But the idea of trying to do all three at once sounds insane. I like how a bullet journal can kind of grab from all three of those things at once. Like, guys! It's a journal/planner you get to DRAW IN!!! I just have to keep reminding myself that it's okay that I have terrible penmanship. I'm in it for the organizing/better documented memories/excuse to draw pictures. Pictures. Not pretty penmanship and headers. That's what I've got to focus on. Anyhow, if anyone out there uses one and has tips/spreads they use (especially any for organizing writing goals or LDS church callings) let me know!

And there you have it! My writing recap for 2017, and my writing goals for 2018. Here's hoping for another good year.

Conferences and Drafting: Writerly News

You might have noticed it's been a little while since I wrote a blog post. Or you might be going merrily along with your life none the wiser. Either option is fine. But suppose you ARE that person who has noticed it's been a while. Suppose you've been waiting for me to complete my blog series on boys and reading. If you are among these people, then you might have worried the past month or so that I wasn't writing much any more.

Well, worry no more! Because as it turns out, the problem was the opposite. I was writing. A lot. And it all pointed towards one purpose...

Conferencing

Last year I completed my Master's, and while that was awesome and exciting, it also left an empty space in my life. During my studies, I'd been enjoying the support of a school writing community that pushed me to produce large amounts of work and also to refine that work into something better. I can't emphasize enough how amazing it was to focus entirely on writing during that time.

But perhaps even more important, school created a sense of urgency in me when it came to writing. If you didn't show up with new pages every week, you looked like you were slacking off, even if you were technically *allowed* to miss a week or two. But why would you want to? The feedback we got by workshopping our stories each week was incredible. All you had to do was finish on time, and people would read your work and comment on it and help you improve it.

Deadlines were one of the best things about school. I could take or leave the grading, but the chance to learn and workshop once every week - well, I can't over state it. Since graduating, it's been difficult at times to force myself to keep to a writing schedule, largely because I don't have someone external to me expecting results in a timely manner. I tried setting my own deadlines, but I felt strongly that I'd do better if I was writing for something.

The best solution I could come up with was to look for a writing conference I could attend at some point this year. Conferences provide a great opportunity to network with other writers, enter contests, interact with publishing professionals and - highly appealing - join critique groups and get feedback on work.

I spent a long time finding a conference that I both wanted to attend and could afford to get to. Eventually, I settled on LDStorymakers. There were agents and writers in attendance I was interested in hearing speak, an impressive schedule of classes and, perhaps most compelling, it was all taking place in Provo, Utah, where I could stay at my sister's house for free!

I've already thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the Storymakers community. People have been supportive and reached out to one another, offering feedback for the First Chapter Contest and playing Twitter games with each other. It only seems like it can get better from here.

I'm also excited - though, honestly, nervous too - about the chance I'll have to interact with other writers who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For anyone who was either raised in/currently belongs to a religious community, it's pretty much impossible for your faith not to influence all aspects of your life. I think this is particularly true for Mormons and other minority religions. We're used to coming off as oddballs to other people at times, because our beliefs aren't common and we might not see things the same way as those who hold more mainstream beliefs. And despite this obvious influence, my writing life and my religion have often been kept in neat, separate boxes.

While I was at school, I was hyper aware of how weird I may or may not seem to people, due to my faith. I'd grown up as a decidedly uncool nerd, and away at Grad School, I got my first taste of acceptance by the wider population. We were all a bit weird, and it was so exciting to be around people who shared that experience and the accompanying enthusiasm for art. But even there, I was still DIFFERENT different. I couldn't go to bars or clubs and, as a result, missed out on some of the wider university culture.

My friends at Chatham were warm, accepting and never challenged me to do anything that went against my beliefs. Any barriers that existed between my faith and how I expressed myself were largely of my own making. My friends all knew I was Mormon and we had a lot of awesome conversations about faith and what religious beliefs we'd grown up with. But when we got into the actual classroom, I had a tendency to shut down that side of me. It was easier to come across as something neutral and non-threatening than to expose that more vulnerable part of me. We come from a culture where "common knowledge" suggests that religion is a topic that makes people angry and uncomfortable, so even when I was experiencing acceptance, it was hard for me to shut down this script in my head, that if I spoke about my writing from a position of faith, I would be yelled at or labeled as narrow-minded.

I don't know if I would have even noticed I was doing this if it hadn't been for a student/teacher mid-term talk I had with one of my favorite professors. He was trying to encourage me to be freer in my work, and I wasn't getting what he meant. As his careful, professional words failed to get through to me, he looked me squarely in the eye and said, "you're Mormon. You believe God put you on this earth for a purpose. That's what you need to write about."

I was instantly in tears, struggling to express how grateful I was to him for saying that. This fundamental part of why I write and why stories matter to me was something I'd never dared express in class. In my head, it would only make me sound crazy. But deep inside, I knew he was right. I didn't tell stories for fun, but because I believed they were part of what I was supposed to do with my time on earth - something I felt accountable to God for.

It's a memory that still makes me cry. In many ways, there are three things that matter to me in my life. My faith, my family and my writing. Inside me, they're all deeply intertwined, but it's rare I get the chance to experience them as united. I don't expect every Mormon author I meet to experience their faith and writing the same way I do, but that's part of what's exciting about the chance to go to LDStorymakers. I'm curious how others have integrated these things in their life and their work. Some will be people who write directly for the LDS niche market. Others will be like me, influenced thematically, but more drawn to books and stories aimed at a wider audience.

Hopefully, all of us can learn from each other. The conference starts on Thursday, May 5th with an intensive workshop, and I'm super excited! And one of the main reasons I'm excited is because I'm bringing a brand, spankin' new manuscript with me.

Drafting

Earlier tonight, I finished drafting my current Work-In-Progress (or WIP as we writerly types like to call it), a Young Adult fantasy novel set in a world based loosely on pre-revolution France. It's about the transition of a country from war to a state of peace and the uneasy tensions that still litter the countryside. And at the center of it is a young woman who's thought of as a traitor by both sides.

Doesn't that sound exciting? I'm so glad that story exists now. And I would likely still be dragging my feet drafting it if not for the fact that Storymakers is starting this coming week.

Remember that talk about deadlines? Well, I promised myself that when I went to Storymakers, I would focus on classes that could help me edit my manuscript. But in order for that to be relevant, I needed to be finished the book I planned on editing. It is rough rough rough, my friends, but it exists. I love this story, and I'm really looking forward to going over it again and reshaping it into the story it is in my head, if not yet on the page.

Later, I might write another post talking about the differences between drafting and editing. For now though, I'm planning on focusing on the conference. I plan on writing at least one more post on LDStorymakers after it's finished. Maybe even more than that. :) We shall see!

Until then, I also want to say thank you to everyone who supported me while I finished this story. A huge thanks to my friends who were very understanding when I had to blow them off so that I could write. Thanks to my brother, who not only was patient with me through this process, but also has let me write about him and our relationship in the most bizarre, twisted of manners. Thank you to my sister who - did I mention? - is letting me stay at her house FOR FREE! Major props to Disturbed, whose cover of Simon and Garfunkle's Sound of Silence literally got me through a few of the darker chapters. A colossal thank you to my dad, who volunteered to drive me to the conference so he could see his grandsons and because he loves me a crazy amount. And a "I couldn't have done it without you" to my best buddy, Miranda Leavitt, who listened to long, rambling talks about characters, plot twists and my neurosis. She's a super hero, and I couldn't be more thrilled that she's coming to the conference too.

And above all, an amazing, all encompassing THANK YOU to my mother, who put up with a flaky daughter who constantly forgot to clean things and instead of getting annoyed with me, would time and again tell me to go finish my book instead. She's even volunteered to do my laundry tomorrow so I can focus on my other conference prep activities, because she's a saint.

For the rest of tonight, I'm gonna celebrate and rock out to the Dolly Parton album iTunes had on sale tonight. It's a good day, folks. A very good day.