Reblog: 6 Tips for Jumpstarting

Well, I’ve done absolutely no reading, note taking, plan making, or editing of fiction of any kind so far this month. And so, because I am discouraged and everything is hard, I am leaning into this reblog: A.D. Nauman’s 6 Tips for Jumpstarting a Stalled Writing Career. Here’s to hoping that some day I’ll get far enough into a writing career for it to even be at risk of stalling out.

6 Tips for Jumpstarting a Stalled Writing Career

A.D. NAUMAN

OCT 11, 2023

When I was in my 30s, literary success felt close. My stories were appearing regularly in literary journals and winning awards. One story was produced by Stories on Stage and broadcast on NPR. I had an agent I adored. My first novel had been accepted for publication by a hot indie New York press, and of course it would be a world-changer, destined for both the bestseller list and the literary canon. I was soaring down the highway to literary triumph.

Then, everything drifted to a stop. My novel Scorch, released in 2001, did not change the world. My agent left agenting. And over the next 10 years, I managed to place only two stories. I wrote a rockin’ middle-grade novel and secured another agent, but she couldn’t sell it. I wrote a cool, creepy YA novel, but the agent didn’t like it, and she dumped me. I have a vivid memory of sitting at my dining room table in late summer of 2010, sobbing, knowing I’d missed it: I wasn’t going to have the life of a writer after all. It was all I’d ever wanted. I’d made so many sacrifices for it.

Now, in 2023, I am finally launching a second novel, Down the Steep, published by Regal House. Once again I’m regularly placing stories in literary journals, including TriQuarterly, Willow Springs, Chicago Quarterly Review, and many others. One of my stories recently received a special mention in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology. I don’t have an agent, but I’m succeeding without one. Granted, I’m no longer racing down any highways to literary stardom, but I have successfully restarted my stalled career, and I’m happy again—in fact, I’m happier than before, because now my expectations are reasonable.

Ready to read on? Head over to Writer’s Digest for the rest of the article! And until next week, wish me luck that I’ll actually find the time to do anything fun with my life ever again. I need it. Happy writing!

Typing Without the Typing Part

I was chatting with a sibling-in-law a few weeks ago and realized, rather abruptly, that someday, maybe a lot sooner than I had previously thought, I might not be able to type anymore. That the mounting pain in my fingers and the ever-more-frequent hand injuries could eventually build up to the point that I wouldn’t be physically able to write or make art anymore. So I sat on the floor and cried for a little bit. As one does.

After attempting such internet queries as “How to type without hands” (which was bizarrely unhelpful—why would I need typing lessons if I didn’t have hands?), I had to reeeally get into the Reddit and YouTube weeds to find anything even remotely helpful. In the end, I mostly just had to come up with these things off the top of my head, so if you have any other tips or tricks in your toolbag, drop them in the comments below! (Seriously, please drop them in the comments, I am begging you.)

I divided my list of ideas into a favorite childhood candy, Now and Later. Some of this stuff I am kind of already needing to implement just to get through particularly writing heavy weeks at school. (I’m looking at you, two-weeks-ago.) I already really feel it in the phalanges when I have to type a lot, and especially when I hand write things with pens and pencils, which are just getting harder and harder to hold firmly. But there are other things that I hopefully won’t have to start using until a little further down the line.

Things I Can Do Now:

Go slowly. Seriously. Sometimes I have to take it one paragraph at a time. Just a few sentences, and then go take a break. It sucks and I hate it, and it makes it hard to really build complex and coherent thoughts in one go, but it’s better than the alternative. Fun fact: this blog took me three weeks to write. ☹

Type deliberately. I started thinking a little more closely about the words I wrote when each word started to make my hands ache just a little more.

Write less. The wordcounts of these posts have started to shrink a bit. I have started skipping weeks when my hands feel like trash and writing a longer post on top of the schoolwork just isn’t in the cards. I am not necessarily okay with this. But I think I’m gonna have to learn to be.

Stab tennis balls. Haha, you read that right. Since gripping pencils/pens/brushes/etc. is becoming more difficult (aka art is becoming more difficult), some very helpful internet person suggested drilling a hole through a tennis ball (or whatever size ball is comfortable to grip) and then stabbing the writing utensil into it, thus making a cheap, gigantic DIY pencil grip. (And I know this one doesn’t have to do with typing, but I’m counting it under the blogging umbrella.) I haven’t tried it yet, but this one is looming near on the horizon. Which leads us to…

Things for the Future:

Use speech to text. I’m pretty sure that my tongue gets possessed by demons every time I attempt this, but maybe you’re a person who is capable of speaking a story and having it come out with any degree of grace or coherence. If so, speech to text is a great option with zero strain on the digits! I hate it but might have to get over that.

Use finger splints. Also known as hypermobility/arthritis/ring splints. Some of these are pretty bleh, but a lot are super cool looking, like intense metal jewelry that you might find on the fingers of a sexy lich queen cosplayer in downtown Seattle. These are the one thing on the list that I’m actually kind of looking forward to, haha.

Create video posts. On weeks when I’m just really not feeling it, I can try video posts until I feel a little more functional. Full scripts can get pared down to talking points to minimize necessary text and hand strain, and I’m sure you’ll all forgive my incoherent babbling. I’m sure.

So I might find myself employing more of these little workarounds in the future, especially in times when I have to reserve more of my finger capacity for other stuff—or when there just isn’t any finger capacity to be had. All this being said, I’m still going to try really hard to maintain the weekly blog schedule as much as possible. I don’t want to just give up on all the things I like (because, tragically, most of my hobbies—writing, drawing, painting, piano, bass, archery, the-making-and-eating-of-insane-amounts-of-bread, etc.—are pretty finger intensive), but I’m going to have to at the very least rethink how I do them.

So seriously, tips and tricks in the comments, please and thank you.

And until next week! Love you all to bits, and happy writing!

Wellness Goals

One of the classes I signed up for this fall is about teaching health and wellness within the K-8 curriculum. As part of the course, we were assigned to come up with some manner of wellness goal (physical, mental, spiritual, whatevs) and track our progress throughout the course, with a weekly check-in at the start of each class meeting. Since this fall has been all about picking up the pieces of my life after our nightmare summer, this fit in pretty well with what I needed to make happen anyway and so I settled onto a mental health goal of 20 minutes with my happy light, 20 minutes of scripture study, and 30 consecutive minutes of outdoor time each day.

I tend to be 1000% on board for whatever I’m hyped up about in the moment, only to go on to ignore absolutely everything else in my life while I’m doggedly pursuing that one goal. It can be a good thing to have such single-minded determination, but it can also be a really, really bad thing, too. I’m not very good at being well balanced, with my pendulum swinging from one extreme (I’m going to go from submitting zero queries for years to twenty in months!) to another (I’m going to run a marathon!) to another (I’m going to get a master’s degree!), often without actually finishing the first thing I set out to do. But then earlier this summer, when my world was blowing up in slow motion all around me, I got the feet knocked out from under me and the board was more or less wiped of all things beyond bare survival (at least physical and academic survival).

Survival mode is fine for a little while, but it gets pretty taxing pretty quickly. So for today, I wanted to chat a bit about why that balance is so important, particularly when it comes to creativity. And for that conversation, I want to focus on just four specific ways that we (read: I) can get better at finding that balance between needs as a human and as a writer.

Practice Basic Self-Care Humans must eat on occasion. Stay warm generally. Maybe clean themselves once in a while. We’re not talking red-garra-pedicures-and-gold-crusted-bath-bombs levels of self-care here. Just give your body good food on a regular basis. If you’re like me, maybe make sure you’re getting enough sunlight/Vitamin D. Stay hydrated! Taking care of your body frees your brain from thinking about its basic survival so that it can tackle more complex issues, like whether or not your MC is going to get up the guts to ask that guy out she likes so much. You’re not going to put your best work into your stories if your brain and body are worried about staying not dead. And once you’ve got that figured out, maybe then you can start thinking about the bath bombs, too.

Get Sleep I know this is a part of basic self-care, but it is so important that it gets its own paragraph. One time I was writing a story wherein a girl was basically cursed and unable to sleep. Researching what happens to a human who cannot sleep was scary. In short, you go crazy and then you die. Fun stuff. Now, you’re probably not getting no sleep, but maybe you’re getting a little less than you’re supposed to. Maybe you’re trying to make up the difference with caffeine or some other stimulant. Maybe you’ve been doing that for a while. Maybe that’s working for you. But you know what works better? Getting an actual good night’s sleep so that your brain can actually do its job right. If you’re not getting enough sleep, no amount of caffeine is going to process memories, build neural pathways, restore energy, remove toxins, process complex problems from the day, and stave off disease, cognitive decline, and dementia. Go to sleep.

Use Social Media Mindfully I’m not going to tell you that you should stay off of social media entirely (although you absolutely could and I would applaud you). But just be aware of how much time and energy you put into it. Be aware of how it makes you feel—do you come out of a social session feeling exhausted or energized? Happy or unhappy? Do you feel like it was a good use of your time? If it’s not serving you well, cut back. If it’s not serving you at all, find another outlet that does. I have wasted many unhappy hours scrolling to infinity through threads about how quickly others found their agents, what some politician in Australia did, how other authors just loved (in past tense, of course) the querying process, and how writers’ beautiful stories just flowed out of their fingers like magic (and how French baristas feel about oat milk). I could have spent that time querying or writing my own stories (or making my own fabulous oat milk drinks, for that matter, thank you very much). But instead, I blew it on the internet with nothing to show for it other than a fog of depression and guilt. Again, I’m not saying you should quit social media—especially if you love it. Just make sure it’s doing what you need it to do for you.

Make Time for Loved Ones You have loved ones! I know you do! Think about the people who fill your cup. The ones that make you smile when you tell people about them. The ones you love to brag about. Make time for these people (or animals, I guess). It can be really easy to tell these people that you can’t right now because you need to work on this one thing. After all, you know they’re going to love you anyway! But I find that replenishing my spirit with these favorite people usually makes me a much better worker at the keyboard than if I had spent all that time plugging away instead of taking a break to read with my kids and kiss them goodnight. Maybe it’s movie night with a partner, or pal parties just because, or a daily walk with that adoring pupper, but whatever it is, prioritize it. Don’t turn into a cave troll. You’ll feel better if you consistently say yes to these loved ones than if you consistently don’t, and that will free up a lot of mental space for your writing (because positive synergy and good vibes!).

The class I originally came up with my mental health goals for, a single-credit mini-course of only five weeks, ended a couple weeks ago and, during the last meeting, we had the opportunity to look at our overall progress toward our wellness goals and to think about whether we wanted to continue with them going forward or let them die along with the class. I did well, but not perfectly, and I think it would be good for me to keep going with the goals as we round out the fall and head into winter, although I did knock the 30 minutes of outdoors time back to 20 minutes (which I’m extra sure of now that the snow has started flying). And I’m squinting extra hard to make sure I’m being a good girl on the five aspects of wellness listed above. Hopefully the worst of the disasters are behind me, at least for a little while, and I can strike a new balance.

So until next week, happy writing!

Happy Equinox!

So, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve got some mood disorderliness going on, and it’s pretty seasonally linked. And since I live in the land of the midnight sun (and also the noon moon, which gets no love), it’s strongly pronounced. I have all sorts of little tricks to try and round out those rough corners—I make an appointment with my doc to talk meds, I start hanging out with my happy light in the last couple weeks before equinox, etc.—but although these things help, the problem will kind of always be there in some degree. (Now that I’m writing this, I’m beginning to suspect that my husband’s gently floating the idea of moving somewhere of a more southerly clime might have less to do with his being tired of the cold and more to do with his being tired of having a wife going absolutely bonkers at least twice a year. Hmmm…)

Climate and seasonal changes are always on my mind during the Big 4: winter solstice, vernal equinox, summer solstice, and autumnal equinox. While the solstices get all the hoopla and are the loud and blatant in-your-face-Alaska! days, the equinoxes are the days when Fairbanks feels the most like the rest of the country, with days that don’t stretch out forever and nights that aren’t insanely cold. While the solstices are the big party days, the equinoxes are the work days because change is a-comin’ and we’ve got stuff to get done. And that is especially true of the fall equinox. There’s a lot that needs doing and precious little time in which to do it before the snow flies.

I’m one of those people who are always looking out for patterns to help me optimize my day, both in general and more specifically for writing. And I’ve written before about the patterns in my mood disorder (see Books for Crazy People) and how the seasons effect my writing (see Writing by Season), but I’ve never really talked about the intersection of those things for me. Mood disorders can be really terrible, particularly when you’re trying to do something functional like writing a book or holding down a job or keeping your children alive, but they can also be kind of like a superpower.

When I’m hypomanic (a slightly lower-key friend of mania wherein I have some amount of self-regulation), I have all the ideas. All of them. I’m bursting with them. Sometimes I feel radiant, like my skin must be literally luminescent, as I write dozens, sometimes scores, of ideas in a matter of days. I feel vast, like I can do or be or create absolutely anything and it will be brilliant. And I’m juuust cognizant enough to recognize the good ideas to keep and how to make them better. (When I stray into true mania, which I don’t do very often, then all bets are out the window, everything is brilliant, and I laugh and babble and scribble nonsense all night long that I’ll find a few months later and try to decipher with skin-prickling horror.) Hypomania is very fun and a little frightening and it is in that state that I come up with probably between two-thirds and three-quarters of my writing ideas in any given year. This state is most pronounced during summer. I can get into hypomanic states during the spring and fall as well, but they aren’t as sustained.

When I’m just slightly depressed, I have the power of plug-and-chug. When I’m in this state of just a little down, I can put in all the work. I feel things more keenly, and I can imagine the dark and miserable more clearly. I can mull like nobody’s business; those plot holes don’t stand a chance against the ant’s nest of my brain chewing on them. (When I’m deeply depressed, which happens more than true mania does, I’m too down to work. Too down to plan. Too down to leave the house. I just lie around and numbly accept hugs from my concerned family while they say gentle things that I won’t remember.) Mild depression isn’t too bad, just a little glum and ho-hum, big Eeyore energy. This state happens most in late fall through early spring, but it’s liable to slump down into deeper depression, so it makes me nervous to stay this way for too long.

The transitional seasons—spring and fall—are an absolute grab bag of moods, with me swinging wildly between them, so it’s hard to stay in either one for long enough to get any real work done. Mostly, I just dance exuberantly around the kitchen to Billie Eilish music, and then stop to consider how global warming will kill my innocent grandchildren, and then furiously prune all my houseplants while loudly reciting The Walrus and the Carpenter in a squeaky British accent, but then I’ll wander away again before I actually finish it (the pruning or the poem). Not a lot actually gets done. Right now, I’m pulled between up and down so I’m not being especially productive with writing. But that is also due to working nearly full time, getting the home ready for snow, getting the bees ready for winter and the honey processed, last-chance harvests in the garden and wild berry patches, etc., etc., etc., so it’s hard to draw any hard conclusions. There will always be a lot going on and I will always be dealing with life as well as my mental health. Writing is an easy thing to fall by the wayside when there is laundry and teaching and raking to be done.

All this said, I’m still doing my best to stay off my mood stabilizers. They shave off the extreme boundaries of my moods, so I don’t get as high or as low, but it can make me feel just a little numb, like I’m feeling some sharp-edged thing through thin gloves. It’s hard to write like that. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been so stinking bad at writing these last few years because of that one winter on stabilizers—I haven’t ever really hit my stride again since then. Besides that, there were side effects and the medicine was so hard to get off of, even in the small doses I was taking. There are lots of reasons to stay off, and not yet enough reasons to start on again. We’ll see what the later autumn and the winter bring. In the meantime, I’ll keep plodding along with my writing projects and hopefully find myself in a steadier writing place come November. After all, and especially with me, a lot can change in just a few weeks!

So happy equinox in the coming days! You might not notice it where you live, but it’s there. Let’s raise a toast to the changing seasons and make some butterbeer or something warm.

And until next week, happy writing!

Imposter Syndrome Squared

Image Credit: Snorg Tees

It’s been a rough half-year for writing. I haven’t been wallowing in too much guilt about it, though, because it’s hard to feel guilty when you’ve chosen the health and wellbeing of your most vulnerable loved ones over a hobby that will keep perfectly well on the shelf for a few months. So that’s been nice.

But earlier this week, one of my writing buddies sent a text out onto our group chat asking, “Do you ever get imposter syndrome about your own past writing?” After a little further chitchat and clarification, she added, “I’m trying to get back into writing multiple times a week, but it gets discouraging. Maybe someday I’ll be where I was two years ago.” And I knew exactly what she meant.

Past Jill was a writing beast. She’d knock out 3k words a day without breaking a sweat. She’d pound out multiple first drafts in any given year and a few second or third draft edits besides. Plus a few shorts just to keep sharp. She would write every. single. night. No exceptions. She’d decide NaNo wasn’t challenging enough so she’d double it. Just for the lols.

Present Jill is… not quite there anymore. Present Jill can hardly keep up on a 1k blog post once a week—and often can’t even manage that much. Present Jill has been working on the same first draft all year long and is sitting pretty at a dainty 55k, which was only made possible because of a 50k Camp NaNo in April before the sky started falling. She has done no editing and no submitting. She is tired. Sloppy. Spread thin. She thinks about writing at night, but she would really rather sleep instead.

So when my friend started looking to her past self as some kind of ideal model for the kind of writer she wanted to be, I couldn’t help but start wondering what Future Jill was going to look like. Past Jill? Or just more Present Jill? (Or somehow worse???)

For most of this year, I’ve been struggling a little bit with my own special brand of imposter syndrome, where I feel so completely disconnected with the kind of writer I want to be and project that I don’t even feel entitled to the imposter syndrome itself. I’m so far from being a *writer* that I’m struggling to feel like even in the struggle anymore. And it certainly doesn’t help that it’s closing in on autumn and it’s gonna start snowing in another week or two, and there’s less daylight and this is the time of year that I always wonder what the heck I’m doing with my life and if I am really secretly a trashcan full of cheap deli meats pretending to be a human.

I’ve historically struggled with feeling like I’m allowed to feel my own feelings. Like I don’t deserve to be unhappy, given all the things that are good. And you know what usually helps me with that? Getting out of my own head. If I can spend a little less time mulling over my own feelings, I worry about it that much less. Maybe that means working more or volunteering at the library. Maybe that means visiting a friend and tackling that sink of dishes they’re too tired to deal with. Maybe it means watching a show or reading a book I love or playing cards with my ever-amazing babies. Just whatever it is that gets me to focus on something other than the simmering goo in my own head.

And you know what will probably help me to start feeling like a writer again? Writing. I don’t have to pin myself down to any gigantic word goals just yet. Maybe just tapping out a few words one more night a week. (Because we’re basically down to Tuesdays with the writing group these days, at which point I bang out half a blog post and call it a day.) And maybe instead of sweating about sending out a batch of ten or fifteen queries, I’ll start with just one. That feels daunting enough all on its own. Why make it any harder on myself?

I have a tendency to let my lofty goals stack up on one another, getting bigger and bigger over time. When I’m feeling blocked, I need to make the barriers smaller. So what if I flop on one or two of my goals? Nobody’s paying me to do this. (Yet!) So I think I’m going to rearrange my goals a little bit for the next few weeks and see how it goes. I’m going to send out one query or submission by next week’s blog post. And I’m going to write a second night this week. And I’ll let you know how it goes in next week’s blog post.

So until then, thank you for sticking with me, and happy writing!

Camp NaNooooowhatareyoudoing

I have had a lot going on this summer. It’s been hard to find free time for much of anything beyond school, work, and sleep, so there hasn’t been much writing going on. But I was talking with a friend in my writing group last week about Camp NaNoWriMo—she was thinking about doing it but didn’t have much time but really wanted to start writing more regularly again—and it was like talking to myself in the mirror.

So we’re doing this. Despite… you know… everything. This pal and I settled on an embarrassingly low number of words for the month, just enough to force us to do a little bit here and there, which is more than what we’re currently doing.

That said, here’s the plan. I’m going to make progress on finishing (probably without actually finishing) the Hansel and Gretel retelling that I was working on in the last Camp NaNo session. But I’m also going to count any other creative writing words that I draft up over the course of the month. Basically, any non-work, non-school things I type for pure fun are fair game. (Hello, blog post! Because that’s been pretty terrible lately too!)

And we’ll see how it goes! It being a NaNo month, you can expect the usual fodder of reblogs and back-of-envelope junk art. Thanks for sticking with me, guys! I’ll try to be more functional going forward!

And until next week (which is definitely going to happen), happy writing!

Reblog: Shattering the Misery Myth

Hello, interweb friends! Another reblog, as I’m still working my way through another month of Camp NaNoWriMo. (I’m about nine thousand words behind. *dies*) I’m sorry, I drew a character sketch to post last week and then… just… forgot to post it….? Unfortunately, it’s sitting on my desk back home in Fairbanks Alaska while I’m here sitting in an airport in Seattle Washington. So… yeah. That’s gonna have to wait a couple weeks before it shows up. Depending on how desperately behind I stay, it might stand in for this month’s comic after I get back home. Who knows!

Continuing with my self-proclaimed theme of mental health and writing, this week’s reblog comes from Kate Sullivan (see more of her work here) over on the TCK Publishing website. Lots of interesting articles to be read on their site! Enjoy the post and I’ll catch you next week, hopefully a little more caught up!

There are a lot of myths surrounding being a writer.

The biggest and most dangerous is that we have to suffer for our art. This “misery myth” holds that writers are moody, fragile, flighty, and prone to bouts of depression—and that we need those things in order to be good at our craft.

It’s true that writers are around eight times as likely to suffer from mental illness than those who don’t pursue writing as a career, according to Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins who wrote Touched with Fire, an excellent book on the topic. But that doesn’t mean that you need to suffer in silence.

Why Are Writers Depressed?

So why are writers more prone to depression and anxiety, anyway?

The answer lies deep within our brains.

Neurology

Studies have shown that in most people, the right precuneus, the part of the brain that is responsible for coming up with ideas only fires up a few times a day—it’s mostly resting while you go about your business and get stuff done. But in writers and other creative professionals, this area fires up all the time.

It’s what lets us do what we do—we’re always thinking of new ideas and tying what’s going on around us into our memories, experiences, and dreams.

Basically, we can’t turn off the firehose of ideas. And that gets pretty darn exhausting; it makes it hard to focus, hard to tune out the flood of thoughts, and hard to rest and regenerate.

Situation

But then there’s also the situational factors.

Writing as a profession, unfortunately, tends to create a perfect storm of conditions that can crank up the dial on our biological tendencies towards depression, anxiety, and overwhelm.

Let’s look at a few—and what we can do about them.

Isolation

Writing is a pretty solitary profession. We’re tucked away in front of a keyboard or notebook for hours at a time, with no company other than our thoughts and the characters we create. This one factor is a huge contributing issue for mental health challenges.

While it’s good to like your own company and to be able to spend time with yourself and your thoughts, too much time alone can lead to a significantly increased risk of depression and other negative consequences. Psychology Today has written about the dangers of loneliness, which extends to the life of a writer.

Without enough social contact, our levels of stress hormones rise, we stop being able to cope with setbacks, and we may isolate ourselves even more because our energy levels fall and we feel generally less positive.

What To Do

Especially when you’re feeling depressed, it can seem like a huge challenge to get out and interact with other people.

Ready to read the rest? Get the full article here!

And until next week, happy writing!

Bullet Journal, Part II: Implementation

Howdy, internet friends! A few months ago, my friend M.E. Tait took me in hand and guided me through an introduction to bullet journaling and the ways that it could help me organize myself and my writing efforts for the upcoming year.

Since then, I’ve been doodling and scribbling in the lovely little dot journal she gave me as part of my primer. (Isn’t she wonderful?) It’s not the most in-depth bullet journal ever, but that’s intentional. I don’t really need a planner for the day to day things. I already have systems that I like in place for that. What I need is something to keep me on track toward bigger targets that take me weeks or even months.

Like annual resolutions! 😀

So I thought I’d take this week to show you the top three features that I’m most excited about in my little bullet journal and the ways I think they’ll help me in my ongoing quest to be a better human. Tally-ho!

Year at a Glance

Would it shock you to know that I currently have no means to keep track of the entire year? (No? Well fine then. *pouts*) I just kind of have to remember important events. Birthdays. Holidays. Conferences. Deadlines. Whatever. Things that come up year after year. If I have something coming up and I think about it, I make a note somewhere and hope I don’t lose the note. What could go wrong?

My year at a glance pages include a single page with birthdays and holidays marked (I’m thinking deadlines will end up on there too), and then a more detailed view following, with lines for each day of the year to clarify whose birthday, what holiday, what major event, etc. This should be helpful. (*writes on floor* pleeeeease be helpful.)

Goal trackers

Remember that not-having-an-overview-of-the-year thing? So not only does it make it hard for me to keep track of major upcoming events, it also makes it hard to keep track of my progress toward yearly goals. Books I’ve read, submissions I’ve sent, what drafts I’ve worked on this year: the information is all there, but it’s scattered around the computer and the internet, and it’s hard to sum up the will to actually check on my overall progress more than a couple times a year since it’s so much work. (It’s even worse for my personal goals because more often than not, they aren’t written down anywhere. I just have to remember them. ☹)

So I actually have two full spreads for goal tracking: one for personal goals and one for literary goals. As I mentioned last week, I’ll be reading twenty-four books, submitting to twenty editors and/or agents, writing one first draft, and writing one second draft. This will help me keep track of all that. (Because seriously, there are like a bajillion goals here and I am scared. Send help.)

Inspiration Page

You ever see something really inspiring and think, “Man! That is awesome and I want to remember it forever!” AND THEN YOU DON’T? I do this all the time. Dreams, shower thoughts, nature walk ruminations, you name it. I think of it. It is fantastic. It is gone. I’m hoping that by having a handy place where I can scribble down the things that inspire me, I can hang on to the feeling just long enough to do something with it, or at least to appreciate it a little longer. This page is quite a bit more amorphous than the others, but I’m excited to see how it evolves.

I have other pages, but they’re less fun and honestly, I kind of just included them because I think you… sort of… have to? Like the Bullet Journal Purity Panel will come arrest you if you don’t? Anyway, I might include some of them in later posts, if only to show off more phalanges and skulls. Because whatever your stance on bullet journals may be, I think we can all agree that this all may be nothing more than an excuse to draw more bones and flowers. Because who doesn’t need more bones and flowers to fill their days?

How about you folks? Do you have any tried-and-true methods for keeping yourselves organized? Have you ever tried bullet journaling and do you have tips? Is there *really* a Purity Panel and which members are most open to bribes? Let me know in the comments below! And until next week, happy writing!

Defining Success

I am at the point in my writing career where it can be very difficult to feel successful. Even my wins are so pathetically small that it can feel embarrassing to think of them as successes.

There are so many ways to measure success in the publishing industry—number of published projects, audience and notoriety, copies of books sold, literary prizes and awards, number of new dollars in my bank account, etc. If all those metrics apply to you, awesome, you’re a champ!

If very few of those metrics apply to you, hello, you are my people.

The metrics that a writer uses to measure success in their writing career can also vary for time scales. My goals for right now are (hopefully) different from what they’ll be in twenty years. And slightly differently, my short-term goals are always pretty piddly, but I have bigger aspirations for the long-term (thus the twenty years comment). I can’t expect myself to have massive sales, a huge audience, etc, all at once, even after I’ve had more time to build my brand; rather, I use my short term goals and measurements to build up to those larger successes.

Everyone’s measurements for success are going to vary because everyone’s reasons for writing vary. Some write to put bread on the table, some to be famous, some because it’s cathartic, some to quiet the eldricht duckie god who commands them. Your reasons for writing are a mix of motives that are unique to you. It’s worth taking the time to assess your own motivations and to come up with your own metrics, especially if, like me, you’re struggling to feel successful.

So in that spirit, I use the following yardsticks for success at this moment in my career.

A successful day: I wrote today. Hooray!

A successful week: I wrote more days than I didn’t. I connected with other literary folk, whether in my online writing group, on Twitter, or in person. I made progress on my current writing projects. Hooray!

A successful month: I wrote more days than I didn’t. I connected with other literary folk, whether in my online writing group, on Twitter, or in person. I made progress on my current writing projects, and shared parts of my work that I needed help on with other writers. I met my monthly literary goals by reading at least two books and making at least one submission for publication. Hooray!

A successful year: I wrote more days than I didn’t. I connected with other literary folk, whether in my online writing group, on Twitter, or in person. I made progress on my current writing projects. I met my annual literary goals by reading at least twenty-four books, making at least twelve submissions for publication, and completing at least three novel-length drafts of writing projects. I shared edited drafts of this year’s projects with beta readers and thoroughly considered their feedback when planning future drafts or publication plans. Hooray!

And that is it! You’ll notice I didn’t include sales numbers, followers amassed, or agent requests. I definitely could include those things, and that’s awesome if you do, but I am at the point where using metrics that involve other people and their ability to make choices just plain depresses me. I feel happier (and am therefore a more productive writer) when I don’t make goals or use measurements that are outside of my control. I dearly hope to some day make enough progress in my career that I do consider those things, but just not yet. (This isn’t to say that I don’t sell writing or hear back from agents or win awards. I simply don’t use those things are measurements of my progress. They’re just a reeeally nice pat on the back that I soak up like a sad, shriveled little sponge baby.)

How about you fine readers? What are your metrics for success as a writer? How closely do those metrics correlate to where you are in your career, and do you have “aspiration goals” that you’d like to meet in the future? Let me know in the comments below!

And until next week, happy writing!

Jill Feels Tense