SEE A HEART

My editor at Dial shared this book with me at Christmas: SEE A HEART SHARE A HEART by Eric Telchin. 

It's truly a lovely collection of photographs.  I've found myself pulling it off the shelf repeatedly during the past few days, as the Ozarks has dealt with a horrible blast of wintry weather: sleet, snow, freezing rain. 

In the midst of ugly, harsh surroundings, it's provided a much-needed ray of warmth. 

THE BEST FIREWORKS

I didn't write much of a post about the Fourth this year, because I didn't get to enjoy my usual celebration...

I live just south of one of the best fireworks displays in town.  Most years, on the Fourth, I walk a few blocks, pop open a lawn chair, and hang out in a conveniently undeveloped field, watching the incredible professional fireworks from the Twin Oaks Country Club.  They completely fill up the sky, rattle through my chest.

This year?  My tried-and-true empty field was a construction zone.  And the heat was absolutely vicious, keeping me from my usual bird’s eye view.  Though my neighbors and I are residents of the county, and can legally shoot our own firecrackers, our worries about the brittle, dry surroundings during this prolonged drought also kept most of us from lighting much more than a few sparklers. 

  

So there just wasn't much going on, in our skies this year.

But we did spend plenty of time in our backyards, hitting grills or backyard pools. 

Some of my younger neighbors—a couple of elementary-school-aged girls—spent the Fourth on a picnic blanket, under a backyard tree, with assorted cold summer snacks and drinks and a pile of books.  I kept watching those girls, as the day lingered on, engrossed in their reads and laughing and enjoying each other.   

It has since occurred to me that those are perhaps the best fireworks of all—the fireworks of connecting.  To another person.  To the voice in a novel.  There’s nothing like that rattle that echoes through a chest when you find someone—or something—that you can relate to, on a personal level. 

So here’s to all those fireworks of connection—may they be popping and banging all around you, this summer and for many more to come…

HE-WHOS AND INTERNAL GRATIFICATION

Shortly after inking my very first book deal, I began to meet them: the dreaded He-Whos (enter demonic, minor-sounding organ chords here).

Yes, the He-Whos. What, exactly, is a He-Who, you might ask? Not to be confused with a yahoo or a nincompoop (although, according to some sources, the definitions overlap somewhat), a He-Who is a very sneaky creature whose natural habitat is a would-be author’s personal life. In most cases, said He-Who has been in a struggling author’s life for quite some time—years, some of them—playing the role of Supportive Confidant. Upon the announcement of an author’s long-awaited book deal, the face of said Supportive Confidant melts into a giant fiery pile of slime, exposing the dreaded, nasty, much-feared He-Who underneath.

A He-Who takes many different forms. The He-Whos I’ve encountered fall into three basic categories:

1). He who shows some initial interest when you announce your book sale, but when you disclose that it’s a YA or MG, he raises his lip off his teeth, lets out an, “Ew,” and explains, “I only read high-quality, serious works of literature. I do not read children’s books.” This statement is expressed rather emphatically, while rolling the “r”s, puffing on an antique scrimshaw pipe, and gesturing wildly to flash the professorly suede elbow patches on his coat. (This He-Who also has the same reaction to any other subcategory of genre fiction: romance, sci-fi, mystery, etc.)

2). He who does not have any interest in your book, but—OMG! He just happens to have a manuscript himself! And it’s awesome! And you should read it—and while you’re at it, rewrite it! And then give it to your publisher! Wouldn’t that rock???

3). He who is just so busy, he does not have the time to read your book—even though the book was released three years ago, and this particular He-Who has also watched every single episode of MY BIG REDNECK WEDDING, sends you emails with links to “hilarious” YouTube vids three times a day, and has repeatedly called to inform you that he has discovered the best way to mow a lawn: with manicure scissors.

Okay, all right, so I’m being a bit flip in my descriptions…But honestly, these people really do exist. These reactions—or some version of them, anyway—really do happen. I can’t say I understand it, two years after my first book hit the shelves, two years after the He-Whos started showing their faces. I might even think I was alone in the whole He-Who thing, had I not run into articles online and in print in which authors described similar experiences. Knowing this is an unfortunate part of the gig, I slowly began to develop a methodology for dealing:

Treat He-Whos the same way you treated early rejections. Okay, so a personal rejection stings worse than a professional one. But the point is, you didn’t let one professional “no”—or, if you’re like me, more than a thousand professional “no”s—derail you. You screamed at times, you shed a few tears, but then you put it away and you went back to work. You didn’t dwell on one response. You also didn’t let it convince you that your pursuits weren’t worthwhile. You didn’t let it convince you that everyone would have the same reaction to your work. You didn’t stop trying, and you didn’t stop sharing. And, most importantly, you didn’t let a few—or hundreds—of rejections dim your own internal gratification. Not the internal gratification you felt for having created a novel you loved. You were proud of yourself then, regardless of the final external response from an editor or agent. You maintained your own internal gratification while letting those rejections push you increasingly closer to your first “yes.”

There’s no predicting how people will react to anything—as authors, we spend so much time with complete control over our characters and our internal worlds, it’s a surprise when our external worlds don’t quite behave like we’d expected or hoped. But the great part is, though, that not everyone is a He-Who. And just as your rejections pushed you closer to finding the right “home” for your work, always allow the He-Whos to push you closer to those who are supportive, are truly happy for you, every step of the way. In my case, unending support and cheering wound up filtering into my life from all sorts of different corners. It came from my mom and brother, who had supported me all along the journey, and it came from some (now infinitely appreciated) old friends, from fellow authors, fantastic local librarians, from bloggers and reviewers—and eventually fans! It even came from some unexpected sources (like old classmates who sent messages through my website to congratulate me).

The ability to maintain your internal gratification is one of the most important skills for any author to master. That internal gratification—that self-pride—will get you through most anything, in your writing career. It will get you through any of the inevitable low points: rejections or less-than-glowing reviews or lower-than-expected sales numbers, etc. That internal gratification will often be your lifeblood, as an author, and is far too precious to ever, ever be handed off to some old He-Who.

TOO OLD NOW TO...

I turned 35 this week. I’m really not quite sure how this happened. At first, seeing this age next to my name was a bit like those instances when you get your credit card bill and say, “Hey, there’s no way I spent this much money this month,” only you know, even before you get out that fine-toothed comb, that you really have. Somehow, I’ve raced through 35 years’ worth of time.

Some cool stuff I got:

* A Kindle cover. Now, I get to retire that sheet of Bubble Wrap I was using to protect it inside my purse. Nobody’ll snicker at me when I haul the thing out in public to read.

*A giant silver piggy bank (he’s so cute, I’m gonna wanna feed him). I named him Ponzi.

* The realization that I am right now in the very place I would have given my eye teeth to be, four years ago.

It’s so easy (for me, at least) to always be looking at some distant prize, dancing on the horizon somewhere. This week, though, I was reminded that four years ago, I had yet to land any sort of deal with anyone—publisher, agent, etc. Although I did have a fabulous hole in the drywall, where I’d been knocking my head against the office wall…

Which brings me to the coolest gift of all, which arrived in droves:

* Happy Birthday wishes, from readers and fans via Twitter, Facebook, my website, and my various email addresses. I always say the best gift is just a, “Happy Birthday.” And I got so many this year, it brought a tear to the eye…Thanks, guys. Seriously.

I wound the day down with a performance from my favorite musician, Will Hoge, on Kimmel. Get this—he sang “Too Old to Die Young.” Come on. How perfect is that?

GRATITUDE & HAPPY THANKS

This year, I'm just really into the Thanksgiving vibe. For those of you who follow my MG and YA author blogs, you know that both are featuring "gratitude" as the theme of the month.

Gratitude, it seems, is a little like these flowers I just found in my front yard—at this time of year, my yard's a giant patch of brown. But once I noticed these little spots of purple, it was suddenly all I saw. Start focusing on what you're grateful for, and all the brown, scraggly annoyances in life fade away, too.

This month, I've been rerunning the below post everywhere I can. Originally written for Tracy Barrett's Goodbye day job! blog, it turned out to be my favorite guest post of all time, because it gave me a chance to talk about all the insanely incredible support I've received while working to get my writing career off the ground.

I'm definitely lucky, as the post explains...but as I find myself saying a lot lately, we're all lucky, in our own ways. Here's to focusing on the bright spot of purple, wherever it happens to pop up in your own life!


ON GRAND DELUSIONS AND UNENDING SUPPORT:

When I got my master’s in ’01, my mom invited me to stay home and devote my full-time efforts to getting a writing career off the ground (my lifelong dream). I figured it’d take a year or so to write a novel, then it’d sell (I was lucky enough to have placed poetry, short fiction, and literary critique in journals when I was in college, and was under the grand delusion that selling a manuscript would be a breeze for me), and in oh, two years or so, I’d have money in the bank, and I’d be off and running.

Okay, seriously. You can stop laughing now.

The truth is that it took seven and a half years just to get my first acceptance. In that time, my friends from college finished up PhDs, started teaching, doing research, became professionals. I often felt like all I had was a deep gash in the drywall where I’d spent months upon months banging my head against it.

And, let’s face it: I had guilt.

I cringe at the stereotypical portrait of the kid who’s living at home: the slacker who lies on the couch, playing video games, letting Mom do laundry, mooching, no sense of direction to speak of. That certainly has never been my life. I feel that your family is your family, regardless of what it consists of: your spouse and your children, or your siblings and parents. I participated in everything going on in my home: the upkeep, the repairs, the lawn, the floor-laying, the painting, the grocery shopping, the meal-planning…My office butts up against the laundry room, and, yes, I’ve always done my fair share of the laundry, as well.

Still, though: the guilt. You aren’t a responsible adult without feeling the sting of not contributing financially (I did teach piano and guitar lessons, and everything I made went to paying off what few bills I had—I got out of college with no student loans). Still, though, no matter how much I contributed, I often felt it wasn’t enough. I butted heads with my mom about finding work out of the house (she always talked me out of it). Instead, I worked, as we’d agreed, on my manuscripts: I created a floor-to-ceiling stack of them in those seven and a half years.

During those years, I learned to balance my writing with the comings and goings of a household. I can fix a lawnmower with one hand and outline a novel with another. I also learned that my greatest first reader is also the same person who insisted I stay home to write in the first place (Mom’s a great titler, too—she was the first to suggest the titles for both my published books). And when the triumphs finally arrived—selling a book, seeing my first book on a store shelf, getting the starred review, receiving a few lit prizes—my mom and brother, who had been my support, my sounding board for project ideas, my first set of eyes, took pride in it, too. They had a hand in it.

Come on—getting started is beyond rough. Everybody has to have some sort of help when they set out to forge a writing career. Now, when I step inside a library or a bookstore, I think there’s not just one person behind each of those titles, but a whole group of them—in addition to the writer, there’s some combination of parent, sibling, partner, spouse, etc., who supported that writer as they got started. It’s pretty incredible, when you stop to think about it…