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What Are My Options?

One of the big questions in every area of life is – what are my options? How do I want my hamburger cooked, what do I want on my pizza, how do I like my coffee – the smaller questions. What will I do for a living, how can I make ends meet until the work brings in the money, which of several directions should I take to get there – the bigger questions. (Why am I here, what is God’s plan for me, where will I go when I die – the most important questions, but not directly related to writing. 🙂 )

In writing, I’ve asked myself if I want to write fiction or nonfiction, business articles or romances, romantic comedies or superhero books with a romantic thread. While I like each of these ideas and many more, I have learned in life that you have to focus first to get started in any new endeavor. You can spread yourself thinner later. So I published a few nonfiction pieces, then focused on romance.

I went to Christian writers conferences in the early years because those were the writer friends I was hanging around. I got close enough that I was getting phone calls from an editorial assistant at Tyndale House, but I was writing just enough out of step that we could never quite get my work to run along on their track. Things never worked out.

A friend introduced me to her agent and soon I had representation. Surely my big break! It seemed the right thing to do was to continue with the romantic comedies (called chick lit at that moment, but shhh, don’t say that phrase any more). My agent and I talked about different things I could try when chick lit died. I chose not to pursue an opportunity with a Christian publisher who pays tiny advances. I was too insecure to try writing YA when my agent suggested it. I could see I had options, and – right or wrong – I made the best choices I could.

After four and a half years, I talked to my agent and decided to walk away. I was trying to do what I felt she wanted me to do, but my creativity was drying up by trying so hard. I needed a break. I’d been thinking about going to grad school for years, so when the opportunity came up, I took it. It was so beyond different from what I expected, not challenging at all, that I complained for a long time about what a waste of time it was.

But over the last couple of months, I remembered that I do have options. I can choose to live with disappointment over my grad school work, or focus on what I learned from it. For instance, I learned that I can write YA! I got some extraordinary feedback on a YA story I wrote. More excellent feedback on a spiritual dystopia/urban fantasy I wrote for my final project. And after flying to last year’s RWA National Conference the morning after my last class, and hearing a couple more editors tell me they weren’t sure they could sell my work, I knew I had another option.

I came home from that conference and decided, as an experiment, I was going to self-publish Little Miss Lovesick, the book my agent almost sold to two houses before chick lit died. When the process went a bit smoother than I expected, I considered my options again. I could keep trying to write and pitch my work to the current establishment, or I could start my own business again. The idea of running my own publishing company got my endorphins dancing.

One option that worked out for me was choosing to get involved in two self-published anthologies. The first one, Romancing the Pages, will come out in September as an ebook – see the lovely cover here. My superhero short story “Hero in Disguise” is one of nineteen short stories I hope you enjoy. In a few months, another anthology will be published with a dozen or so short stories written by my friends in my Sydney writer’s group. Another group of stories I think you’ll enjoy. My “Rescue at Loon Lake” is a fun little precursor to my novel Love at the Fluff and Fold.

It’s been a heck of a year. Several moves, several deaths, more months of unemployment than paid work between John and me, a lot of trials and testing. Career-wise, the worst part for me has been not being able to follow-through on my goals, my commitments to myself that I made end of last year. I’d planned to get Little Miss Lovesick into print by Christmas, finish and self-publish Love at the Fluff and Fold digitally and in print by March, and have the next book out in September.

Due to the weight of life this year, I’ve thought about sending my work to other publishers, let them do some of the work in return for some of the monetary rewards. I know I have options. Maybe giving myself a little break would help. It’s an awful lot of work to do all of the publishing work yourself. Several wise men in the Bible have said to count the costs before you start building so you don’t wind up broke, half-finished, and a laughingstock. I think I know the costs of continuing down my current path, and I’m willing to pay them.

I’ll continue to try to keep my options in mind at least once a year so I can adjust my course as necessary. It’s a good writing routine to have. In fact, because I love teaching and miss doing it more, I’m going to offer my Goal Setting and Time Management for Writers class again in January. We’ll start bright and early on the first Monday in January and get our ducks in a row for the coming year. I’ll remind you again when you can start signing up.

Whatever is going on in your life and your writing career, remember that you have options. Some will be better than others, but rarely is “I had no choice” true. What are some of your options?

Kitty Bucholtz decided to combine her undergraduate degree in business, her years of experience in accounting and finance, and her graduate degree in creative writing to become a writer-turned-independent-publisher. Her first novel, Little Miss Lovesick, was released in September 2011 as an ebook and will be available soon in print format. Kitty has also written magazine articles, devotionals, and worked as a magazine editor. She is the co-founder of Routines for Writers where she blogs every Monday. Her next novel, Love at the Fluff N Fold, will be released in late 2012.

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My Creativity is Currently in the Warehouse (13)

August 9, 2012 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as creativity, goodreads, It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, Routines for Writers, TV, What Inspires You

I’m on a Warehouse 13 marathon right now. Even though we’re watching episodes we’ve seen, starting at Season 1, Episode 1, I still love it. That’s the great thing about stories you love. You can enjoy them over and over again.

The other thing about stories you love is that they inspire creativity. Watching episode after episode of Pete and Myka grousing at each other, competing with each other, and always having each other’s back presses all my creative buttons. When Pete asked Myka if she was afraid they were the Red Shirts, and she said yes, John and I laughed out loud when Pete replied, “First, we aren’t going to die. Second, I’m so pumped you know what that means.” [paraphrased]

Over the last 20 episodes, I’ve gone from just enjoying the show for its own sake to thinking about my work and how I can make it funnier, more interesting, tense without being over-serious, adding death and destruction if necessary without a Law & Order feel. All the artifacts and the things that they do make me think about what I can add to my stories, whether fantastical stories or “regular” ones.

One of the “ah-ha” moments in creating my current romantic comedy series, Strays of Loon Lake (Love at the Fluff and Fold, book one in the series, will be out later this year), was when I decided that a local dog was the frisky father of a lot of puppies in town. Suddenly I had this funny element that I could play up.

In addition to a lot of TV watching, I’ve upped my hours of reading lately. It feels soooo much better to be reading more, like I’m eating healthier or something. I’m reading a lot of nonfiction on writing, self-publishing, and neuroscience. But I’m also reading a lot more fiction than I have in the last year or so. I’ve been reading inspirational, historical and contemporary romance, young adult books, paranormal and urban fantasy books and short stories, some horror, and some suspense. (Trying to track it all on Goodreads, but forgetting to add every book.)

Now here’s a chicken-and-egg thought: in the midst of this burst of desire to pull creative stories IN, I’ve also been writing more, getting creative stories OUT. Did the extra reading inspire me to write more? Or did the deadlines for the two anthologies I’m in push me to gobble up more stories for inspiration? My answer is YES.

Add to all that, my jump from wanting to know more about how the brain works to finding books explaining it to me, and I’ve added yeast to the bread mix. I mean that in terms of rising and growing, not in terms of becoming gaseous and fermenting. Though the fermenting part is making me think of wine, which reminds me of living in Australia, which reminds me of some of the unexpectedly creative pieces I wrote in uni. (Now that I have Australia-brain, my brain is using Australian terms. “Uni” is short for university, i.e., my master’s in creative writing program.) And using Aussie vocabulary reminds me of my friends whom I miss terribly, which reminds me I was going to call Verizon this week and get that international calling plan, which makes me think about having some international characters in my superhero novels, which makes me think of the Cowboy character I created for a short story that went nowhere. Now I just need to figure out how to get an Australian superhero named Cowboy, and his super horse, across the ocean to Michigan where my superheroes are living.

And THAT is how creativity so often works. It’s a bunch of very quick, sometimes illogical jumps in the synapses of the brain that lead from one idea to another. The more you allow and train your brain to make these jumps, the more creative you can be. Sometimes you can even get more creative more quickly.

Many writers have named the part of their unconscious that does this work. Jennifer Crusie calls her unconscious “the girls in the basement” I believe. Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird that her friend Carpenter says there is a little boy in the cellar handing up characters through the cellar door.

I get this “down below consciousness” idea, but I’ve rarely, if ever, been in a basement that made me feel happier than any other room in the building (even the very cool basement of the State Library of New South Wales isn’t as awesome as the Shakespeare Room there; that’s a room I could be locked in forever!), and I’ve never been in a cellar that I wanted to stay in for hours. (Not even a wine cellar.)

I had problems being nice to that creative part of myself. I found myself whipping it to give me more, faster. It didn’t produce much, so I whipped it more. Then I read and really got the idea that you needed to be nice for the unconscious to flow. But basements and cellars didn’t seem that nice to me.

So I created a character named Katie, a little girl about 10 or 12 who plays in the sunroom or in the huge beautifully well-kept backyard. (I live in a small apartment.) Katie loves to read and watch TV and movies that make her laugh or make her a little scared but that always end well. She likes to pretend after the movie or book ends that she is the hero who vanquished the enemy and tamed (rather than killed) the dragon. Or she is the heroine who helps the hero save the day and they live together happily ever after.

I like Katie. I like her so much that I like to play with her even though she’s a little girl and I’m a grown woman. She’s fun. And when she’s making me laugh or making me wonder what will happen next in her one-girl backyard plays, I find myself writing more words with more joy than ever before.

As it turns out, both Katie and I love watching Warehouse 13, and mostly for the same reasons. Katie is giving me ideas about “artifact”-like things I can put in our stories. She wants me to put in more pop culture references like Red Shirts to make people who get the jokes laugh. I tell Katie this is too much work, I’d have to do more research, keep better notes, and I remind her that I too often lose my notes-on-napkins anyway so really–

Katie interrupts me with some cute begging and funny faces and tells me that surely these touches will make me really famous and make me heaps of money and (she knows this is the coup de grace) I’ll make people laugh.

I think about it and then consider the alternative. But what if I don’t make people laugh, Katie? What if they think it’s dumb?

And in her properly outraged 10-year-old voice, she shouts, “Then they’re dumb!”

I laugh and shake my head and agree to try harder to be cute and funny like her. And then I start writing and…well, Katie and I like the results.

What about you? Where does your creativity come from?

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My Author Crush Faves

March 9, 2012 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as Cat Weatherill, Dr. Debra Holland, It's Worth It, Jacqueline Diamond, James Scott Bell, Janice Cantore, Kathleen Wright, Kitty Bucholtz, Lauraine Snelling, PJ Sharon, Routines for Writers, Stephanie S. Saunders

What a great month! I love Author Crush month at Routines for Writers. There is always someone you never heard of who becomes a new fave. I mightâ€™ve picked up three new favorites!

After reading Cat Weatherillâ€™s blog post, I downloaded the Kindle sample of her book Wild Magic and fell in love! I absolutely must buy her book! Just reading a few pages of it, I became immersed in not just a magical story world, but an overwhelming sense of magic washing over me. I stopped reading several times and asked myself, how did she do that?! Iâ€™m totally going to keep reading and try to figure it out. I want my books to instill that sense of the magical!

Similarly, when I read the Kindle sample for Stephanie S. Saundersâ€™ Villain School: Good Curses Evil, I was laughing out loud more than I was reading silently! Another must-buy for me!

The title alone made me curious about PJ Sharonâ€™s upcoming release, Savage Cinderella. But reading the blurb on it, Iâ€™m hooked. Iâ€™ve got to give that one a try as soon as it comes out! (Release day is March 15.)

The rest of the posts this month had all kinds of new and interesting thoughts to consider.

James Scott Bell made me wonder if should give a little more thought to writing short stories. Hmm, something to think about.

Reading Jacqueline Diamondâ€™s post about making her own book covers made me want to give it a try, if only for the fun of it.

Art Holcomb gave me a lot to think about with his thoughts on plotting the larger arc for a series, and how I need to stay enthusiastic about my story in order to write a great book.

Thanks to Gail Carson Levine, I am more determined to write wherever I have to, whenever I have to. I was ten minutes early for Bible study this week, so I turned on the inside light in the car, and wrote another few lines of my latest short story.

Debra Hollandâ€™s self-publishing journey is always inspiring, no matter how many times I read about it. Go Debra!

I loved that Iâ€™m not the only one who picks out just the right pretty or quirky notebook for my next story. Thanks, Nancy Rue!

And Stephanieâ€™s posts about the books sheâ€™s reading that help her in her journey toward healing – well, I admire her so much for making it a public journey so that others might be helped as well.

Even though they arenâ€™t really part of Author Crush month, per se, I also am tickled to death that my dear friends Janice Cantore, Lauraine Snelling and Kathleen Damp Wright put bookends to our month with fantastic tales of newly published novels!

Ahh, what a great month! I always feel so refreshed and excited and motivated by March 1! I hope you take a look at some of these posts and get inspired, too! 🙂

P.S. Remember to tune in to Routines for Writers on the first Tuesday of each month and welcome our new monthly contributor, Jamie Raintree!

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News You Can Use – A Mashup

February 9, 2012 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz

This month, I decided to share with you some of the interesting things Iâ€™ve been finding on the Internet lately. Some of this, you may already know. Some of it may be new and interesting to you.

You know that we have a cool class coming up next week here at OCC. Linda O. Johnston is teaching a class on writing cozy mysteries. I am totally signed up!

Another writer friend told me about this class, More than Word: Getting the Most from Scrivener for Mac. My friend took it last year and she just raved about it. Iâ€™m signing up for this one, too! And if youâ€™re a Windows user, it says that you can sign up, with instructor approval.

If you missed our November class on talking back to your brain, the instructors wrote a great blog post about it at Writers in the Storm. Trust me, you need to read this article if you havenâ€™t yet.

I personally love learning about how the brain works, and my husband sent me this link about how storytellers and their listeners begin to sync their brains. Even though this is a study with a verbal storyteller, I bet there is something to the rhythms in our writing that could be studied in a similar way.

Speaking of writing, I found this checklist for your scenes interesting.

If you prefer questions to ask yourself about your writing, or if you like writing prompts, the Donald Maass Agency has this list on their web site. Itâ€™s on the page that says, “what weâ€™re looking for this month.” Nothing is listed there right now, but if you want to know what agent Nicole Resciniti is looking for right now, here is an interview with her on Honestly YA.

You probably already heard about Harlequin buying the Heartsong Presents line from Barbour Books. I read about it on Steve Laubeâ€™s blog. Even though I know Steve, Iâ€™ve never gotten around to reading his blog before. (Sorry Steve!) But I noticed there is all kinds of great stuff on it, including a series on creativity by author and former agent Karen Ball.

Youâ€™ve probably also heard the rumors about Amazon opening a bricks and mortar store. Here is an article confirming a store opening in Seattle later this year.

And finally, the most fun item comes from my friend Shonna at Routines for Writers. Here is a blog post with a whole list of fun writer gifts! I totally want a bag with my book cover on it! LOL!

I hope you find one or more of these topics of interest to you. Enjoy!

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Getting Published

December 9, 2011 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as It's Worth It

I posted this last week on Dark Side Down Under, a blog I belong to in Australia with lots of paranormal writers. I wanted to share it with my OCC friends, too. 🙂

Just one week ago today, I got on a plane in Sydney with my husband John and moved back to California. Weâ€™d found out less than three weeks earlier that there was no more work for him in Sydney, for now anyway. (He just finished working on Happy Feet 2, and his other opportunities fell through at the last minute.) In spite of the stressful situation, we were determined to make the most of it. Above all, I didnâ€™t want us to let the stress cause fights or arguments between us. Thanks to formally making that decision â€“ and thanks to the grace of God â€“ we made it through a crazy month with only one blowup and lots of laughter.

When it comes to romantic comedies, I donâ€™t know if I loved them and so saw my life as one, or if my crazy adventures with John have spurred on a love of the same in fiction. In any case, my first novel, Little Miss Lovesick, certainly has aspects of art imitating life. The heroine Sydney (named long before I dreamed of visiting Australia) wants nothing more than a lifetime of true love. When things donâ€™t work out, sheâ€™s determined to do whatever it takes to fix the situation, but every attempt seems to only create more problems.

Oh my gosh, that was so me! After a short but disastrous stint trying to find meaning for my life as a U.S. Marine, I went back to college and decided to forget a higher purpose. All I wanted now was a husband and a boring career. Safety. But the man I was determined to have (at age 19) was not interested in pursuing me. My roommate had his attention. My friend across the hall definitely caught his eye. But not me. No worries. Iâ€™d simply keep pursuing him until he realized what a great catch I was! And what lengths I went to!

If youâ€™re laughing, you understand why I write romantic comedies. Even when Iâ€™m making things up about pretend people, I canâ€™t help but pull from experiences in my real life. I love to laugh, and John and I both tend to do whatever it takes to make each other laugh. That flows into my writing as well. If youâ€™ve ever seen John and me together, you know Iâ€™ve got a lot of material to work with! Some of that has been written into a series of romantic comedies scheduled for 2012 and 2013 set in a little lakeside town like the area where I grew up. The first one, Love at the Fluff N Fold, will be out in the spring. Theyâ€™re sweet and funny like Little Miss Lovesick.

Later in 2013, Iâ€™ll begin releasing a series of superhero romantic comedies. The first book in the Adventures of Lewis and Clarke series is called From Zero to Hero. The idea began when I got tired of John ignoring me to play video games and read comic books. (Guess who has a growing collection of graphic novels now? I had no idea they were so good!)

I love writing these kinds of stories! My books always have a young woman who is searching for something and finds she has more power in her life, yet less control, than she realized. By the end of each story, sheâ€™s not only made her own life better, but othersâ€™ as well. It took me a few years to realize I write about these women because thatâ€™s what I want in my own life.

I guess I thought most women felt the same, so it was a surprise to find editors telling me (and my agent when I had one) that romantic comedies are hard to sell. That didnâ€™t make sense to me since rom-com movies are a staple in the film industry. After hearing more agents and editors at the Romance Writers of America conference in New York this year tell me more of the same (â€œWe donâ€™t know how to sell/have good luck with romantic comedies.â€), I decided to go it on my own.

I knew self-publishing would be a long, hard road, but I was sure there was an audience out there who would enjoy my book. I was right on both counts. Itâ€™s been a slow and sometimes difficult process, but Iâ€™ve gotten great reviews. Iâ€™m writing from my heart and enjoying my work. And Iâ€™ve found the contentment I was looking for, knowing that Iâ€™m entertaining people. Right now, Iâ€™m working on getting Little Miss Lovesick into print. (Look for it on Amazon in a week or two!) The process is taxing my jet-lagged brain cells â€“ LOL! â€“ but Iâ€™m grateful to be on this path. Who knows? I might create a heroine who starts her own business despite the odds, surviving mayhem and facing disasterâ€¦ Sounds fun to me!

Kitty Bucholtz decided to combine her undergraduate degree in business, her years of experience in accounting and finance, and her graduate degree in creative writing to become a writer-turned-independent-publisher. Her first novel, Little Miss Lovesick, was released in September 2011 as an ebook and will be available in December in print format. Kitty has also written magazine articles, devotionals, and worked as a magazine editor. She is the co-founder of Routines for Writers where she blogs every Wednesday. Her next novel, Love at the Fluff N Fold, will be released in Spring 2012.