novels

Why you need to find your tribe

gretedeangelo 2 Comments

people-1230872_640When I started out in fiction writing, I got some misguided advice to stay away from other writers (they’re the competition and they don’t buy books). So I toiled away alone for a couple of years, often yearning for a learning community of people who love writing as much as I do.

A few months ago, I joined the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and it’s been exhilarating and amazing. I’m in a critique group with three other novelists and I’m overjoyed for how nitpicky they are.

When I listen to a symphony, I can enjoy the music, but since I’ve never played an instrument, I have very little to say other than “I like it.” Now I have the chance to work with writers who know the guts of a novel, its plot development, dialogue, character arcs, and themes. We can talk shop and know we’re not boring each other.

I realized that other writers are my friends and support network, not people to be avoided. It’s not like buying a car… readers buy dozens of books a year. And I’m a writer who buys books, especially in the same genre I’m writing. After all, I write what I like to read, and I never would have started writing if I didn’t first love reading.

Whatever your interests, there’s a group out there for you, whether in person or online, and it’s easier than ever to find them.

Please comment below and share your passion!

Have a wonderful day and take care,

Grete

[Image courtesy of public domain images on http://www.pixabay.com]

If you enjoy reading my blog, please check out my first novel, Giving Myself Away, about a divorced mom making tough choices and a fresh start.

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Give respect to your passion

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What’s the thing you most wish you could do, but it means so much to you that you put it off or push it to the side? What’s that one thing you want, but you’re afraid it will get ruined forever if you don’t do it right?

For me, it’s always been writing. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White was the first book I remember reading that filled with me with longing… if I only I could write like that. Then I read White’s The Trumpet of the Swan and swooned. In the years that followed, there were many others. I recently finished reading Me Before You by JoJo Moyes and had the same experience.

For many years, writing fiction felt like a fragile bird’s egg I held in my cupped hands. The idea of breaking that egg caused me to avoid my truest passion by majoring in journalism and starting a career in nonfiction because it didn’t seem so precious to me. I loved the creative outlet that news and feature stories brought, but there was a desire in my heart that wouldn’t die, telling me to go ahead and write a novel.

I finally did so a few years ago, and as I work on my second novel now, the same fears dance around in my head. What if this is the one that everyone hates? What if even my friends think eww, but don’t want to say it to me?

I’ve decided to put away those fears once and for all. I don’t need them telling me what not to do anymore. The fear of writing manifested for me in a lack of time and organization to devote to my craft. Sure, I’m a single parent with a teaching career, and I don’t have a lot of time to write, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. What I found is that I was often putting everything else ahead of writing, even things like scrubbing down the refrigerator.

Instead of having an office for my writing, I used the side table in my dining room to throw my writing notes in with a teetering pile of kids’ schoolwork, bills, and other papers that have varying levels of priority. I wasn’t giving respect to my passion.

I may not write in an office, but I recently made my writing more official by devoting a small bookshelf exclusively to my notes and files, my copies of Writers’ Digest, and the binder that organizes my work-in-progress. The boost of knowing there’s a physical space in my house devoted to writing has fired me up to keep at it, day after day. Instead of hiding my writing with the rest of my household detritus, it has its own orderly space.

What can you do to respect your passion? Make a space, even if it’s a little one, so that you can see the evidence of your biggest, fondest dream every day. Don’t hide your passion in the corners of your life.

 

Please check out my first novel, Giving Myself Away, about a divorced mom making tough choices.

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What were you happiest your ex took with him in the divorce?

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Adriennes blog 15 brown recliner picHi, I’m Adrienne.  I’m one of those people who likes to make lists.  You’ll find them stashed in drawers, hanging in the kitchen cabinets, and in the reminders app on my phone.  Not all of my lists are things to do.  Some of them are things to be grateful for.  There’s a list I pull out from my jewelry box every now and then when I’m feeling sorry for myself about being divorced.  The paper is getting fuzzy along the edges from being folded and unfolded so many times, but I’m happy to say I don’t need to look at this list as often as I used to.

Things I’m happy Drew took with him in the divorce:

  1. His hideous brown recliner.  You know the chair, the one that comes with you into your marriage.  You know it’s a bad idea to let him bring it with him, but you’re so happy to be pulling your separate lives together that you overlook that chair.  It might be a hand-me-down from his parents or he might have picked it up at the Salvation Army, but either way, it was part of his bachelor life and now it’s got memories.  Never mind the fact that it’s ugly as all get out, stained, and not even that comfortable anymore.  There’s no slipcover that’s going to make that lumpy excuse for furniture look respectable.  It doesn’t match anything else, and you just have to hope you have one of those man-cave rooms to hide it in, because it’s not going anywhere…until you get divorced, that is.
  2. His “collections.”  Beer steins, baseball cards, comic books, you name it.  The monetary value or the space it takes up is completely irrelevant.  The older his collection is, the more determined he is to keep it.  You can bet his mother can’t wait to get it out of her house.  I never saw Drew’s mom lifting such heavy stuff as the day she finally unloaded Drew’s boxes from their attic to ours.  Or maybe your man had a mother who threw out his stuff and he still resents her for it.  These are the ones to watch out for because if you so much as throw out an old receipt of theirs for a hot dog from a baseball game ten years ago, you’ve just discarded a piece of his life.
  3. His snoring.  I put up with it and I learned to sleep despite it, but wow, I’ve never slept so well in my life now that I’m single.  I can sleep on the left side of the bed, the right, or the middle, and there’s always room for me.  No one to snuggle up to, but at least it’s quiet and roomy.
  4. His clothes.  Clothes = laundry and some men never learned to unball their socks or take the stuff out of their pockets.  I’m already mom to two kids; did I really need to be his mom too.
  5. The love letters I wrote him.  I promised I’d love him forever, and of course I believed it.  Who doesn’t think their romance is the best, truest love the world has ever known?  I might be tempted to look back and get sentimental about old times I can’t recapture, but thankfully he’s removed the temptation.
  6. The petty resentment.  I spent a lot of time being mad at Drew for not doing the household things that I felt like he should be doing, such as taking the trash out, mowing the lawn, or fixing the broken vacuum cleaner.  Now there’s no one to nag but myself.  My “honey-do” lists are only for me, and I can check off the items or ignore them at will.
  7. His debt.  Some of it I was responsible for, but now that we’re divorced, what he does or doesn’t do financially can’t hurt me anymore.  There’s no one to negotiate with over what we can afford.  If I put something on the credit card, I know I’ll be the one paying for it.
  8. His pet snake, Lulubel.  Drew and his roommates bought a ball python during a drunken night of college partying, and somehow he inherited her by being last to move out of the guys’ apartment.  I will not miss weekly trips to the pet store to buy mice to sacrifice to Lulu, or the semi-regular dreams I had that she would escape and kill one of us in the night.

You might say this list sounds like sour grapes, but it gets me by on the days I miss being married, miss having the comfort of a spouse and someone to share all the joys and sorrows of life with.

What were you happiest to let go of when you and your spouse separated?

You can read more about my lists and my adventures with and without Drew in Giving Myself Away, available now.

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Available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle format

Available at Barnes and Noble in paperback and Nook format

It’s here!

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Dear Readers,

Giving Myself Away is finally here, published, for real!  I am going to write as myself today rather than Adrienne… She’s funnier and sassier, but she also gets into a whole lot more trouble than I do.  I’m the one with common sense.

I highjacked Adrienne’s blog today to tell you what it means to me to be published.  Until two years ago, I would never, ever show anyone the fiction I had been writing.  It sounds funny, considering I’ve had more than a hundred articles published, but they were all nonfiction and they were observations about people around me rather than characters I had made up.

With the help of a life coach (thank you, Cathy Colangelo!), I decided to make my theme for 2013 to “Put yourself out there.”  Whenever I had a choice to make, I applied this standard and went for it in both my professional and personal life.  I joined a small group of friends and work colleagues in a writer’s critique group and I remember panicking before emailing them my first pages, but they encouraged me to send more.

Then I saw an ad in Writer’s Digest for the The Write Stuff annual conference of the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group.  I registered for the conference and met lots of other published and hoping-to-be published writers there.

It was here that I met Deborah Riley-Magnus, an editor for Assent Publishing who asked me to send my manuscript.  A few months later, I got a call from Les Denton, publisher at Assent, with the news that she’d like to publish my novel.

Since then, it’s been a crash course in “putting myself out there,” something that would normally be uncomfortable for me, except that I am willing to do what it takes because one of my fondest dreams from as far back as I can remember is to be able to bring others the same kind of comfort I’ve always gotten from reading.

One of the best feelings is to come home from a long day of work and know there’s a good novel waiting to get back into before bedtime.  Or to wake up early on a weekend morning, make some coffee, and let the characters envelop me in their stories.  I love finding the next book that will keep me company for a few days.

I hope you will enjoy Adrienne’s story.  She’s as real as anyone I’ve ever known and I made a promise to her that I’d do whatever I could to bring her out of my head and into other people’s hearts.

Thank you for your support.  If you’d like to purchase Giving Myself Away, here are some helpful links.  If you enjoyed it, I’d be ever so grateful for some good reviews!  The publishing market is huge, and books, like everything else, are sold by word of mouth.

Available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle format

Available at Barnes and Noble in paperback and Nook format

Coming soon to Apple iBooks, Sony Reader Store, and Kobo Books

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