Believe in Yourself and Your Books

Joining us today is Author Shirley Kufeldt. After growing up with four sisters in Illinois, then raising two daughters, Shirley Kufeldt and her husband left Illinois and her daughters to retire to Northern Wisconsin in 2007. Having participated in Bible studies for over 30 years and hearing of the efforts of so many others over the years to document their personal walk of faith, she developed the Bible Bites series.

Believe in Yourself and Your Books 

by Shirley Kufeldt

 

All my life I’ve worked as an office admin, many times as a temp as our two daughters grew up. I’ve switched careers now and compile Bible verses for publication in small topical devotional journals called BIBLE BITES. Reading one or two topical verses each day and writing down your prayer response to Scripture is what BIBLE BITES is all about.

My first writer’s tip is to research something that you want to learn. I participated in a support group to learn about codependency, learning that what you fear controls you. Two simple examples: First, A students study hard, fearful of poor grades and less-than-desirable employment. Second, we diligently work at employment, fearing job loss.

Like many others I feared angry people, till I finally discovered the source of my fears: my second grade teacher shook me over a homework assignment. An angry comment by any authority figure turned me into a fearful seven-year and I was easily manipulated for 45 years.

My second tip for writers is to realize you are who you are five years from now unless two things change: the books that you read and the people you spend your time with. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always be what you’ve always been,” is quite true. 

Imagine your current relationships five years from now. Are they great? Can communication be improved? Are you ready for a career change? What books are you reading and who do you hang out with? What are you willing to change that will improve your life? What are you afraid of changing? And do you know why?

My third tip for writers is that happiness is the result of doing something significant with your life. By examining the fears in your life, the books and relationships that bring you joy or grief, you have the opportunity for significant changes. During the years I attended a support group, I definitely changed the books I read (my Bible) while meeting new people who overcame similar challenges. 

Each support group meeting brought new opportunities for those who chose to change, reading, doing homework, participating in discussions and applying new skills. But no discipline is enjoyable while it is happening—it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way Hebrews12:11(NLT)

Journaling in BIBLE BITES devotionals enhances your relationship with God, matures your faith and is a significant aid in conquering fears. After years in support group, the result is a unique happiness by doing something significant with my life for the BIBLE BITES series. I choose Bible verses for specific topics and compile them for publication.

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BIBLE BITES booklets are small pocket-sized monthly journals that include current prayer requests and focused daily Scripture for journaling and reflection.   

Places where your book(s) are available for sale:

www.halopublishing.com

(Verses come from the New Living Translation)

You can find out more about Shirley Kufeldt and her books at http://tinyurl.com/bb3ofxd

 
Thank you Shirley for sharing your thoughts today.

Why we write

NaNoWriMo is over and I kind of miss it.

Totally glad it is gone. The rest of my life can gear up for the holidays and deal with things that went ignored. I don’t have the pressure to daily crank out words no matter if the story was moving or going nowhere. I’ve been able to take a day or two off from writing without guilt.

But the story is still out there. It keeps creeping back in and the only way deal with it is to pull out the laptop and write. You can’t beat it back.

It’s a love/hate relationship. I’m not stressed to write, but I do miss the discipline of daily writing. The story is still in the development stages and it keeps nagging at me.

There have been other times in writing life when, after months on a project, it comes to a screeching halt. The writing is crap, I’m a fraud, delete the whole thing from the hard drive. I put the whole thing away and wipe my hands of it. I’m done.

Then two weeks later, I’m working on it again.

What makes us do it? Why are we so compelled to create something and manipulate it to perfection? How can joyous pleasures override the deep frustrations? To earn a living? Hardly. Except for J.K Rowling and the like, most writers report meager earnings. Is it a desire to seem clever, to be talked about, or be remembered after death. I hope that’s not what motivates me.

Is it simply to communicate or to play with language? There is something emotionally satisfying about writing. Pure pleasure comes when you turn that phrase, massaging the wording until it’s ideal, engaging in language. We feel so good when we can set obstacles for our characters and direct their path through.

Why do I write? Because I have to.

Short-circuiting the Great Chain of Rejection

by Deren Hansen

One of the down-sides of becoming an artisan publisher is that you must forego the luxury of getting rejected by agents and editors.

“A luxury?” you sputter.

Yes. Instead of the gentle buffeting you’ll receive from publishing professionals, who respond with a polite, but vague, “it’s not a good fit for us,” you’ll get slapped around by readers who have no qualms about telling the world they think your book is a piece of crap.

As hard as it may be to believe, rejections from agents and editors offer several layers of comfort:

• They readily acknowledge their opinions are subjective and that perhaps someone else will like it.
• There’s always the opportunity to revise: when you submit a manuscript to an agent or editor, you do so knowing they will generally ask for revisions.
• Agents and editors are always open to future submissions. Even if the piece you’re shopping now isn’t right for them perhaps your next one will be.

Compared to that, readers have no mercy.

• Most readers believe their opinions are objective, or at least representative: if they didn’t like your book, why would anyone else.
• Readers expect a finished product. If they don’t like your first version, they’re not going to read your book a second time no matter how much you revise it.
• Readers hold grudges. If they hate one book, they’ll hate the rest sight-unseen.

If you’ve turned to artisan publishing because you’re tired of rejection you’ve come to the wrong place. Electronic publishing does let you bypass the gatekeepers who in the past might have kept you out of the market altogether. But the price for that access is that you also bypass the safety net those gatekeepers provide. If you’re not careful, you open yourself up to getting rejected for everything from typos and grammar errors to characters and stories that don’t resonate with readers.

Offering your work directly to readers requires more courage and a thicker skin than letting a publisher bring out your book. If you have a publisher and your book fails in the marketplace, you can always take consolation—whether it’s true or not—in blaming them. If you publish your own work, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

If you can listen to readers rant that your loathsome book defiled the electrons used to store and transmit it and that the author should be hunted down and forbidden from ever putting pen to paper, and then return to your writing with full confidence and vigor you’ve got what it takes to become an artisan publisher.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

How Do You Feel about Love Triangles?

By Julie Daines

All, right. Let's get right down to it. In YA literature, love triangles are everywhere. Example from Twilight: the Edward-Bella-Jacob triangle.

I want to know how you feel about love triangles. Do you like them? Hate them? Don't really care? Depends on how it's written?

As a genreal rule, I don't like them. I don't mind so much if it's simply a case of two people liking the same person. What I hate is when that one person strings along the other two.

I have to fall back on the Twilight example. Bella likes Edward, and she seems set in her feelings towards him. But she also sort of likes Jacob, even though she claims there is no chance she'll ever end up with him. Instead of kindly cutting him loose, she strings him along. We see this kind of thing all the time in YA lit.

I think the reason I can't stand this type of scenario is because it makes the character doing the stringing appear unfaithful, cruel, and selfish. Why would either of the guys put up with that? The story loses credibility and my sympathy for the characters.

What are your thoughts on the love triangle?

All I want for Christmas

Looking for that perfect Christmas gift? How about a WIFYR conference?

I’m not talking about something for others in your life. This is a special gift just for you, for the writer you. He or she deserves it. And a wonderful gift it is.

There are several ways to go about it. You can leave subtle little hints around the house. In notes, strategically place here or there, you could mention the great authors your gift entails. They run the morning workshops and share their expertise in the afternoon sessions. Matt Kirby, Martine Leavitt, Cheri Pray Earl, and AE Cannon will be there. As will Mette Ivie Harrison, Sharlee Glenn, J Scott Savage, and Kris Chandler. Steve Bjorkman will be heading up the illustration class. Perhaps a conspicuously misplaced letter to Santa would get the message across. Remind the jolly elf that the gift fits all, from beginner to advance writers.

If subtle doesn’t work, a more blatant approach is needed. Tell your significant other you want to take your writing to the next level. Sitting for five days with a room full of like-minded writers, critiquing and being critiqued, discovering the nuances of the craft, learning areas your story works and where it needs help; no other gift can offer so much.

Yes, it’s pricey. Compared to other conferences, however, it is cheap. The Southern California Writer’s Conference costs almost as much but it only runs through a weekend. You don’t get the critique workshop experience. Same for the SCBWI conference in February. You could pay more for the one in San Francisco. It stretches over the longer President’s Day weekend, but still no critique session with your very own published author.

And none of the others is run by our own Carol Lynch Williams. Carol has done so much to help developing Utah writers through this conference.

If your gift givers are still not getting the message, to heck with them. Give this one to yourself. In addition to hints on the multiple aspects of the craft, WYFIR offers editors and agents who provide tips to getting publication. They view the attendees as serious writers and often offer specific submission guidelines to help move your query above the slush pile, base just on your attendance alone. A morning workshop gift for you is ideal, yet the afternoon sessions alone is a less expensive option that will still get you close to editor Alyson Heller and agents Ammi-Joan Paquette and Stephen Fraser.

Merry Christmas to you. Registration will be opening soon at http://www.wifyr.com/

Author Biographies

by Scott Rhoades

Every once in a while, I like to read a biography of an author I enjoy reading. Some, like Shakespeare biographies, are largely for the sake of historical information and better understanding of the writer's work. Others, like various editions of Twain's attempts at an autobiography, are entertaining and provide more info about his colorful life. My favorites, though, show me that writers who are much better than I'll ever be suffered as much or more than I do when playing the writing game. I love reading about writers at work, living the not-always-glamorous life of an author.

One of my favorites, Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, shows John Steinbeck struggling with this great work, expressing doubts about the book being any good. He contemplated giving up a few times when it seemed to difficult a work to finish.

In Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams, I learned that, no matter how much fun it seems Adams is having in his books, writing was pure torture for him. He procrastinated so much that his publishers had to put him up in a hotel room and force him to write.

This year, I read Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. Perkins was the editor at Charles Scribner & Sons who had the fortune or misfortune of editing people like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Marjorie Rawlings, and others. The book follows him and his writers through their struggles to write cohesive books, and to make their deadlines. Often, Perkins was as much babysitter as editor. I learned more about his writers, especially his big three, from this book than I ever did in school.

Many writers have been the subject of biographers, and many others have written autobiographies or kept journals. Reading about your favorite authors can inspire and educate, bring new understanding of their works and their personalities, and help you to explore your own life as a writer.

A Propper Comeuppance

by Deren Hansen

When you began to believe your writing might actually be good enough to be published, you were determined to do everything right: you read writing books and blogs, went to conferences, found a critique group, polished your novel, researched agents, and sent the perfect query letter. And in return you got nothing but silence punctuated by the occasional rejection.

You did everything right and you weren’t asking for special treatment, so why didn’t you get any kind of positive response?

Even if you understand publishing is subjective, as time, rejections, and silence wear away your enthusiasm, it’s hard not to suspect agents and editors of conspiring to suppress your genius or being willfully ignorant.

Vengeance and vindication make a powerful motivational cocktail. Like many intoxicating substances, a little might help but a lot is a recipe for trouble: a desire for vindication may be good if it motivates you to finish and polish your project but leaping into artisan publishing because you’re going to show all those shortsighted publishing professionals how wrong they were is a recipe for frustration and failure.

To begin with, the people who rejected or ignored you will probably never know that your project has been published because there are simply too many things being published for anyone to keep track of it all. Should they hear of your project they will likely give it little or no notice: agents and editors are looking for new material to sell.

The only thing guaranteed to get the attention of the gatekeepers is to release a book whose sales go off the charts. But even that won’t convince an agent or editor she was wrong. Beyond subjectivity, there’s so much serendipity in the process of producing and selling a book that having different people involved could produce wildly differing results: a different agent—your dream agent—might have sold the project to a different editor whose sensibilities might have colored the story just enough to miss striking a popular chord.

At a practical level, the slow, laborious path of artisan publishing means that you must invest a tremendous amount of work and patience into something where the odds of it making a big enough splash in the market to cause the gatekeepers even a twinge of regret are extremely small.

But the deeper truth is that artisan publishing is about love and devotion, which makes it fundamentally ill-suited for revenge.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

The Power of Three

One of the hardest things to write is good characters, all of them. How many times have you read a book and only one or two or three characters have any life to them? The rest are just...there?
Do you have trouble filling out your characters?
Have you tried the Power of Three for your characters?

Try these ideas on ALL your characters:

Three wishes
Three fears
Three flaws
Three heroic qualities

Here are ones I did for my MC, Angelica:

Three wishes:
To be a normal girl
For her dad to not have to work so much
Get her sister out of an abusive relationship

Three fears:
She really is a serial killer
She will lose her family
She is a monster

Three flaws:
Set herself up to be unlovable so no one else dies
Distrustful
Chooses to be a wallflower

Three heroic qualities:
Loyal
Brave
Smart

Now your turn.
Choose one category and share with us in comments! 
Or if that is too hard, tell us your favorite character.

NaNoWriMo week 4 (and wifyr again)

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13 things I’ve learned from NaNo

-1600 words a day is a lot of words

-especially when you’ve got your job, your family, the rest of your life to deal with

-some days the words are there, some days they’re not

-1600 is a bunch of words when your story dies and you have no idea how to jump start it back to life

-stories have legs; the legs can walk the story; they can walk away from it.

-this has been a fun way to write. In my normal routine, I get too hung up on getting chapter 1 right before moving on to 2. NaNo helped me advance the story quickly (when the story was there). Writing this way was freeing. You can ignore story details and quickly figure out what happens next.

-jotting notes to self adds to word count

-butt-in-chair rule must be adhered to

-not having a clue as to what your story is going to do next can make butt-in-chair rule easy to ignore

-email & Internet sites is not a legitimate butt-in-chair activity

-but it can add to your word count. (I counted my research notes.)

-and sometimes, any diversion is good enough

Win, loss, or draw? I definitely didn’t win. At 17000 words, I wasn’t even close. As the month ended, my story is bogged down and in need of direction. It’s been there before, several times in the last 30 days, actually. It seems as though every time I got on a roll, I would run out of story. It would languish a few days and come back to life, then repeat, repeat, repeat. NaNo ended at a time my story was in one of those low points on the cycle. As much as I wanted to ring in the new month furiously typing away and energized for a few more weeks, it didn’t happen that way.

But I didn’t lose. I have a solid start on a project that has potential. It has history. Like the stock market, its been up its been down. It should come back. Without the daily motivation to work on it, I now get to move away from it and let it simmer. I can get back to another project, one I was tiring of before NaNo and ready to take a break from.

So, by NaNoWriMo standards I didn’t win. But I gained something

-Oh, and #13, I think I’ll do it again next year.

Something I didn’t learn from NaNo but realized the first time I went to one, the WIFYR conference is a good way to polish off your new creation. If you’ve got only a start or were one of those people who cranked out 50,000 words, you need to think about attending next June. The afternoon sessions are invaluable, but joining a week-long morning workshop with an experienced author and several other similar aspiring writers, WIFYR can take your story to the next level. Check it our at http://www.wifyr.com/