Writers in the Storm

My favorite quote is from Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture (if you haven’t read that small book, you should - it’s incredibly inspiring).

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

If you’ve read this blog for long, you know a bit of my publishing story:

• 15 years
• 413 rejections
• 3 books written before I got an agent and sold.

Last Saturday, I received Romance Writers of America^® highest award – A RITA^® for my first published book, The Sweet Spot. I don't even have words to describe that experience, but for me it was the pinnacle.

People ask me how I was able to keep going all those years. I usually tell them that I’m too dumb to quit, then I laugh. I don’t talk about the real reason. I’ve decided to share my story here, with you, in hopes that it will help someone else facing challenges.

In my early college years, I was in a challenging RN program. I could handle the bookwork, but being the youngest in my class, I didn’t have the maturity to handle the emotional side of dealing with dying patients. Their suffering terrified me.

I wanted to get out, but I had nowhere to go. My home was a middle-class battleground; my hard-working mother and my loveable alcoholic dad were divorcing. The home I knew was collapsing.

So when I met a guy who liked me, I went with him. We eloped after we'd known each other a total of ten days. He took me to his house – an idyllic log cabin on a river in upper Michigan. We were married in front of a roaring fire, with the snow coming down outside. Sounds romantic huh?

There were other cabins nearby, but summer people owned them. It was January. We had a wood stove for heat, but couldn’t afford propane for the stove or the washer and dryer. The mailbox was five miles away, the town ten. We had one car. No phone. No cell phones back then – no computers. He believed that women shouldn’t work; that was a man’s job. So I stayed home all day, cleaning, teaching myself to cook in a Dutch oven and washing our blue jeans with a floor brush.

When he started hitting me, I thought it was my fault. After all, I didn’t even know how to balance a checkbook. But when I got better at all those things, the hitting didn't stop. For no reason I could discern, at times my sweet husband would disappear, to be replaced by a stranger with angry eyes. I hid bruises, walked lightly and tried very, very hard not to conjure that stranger. I didn’t tell anyone. My family and friends all thought I was blissfully happy. And I worked hard to hide the truth behind pretty curtains.

A book saved my life.

We went to town once a week on Saturday to do grocery shopping and laundry, and every week, I went to the library. I checked out the biggest books I could find, so I wouldn’t run out before the next Saturday. Something clicked when I read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I realized I could take control of my own life.

Suddenly, I saw my paths clearly. I could stay and die, or leave and live. I guess I needed to hit bottom, because it gave me something to push off of. I decided to live.

Don’t call Oprah. That was long ago, and I have a wonderful life and a 27 year-and-still-going-strong marriage to Alpha Dog.

Over the years, I’ve come to cherish the lessons I learned in that cabin. I've kept the vow to never again let things 'just happen' to me. The experience showed me that no matter how many mistakes I made, I knew how to pick myself up and start over. That time in the cabin taught me to meet life, head on.

Five, ten, even fifteen years isn't so long to wait for something you want. If it’s something you really want – don’t let the walls get in your way.

Here's my acceptance speech.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/d641Hq_iZw8]

Write on - Peace out.

~Laura

 

Today is the release of the next in my Widow's Grove series, The Reasons to Stay!

Romantic Times 4 Stars!

Where she belongs?

Free spirit Priscilla Hart doesn't get tied down, to anyone or any place. Then she arrives in Widow's Grove and meets her half brother. The ten-year-old tough guy has no one else but her. So Priss stays—for now.

But her sexy new landlord, Adam Preston, is interfering with her ideas. He's everything Priss normally steers clear of—committed, stable and no rebellious urges in sight. As opposite as they are, each conversation, each touch, each kiss they share feels so right. Can a little gangster-wannabe, an irresistible "nice guy" and an odd assortment of new friends make Priss want to stay for good?

 

Sierra Godfrey

It would be nice if we all had a virtual set of Tupperware that allowed us to take out nice fresh pieces of our websites or blogs when things get stale. Let’s face it—even if your website or blog is professionally designed or a straight-off-the-shelf template, and whether you’re promoting a book or just building an audience or community, we all have the same problem after a while.

Websites get stale.

For as long as I’ve been involved with designing or creating websites, it’s always come as an unpleasant surprise to clients that they actually have to put some work into running a site after it’s designed. The web moves fast and you need to adapt to keep your site interesting and visitors coming back. If you’re promoting books, then you need to count your website as an important part of your overall publicity—whether or not you can see the results of people visiting.

Here are seven tips for keeping it real:

1. Make sure your site is up to date with your work. There’s nothing worse than a website that looks like a ghost town. You know, tumble weeds flitting by on your About page. A blog with broken, swinging saloon doors that hasn’t been updated in two years. A cobwebby book page that still says “Stay tuned for the new release, coming October 2009!” Go through and clean it up, sweep away the dust, and get the most current book information on your site, front and center. If you aren’t yet published and aren’t promoting a book, keep your blog front and center.

2. Consider removing features that force you to update too often. Examples include a “What’s new” section that almost every new visitor to your site will click. If your latest news has been “Welcome to my site, I just updated my site from Geocities!” for six years, then it’s a no-go.

3. Look at other author sites. What are other authors doing? How are they presenting their news? How active do their sites look? Are people adding excerpts, recipes, and character sheets with their books? How about digital autograph tools? Playlists?

4. If you do decide to redesign, beware of current fads. It’s tempting to look “techy” with a parallax style website. Parallax is a wide-screen format with vertical scrolling, and it’s the current trend with high tech companies. Parallax can be great for mobile users with websites that tell a story but in most cases, author sites don’t tell stories, you sell them. I hate to see people using parallax because it looks cool in lieu of actual content. By the way, if your reading audience is a bunch of teenage girls, then you might consider updating your site to be more mobile-friendly. There are several ways to do this that are beyond this post, but you can definitely Google that.

A parallax example

5. Update your look to your latest book. It’s great to have a site that looks just like your book cover, like using a background that matches the cover. I’ve worked with several authors on their websites who wanted sites to match the tone of their first release. Inevitably, they write more books! I’m thrilled for them, but then their site needs updating. I always advise sticking with a neutral theme that matches your personality and preferred writing genre. That way you don’t get stuck with the look of your first book.

6. Check your site stats. You should have a basic site statistics tool installed. Google Analytics works with pretty much everything including Wordpress, and I also like the Jetpack site stats tool for Wordpress because it’s easy to use. If people are visiting one section of your site in particular, consider expanding that section to offer more. Rewrite the content, add more pictures. And then consider combining the unused section of your site or deleting it altogether.

7. Finally, kill your darlings. Oh sure, we know this one as it applies to writing, right? But if you’re dead set against changing your menu graphics because you like the way they are, but they no longer serve the right purpose (reminder: that purpose is to get people to read your site content!), then change it! I recently spoke to a friend who knew her links were confusing but she liked how they looked. If she wanted to move forward with the site update, she would have to let go of her darlings.

What about you? What ways have you found to keep your site fresh? Is this is something you’ve heard about before, but haven’t addressed? I’d love to see your websites—put them in with your comment!

About Sierra

Sierra writes fiction that features strong heroines who grow from the challenges they face (and there’s usually a guy involved; you know how that is) A graphic designer by day, she lives in the foggy wastelands of the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and a grateful quarterly contributor to the Writers in the Storm. Her non-fiction essays have been featured on Maria Shriver’s Shriver Report and Architects of Change website, and in the anthology, Nothing But The Truth So Help Me God: 73 Women on Life’s Transitions.

You can find more of her sass at www.sierragodfrey.com and she’s pretty mouthy on Twitter (@sierragodfrey), too. Come talk to her, she loves it.

 

 

 

Kathryn Craft
Turning Whine into Gold

In our ongoing look at what wisdom Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements can offer writers, we come to agreement number three.

[Click here for Agreement 1 and Agreement 2.]

Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

“Communicate with others as clearly as you can”—as writers, you’d think we have this one in the bag. We are all about communication! Yet as fiction writers we do so indirectly, while balancing character development, plot advancement, setting, word craft, metaphor, and more. And that’s just the fiction, let alone the clarity of the emails you’re trying to answer and the tweets you’re trying to push out and blog posts that need tending and the gigs you’re trying to line up.

Is it any wonder we sometimes fail to contextualize our comments, or express our needs, or ask all the right questions?

Yet a career is built of relationships that require clear communication. Let me count the whines that the simple act of asking questions could resolve:

Rather than whine: My critique partner gives me all the wrong feedback.

Ask: Don’t worry about correcting my grammar, could you just give me notes on how the story is adding up in your mind?

Rather than whine: My career has stalled for eight months. I don’t know what’s going on with my submission.

Ask: Hi [agent], sorry to be out of touch so long. Could you give me an update on my submission status?

Rather than whine: I don’t understand my contract but I don’t want to look dumb.

Ask: I don’t understand this rights clause. You’re the expert—could you explain it to me before I sign?

Rather than whine: My book isn’t ready but I’m afraid to tell my editor because I might never get another contract.

Ask: I am so closed to finished and want to give you the very best possible product. Is there any wiggle room in my deadline?

Rather than whine: This is my first speaking engagement and I’m not sure what they want me to talk about.

Ask: Could you tell me more about your group and its recent talks so I can give them something they’ll really like?

Rather than whine: I need more support at home but my husband simply refuses to read my mind.

Ask: I’m writing on deadline and really feeling the pinch. Could you cover dinners this week?

Pretty sure you see where I’m going with this:

JUST ASK.

An overstressed writer can, amazingly, sometimes be a poor communicator. It happens.

But here is something else a writer always is, no matter how stressed: an inquisitive being who is not only capable of learning, she feeds on it. Honor that instinct, and ask for what you need. You might be surprised at how well it works.

What assumptions have you made in your writing life that did not necessarily serve you well?

About Kathryn

Kathryn Craft is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling, and The Far End of Happy, due May 2015.

Her work as a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft, follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she now serves as book club liaison for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads workshops, and speaks often about writing.

Kathryn lives with her husband in Bucks County, PA. Although a member of The Liars Club, she swears that everything in this bio is true.

Website: http://www.kathryncraft.com/