Happy second Monday of September!
Technically, it’s not fall in the Northern Hemisphere yet, at least not until September 22 at 11:19 a.m. Pacific time. Alas, Mother Nature has turned down the thermostat in our immediate area — thank you, dear sweet Mother — the elementary school up the street is abuzz with shrieking littles and horn-honking parents, and pumpkin spice everything has taken over the menus of local eateries.
You know what that means, writer friends: Time to launder and store those beach towels, put away the sand-encrusted flip-flops and wide-brimmed hat littering your repository for random bedroom junk writing chair, and get your butt back in the game.
Of course, many of you did not take the summer off from adding words to your masterpiece(s) currently under construction. And good on you. That’s bloody awesome. No, seriously — someone needs to tell you to your beautiful squishy little face that you are doing an amazing job, whether you’re jotting down 10 words a day or 1000. Whether you’re celebrating the release of a new poetry chapbook that took a decade of your life to compile or launching into yet another round of revisions on your opus after receiving an excoriating but productive editorial letter. Whether you took time to do the THINKING part of writing or spent the last few months elbow-deep in research.
It all counts. It all matters. It’s all in service to the work.
You know what else counts? The entire summer season spent not even thinking about writing.
Sounds counterintuitive. But often a break from the Writing Thing™ is exactly what our brains need to reinvigorate us to recommit, to make a pact with ourselves to get back in the game. Brain breaks are important — as long as they are managed and not an excuse to avoid the action of placing the words in a pleasing order for the benefit of your waiting fans.
If you are not a great self-disciplinarian and/or if you do not look at the change of seasons as an opportunity to start fresh or resume a prior project, then perhaps you should consider an accountability buddy. A writing circle. A dom with a bullwhip and studded leather pants who stands over you until you finish an entire paragraph. OR, you could try …
- The Creative Academy for Writers
- The Federation of BC Writers Writing Intensive: Creative RX
- One of the Fed’s writing circles
- Perhaps their Fall Into Writing retreat at Loon Lake in November
- Or Danika Bloom’s Author Ever After — looking at YOU, romance writers!
- How about Anne Lamott’s Writing Room
- Or Jessica Brody’s Writing Mastery Academy
- Or Rhonda Douglas’s Resilient Writers
By all means, if YOU have a community you love, please share in the comments!
TL;DR: Embrace the changing seasons. And don’t fear the writing.
YOU are a wordsmith, a god/dess of calamity, a bringer of laughs and tears and sentimental overture, a master of murderous intents. And you are the only person who can write the story the way you do.
Work with me here. Let’s set a time at least once a week, if not every day, where we slip into our seasonally appropriate footwear (ahem, fuzzy socks) and step boldly into the fray. I CHALLENGE you to write 100 new words this week. Five hundred. A thousand. Your prize if you partake? A metaphorical gold star — and the satisfaction of knowing your self-doubt demons and time-eating trolls didn’t get the best of you. Also you should grab yourself a doughnut.
And fictionaries, when you’re done with that 500 words, polish ’em up and enter our First Page Cage contest. (Good segue, right? I know. It’s a gift.) Someone’s gotta win — might as well be YOU!
Then, TREAT YOURSELF to some fantastic storytelling by signing up for one of our ARC (advance reader copy) campaigns. We’ve got three VERY DIFFERENT books coming at you this fall: Leo X. Robertson’s Barhopping for Astronauts: Cosmic Horror, Late-Stage Capitalism, and Other Light Reading, or Mel Anastasiou’s Stella Ryman and the Search for Thelma Hu releasing in October, followed by Freya: Book 1 in the Hendry Family Saga, by Jennifer Sommersby (hey, I know her) — ALL OF THESE BOOK BABIES could use your love and attention, so if you’re in the reading mood, we’d love to have you on our ARC teams. Yay, Team Books!
Quick parting note …
My friends, as I head into my fourth month with Pulp Literature/PulpFemme, I can say with confidence that sitting on this side of the submissions desk is wild. I am spinning plates as fast as I can, but I do think it would be easier if I were an octopus. Can you imagine having eight hands for plate-spinning? That would be amazing.
With that said, if you have submitted your book to us over the last couple months and you have not yet heard back, do not despair, my literary compadre. I am still moving the furniture around, so to speak, making sure our systems and processes are where they need to be to deliver an awesome experience for authors and readers alike. I’ve spent lots of time on phone calls and in meetings in search of the best solutions for our future publishing endeavours — it’s no small feat to birth a book, not to mention a whole litter of books, and I take this honour seriously.
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