How to Train Your Patience ...

2020 seemed rather unformed when it started back on January 1st, but I am happy to say things are beginning to take shape and give some structure to my year.

One of my picture books, Sharing with Wolf, (with the lovely and talented Nikki Slade Robinson and published by Scholastic) is off to the printers and oh-my-giddy-aunt, it has endpapers!! You know what that means!! :-) This book is set to take off on June 1st and tells the story of a lamb keen to rent a room at Wolf's place. It is very gratifying when you have tried to write something funny and you hear people laugh out loud as they read it. And there is humour and much more in the illustrations besides.

Look how delicious it is!! I can't wait to show it to you.

Illustrations are also coming along for Moon and Sun (illustrated by the amazing Malene Laugesen and to be published by Upstart Press). I have had a sneak peek and they are dreamy and divine and just right for a story of sibling rivalry and sisterly relations. This book could not be more different to Sharing with Wolf. Was it written by a different part of me? Maybe. You will need to judge for yourselves. I hope to give you a glimpse of this soon. It is all very exciting.

In other news, I was approached by an Auckland Council Community Group to run some creative writing workshops for intermediate and high school aged students and this is now all on at Te Oro: Music and Arts Centre for Young People in Glen Innes. There will be five 90 minute workshops covering different aspects of writing, run weekly on Mondays at 5pm, starting March 2nd. I'll be running the course again in May as well. You can check out details here

And I am now the New Zealand Soc. of Authors representative on the Book Awards Trust. I'm also working on a new junior fiction project which is a very different form to anything I've written before. Please hold caller, while my old brain works out these new tricks. Crikey, folks, it's all go in the muppet labs.

I still have manuscripts out with some publishers both here and overseas and as always I remain hopeful of a good outcome from someone. I mean, why submit if you don't have hope, eh? The challenge, as always, is to keep the career alive. You might point out that I had a book out last year and I am about to have two books out this year, but I would then remind you that publishers are working two years ahead and whatever is accepted now is unlikely to be out until 2022 (or maybe even later). And an acceptance, if it happens, may still be months away or perhaps even years. Or it just might not happen and whatever I am working on now needs to be finished and polished before it too can begin to try its luck out there, rinse and repeat. Training your patience is one of the best things you can do for yourself as an author. So, how do you train your patience?

1) Your patience will function better if it has deadlines to work to. Always ask when a response/result can be expected and keep your patience informed. Although once deadlines have come and gone I have nothing for you and all bets are off 

2) Your patience can sometimes be talked down with a mantra of rational reasons for delays, silences and deadline blowouts. Memorise this mantra

3) Distraction is a useful tool that will help your patience remain up to the task. I find frequently shouting 'over there' and pointing into the distance can keep your patience disoriented enough to perform twice as well as it thinks it can

4) Reward your patience regularly. Your patience will work harder for you if it feels loved and respected. 

5) That ugly relation impatience is always lurking, trying to muscle in on the action. Be vigilant. A good treatment for impatience is to give it something else to do - for example, when will my basil seeds sprout?

Without a parachute...

The life of a book is equivalent to a piece of string. How long is the piece of string, you might ask? Well as long as the life of a book.

Yes....exactly.

My first picture book is now out of print. All my other print books are still out there I believe, but I am under no illusion that OOP can strike at any time. When a new book is launched it feels like it is everywhere and then the following month new books are launched and they are everywhere and your book not so much, and the honeymoon can feel, well, over. I am not complaining. I did get the chocolate on the pillow, the romantic pics on the beach, and the late wake up call. So it is rather nice to have reviews still wandering in for a book launched back in March. Thanks to Bookwitch for a nice review of A Winter's Day in 1939 here in the UK. And if you check that book's page on Fishpond NZ there is a great review there too. And I liked this one on Goodreads - short and sweet but quite complimentary really. Each one feels like another lovely surprise chocolate on my pillow.

And in breaking news, it seems a picture book of mine published a few years back may be translated and sold in another country. More news on that when/if it all comes together. Very exciting. I know of other folks whose books have been picked up overseas 5 years after publication. I never give up hope. A short story of mine waited 7 years from acceptance to print. Time becomes Einstein fluid in the publishing world, or perhaps publishing all happens inside the Tardis and who knows what time it is in the world outside. My one regret is that the eternal youth of the space traveller doesn't seem to be applying to me. Anyways... I digress. The answer to how long is the life of a book is patience. My patience has slowly become a well-oiled, efficient little machine: overworked but better at its job than it used to be. It hums along these days, now that I've switched it to the long game setting.

Fellow blogger Maureen Crisp linked to this wonderful piece by Libba Bray; wonderful and somewhat distressing. Ms Bray talks about 'writing despair' - the despair of failing to bend a story to your will and make it work. For all the times we feel this despair and work through it to end up with a story that we are happy with, we know there are no guarantees this will happen next time. We live in fear. We break through and then admonish ourselves for ever thinking we couldn't do it. And then we start all over again. In my writing, like Ms Bray, I am untethered by outlines and structure and Scrivener and rolodexes full of character eye colour, and background, and inside leg measurement. I wing it. Without a parachute. Sometimes this works better than other times. The biggest stumbling block for me is always fear - will I stuff up this great idea. It looks so pretty/smart/elegant in my head but turns in to a hoiked-up fur ball on the page. People who think series or sequels are such a great idea because you already have that world and those characters built be warned - you can no longer bend that world or those wills anew to your own purposes. You made rules last time and now they must be obeyed. And there are expectations. Expectations! If you ever wanted success, know that expectations come with it. And, apparently, fear. The key of course is patience. And I can only hope, for Ms Bray's sake and mine, that the length of the life of the book will be positively influenced by the length of its gestation.

Submitter's neuroses

So I've registered and paid to attend the Spinning Gold Conference in September in Wellington. I've put my name down for accommodation, organised my roomy and warned her about my unique snoring style. I've made my first and second choice selections for workshops and ticked the box to do the pitch slam because it sounds like insane fun and who knows, maybe, possibly, something that will have results. I made some unusual selections (poetry? drawing?) and figure sometimes you've got to try new things. It all sounds like enormous fun, I'm glad I registered in time to get in and I am excited to find out who else will be attending.

I missed out on Creative NZ funding again which is a tad disheartening (who is Tad and I hope he doesn't mind me using his name this way). As a friend pointed out though being funded is a sometimes sorely needed acknowledgement and endorsement of us and our writing. A big tick from the powers that be. It is hard to know whether to keep trying, to keep investing in the process thereby making ones self vulnerable to the outcome? How many times is the charm? I also didn't get the SCBWI scholarship to attend their summer conference in LA. This last bit may turn out to be a blessing though, as it is in August and may have been the last straw in an increasingly complex schedule of events and deadlines. And I doubt the scholarship would have covered all my costs.

I'm trying to get a head of steam up again on my WIP. I'm keen to try finishing it and i am on the homeward stretch. I need to distract myself too because I am at that awkward phase in submissions when its been a significant length of time since I sent things to publishers but its possibly still to early Or I'm too chicken to enquire after my manuscripts progress. Its a kind of no mans land. A doldrums of creativity and sanity where its impossible to focus on things one should be doing because there's this big weight of wondering blocking up the works. No matter how long I've waited, my patience is almost always guaranteed to run out before there is a response, irrespective of the time involved. There is no cure. Its the writer's disease - like tennis elbow or housemaid's knee, writers get submitter's neuroses. It can be ugly. There is no cure except the passing of time. And the worst thing is being patient under duress can lead to the development of certain male qualities which is only okay if you're a bloke. I guess they do give me the courage to enquire after a submission sometimes but what do you do with them afterwards?

Waiting on some research

Someone's hammering on the roof next door. This is not conducive to writing. And I've hit a small hiccup with my writing because the scene i'm working on now needs some convincing trick bike riding lingo. I'm obviously not hip enough because when i tried to find some books to get out of the library to do some research on the topic i can't even find any. I don't know the right words for the search engine. I'll have to go in and do it manually. i'm waiting for the library to cough up Darkly Dreaming Dexter because after watching the Dexter tv series I'm hooked (despite the fact that he's an emotionless serial killer) and as tv series are never as good as the books they're based on i can't wait to read it. Can my trick bike riding scene wait until the book i've requested turns up? I'll give it a few days, keep my fingers crossed and see what happens. And then I'll probably end up making two trips anyway. My patience always runs out before the waited for object,event, reply arrives. You'd think I'd learn from this but no, my impatience is a demanding little thing.

I also need to do an outline for my new project to give to my agent so she can try and sell it for me. I have never met anyone who says outlines are easy to write. Darn. I'm so lazy i like easy things. I've made a few notes which roughly correspond to an outline which i'm pretty happy with but the strangest thing is i can't seem to do an outline for the bit I've already written. Turns out fiction is stranger than fiction too, along with the truth. if anyone has some outline writing tips (or wants to do it for me, she says optimistically) let me know.