Daily Writing Tips

See my latest work at Daily Writing Tips. The site includes advice on grammar, punctuation, misused words, spelling, writing basics and fiction writing.

My first post is Audience is Everything.

Click HERE to visit.

Horizon? Yes, and it looks decent today.

Got a gig! Will share when a piece actually goes up.

It seems this last leg of the month is always crammed full of writing. With the last minute lunge to get Estella's Revenge online, I feel most "writerly" right now. Formatting author interviews, editing essays, scraping together my own work for the new issue. It's exhilarating and exhausting, and that's how I've always pictured the "writing life."

One thing I've learned in these last few months of freelancing, is that it's also wicked hard. But, surprisingly enough, I'm not as downtrodden and hopeless as I was afraid I might be after a handful (ok, dozens) of rejections. Maybe because I haven't actually received any rejections...just gigs that sort of meandered off into the sunset, backs turned, and pretended I'm not here waving my arms and screaming for some confirmation.

But I digress...

It's a mad lifestyle and it's a mad business and one just has to wade through, up to one's respective waist in shit until the ground begins to dry up and you can catch your footing again.

Press on, kids, press on.

For a real pick-me-up, read this story from New York magazine. Click HERE. While it might make you want to swan dive off of a 36-story building, there's also some odd comfort in the community aspect of writing. I've been lucky to find some of that not only among my graduate school peers, but my Lovely Ladies of Writing group, too.

(I just came up with that name, what do you girls think?)

Short Stories Knocking on My Brain

It's a fortuitous turn of fate that since I posted my rant about my troubles with short stories, I now have one feverishly knocking on my brain. I found a site today that publishes chick lit short story offerings, and I immediately had an idea. Never have I thought of writing a chick lit short story (novel, yes; story, no). But *poof* there it was, begging for attention, bugging the heck out of me.

So, I'm writing a chick lit short story. It stars a duck. Who knew!

Stay tuned.

If there's one thing I've learned...

If there's one thing I've learned about this freelance game so far it's:

Never count a query out.

More than a month ago I applied for a freelance position with a respected academic publisher and after a few weeks I lost hope that I would hear from this particular position. It seems that I (incorrectly) assumed that a job of this sort would go quickly. Apparently (thankfully) I was wrong. I heard from the company today and they requested more info (references, writing sample), so it appears I might still have a chance!

As the proud owner of the "Most Impatient Woman on Earth" title, I have to remember, sometimes progress takes a while. Much longer than I would like.

Cross your fingers! It would be wonderful to be able to pay rent and buy food once I move across the country in a few weeks.

On Writing: Journaling and Short Stories

I've always attempted journaling but I can't say that I've had very good luck. There are journals piled around here everywhere, some of them full, some half-full, some sporadically drawn and written in. Doodles, phrases...sentences if they're lucky. Periods of manic scribbling and years of silence.

My computer has become more of a journal than any bound volume could've ever hoped. I can type much faster than I write. In light of this simultanous compulsion to write and total lack of consistency, my computer has lots of little bits of me floating around in it. I write snatches...thoughts that seem particularly poetic or promising. Blips of frustration. Collections of mild insanity. Since I can't sleep, I was reading through some of my niblets and found a diatribe on writing short stories.....

I don’t particularly like short stories. They’re premature novels…brain puffs that never got loved into life. They’re the angsty teenagers of the literary world standing bold and defiant amidst authorities but really longing for love and maturity. Maybe I’m just bitter because I’m no Flannery O’Connor or Annie Proulx. I’m not even a second-rate John Grisham or Dan Brown. Maybe I’m just mad because I don’t think I have a good short story in me. A friend says we all have one novel in us. I happen to know I have four novels in me, but short stories…I don’t feel those knocking on the inside of my head antsy to be loosed upon the world. The novels are insistent. Bratty even. They claw and scratch and scramble. Short stories don’t whip themselves up in my head. They don’t jump around like magic beans..

I feel like I should write short stories. Shouldn’t I crawl before I walk? And that’s a cliché I wouldn’t put into a short story unless it was a particularly naughty one that I felt needed punishing. If I wrote a short story I’d want it to be gritty. Completely unlike me in every visible way. I would step half out of myself. I would put the academian aside and embrace my past. The one I don’t think about too often. I would embrace my upbringing. The one that most “refined” people would hope I’d find embarrassing. The Texas’ness in me. The street dances and the rodeos. The smell of cow shit globbed on the foot rail at the stockyards. Grease and rocks and fried fish. Baby rabbits in shoe boxes—a surprise from my grandpa. Crawfishing with bacon on a string, my grandmother chasing my cousin around with a cigarette in one hand and a flyswatter in the other. “Y’all” and “yesterdy night” and horses and trail rides and thunderstorms. The dirtiest, most precious station wagon on the planet. Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, Sr., and Big Red soda. My ancestors would kick my country girl ass for calling it soda.

And then I went back to work on a short story that I've left languishing, loveless for a year or more.

Finally!

Finally, I've (sort of) finished putting together something that looks vaguely like a website to list my portfolio, bio, news, etc. Somewhere to point people when I submit my work. And, along with it, this blog where I'll celebrate the victories (hopefully) and despair over the failures (but just for a minute).

Many thanks to Heather F. for her fantastic header image. And a big hello to all of those listed over on the sidebar. Included are many dear friends, fantastic writers, and wonderful publications.

I'll be back soon with a discussion of breaking into the freelance world and what I have in the works.