THERE MUST BE A REASON I'M UP AT 4:30 A.M.

I’ve been on a bit of a roll with my SFR manuscript Unchained Memory lately, all praises to the Forces of Good in the universe. God (big G) and the writers’ gods (small g) have smiled and granted me some small progress on the slog toward publication with a big contest win, a couple of contest finals and some potential interest from the people who really count—agents and editors. I’m excited, gratified and hopeful, while at the same time trying not to read too much into anything.

These small successes have me re-examining my goals as a writer almost as much as a series of setbacks would have. I’m not rethinking those goals, but touching base, just making sure I still know what I’m trying to accomplish with all this. Questioning oneself is common when the contest feedback is negative or the queries all come back as rejections. I'm a little surprised to find myself doing it when things are going the other way.

My first “real” job once I got out of college was as an administrative assistant (they called us “secretaries” then) to a self-made millionaire, a man who spent all day in an office tracking his investments, making more money. He had started out as a teenager selling Bibles door-to-door, worked his way up to the position of treasurer of the company and made a fortune when the company was sold to Times-Mirror Corporation. He was in his forties when I met him.

He asked me in the job interview to describe my five-year plan. I believe my answer was, “Huh?” He hired me anyway, but he gave me an assignment to write one up. The resulting plan in no way resembled my life beyond that point, but the idea stuck. I’ve been trying to think ahead, to have goals and plan for them, ever since.

The amazing thing is, when you are serious about setting those goals and working toward them, you often end up reaching them. I believe in having dreams. But success is less about dreaming and more about working for what you want. Dreams stay dreams because they tend to be nebulous. Goals require that you spell them out so you can make them happen.

Newbie writers get an earful of goal-setting and planning in motivational talks at RWA conferences and chapter meetings, in workshops and the like. All that nudging is useful because it can help get you from a pile of disorganized musings to an honest-to-God novel or from one manuscript to a marketing plan. Some of that incessant urging to think about where I was going made me consider the need for social networking, how to approach querying, where contests fit into my review process and so on. Without an overall plan, I might have been trying things hit-or-miss, or ignoring them altogether.

But I think our goal setting has to go above and beyond simply planning for the next stage in our writing, or even the next few years in our writing careers. And that is why I find myself pondering an essential question, even though things are heading in the right direction. Why am I doing all this, after all? Why all the hours of work, the anxiety over this judge’s reaction or that agent’s response, the endless drive toward improvement with the next draft, the next book? What is this writing thing, anyway?

I found an echo of this question in the speeches Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz gave at RWA Nationals in July. Both women, veterans of decades in the business, winners of multiple honors and, in Roberts’s case, one of the most successful writers in the world, spoke to the difficulty of riding out the market’s vagaries, of finding something of your own to hold onto through all that this hard business had to throw at you.

Just saying you want to make the NYT bestseller list in five years is not enough. Just saying you want to write and sell a book you can be proud of once a year for the next fifteen years is not enough. There has to be a reason you are doing those things. For fun? I think not. This ain’t fun most days. For profit? Good luck. Most working writers still hold down a day job. For fame? Maybe for fifteen minutes. On your chapter loop.

Harlan Ellison once said that he was a writer because he couldn’t not be a writer. That’s a little closer to what I’m after, though Harlan would be the first to admit he wouldn’t be happy just writing in a journal for himself. Neither would most of the rest of us. Writing, after all, is about communication. And publication is about communicating with the biggest, broadest range of readers possible.

Now here’s where it starts to get deep, maybe in more ways than one. By seeking to communicate through our writing, we’re seeking to touch those readers in some way—with an idea, with a vision, with a character or a relationship, even with something so elementary as laughter or tears. Maybe we have consistent themes that we return to over and over in our work that resonate emotionally with readers and mean something to them. Maybe our work is more political or thought-provoking. Maybe we’re even smart enough (or naive enough) to have something profound to say about the human condition.

Whatever it is, the best writing aspires to reach out, from mind to mind, from heart to heart, to make a connection. That is the ultimate goal, the one we should all be striving to attain.

Cheers, Donna

Congratulations, Donna!

Co-blogger Donna S. Frelick has won the TARA Contest Paranormal category with her awesome Science Fiction Romance manuscript, Unchained Memory.

Many congrats Donna on an impressive win!

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It's Time to Burn Badjuju

Last year, Spacefreighters Lounge reported on the annual tradition in Santa Fe, New Mexico of burning Zozobra. This ritual flaming of the "Old Man Gloom" effigy represents letting go of all the cares, disappointments and griefs that have accumulated in the past year. For weeks prior to the event, residents converge on the offices of the Santa Fe Reporter to leave artifacts of their troubles. The monstrous puppet is then stuffed with these notes, documents, photos, legal papers, and other representations of aggravation and set ablaze before a crowd of thousands.

Last year, we suggested that writers need their own version of Zozobra and many agreed, coming up with the name "Badjuju" for our version.

Today, we're building our Badjuju to torch along with Zozobra this evening. Help us stuff our "Writer's Old Man Trouble" with your rejection slips, deep-sixed manuscripts, misguided reviews, low contest scores, delusional judge's comments, and other worries and woes so you can watch them go up in a blaze of glory.

What would you stuff into Badjuju?

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THE VIRTUAL PROFESSOR

I graduated from high school in the age of dinosaurs, when English teachers took their jobs very seriously. They forced their students to work their little fingers to nubbins diagramming sentences and set young brains a-spinning trying to sort out the difference between a dangling modifier and a misplaced pronoun. But, by golly, if you managed to get an “A” in English in those days, you could put together a competent sentence in a variety of styles, with all the words in the right places, spelled correctly and punctuated properly.

That explains how a working journalist could advise me to major in history or government in college, rather than English, to prepare for a career in news. “You already know how to write,” he said. “You need to know how the world works.”

So I took an interdisciplinary major in International Relations (heavy on the history and government) and ignored the English Department. And it was good advice, overall, seeing as how I needed flexibility once I graduated into that mid-Seventies recession. (That’s the one no one seems to remember now.)

Little did I know that I’d need something from those old guys in the tweed jackets years later. Who knew I’d want to write fiction, of all things, and competent sentences, with stuff in all the right places, is just not enough. (Though, you know, it does count for something, after all.)

Now I could spend a lot of money and go back to school for another degree. Heaven forfend. Or I could fork over some more cash along with a pound or two of flesh and try to get accepted to a prestigious writers’ workshop or two—Clarion, say, or Iowa. Is it wrong of me to envision those classes full of 23-year-old grad students with little life experience and a high opinion of themselves, plus one or two thirty-something alcoholics with plenty of dissolute life experience but no life, and one housewife whose sold her car to be there but gets no respect because she wants to write commercial fiction? Well, at least I’d have one person to talk to.

Fortunately there is a wonderful alternative to these depressing options. I can learn about almost any aspect of the writer’s art through online classes taught by professional writers who are themselves at the top of their game as authors of commercial fiction. I can focus on a very specific topic—fight scenes, for example, as I did in a course with paranormal writer Angela Knight—or I could take a whole I-want-to-be-writer independent study course with writing gurus Jacqueline Lichtenburg and Jean Lorrah of SimeGen fame through the Worldcrafters Guild (http://www.simegen.com).

A two-week workshop can provide a lifetime’s worth of information and insight into the world of creative fiction, from someone who is involved in the process every day. That’s something that money could never buy. But the best part of these workshops is that they range from free (at Worldcrafters, for example) to very cheap ($15 for local Romance Writers of America chapter members for the typical two-week course; $25 for non-members).

At RWA Online (a relatively new chapter of the national organization), a $25 one-year chapter membership buys unlimited free access to online courses for the year. Woo hoo! Sounds like unlimited fun to me. I peeked in on a course run by Leigh Greenwood the other day just because I’d met the author of 40-plus Western romances at the National Conference. The topic was gender-specific language—what would guys say or talk about that gals wouldn’t and vice versa. Fascinating! Did I mention Leigh is a guy?

Many local and online RWA chapters (such as Fantasy, Futuristic & Paranormal) offer workshops as a service to their members and a way of generating income for the chapters. Information about what courses are coming up can be found on chapter websites and are shared widely on chapter loops. (Though if you are not an RWA member, well . . .)

I just finished a course (“Prune Your Prose”) at RWA Online with Linnea Sinclair. Yeah, that’s right. I schmoozed with the Queen of Science Fiction Romance. Exchanged homework and emoticons. Clinked virtual martini glasses. We all had a blast in that class, though I must say we worked our little behinds off. I was reminded of some of those English teachers of yore.

Like the best online courses, Linnea’s class offered all of us—from the rawest newbie to the most polished professional—the chance to interact with a writer who loves her craft and puts it to work every day. She assigned tasks (every freakin’ night!) and gave us individual feedback to help us hone our skills in a very personal way. And though that could be challenging (and difficult for some), it was also inspiring, even intimate. I find it amazing that someone with Linnea’s schedule and commitments would take the time to give us that kind of individual attention.

Linnea may be unusually patient, but the online course format seems to encourage close interaction. I’ve experienced it in courses I’ve taken with Angela Knight and with writing/marketing expert Bob Mayer, and I suppose now I’ve come to expect it. I’m spoiled. It would be awfully hard to pay good money to sit at an actual desk in a real classroom only to be ignored because what I write isn’t “real literature”. Forget that. Let me learn from the people who know. And thank God they’re willing to teach me.

Cheers, Donna