As we labour away on our keyboards, bringing our first novel to life, we all know the odds of getting published are miniscule.

It’s a tough world out there for new authors. So why even try?

Take heart! Have a read of Jenny Crusie’s slant on the reality of publishing.

I’m definitely a rat looking for an island. What are you?

Following on from my last post, I saw a quote by Jodi Piccoult about the task of writing. It comes from an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on July 21st.

Jodi has written many books, and I consider her to be a good writer. ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ is one that stands out in my mind.

The quote reads:

‘Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it’s all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don’t buy that. It’s a job. There are days when I
really want to write, days when I don’t. Every day I sit down and write. You can always edit something bad. You can’t edit something blank.’

How true is that! Yesterday, I was procrastinating about writing a particular sscene in my young adult novel. I forced myself to sit at the computer and at least have a go at it. The result was that it flowed really nicely. But I wouldn’t have minded if I’d written rubbish, because I knew that editing it would be far easier than trying to create it in the first place.

It’s words of wisdom like these from Jodi that help us keep pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

Last night, I saw an interview with Thomas Keneally on a TV program. Keneally has published over forty books and has been writing for about fifty years.

Often, when I listen to novelists speak, I feel discouraged and depressed. It seems impossible to ever reach the level they have achieved. But Keneally was different. He said a couple of things that hit home for me.

Firstly, he said: “write first, get it right later”. He reinforced what I’ve heard before and what I should know, that you need to get your story down, do the editing later. Don’t let that critic in to stop your flow of thoughts and ideas. But it’s hard to stick to this. When I heard this, I suddenly realised I had stopped writing my young adult novel, because the critic had taken control. For weeks, I’d been on Chapter 14 and not budged. Prior to that, I was writing one chapter a week! So I put my head down, fingers to the keys, and got back to the writing. And now it’s flowing beautifully.

The second thing he said made me smile. He said that as writers, we’re made up of fifty percent uncertainty and fifty percent artistic arrogance. The arrogance is about us thinking that the world needs and wants to read our books. Both are so true. I swing from feeling self-doubt and uncertainty about my stories, to being incensed that my work doesn’t always get published. It’s an interesting mix.

So I sally forth, feeling a bit less isolated in my writing career, determined to keep going. One bit of feedback I got from a manuscript assessor for my junior fiction novel, “Seeing Dogs” was so uplifting, that I feel driven to get it published, no matter what. Sally Odgers, a multi-published children’s author, read “Seeing Dogs” and told me there was nothing wrong with it. The problem in getting it published is with it not fitting the market. I’ve got some choices about how to remedy this, one being self-publishing, the other being condensing it into a picture book. I’m considering both, but still searching for that elusive publisher.

The other bit of encouragement that is keeping me motivated and my fingers on the keyboard is an acceptance of a couple of my pieces by Harcourt, the educational publisher with whom I’m now aligned. They’re non-fiction pieces for a year six literacy unit, but it’s a foot in the door. I love this type of work: it’s challenging, exciting, and a new learning curve in terms of knowing how to write for the education market.

So I’m going to practise what Thomas Keneally preaches: write first, get it right later.

I’ve heard of and experienced writers’ block, but I’ve never really been through writers’ burn-out.

That’s what I’m calling my slump in the novel writing this week. For the past six or seven weeks, I’ve been solidly writing scenes and chapters for my young adult novel, never missing a day and loving every minute. But this week, it all came to a grinding halt. I had no ideas at all for the next scene, and no enthusiasm to find them. It felt so awful, but I couldn’t do anything about it in terms of making it happen.

So I did the next best thing. I wrote a whacky little short story to lighten me up a bit. I didn’t consciously think that this might shift things for me, help me get back into the novel, but it has.

And it makes sense now that I look back on it. When you are bogged down in something and can’t move, doing something completely different is often the best way of becoming unstuck. I didn’t want to stop writing - especially as this is my career - but I had to get away from my novel. The light-hearted, quick paced story I wrote has done the trick.

In this story, I wrote about a totally unbelievable situation with a gullible character. It was meant to be whacky and way-out. I sent it off to my tutor for feedback, which in a way, I knew was dumb. My tutor has taught me to write realistic scenes with believable characters. Needless to say, she was very sceptical about my whacky story. But I’m not worried because it has worked its magic. Maybe I needed to go a bit wild for a while.

I’m still going to enter my short story in a competition and see how it is received. There’s no harm trying. But now, it’s back to the novel.

If you feel stuck with something you’ve been doing for a while, try doing something completely different. Dont’ worry about time loss through doing another activity; you will feel refreshed and attack your old task with renewed energy, and therefore be more productive.

I’m into week three of my intensive writing course and I’m just loving it.

For the first time ever, I’m so focused on my young adult novel. I’m living it and breathing it. Each night when I go to bed, I start creating the next scene or rethink the scene I’ve just written. And because I’m “in the zone”, the story is taking shape and developing in a way that I never thought it would.

The difference between being able to get stuck in now and not before I think is threefold: firstly, we were encouraged right from the start to set weekly goals which included strategies to achieving these goals; secondly, I was pushed to submit at least one piece of work a week to benefit from the feedback and the tutor’s expertise; and thirdly, getting positive feedback on my work and being able to discuss styles and techniques, as well as plots and subplots.

This week, I started on a couple of scenes where I needed to do some research. One of my characters has an acquired brain injury and wanders from home. She is only twenty years old and her father works full time as a police officer. He can’t get enough care in the home to ensure her safety. So I needed to find a GPS personal locator that would set off an alarm or something to alert the father to the fact that his daughter had wandered from home.

I rang the Alzheimer’s Association of WA to see if they knew of any such devices. I did this after searching on the internet for GPS systems and finding one that would have been perfect if it wasn’t for the wearer having to activate the device. I got a really helpful person at the Association who had the answer I needed. Now I can write that scene with confidence, knowing that what I am describing is not ficticious.

It’s really exciting when things come together like this. The more I get into my novel, the more engrossed I am becoming. Even wehn this course finishes in about two months, I know I will keep up the weekly goals and get this book completed.

I always talk to high school kids about the importance of setting goals. But it really relies on self-discipline. Even I have to keep reminding myself how important it is to set goals.

You can’t take the athlete out of the athlete, and so with my sights set on getting a personal best, I set off to the Perth Freeway Bike Hike yesterday with my slick green tandem. I’d told my front rider, Beau, that with all the training we’d been doing, we were sure to go faster this year - we’ve done two freeway bike hikes to date.

But he reminded me that we were older, and so bound to start slowing down. Not a nice thought, and I wasn’t about to give in to age. So right from the start, I put in everything I had to beat the stopwatch.

Well, we did beat it! Our time this year was 41 minutes and 48 seconds, compared to last year when we did 42 minutes and 2 seconds. We chopped off a whopping 14 seconds! Now that’s good in my books, especially considering we had a head wind, and that we are both ageing. Our average speed was 41.9 km/hr. Not bad!

For those of you who don’t live in Perth, the Freeway Bike Hike is a fund-raising event for asthma held every year. This year, nearly 8,000 bikes participated. It’s not meant to be a race, but for those of us who are serious recreational cyclists, it’s just that. The freeway north is closed to all traffic for a 30 km stretch, and we get to ride through the tunnel that is normally closed to bikes. This alone is great fun, not to mention flying up the freeway which is smooth and a pleasure to ride on.

So next year, my goal is to shave off another few seconds. I haven’t told Beau yet. I’ll have to break it to him gently.

It’s always hard to pitch to adolescents, to know what they want, what they will hear.

When I prepared the ‘Surviving Year 12′ presentation, I thought about what kids these days are experiencing, how they view the world, along with what I went through as a teenager and what would have helped me. I came up with a package that I trialed on Year 12’s at All Saints’ College in January.

Grace Itzstein, the Career Counsellor at All Saints’ College, has just sent me through some feedback from the students. It was reassuring to find out that my talk hit the mark, that the students did get something out of it. On the day, it was hard to tell, and of course it was particularly difficult for me because I can’t see my audience. Even though the feedback from staff was encouraging - “Janet, they were silent, so that means they were listening!” - I still wanted to get an evaluation from the students themselves.

You can read their comments here

Thanks to all those who let me know that I’m on track with my presentations! 

Last night I had a dream that made no sense at the time. But in the morning, I worked it out.

In the dream, I was on a train. The train stopped at a station, and I left my seat to get off. I knew the station and was sure it was time to disembark. But then I became aware of my Dad. He told me to “stay on the train”.

I didn’t want to stay on because I didn’t know where the train was going. It all seemed so foreign to me. But I did what he said and sat back down. As I looked around, I noticed that the train itself looked different, somehow unfamiliar. But my Dad’s words hung around me: “stay on the train”. Despite my discomfort, I stayed on that train.

In the morning, I realised what the dream meant. My Dad died nearly fifteen years ago. I’ve always missed him, even more so now that I am in my own business. He would have been a great business mentor for me. The message of “stay on the train” was really telling me to not give up on some new business ventures I have in mind. There are two in particular that I’ve been toying with for a while but have been unsure about how to develop them. I almost gave up on one of them entirely.

But today, quite by chance, I’ve pushed through one of the blocks to one of those ventures. I’ve found the right contacts to get me started on something I’d love to do - blogging for other businesses. There’s so much information on the internet about how easy this is to do, but it’s difficult to know where to start in such a huge potential market. I am going to start small with someone I know, and take it from there.

Dreams tell us a lot about where we’re at, what we worry about. Sometimes I find my dreams keep me inspired and motivated. If a particular scene in a dream stands out, no matter how disjointed or crazy it seems, I know I need to analyse it.

Now I’m definitely staying on the train. 

If adolescence isn’t hard enough to cope with, then surviving the final year of high school is certainly one of life’s major challenges.

All Saints, an independent high school in Perth Western Australia, is striving to give their final year students the key to success and survival by holding a one-day workshop before the start of first term. This is a new initiative and is being trialled this year.

The day will include lots of good information and advice to students on such things as study techniques, how to use memory effectively, and how to change negative thinking into positive thinking.

I have been invited to kick start the day with a keynote address, to motivate the kids, and I’m really looking forward to it.

I think the school is really concerned about helping their students get through their big year. I only wish this sort of thing had been around in my time! I could have done with better study techniques!

You can read more about my presentation here 

This was the big one for me. I set myself the huge goal of coming up with a story to send to this creme dela creme of writing competitions. I know I have no hope of winning it: I just needed to meet this goal as a way of advancing my writing and improving my style. At least it will get read!

The hardest things I had to overcome were:

1.  finding a story line;
2. writing for adults, not children - I couldn’t handle having no young characters at all, so stuck one in as a minor character; and
3. meeting the max word length of 5,000 words.

After a lot of sleepless nights, tormenting myself over the plot, squeezing myself into my characters’ minds, I finally got there!

So it’s done, ready to go, and I’m happy with it. I’ll do the right thing and sit on it for a week, as all writers should, because then any glaring errors will jump out.

I’ve set myself many writing goals, including entering competitions, and this has vastly improved my writing techniques for one, and my ability to churn out more and more. I would recommend making a weekly list of goals - realistic ones of course - as a way of advancing your own writing.

At least I’m adding to my list of short stories that I can send out to other competitions. This, in itself, is reward enough.