I’ve been having a pull-back week this week. It’s kind of like a mental health day, only longer. On emotional overload after my uncle’s funeral, and after seemingly every one of my close friends has had some kind of crisis, I finally had to pull back. To limit phone calls and emails and invitations in order to process some of what I’ve taken in. Death often causes us to do this. To look at how we’re living, to see if we have our priorities straight and our “house in order,” even to the extent of updating our wills and health care powers-of-attorney.

Before I learned about the death of my uncle, I had been struggling with a career decision. An agent expressed interest in my first book, Thinking About Therapy. She wanted to try to sell it to a mainstream publisher–every self-published author’s dream–except that, in her opinion, re-marketing it would require pulling it off my website. At first glance, it seemed like a no-brainer. I could have an agent! One who doesn’t intimidate me, is passionate about my topics, and returns my phone calls.

On the other hand, I had a visceral reaction when she mentioned pulling the book, especially after the enormous effort that went into redesigning my website last fall. Add to that the fact that I’m getting some traction on various fronts online, and the timing felt completely off. It would have meant switching gears, perhaps even backtracking. In the end I decided to decline the offer, although we left the door open for working together on future projects.

Then, this week, the webmaster for an online magazine for women responded to my request to blog on their site. A few weeks ago they had put out the word that they were looking for bloggers, and, in a high-energy moment, I had signed up. They sent me an application, and asked if I was interested in writing a regional or national blog. As my husband likes to say, “Is that a trick question?” Don’t all writers want as much exposure as possible? At any rate, the application asked me to explain what I thought I could offer to their readers.

Isn’t it amazing how hearing the right question can set your brain straight to the task of answering it? Part of my emotional funk this week has been due to a lack of focus. Self-published authors face a dizzying list of shoulds. In order to build an audience and sell books, we are told that we should blog, set up book signings and speaking engagements, send out books for review, write magazine pitches and sell articles, create book trailers, mine the web. And, oh, by the way, write the next book. I’m guilty of switching haplessly from one to the other, sometimes getting overwhelmed in the process.

Which brings me back to the “What can I offer?” question. I know the big-picture answer because I’ve done a lot of work in this area and I have a personal mission statement: “To inspire others to live a more joyful, purposeful life.” I want to share my personal experiences with other people, particularly women, in the hopes of saving them some of the emotional struggles that I’ve been through.

I just needed to be asked the question again. Refocused, I know where to put my efforts going forward. I have a feeling that, as a result, next week is going to be one of those pull-ahead weeks.

As Greg Anderson says in his uplifting book Living Life on Purpose, “You have a mission in your life…Truly, the world has need of you…You are here, now, where you are, how you are, given the personality you have, with the unique abilities you possess because this is your moment to contribute to the world.” 

How about you? What can you offer to the world? Do you need a pull-back week to figure it out?

Take all the time you need. We’ll wait.

We lost another WWII veteran today. My uncle, John Stanley, who was 98, served in the Navy on the U.S.S. Texas as a gunner’s mate. Like most of the men in that job, he lost much of his hearing while doing it. On my last visit out to Denver, where he and my aunt lived, he showed me his medals, and an amazing picture of a kamikaze plane just about to crash into the ship behind his.

You know all those old jokes about women falling in love with the milk man? Well, that actually happened to my Aunt Winnie. Uncle Johnny drove a milk truck and he delivered the milk to her house at 5:30 every morning. He fell for when he was 20 and she was 14. The story goes that, because of his affection for her, he left her a small bottle of chocolate milk every day as a treat. Unfortunately, her brother John woke up first, drank the chocolate milk, and never mentioned it to anyone. Uncle Johnny had to wait for two years to date Aunt Winnie, because she wasn’t allowed to date until she turned 16. They were married when she turned 21, and have been married for 71 years! They have seven children.

Uncle Johnny was a numbers man. After the war he got a job selling Prudential insurance, the perfect job for him. He had an incredible memory, and loved trivia. Every time we saw him, he would say something like, “Do you know how many bricks it took to build the (fill in the building or structure)?” Of course we’d have no idea, but he’d tell us exactly how many bricks. Or how many men it took to build it. Or how many man-hours. The numbers were always in the millions, but he’d remember them down to the last digit. He was an affectionate guy, and would always hold my hand when he talked to me. He loved to sing, and made up songs about working the milk route.

For most of his life he was strong and healthy, but he had occasional, bizarre health issues that would have set others way back. Not him. He was blind for an entire year when he was a senior in high school, until his dentist figured out that a wisdom tooth was pushing on a nerve. Once they removed it, he could see again. In his mid-80s his vision was failing again, and he was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor which needed to be removed. He had to shop around to find a doctor who was willing to anesthetize him at his age. We were all very nervous about the surgery, which was quite serious, but he was undaunted. Of course he came out of it with flying colors.

The last time I saw my aunt and uncle in Raleigh was a few years ago, when they flew in to visit my mom. I have an image of them in my mind that I’ll hold on to forever. The two of them were in a guest room in the residence where my mom lives. They were sitting on a bench at the bottom of the bed, side by side, like birds on a telephone wire. The bench was pulled up close to the TV so they could see and hear it, and they were holding hands, as always.

Uncle Johnny was a lifelong Catholic, and up until two years ago when he had a stroke, he was still acting as a Eucharistic Minster at his church, giving out communion at mass. He was also still driving, and attending weekly Rotary meetings. He contributed to his country, his family, his church, and his community in ways too numerous to mention. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

So long, milkman.

This photo was taken in 1992, at my folks’ 50th wedding anniversary mass. My mom and dad, Bill and Angie, are on the left. Uncle Johnny and Aunt Winnie, my mom’s sister, are on the right.

This is the final installment of my three-part blog from www.triangleareafreelancers.org, originally posted on October 15th, 2007.

 
Remember when you tried to get your first job out of school? More than likely, you were told you needed experience, but you couldn’t figure out how you were supposed to get that experience without a job.

The publishing world works much the same way. You can’t get published without an assignment, but you can’t get an assignment without being published first. What to do?

Now, more than ever, there are solutions, both in print and online.

Most newspapers accept Point of View pieces from readers for their Op-Ed pages. If your newspaper has a community column section, you can submit an essay in the hopes of becoming a guest columnist. Magazines such as Writer’s Digest run regular contests where they ask you to write based on a prompt, and publish the winning entries. There are a number of non-paying print magazines, such as Reminisce, which will publish your story if it is accepted. Some writers’ groups publish anthologies of their members’ short stories or essays.

Online there an endless number of websites that need content—it’s just a matter of matching up what you want to write about with someone who wants to publish on that topic. One way to get started is to post material on a “content” site, such as Constant-Content.com. These are basically auction sites which allow you to offer your work to the highest bidder, but they do allow you to post free content, which may get picked up by a website with a small budget.  

Many startup e-zines are non-paying at first and then graduate to becoming for-pay sites once they gather enough advertisers and readers.

Writing sites which cater to specific genres, such as HumorPress.com, run bi-monthly contests and offer publication and small monetary prizes to the winners. Humor Press then publishes books of the winning essays. 

If you like to write book reviews, you can submit them to online review sites such as Blogcritics.org or BloggerNews.net.

With the proliferation of blogs, you might want to offer to be a guest blogger on a friend’s site. Or you can create your own blog for free on places like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal or OutBlogger. The December 2007 issue of the Writer’s Digest magazine compares the features of these sites.

Finally, you can create your own website using free services such as Geocities.Yahoo.com. 

Once you get a few publications—print or online—under your belt, you’ll feel more confident about writing queries in order to get paying assignments. If you’re a good writer, and you’re professional, it’s just a matter of being persistent. It will all be worthwhile when you get the first “Yes” from an editor!

This is part two of my three-part blog from www.triangleareafreelancers.org, originally posted on October 13th, 2007.

Beginning writers are often told, “Write what you know.” This is because what you know—and especially what you feel passionate about—will roll off your tongue (and on to your computer screen) more easily than a researched topic. If you write about an area in which you have some expertise, your depictions will feel more authentic to the reader, and your words will ring more true.

Some aspects of freelancing are counterintuitive. It might seem to make sense to write about topics with general appeal in order to attract the greatest number of readers. In fact, it’s better to create a market for yourself by writing about what other people aren’t writing about.

This is one of the joys of freelancing. It gives you license to indulge your obsessions, to embrace your inner nerd, so to speak. The most quirky topic or hobby may prove to be the most interesting to a potential editor.

Think about what’s unique about you. What fan clubs do you belong to? What online forums do you contribute to? What hobbies do your friends tease you about? Try writing about your favorite episode of The Waltons, the best Clay Aiken concert you’ve attended, or the farthest place you’ve traveled to attend a Star Trek convention.

As a former columnist for The News and Observer, Don Vaughan, says in his April 20, 2007 column, “Don’t be ashamed – be proud! Stand up and let the world know. By admitting your passion, maybe, just maybe, you’ll open the eyes of someone who has never before experienced that particular joy. And that’s a wonderful gift to share.”

Don happened to be referring to his life-long interest in comic books. I would reveal what my personal obsession is, but I can’t right now. John-Boy’s coming on TV.

I’m having a super busy week–a good kind of busy–so over the next few days I’m going to post a three-part blog I originally published at www.triangleareafreelancers.org.

People often come to freelance writing later in life and from other careers. Some switch from other writing fields, such as technical writing. Others have done business writing, including press releases and marketing materials, as part of their job. Exposure to a variety of knowledge bases can be a boon for a freelancer. The more exposure you have to the world, the more you have to write about.

But one pitfall for beginning freelancers is that they often don’t see themselves as writers. New members who come to our group often say the same thing. “I’m not really a writer—I don’t have anything published.”

Although some people have a more natural aptitude than others, thankfully, writing is primarily a learned skill: the more you write, the better you get. There is no acid test to determine whether you are, or are not, a writer. You are a writer if you write.

But thinking of yourself as a writer is a critical step towards being one. If you’re not there yet, you can borrow a role-playing technique psychotherapists use to help people get a jump-start on learning new behaviors. It’s called “acting as if” (known in laymen’s terms as “Fake it until you make it.”)

For example, if you’re uncomfortable in social situations, you can “act as if” you are extroverted. You can walk into a room of strangers, make solid eye contact, introduce yourself, give a firm handshake, and smile warmly at everyone.

People are funny. If they see something that “walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” they think it’s a duck. If you appear to be outgoing, they assume you’re outgoing. If you appear to be a writer, they assume you’re a writer.

One of my favorite anecdotes from Sue Monk Kidd’s Firstlight, which is a collection of her early inspirational writings, is her description of how she announced to the world that she was going to become a writer. (She had had a long career as a nurse.) “The world” turned out to be her husband and two-year-old, who were sitting at the breakfast table eating cereal. Her point was that she had decided.

If you’ve decided you want to be a writer, start “acting as if” — by doing the things that writers do. Establish a space in your home to write, buy writers’ magazines, join a writers’ group, take a writing class, talk to people about what you’re writing, and most importantly, write!

I’m back from vacation and will post an entry about our adventures in a day or two, but today on Memorial Day I wanted to recommend two WWII books to you. Both are excellent, and will give you a very clear picture of what day-to-day life was like for those who served during WWII.

The first is my uncle’s book, Normandy to the Bulge, which I wrote about in a previous post. My uncle was a Pfc. in the army, in the 26th Infantry Division. He and his buddies fought across Europe, enduring mud and rain and a constant lack of food. He was trapped in a foxhole for 17 days, and later helped to liberate several concentration camps. He kept a diary of his experiences, always intending to write a book about them. He finally wrote and published it, 51 years later.

The second book I discovered by accident while searching to see if there were many other WWII books with letters in them, similar to All on Account of You. It is called At War and At Home, edited by Bob and Gale McClung, and contains the correspondence of an entire family: three brothers (one of whom was Bob McClung) who served in three different branches during WWII, their parents, and their little sister. I posted a review of it on Goodreads.com. Sadly, Bob passed away shortly before the book was released, but Gale and I have become online friends.

Last night I watched the National Memorial Day Concert in Washington, D.C. on PBS and was moved by it. It’s good to see that we’re finally paying attention to those who haved served and are serving to keep our country safe, and it’s important that we keep telling their stories. God bless all of them.

Happy Memorial Day.

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Including our parents, there were ten of us in our household when we were growing up. You can imagine that, in that type of environment, efficiency is very important. You have to do daily tasks quickly, or you’d never get to do anything else with your day. So I learned to speed up, and to utilize everything at my disposal so that I didn’t have to create from scratch or, as the saying goes, reinvent the wheel.

A friend and I were chatting yesterday about writing and marketing, and we were both expressing a similar hope: that if you do something well, and persist, something good will happen. If you believe in kharma, it just makes sense.

I had planned to blog about the subject today, but before I got there, I read Kevin Alexander’s blog, This Writer’s Life. Kevin is another one of the Writer’s Digest bloggers. As fate would have it, Kevin wrote a longer-than-usual post today which includes what he calls his mantra. It just happens to be on my topic. So as not to reinvent the wheel, I’ll include the revelant excerpt from today’s post. 

“You see, I have this theory about writing and writers. My theory goes like this: no matter who you are and where you are from and what your parents do for a living, if you can write and you know you can and you work at it every day and you know deep below the surface in that place where only the truth exists that you’re not just being daft and irrational, you will get discovered. This may take weeks or it may take years or it may take decades, but my feeling is that good, solid writing rises to the top. Editors can spot  it. Agents can spot it. Other writers can spot it. And this is the beauty of the writing world. You always have to fall back on your own talent. Yes, you may get put in a prime spot by things like connections or nepotism or the lottery, but if the writing doesn’t hold up, you will fall and ultimately you will fail. That–more than anything else– is the powerful self-correcting agent in the writing world. And–despite all of my cynicism and my love of irony and all of the other knee-jerk reactive habits infused in me by my age, social standing and penchant for limited edition sneakers– I believe in that. If I had a mantra, that would be it. Good writing rises to the top. It’s not catchy, it doesn’t sound good in a Nike commercial or on a lower back tattoo, but that is what I believe.”

Thanks, Kevin, for saving me time today. You said it better than I could have.

“Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.”
                                                                                         Daniel Francoiseprit Auber

My mother said a funny thing the other day. She was frustrated that her sewing machine was acting up, and she said, “I know I threaded it right. I’ve been doing it for centuries.” She’s nearly 90, and it probably does feel to her like she’s been doing some things for centuries.
 
Her machine has been giving her trouble since she had it serviced a month ago, but she sounded defensive, as if I would question her skills. The thought hadn’t occurred to me, and I wondered at first why she felt the need to explain herself.

It made me think about what it must truly be like to be her age, to have people question what she is doing and how she is doing it. Even without Alzheimers, older people become aware that, over time, they are losing the ability to do things they once knew how to do.

As we watch our parents age, it’s easy to get impatient. We experience the changes in terms of how they affect us. They start to repeat themselves. They lose things. They don’t pay their bills. They forget to take their medications. They become, for us, like another one of our children, and we begin to speak to them in the same hassled tone.

We truly forget that it will happen to us one day too. And it will, if we live long enough. There’s no getting around it. Imagine for one minute what it must actually feel like to have your child treat you as if you were the child. To have them remind you of things, explain things to you, drive you places, speak to people on your behalf.

I’m going to try to hold that picture in my head the next time I visit my mom.

This week I’ve been consoling a friend who is having trouble with his teenager. Normally an optimistic guy, his recent late-night emails reveal the depth of his sadness and frustration. I have been there, with both of my kids, and I wrote a lot of desperate emails to friends, too. The writing helps, and the supportive responses help more.

When my daughter was in the hormone-filled middle school years, she sometimes wrote me notes when she was too upset to speak to me. Sometimes they were scribbled on paper and left on my pillow, and sometimes they were emails. It sounds crazy—there we were in the same house—but you know how it is when the emotion runs so high that you can’t stand to be in the same room with each other.

She is the one who always initiated the notes. To be honest, I never thought about writing to her. But it worked. She explained things I didn’t know about the stress she was under at school or about issues with her friends that were spilling over onto her. And, no matter what, she always signed them, “I love you Mama.”

In turn, I was able to write back and tell her how stressed I was as well, and how scared I was for her, but only because of how precious she was to me.

Once we were able to take it down a notch, we often went to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant near us to talk the rest out. It started one day after her dance class when she was still mad at me, but also hungry. So we went to the KFC across the parking lot from her dance studio, and ate and talked for a long time. The conversation went so well that we decided it would be “our place.” We went there often that year and the next, to talk through the hurts and frustrations.

Eventually, we didn’t need to go as often, and later, we actually made up “fights” just so we could go and be together and treat ourselves. We still tease about it.

If you’re in a tug-of-war with your teens, try writing to them for a change, and see how quickly the tone can change from one of blaming each other, to that of understanding. And I promise you, no matter how frustrated or sad or scared you are right now, one day soon you will be so proud of your emerging adults, you’ll be bursting.