Tag Archives: turning points

Turning Points: Guest Post by Stephanie Burgis (+Giveaway)

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? Here is author Stephanie Burgis revealing hers…

GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: Keep reading for a chance to win Stephanie’s newest middle-grade novel Renegade Magic!

Guest post by Stephanie Burgis

When I first sat down to write this entry, I froze up. Too many choices were tumbling around my head. Which turning point do I talk about?

Here’s my first major turning point: the moment in 2001 when I made the absolutely illogical choice to attend Clarion West, a writing workshop I knew I most definitely could not afford. Against the advice of many smart people, I put $2,000 on my credit card and flew into the unknown for six weeks, acting as if I were a real writer whose work deserved the investment—as if my writing could ever be worth a $2,000 expense!

As if. I was physically shaking as I stepped onto that plane from Pittsburgh to Seattle. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I was so terrified that night at our first group dinner, I actually felt like I was floating above my own body as other workshop members asked me respectfully about my writing.

I smiled and I came up with answers somehow, but inside I was thinking: Can’t they tell I’m just an impostor?

Yes, I had known since I was seven years old that I wanted to be a writer—but that was just a crazy fantasy, a pipe dream! Yes, I’d won my acceptance to the competitive workshop—but that was a fluke. It had to be! Couldn’t they tell just by looking at me that I didn’t belong with Real Writers like them?

They couldn’t…and by the end of those six weeks, neither could I. By the end of the workshop, I was calling myself a writer out loud for the first time in my adult life. Those six weeks changed everything for me—not just my writing (which improved so much there), but my whole life, as well.

Less than a year later, I was flying into the unknown again, getting onto another plane—and this time, it wasn’t just for a six-week trip. This time, I was moving to England to live with the amazing man I’d met at Clarion West, one of my favorite writers in the world, and the single reader whose opinion matters most to me.

Even beyond that, I was part of an active critique group I’d joined because of Clarion West. I was writing and submitting stories to professional magazines, coping with rejections and sending those rejected stories right out again. Everything about the way I treated my own writing had gone through a massive shift—I was finally turning my crazy dream into a practical plan, and that made all the difference.

Without having attended Clarion West…well, I would still be a writer. I’ve been a writer ever since I was seven years old. But I wouldn’t be where I am right now, not physically, emotionally, or professionally.

But that’s not the only major turning point for me and my writing. Four years later, I had to choose between finishing my PhD in music history or making another, even scarier commitment to my writing.

I was halfway through my PhD thesis when my funding ran out and I had to take a full-time day job. I knew by then that I didn’t want to be a professor, but after spending three years in a PhD program, it seemed crazy not to finish the PhD, just to put a cap on all that work. Moreover, I come from a family of academics: three of my close relatives have PhDs, and a fourth is in a PhD program now. Education, and degrees, mean a lot in my family.

“No problem!” I told everybody I knew—especially myself.

I just planned to do it all: work the day job during the day, write my fiction at lunchtime, and write my PhD thesis at night. I could finish the thesis within a year, and have that PhD diploma to make me officially a success. Easy-peasy!

Well. Guess how long that plan worked out?

I think it was on the second night of my new schedule that I started crying helplessly when I sat down at my computer, completely overwhelmed. That was when I realized that I’d made a fatal error in my planning: I’d forgotten to schedule any time with my husband, or, in fact, any time to decompress at all.

That was not a livable schedule for me. So, something had to go.

The obvious answer? Fiction writing. After all, although I’d finally published a couple of stories by then, my career certainly hadn’t taken off in any way. No one in the literary world would miss me if I just stopped writing for a year. I could always pick it up again after a year, once the PhD thesis was finished…

…Except that I couldn’t. I genuinely could not do it.

Ever since I was seven years old, I’ve known I wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world. Writing is like eating to me; it’s like breathing.

No one in the literary world would have missed me that year…but I would have missed myself.

Because without writing, I am not myself. It comes right down to that.

Giving up the PhD was hard. It was hard to admit that I was not going to be the super achiever I had planned to be. It was hard to admit to my wonderful supervisor and advisor that their hopes for me were not going to pan out. It was hard to admit to everyone I really wanted to impress that I was not, in fact, as impressive as I had hoped.

But I have never, ever regretted making that choice—any more than I’ve regretted the fact that, a year later, I chose to finally change literary streams, switching from the darker, adult fantasy novels that had won me my first agent to write the book of my heart instead: a lighthearted, funny MG fantasy adventure set in Regency England, which has since been published as Kat, Incorrigible. I’d been writing darker, adult books because I thought that was what a Serious, Important Writer would do—and surely I had to be impressive in some way, right? Right?

Wrong. It turned out that I wasn’t Serious or Important after all…but what I really wanted to write was so much fun, I couldn’t bring myself to care anymore about what other people thought. And that was the real reward, in itself.

In the end, all of my most important turning points have come down to those moments when I had to step forward and make the choice to believe in my own (quirky! implausible! embarrassing!) dreams…

…Which really means believing in myself, the person behind all the social masks, the person I really am: not Serious, not Important, not capital-I Impressive. Quirky. Human. Me.

I don’t know a scarier step to take—but I don’t know a better one, either.

Stephanie Burgis grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, but now she lives in Wales, surrounded by mountains and castles. The first book in her MG Regency fantasy trilogy, KAT, INCORRIGIBLE, was chosen by VOYA as a Top Shelf pick for Middle School Readers. Her second book, RENEGADE MAGIC, was published on April 3, 2012. You can read the first three chapters of both books on her website: www.stephanieburgis.com

GIVEAWAY:
WIN A COPY OF RENEGADE MAGIC!

Stephanie is giving away a *signed* hardcover of her new middle-grade novel Renegade Magic to one lucky winner! You can enter this giveaway either by:

  1. Leaving a comment on this post, or
  2. Filling out this entry form.

And if you do both, you will be entered twice and have two chances to win! (Also, if you tweet about this guest post and/or share it online and tell me so, I will give you a third entry. So share away.)

This giveaway is open INTERNATIONALLY! And it will close on Friday, May 25, at 8pm EST. Good luck!

There’s more in the Turning Points series. Catch up with any posts you may have missed here.

Turning Points: And Now for Something Completely Different by Bethany Griffin (+Giveaway)

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? Here is Bethany Griffin revealing hers…

GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: Keep reading for a chance to win Bethany’s new novel Masque of the Red Death!

Guest post by Bethany Griffin

I once sent my former agent an email with that subject…And Now For Something Completely Different. It didn’t turn out very well. But, since we are discussing turning points, it seemed a good place to start! My first agent signed me for a book called Handcuffs, and she loved that book very much.

It was a book about this horrific place called high school, and this blog post is about the meandering path—as I’m not sure there was one clearly defined turning point—that took me from writing a book set in high school to writing a post-apocalyptic slightly steampunk (or at least speculative historical) retelling of a classic Poe story.

I still love my first book in the whole slightly-cringing doting-parent sort of way. It was like trying out a hairstyle that, while flattering, didn’t really work out. And while I’ve moved on, and grown as an author, there were parts of that book that were so honest, and so me, that they still make me uncomfortable. Like this passage:

That’s how shyness works. You want to talk but you can’t. People look at you with scorn. Being an ice princess is infinitely better, even if some people think you’re a total bitch. A snob. Reserved. Those are choices a person makes, to be reserved, to be quiet, or to be a snob. Shy isn’t a choice.

I will never be able to read that passage and deny that this book is a reflection of middle/high school me, perhaps more so than fiction should be (though the plot is purely 100% fiction). But what was I doing writing a realistic contemporary novel, anyway?

As a kid, I read any and everything, but my first love was fantasy. LOTR, The Prydain Chronicles, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, so many awesome books. In middle school I veered off into reading historical novels for several years, and then something weird and wonderful happened: My mom started giving me all these gothic…romances? By authors like Victoria Holt. I won’t argue that these were great literature, and I think my mom gave them to me because I was reading above grade level and those books never had any sex in them, but they also had all these dark haunted manor houses and moors, and secret passages, and mysterious deaths. In middle school I also read Poe for the first time, and his work obviously had an impact on me, but my love has always been the novel, which may be why I took it upon myself to take the essence of Poe and try to make it into a novel, who knows?

In early high school I read everything ever written by VC Andrews, twice, and everything by Stephen King, and then I restarted with fantasy, science fiction, and every other weird bit of speculative fiction that I could get my hands on.

What this history of my childhood reading habits is meant to show is that if there is a particular type of book that I am well-suited to writing, that type of book is NOT realistic contemporary.

So that crazy weird dark mix of genres that I mentioned in the first paragraph? My post-apocalyptic steampunk reimagining of the world created in Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death? Add in speculative history, and maybe a dash of dystopia (since there is an evil dictator) and maybe that’s what I was meant to write. Or at least what I believe I am best suited to writing. And I guess figuring that out is the turning point that this post is meandering toward.

At the time when I composed the email to my former agent, gave it a lovely Monty Python–inspired title, and hit send, I hadn’t quite figured out what I wanted to write.

But I simply wasn’t that excited about doing another realistic book, so I sent her this other manuscript that I’d written during this dreamy state that I’d drifted through during my first pregnancy. It was a weird little fairy tale that I still sort of love. But, I mean, you can’t really spring a surprise like that on a person who is expecting a book about high school and expect anything good to come from it. My former agent said the voice was fantastic, but the rest was vague (it was) and that if I wanted to write fantasy I’d need to start from scratch and define all the rules of my world before I even started writing.

So, I never mentioned that manuscript again. Not to anyone. Not until right this minute. I didn’t respond to that email, I didn’t ask questions. I mentally shelved it forever.

And I went on to write a realistic contemporary manuscript that was probably as good as my first book, but wasn’t really where my heart was, and it didn’t sell.

At that point I didn’t really feel like a writer at all. Certainly not a successful one. And I had an idea for my next story that was huge and awe-inspiring and daunting, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. But that’s the sort of thing that speaks to me (huge and daunting, very dark and quite disturbing), so I jumped in.

My former agent had left the business, and I was agentless, making it a good time for reinventing myself, though the process, for me, was never that deliberate. I was still me, just a me who had become daring enough to create the sorts of settings and characters and stories that I was more qualified, and possibly uniquely qualified, to write.

I’m sure my current agent, Michael Bourret, will be reading this, since he’s also Nova’s agent, and if I wanted to be all sentimental (I don’t) I could say that signing with him was also a turning point, because he really got what I was trying to write, and I really needed someone to get it. These words from an early email, describing my writing—It’s dark, and sexy, and just the slightest bit wrong, but all in such a delicious way—expressed exactly what I was trying to do!

And I needed that validation.

So, I set out to write something different and unique, and what I came up with was Masque of the Red Death. The voice, the world, the setting, the characters, they were all exactly what I was meant to write. The sort of story that came naturally and felt right, and happily, I think it’s the sort of thing some people will enjoy very much. At least I hope so, because I’m going to leave realistic novels to the authors who have so much more to say in that genre. I’ll stick to weird dark gothic stories, with horror, adventure, and secret passageways. And scary crocodiles.

And just maybe, the occasional love triangle.

Bethany Griffin spends her days coaxing teenagers to read, and her evenings writing books that someone else can coax teenagers to read. She spends too much time reading and on the internet, and not enough time doing anything else, but rationalizes that everything else is overrated, anyway. Masque of the Red Death was just released on April 24, by GreenWillow Books.

Visit her online at www.bethanygriffin.com.

GIVEAWAY:
WIN A SIGNED COPY OF MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

Bethany is giving away a *signed and personalized* hardcover of her new YA novel Masque of the Red Death to one lucky winner! You can enter this giveaway either by:

  1. Leaving a comment on this post, or
  2. Filling out this entry form.

And if you do both, you will be entered twice and have two chances to win! (Also, if you tweet about this guest post and/or share it online and tell me so, I will give you a third entry. So share away.)

This giveaway is open in the US ONLY. Please make sure you have a mailing address in the US if you enter. And the giveaway will close on Wednesday, May 23, at 8pm EST. Good luck!

There’s more in the Turning Points series. Catch up with any posts you may have missed here.

Turning Points: Guest Post by Claire Legrand (+Giveaway)

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The Turning Points blog series is back with more guest posts! I’ve asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? Here is debut author Claire Legrand revealing hers…

GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: Keep reading for a chance to win an ARC of Claire’s debut middle-grade novel The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls!

Guest post by Claire Legrand

My turning point didn’t come when I wrote the book that got me a publishing contract.

It came with the book I had to let go.

First of all, I have to say as a disclaimer that I’ve already told this story in bits and pieces on my blog. But the more I talk about it, the stronger I feel, the more encouraged, the more determined. So, here it is again:

I still remember how the idea for that story—the one I had to let go—came to me. The summer after I graduated from high school, I visited Washington, D.C., with my family. On the flight home, while staring out the window and daydreaming, I had a vision. Calling it that makes me want to roll my eyes, but it happened. An image popped into my head, one I had to explore.

It would later become one of the final scenes in the final book of a trilogy that I have yet to write.

Two years later, halfway through my undergraduate degree, I changed my major and left music behind, at least in a professional sense. Part of the impetus behind this decision was that vision that wouldn’t leave me. The story of it haunted me, begging for existence. I changed my major rather listlessly to English literature. I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself, at that point. But I knew I was going to write this book.

I spent the next two years brainstorming. I scribbled aimlessly in notebooks and wrote fan-fiction for characters that have yet to see the light of day. I composed glossaries and encyclopedic essays, designed clothing, and dreamed up spectacularly elaborate fictional histories, maps, wars.

In 2008, I finally started writing. I still remember the feeling of sitting down that first day and typing the word “Prologue,” my fingers shaking. (Yes, prologue! Haters to the left.)

This was the beginning of the book that would get me published. I just knew it.

Funny how things so seldom work out the way we thought they would.

I finished that first bloated, ridiculous, beautiful first draft about a year and a half later, in the summer of 2009. Immediately, I started querying this book that was approximately 200,000 words too long. (Yes.)

Part of me was very practical about this whole process, this dream of being a published author. I was in graduate school, after all; I would earn my librarian degree, I would have a back-up plan. Not that I would need it. This mammoth book would be my ticket to the big time.

How could I have possibly thought such a thing?

I think a lot of it stemmed from fear. It was like I knew, somewhere deep and unacknowledged in my gut, that this wasn’t going to work like I hoped. That I needed to do more research, take time to learn the craft. I scorned words like “craft” and “process” because I was confident that I somehow knew it all innately. That sounds like arrogance, but really, truly, it was fear. Fear that, if I took that extra time to research and plan and hone, the window of opportunity would close for some reason. Fear that, at any moment, someone would pop up, point and jeer, and say that I wasn’t good enough.

I therefore rushed into things way too fast, before my poor, bursting book was even halfway ready.

I queried, and queried, and queried. My original query letter was two pages long. Two pages long! I didn’t include the word count. I didn’t do anything that I was supposed to. Somehow, miraculously, I still managed to get requests, and my rejections were always kind (bless the hearts of those nice agents who could have laughed me into smithereens, but didn’t). However, they were still rejections. These requests never panned out.

Until this one, about six months after I started querying. They say it only takes one.

They’re right. Well, sort of.

I don’t remember how I stumbled upon Diana Fox, exactly, but somehow I ended up at her blog in November 2009. She was going to attend a conference near me in the spring, and I thought, “How fortuitous!” I sent her my query and the first few pages of my prologue. A couple of weeks later, she requested my full manuscript.

And it was a fortuitous thing that I didn’t say how long my book was in that query, and that Diana requested it anyway. That she didn’t open up the Word document, curse, laugh, and send it back to me with a standard rejection.

In February 2010, I checked in with her. In response, I received the longest, most thoughtful email I had yet received from any agent. She had read my book. She liked many things about it, she said, but lots of things still needed work. Perhaps we could talk about it over coffee at the conference in April? I agreed. I probably danced a happy dance of some kind.

April 2010. I went to the conference, all dressed up and sweating profusely. God, I was nervous. This would be, I was convinced, The Day. Sure, Diana had some reservations about my book, but if she saw me in person, if she heard my passion firsthand, she would change her mind. Maybe we could talk revisions, with the promise of representation afterward. Maybe! Maybe!

But a voice kept whispering in the back of my mind, “You know that’s not going to happen, Claire.”

The voice was right. That didn’t happen.

What did happen was that Diana and I sat on the poolside patio of her hotel and chatted about—well, everything: writing, books, my book in particular, life—for three or four hours. I nodded and smiled and said, “Uh-huh” and admitted numbly that no, I hadn’t read that book . . . or that book . . . or that book. I took notes. More sweating.

She did not offer me representation. She did, however, tell me to stay in touch.

“Stay in touch.” The three most evil words since “It’s not you . . . ”

Later, when I got home, I cried as hard as I did when my parents told me they were getting a divorce, as hard as I did the first time someone broke my heart.

I cried because it had finally hit me: how much work I needed to do, how much time I had wasted, how this was the end. I would have to stick my characters in a drawer somewhere until neglect eradicated them.

I cried because Diana had been so ruthlessly honest, and yet so kind. She loved it, but not enough. I had been so close.

A couple of days later, I started revisions, struggling to incorporate everything Diana had suggested, not pausing for one second to think that rushing into this wasn’t a good idea. Instead, I plowed through, revising and re-writing and re-thinking.

It still wasn’t good enough, though. I wasn’t good enough. Not only was I not living up to my own standards, I was also letting my characters down. I wanted to be good enough for them because the feeling of them in my chest was like solid, warm little knots, made up of me and embedded in me and breathing through me.

But I wasn’t. Every query ultimately led to a rejection. So, I put my first book away—and that right there, that decision—changed everything. I put one book away, and I started another one.

This book was something different. This was not a story requiring glossaries, prologues, and an encyclopedia. It was fun, it was creepy, and it cleansed me. For so long, I had been stuck stubbornly trying to hammer out this story that was too big for me. I had focused on it at the expense of all else—reading, researching the industry I so desperately longed to be a part of, developing relationships with other authors.

My turning point came when I realized all this, and took steps to fix it.

When I said good-bye to the book of my heart and started a new book, a step I had never imagined I could stomach taking.

When I admitted that I had work to do, and did it.

That’s when everything changed.

I finished this book, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, and sent it to Diana, with whom I had stayed in casual contact. She requested it, and by the time all was said and done, she had offered me representation, as had two other agents.

I chose to sign with Diana. A couple of weeks later, we started submitting to editors. A couple of days later, we had our first offer, and we ended up selling the book to my brilliant editor Zareen Jaffery at Simon & Schuster.

I like to think that that first book, the book of my heart, was the hand scrabbling resolutely at the door to the publishing industry. It left behind some blood, some fingernail splinters. But it wedged that door open a smidge, just enough for my Cavendish-shaped foot to slip in and open it fully.

What will happen to that first book? I honestly don’t know. I know that I think about it often. I know that I’ve re-written the prologue, that I’ve re-tooled much of my world-building. I know that, when Diana speaks of it, it is with genuine enthusiasm, and I know what couple she ’ships (an aside: there are many awesome pairings to choose from; I’m just saying). I know that I will return to it, someday.

I also know that, without that first book, without the vision on that plane, I might not have started writing again. You know, I might not even have changed my major. My ambition in life might still be to play in the New York Philharmonic, and I might be spending money on mouthpieces and piccolo trumpets instead of books and printer cartridges and BEA.

We all need that first book, that book of the heart. This isn’t to say that all the books we write aren’t from the heart. But there is always that one book that gets us started, that inspires and propels us. We all need that book—to write it, to slave over it, to get it out of our systems.

Sometimes we even need to let that book go. I know I did.

But whether that book gets published or sits in a drawer, whether it becomes a best-seller or not, whether people love it or hate it, it is the book that made me dream.

And that, the dreaming, is what makes all the difference.

Claire Legrand is a full-time writer and former librarian living in New York City (although she will always be a Texan at heart!). Her first novel, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, will release on August 28, 2012, from Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. Her second novel, The Year of Shadows, is due out August 2013, and her third novel, a re-telling of The Nutcracker called Winterspell, is due out the following year, both from S&S BFYR.

Links: blog | twitter | facebook | goodreads | tumblr

GIVEAWAY:
WIN A COPY OF THE CAVENDISH HOME FOR BOYS AND GIRLS!

Claire is giving away a *signed* ARC (advance reading copy) of her middle-grade debut, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, to one lucky winner! You can enter this giveaway either by:

  1. Leaving a comment on this post, or
  2. Filling out this entry form.

And if you do both, you will be entered twice and have two chances to win! (Also, if you tweet about this guest post and/or share it online and tell me so, I will give you a third entry. So share away.)

This giveaway is open internationally and will close on Monday, May 21, at 8pm EST. Good luck!

There’s more in the Turning Points series. Catch up with any posts you may have missed here.

Turning Points: “How Michael Jackson Helped Me Love Writing Again” Guest Post by Aimee Phan (+Giveaway)

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Dear Readers: Thank you so much for stopping by to take in the Turning Points series here on distraction no. 99, in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? Today’s guest post is the last before I take a short hiatus at a writers colony—but the Turning Points series will return in May, with more inspiring guest posts from more wonderful writers, I promise.

In the meantime, I’d like to leave you with this Turning Point from Aimee Phan, in which she struggles in the face of the recession to find a good reason to keep writing…

When my then boyfriend and I left graduate school in our early twenties, all we wanted to do was write. We had no responsibilities but to take care of ourselves. Our parents were healthy and financially independent. My parents often lent me money during the lean months when my checking account was low. Although it took some convincing, my parents were willing to see me through this writing dream to see if I could actually make it work. Matt’s parents were even more encouraging and supportive of his ambitions to write poetry. Everything about our upper-middle-class suburban background had fooled us into believing that if we worked hard, we could have it all: literary success and a cushy, comfortable first-world lifestyle.

The Reeeducation of Cherry Truong

It is that short, but blissful, bubble of time that most writers probably never have. And for the few who do, they will never appreciate it enough while they are in it, and will always want it back: the absolute freedom to write without much concern about anything else. The beginning felt promising: within a few years, I had sold my first book as part of a two-book deal and landed a tenure-track creative writing position. My boyfriend was awarded a prestigious post-MFA fellowship to pursue his PhD in literature. I realized how incredibly fortunate we were, and felt thankful for the opportunity to have this support to continue to write.

A few years later, still in the bloom of our teaching and writing careers, freshly married and now relocated to the San Francisco bay area and its thriving literary community, we watched as the economy crashed. The condo we had purchased transformed from nest egg into a money pit. We lost two of our beloved cars to random car accidents, which the insurance companies deemed better to total rather than repair, even though we could not afford to replace them. My parents started coping with serious health issues that required my brother and I to rotate regular visits to Southern California. Our bills were mounting, while our savings dwindled. As the great recession took its toll on our neighbors, family, and friends, and as we read about many others who were experiencing even worse financial circumstances, I struggled to find a good reason to continue writing. While I still loved my manuscript and its potential, it felt somehow inappropriate to commit myself to an imaginary world, when the current world I lived in was imploding. Recently laid-off or underemployed people surrounded me in coffee shops, crouched over their laptops, searching the Craigslist want ads or refining their résumés. I felt incredibly guilty—they all wanted hourly jobs to make ends meet and support their families, while I thought nursing my mocha and playing with words was worthwhile.

When I became pregnant, my writing anxiety grew worse. With the impending birth of our first child, and her amazing arrival and adorable companionship afterward, I began feeling like the inadequate parent. While our friends and siblings were able to provide spacious nurseries, safe neighborhoods, and luxurious grass lawns for their progeny, we were squeezing Amelie’s crib into our office space between bookshelves and our writing desk. I would look at our cramped condo with increasing concern: How we were going to provide for her? Didn’t she deserve better than two parents who were still dreaming of their own successes? I started to believe that our choice to become writers was selfish, indulgent, and irresponsible. I already had a day job as a professor, and started concentrating more on these administrative duties, which had been steadily piling up. I encouraged my husband to consider looking for 9-5 jobs so that we could have a bigger income that could keep us afloat in the expensive Bay Area. Essentially, I betrayed everything I held precious about the writing life. I devalued, deprioritized, and marginalized it. And I fooled myself into believing I was growing up.

I wasn’t the only one questioning my livelihood. Our classmates from writing school were doing the same thing. Many had moved on to other jobs to pay for rent and health insurance, or returned to school for law or psychology degrees. On the phone and in our Facebook updates, talk of writing projects dissipated, gradually replaced by more realistic, yet mundane, objectives of real life, such as the best 401K plans or the safest neighborhood schools for our children. It was…absolutely depressing.

But perhaps this was what was supposed to happen. Our twenties was our time to be hopeful, dreamy, ambitious, while our thirties was about realizing the limitations of our abilities, and taking up the responsibilities we owed to our families. My novel felt very far away from me. I wondered if I could ever finish, if it was worth it, if anyone would even care. I worried about my daughter, Amelie, a child of two writers, and how very likely it was that she’d have the same unrealistic expectations her parents currently harbored, and face a life of financial uncertainty.

So what pulled me out of my slump? It wasn’t an amazing work of literature, or a poem, or even a great film or addictive television show. It was a dance move. By the Jackson Five.

Michael Jackson had just died and the television was awash in tributes and flashbacks of his musical glory. One evening, they re-aired clips from the Jackson Five Reunion Motown 25 special, so I left it on the television as background while I finished up some work emails. Michael and his brothers had run onto the stage to perform one of their greatest hits, “Stop, the Love You Save.”

The moment for me occurred near the end of the song: a choreographed series of dance steps between all the brothers that came together in several seconds of pure inspiration and beauty. My heart grew full and I nearly burst into tears. The irresistible combination of their singing, dancing, and beleaguered history transfixed and fascinated me. This, I thought, is why art—literary, visual, performative—is transcendent, and worth all the years of heartache and frustration. I tried to explain to my husband, who had barely been watching, why this was so fantastic. I could even try to tell you (if you go to this youtube video, it occurs in minute 3:50 to the end of the song), but I would not be surprised if its specialness does not translate to anyone else but me. The Jackson Five probably has many other song and dance highlights that surpass this one. But for me, this was my turning point.

This is why I write, in absolute pursuit of that emotional, heart-stopping moment. And I know in my writing, I am not chasing after the lyrical sentence or an evocative expression of a physical act, but instead the intersection of human connection, of both tragedy and hope—when I feel as full and joyous and sad as I did watching Michael reunite with his brothers.

So I found myself reinvesting in my writing and realizing that these years of efforts and hard work are worthwhile and important. Because if Michael and his brothers could achieve that musical epiphany so many years later, then I could certainly try to find my own apex, though admittedly on a much smaller scale. It is worth trying. It is why I started writing in the first place.

Every year that passes, I know it will be harder to write. There are too many moments when it is simply easier to just close the laptop and concentrate on the solid tasks that I know will make my daughter happy, give us more security, and assure us a place to live and an income to depend on. Our financial troubles and concerns for the future have not gone away, but we’ve grown more comfortable with its unpredictability. We can prepare, without blaming our youthful choices. I only have to look around me now to realize that the harder it gets, the more important it becomes to prioritize my writing. No one else is going to do that for me.

Recently, Amelie has begun inventing narratives. She will open a book—any book, whether it’s a cookbook in the kitchen or one of Matt’s theory books lying in the car, and in her most articulate, teacherly imitation, she will mash up the stories she remembers us reading to her the previous night. Her memory and imagination astonish me. She is entertaining herself with these made-up, rather nonsensical, deconstructed tales. She takes delight in the creation, just as we probably had when we were small children.

I do not know what Amelie will choose to be when she grows up. But I cannot in good conscience ever discourage her from wanting to create something beautiful, not when her mother is still trying to accomplish the same goal.

—Aimee Phan

Aimee Phan is the author of the forthcoming novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which will be published tomorrow, March 13, by St. Martin’s Press. She is also the author of the story collection We Should Never Meet. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and The Oregonian, among others. She teaches at California College of the Arts.

Visit Aimee at www.aimeephan.com. 

Follow @aimeephan on Twitter and visit her on Facebook.

EDITED MARCH 20: WINNER OF A SIGNED COPY OF THE REEDUCATION OF CHERRY TRUONG ANNOUNCED! 

The Reeeducation of Cherry Truong

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway via the entry form—and thank you to the author for donating the prize! I’m happy to announce the winner:

Lisa Kalner Williams won a signed copy of Aimee Phan’s debut novel, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong! Congrats! I’ll email the winner to ask for a mailing address. Thank you again to everyone who entered!

And thank you again, blog readers, for reading the Turning Points series. If you missed any of the guest blogs, you’ll find them listed below—and come back for more writers’ Turning Points starting again in May!

Here are the posts in the series:

Series images by Robert Roxby.

Turning Points: Guest Post by Andrea Cremer (+Giveaway)

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? I’m honored and excited to host their stories. Read on as Andrea Cremer reveals the accident that led her to writing her first novel, and the choice she had to make to keep writing more…

My turning point has been both sudden and slow. It began with a horse and ended by turning everything in my life upside down.

I’ve always been a writer. Since I first could hold a crayon I’ve drawn pictures and created stories about those pictures. The picture to written story ratio reversed as the years went by, but the creation of worlds and characters never ceased.

Despite my love of writing, I didn’t see a career as an author as a viable option. To strive to be a writer was akin to hitchhiking to New York in the hopes of making it on Broadway. Sticking with the sensible road, I pursued graduate education until there was none left to pursue and set out into the working world with a Ph.D. in early modern history. I landed a dream job at Macalester College, a wonderful liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota. Work was both close to my family and introduced me to an abundance of smart colleagues and incredible students.

Though I was thrilled at the job and enjoying the start of my ‘real’ adult life following so many years of studenthood, the summer after I finished my first year of teaching I felt that something had been missed. Having given over so much time to study, I decided that some time off was in order and went in search of the those things that I’d left behind when I dedicated my life to the study of history almost exclusively.

Like many girls (and boys) I was obsessed with any and all things horse, and benefited from summers working on a local horse ranch. Once I went to college both time and money kept me from riding. With a job secured and the summer free I thought it no better time than to return to my love of horseback riding.

In June 2008 I had my horse all tacked up and ready to go on our first trail ride. As I led him from the stable, he was startled by another horse, jumped, and came down on top of my right foot. With two broken bones in my foot, the summer of riding came to an end before it began.

Not only would I not be riding, I had doctor’s orders to stay off my foot for the entire summer. My days would be spent on the couch, rather than on the trail.

I consoled myself for a time with my go-to comfort activity—watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But even Buffy couldn’t offer a full reprieve from my sense of a summer lost. In Minnesota, where winter goes on forever, a lost summer is something to truly grieve.

Wanting to salvage my days before school began again I wracked my brain for something that would give me a sense of accomplishment. Something couch friendly. As I mulled over the possibilities, a long-time dream came to mind. I’d always wanted to write a novel. My journals, notebooks, and computer hard drive were already filled with scenes, thoughts, and scribbles accumulated over the course of my life, but I’d never given myself the space or time to write a book from start to finish.

Still on the couch, but armed with my laptop, I began to write.

That was the beginning of my turning point.

My love of writing was not only confirmed, it was transformed: into an obsession. I had never felt so alive, or complete, as when I put words to the page. The experience was thrilling and terrifying. It reminded me of falling in love—I was afraid to let go of the experience, thinking I might never capture the magic again and at the same time the thought of trying to make writing more than a sideshow in the carnival that was my working and personal life seemed an impossible task.

But I couldn’t stop writing.

And I began to live a double life. Professor by day, writer by night (and morning, and any time I could snatch for myself). In addition to writing, I did research. I  consumed every piece of information I could about the publishing industry. I taught myself about literary agents and query letters. And after writing two “practice” novels, I wrote Nightshade. And I knew I’d reached the point where I wanted to take my work into the world.

I began to query.

There were rejections.

I continued to query.

My (would soon be) agent requested the manuscript.

I waited.

My (almost) agent offered to represent me.

I signed with the agency.

We revised the manuscript.

Nightshade went on submission.

Nightshade

Michael Green purchased Nightshade in August 2009, a little more than a year from the accident that started it all.

This is halfway through my turning point.

By phone and email I met my editor, Jill Santopolo, who turned out to be (and still is) one of the most talented and amazing people I’ve ever met. Not only did Jill understand my writing, she understood how to make it better.

I learned much more about writing and revising through working with Jill. Nightshade went into copyedits. I wrote Wolfsbane and began Bloodrose while Nightshade was in the run-up to release.

Nightshade was published in October 2010 and hit the NYT bestseller list. I cried and danced. I kept writing. I kept teaching.

Wolfsbane

Writing and teaching managed to be both complementary to and at odds with one another. My students always inspired and energized me, but the time of preparation, instruction, office hours, recommendations, and meetings sapped the time I needed to write. When I’m drafting a novel, I want to immerse myself in it—an aspect of my process that required compromise in the face of my “real” job obligations.

Wolfsbane debuted on the NYT list. I finished writing Bloodrose and embarked on multiple new projects. I requested and received a reduction in my teaching load to part-time. For a year I thought I could do it all.

I discovered I could not.

The time and energy required not only by writing, but also in promotion, answering email, touring, was draining my enthusiasm for teaching. Not because I didn’t love being in the classroom, but simply because I was exhausted. I’d been stretched thin by my schedule and while those sacrifices were reasonable when I was trying to get my foot in the publishing door, I seemed to have landed in a room of my own and I wanted to live in it instead of feeling like a sub-letter.

I had a choice to make. To maintain my academic career and continue to write would mean I’d have to scale back my life as an author by a long-shot. I’d have to travel less and write fewer books. I would have to take time off from writing to focus on my academic work.

Bloodrose

I could have made that choice, but my turning point had set me on another path. What I wanted was to be a full-time writer. A writer who could lose herself in her books without apology. Admitting that the writing life was the one I wanted was as frightening as beginning to write my first novel. It meant leaving a life of comfort and security, for one that is more unpredictable. It meant that my Ph.D. would still be put to use, but in an unconventional way that might draw questioning gazes from more than a few people.

But my life had turned, opening a new road that I wanted to walk. Turning back would only feel like defeat.

I write this piece amid the last semester I’ll teach at Macalester. When classes end, I’ll pack my bags and head to New York to chase a dream. And life will begin again, until the next turning point.

—Andrea Cremer

Andrea Cremer

Andrea Cremer lives in Minnesota and teaches history at Macalester College in St. Paul. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling Nightshade series. She wants you to know that history is not boring and dreams are best lived.

Visit Andrea at www.andreacremer.com.

Follow @andreacremer on Twitter.

EDITED MARCH 17: WINNER OF A SIGNED COPY OF BLOODROSE ANNOUNCED…

Bloodrose

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway via the entry form—and thank you to the author for donating the prize! I’m happy to announce the winner:

Kel Vorhis won a signed copy of Bloodrose! Congrats! I’ll email the winner to ask for a mailing address. Thank you again to everyone who entered!

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

Series images by Robert Roxby.

Turning Points: Guest Post by Jaclyn Dolamore (+Giveaway)

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? I’m honored and excited to host their stories. Read on as Jaclyn Dolamore talks about making things that seem impossible happen…

Sitting down to write a blog post like this, you have to review your whole life in brief, looking for where the turning point actually was. Usually I think of it as the moment I sold Magic Under Glass. Well, the moment my agent sold Magic Under Glass. Which is kind of the problem with that as a turning point. It was a huge turning point for my life and I could tell you all about how I sent 100 queries and rewrote the book twice and found critique partners and read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers and all the work that led up to it.

But when I really think about it, turning points happen first in the mind. Once in a while, amazing opportunities and life changes fall into people’s laps. But usually they don’t. Usually life is a bit of a rut. This is what I do, this is where I live. If you’re lucky, you’re exactly where you want to be.

In 2005 I was not where I wanted to be at all. I was young. But not so very young that it didn’t feel like something better should be happening. Some of my friends were at great colleges, and one of them was a professional comic book artist, while I was directionless. I wanted to be a writer in theory, but I wasn’t doing the work at all. Being able to BE a writer, to do what I loved and get paid for it, felt impossibly far away. I knew that every year, agents and publishers received KAJILLIONS of manuscripts and they only accepted a few. I was one of those kids who got a lot of attention from adults growing up, because I could write and draw and speak articulately and use big words. Life is often hard for those kids when they grow up. “Hey, you’re a kid who isn’t stupid!” is no longer enough to make you feel like a winner. You have to actually DO something. And deep down, I wasn’t sure I could do it, I guess. I was afraid of failure, although it wasn’t a very conscious fear. It just felt like a resistance to meaningful action.

Before you can get to the point where your life actually changes, I think you have to actually believe it can change. And maybe that is the hardest part sometimes. If you don’t actually believe your life can change, why do anything about it? At first it feels like an uphill battle. You click “send” on a few e-queries and sit there nursing nausea and a sense of hopelessness. It feels like there is SO MUCH between you, a writer sending your first query, and a published writer with books on the shelf. Getting a request for pages back on my first batch of queries helped. I started to treat writing like it was my job. Writing became my default task for my days off. No reading or TV-watching or anything else was to be done until I sat in front of a document for a couple of hours, whether I wrote a few sentences or 3,000 words. But I still sometimes had trouble imagining it happening. REALLY happening. There were no guarantees it would ever happen. Just a lot of work, a few years of it, while I made more and more writer friends and saw more of them sell books, and every time they sold their debuts, it felt a little more like I could sell mine too, but it also brought a huge wave of doubt that maybe I just wasn’t quite good enough, that maybe being “the smartest two-year-old in Oviedo, Florida!” would have turned out to be my life’s peak.

Selling Magic Under Glass was a huge accomplishment, but even then I was stuck in the rut. I was born and raised in central Florida, but I never liked the place. My family took us on a lot of road trips. I was enthralled with mountains. At the low point of my young retail days I was standing alone in the lingerie department of Sears where I worked and I started thinking of mountains and how I hadn’t seen them in two years and I just went into the stock room and cried. I felt so trapped and miserable. If I could just afford to take a trip to the mountains, I thought, I could keep living, but as it is, what the HELL AM I DOING?

I had no idea how to get there. It would take a lot of money and a lot of steps. I was hugely overwhelmed.

Between the Sea and Sky

This time, at least, I had learned a little bit of a lesson from Magic Under Glass. I knew that things that seemed really impossible could happen. And I knew that the way to make them happen was to just believe they were possible and start behaving as such even if you had NO clue how to get there at the moment. So I started spending hours investigating different towns and their available housing stock. I checked out books from the library about how to buy a house to learn about the process. I used some of my advance money to take a trip to Maryland to check it out. My partner grew up in Baltimore and he thought Maryland would be a great place for us. I loved it there from the start. The next year we took a trip to Pennsylvania to check out some other areas. “Next time we visit we’ll have a Realtor,” I said, even though I still didn’t have anywhere near the kind of money to buy a house.

I was right. The price of houses continued to fall, and meanwhile I sold my next book for enough money for a down payment on a house. That makes it sound so easy. But…let me rephrase. Enough money for SOME kind of house. I still struggled constantly with my fears about the process—could I get a loan, could we actually find a house in our price range that we loved enough to make that kind of commitment, could we really afford it with all the associated costs that were hard to calculate until you were kind of IN IT, from hiring movers to paying heating bills? We had already accepted that we had to look around Hagerstown, which was 70 miles from DC and Baltimore. I didn’t really mind that, it wasn’t like we had day jobs in the city and it is darn pretty in Washington County. But we were still looking in a pretty low bracket. After looking at a baker’s dozen of houses in one day, houses I had been watching for weeks or months on real estate websites, houses that APPEARED to be the best choices around, I felt sick and I cried. I didn’t want any of them.

Magic Under Stone

Luckily my partner tends to have a clearer head when I’m losing it. He really loved a Victorian house, the last one we’d seen. It had pretty much everything on our wishlist. It was the ONLY house that had almost everything on our wishlist. We looked at it again, and after having a night of sleep to clear my own head, I fell in love with it too. We made an offer. The loan worked out. I’m sitting in that house right now writing this. I love it even more now that it’s mine.

So now I have the career I want and the house, too. I can still hardly believe it. But there are still unfulfilled dreams. Things I worry and worry over because I don’t know how they will happen. But it’s starting to get easier. At least I know where to start. I just have to believe it’s possible.

—Jaclyn Dolamore

Jaclyn Dolamore is the author of Magic Under Glass, Between the Sea and Sky, and Magic Under Stone. She spent her childhood reading as many books as she could lug home from the library and playing elaborate pretend games with her sister. She has a passion for history, thrift stores, vintage dresses, David Bowie, drawing, and organic food.

Visit Jaclyn online at www.jaclyndolamore.com.

Follow @jackiedolamore on Twitter.

EDITED MARCH 17: WINNER OF A SIGNED COPY OF ONE OF JACLYN DOLAMORE’S BOOKS ANNOUNCED…

Between the Sea and SkyMagic Under Stone

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway via the entry form—and thank you to the author for donating the prize! I’m happy to announce the winner:

Megan Ratliff won a signed copy of the book of her choice—and she picked Magic Under Glass! Congrats! I’ll email the winner to ask for a mailing address. Thank you again to everyone who entered!

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.

Turning Points: Putting Book Reviews in Perspective by Kate Messner

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? I’m honored and excited to host their stories. Read on as Kate Messner tells how she came to gain perspective on bad reviews…

Book reviews aren’t personal. They are people’s opinions about books. And people are allowed to have opinions that differ from ours. People are allowed to hate books that we love. In fact, they are allowed to hate books that we wrote and poured our souls into. Which…makes those book reviews feel…well…personal. Even when they’re not.

Figuring this out, and putting negative reviews into healthy perspective, was a turning point for me as a writer one morning in 2007.

Spitfire

I woke up very, very early, poured myself a cup of coffee, and skipped down to my computer. One of the area newspapers was publishing one of the very first reviews of my very first book, Spitfire, a Revolutionary War novel published by a small regional press. The features editor had emailed me earlier that week to let me know it was running, and she asked for a jpeg of the cover and a nice, high resolution author photo that they could run along with the review. “Wow!” I thought. “They must have loved it.”

Only they didn’t.

When I found the review early that morning, my heart sank all the way down to my feet. It wasn’t just critical; it was scathing.

The review started with two or three paragraphs of fairly detailed plot summary. The next paragraph began, “As literature, this book is lacking,” and went on to blast everything from the characterization to plot to punctuation. Or at least it felt that way.

I cried.

And then I wrote a teary email to a more experienced writer-friend, who responded in two minutes, “Oh, honey… I am so sorry. I’m up and not busy. Call me.” I dialed her number after she’d had a chance to read the review, and she reminded me that this was, indeed, just one person’s opinion, that she’d loved my book, and that perhaps many people wouldn’t read beyond those wordy plot summary paragraphs anyway. The person who wrote the review, she noticed, was someone who had also written kids’ books, and her books were quite different from mine. Probably, my friend said, she just has a different idea of what a children’s book ought to be.

I hung up feeling thankful to my friend but still twisty and small enough inside to Google the name of the book reviewer. Who was this person who had ruined my day? She was indeed a fellow writer, though I hadn’t read any of her books. A couple were out of print, a fact which I am ashamed to admit made me happy for a few seconds. Until I clicked on a different link with her name attached.

It was an online magazine article she’d written about her decades-long battle with depression. It was one of the bravest, most beautiful things I’d ever read. She described one of her children’s birthdays, when she couldn’t get the cake to turn out the way she wanted, and despite her child reassuring her that it was fine, threw it to the kitchen floor in tears in front of her. The piece was stunning, and it made my heart ache. And all of a sudden, that review mattered a whole lot less.

People read books through all kinds of lenses, I realized. And though the reviewer’s article on depression had nothing to do with her thoughts on my book, it reminded me that each reviewer is just a person. Just one. That’s all. A person like me, who reads books and loves them or doesn’t, a person who loves their kids like I love mine, and who probably lets the rice burn in the bottom of the pan sometimes.

The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z.

I was reminded of this again when I got a really lovely package of letters from a teacher whose classroom I’d visited to talk about The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. Most were about how much they’d enjoyed the book. And then there was Patrick:

I am sorry, but I didn’t really like your new book, The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. I like books with a lot of action, and I felt there wasn’t enough in The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. I think you could make it more exciting by adding sectionals and have Gianna win by a centimeter or something like that. It’s just not my type of book. But if it was, I would have thought it was a great one.

Merry Christmas,

~Patrick

I have kept this letter on my desk ever since, and when I get a review that’s not glowing, I simply imagine that School Library Journal or Kirkus reviewer adding one more line, in Patrick’s voice.

I’m sorry. It’s just not my type of book. But if it was, I would have thought it was a great one.

Eye of the Storm

p.s. I’m thankful to Patrick for another reason. His letter got me thinking about writing a thriller. And this spring, I’ll have not one but two Patrick-style books in stores. My futuristic weather thriller, Eye of the Storm, releases from Walker-Bloomsbury March 13th and on June 1st, Patrick will be able to read Capture the Flag, the first in my new mystery series with Scholastic. Both feature action, mystery, and fast-paced chase scenes written especially with the Patricks of the world in mind.

Capture the Flag

—Kate Messner

Kate Messner is the award-winning author of more than a dozen current and forthcoming books for children and teens, including E.B. White Read Aloud Award winner THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z. (Walker-Bloomsbury), the popular MARTY MCGUIRE series with Scholastic, OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW, an ALSC and NY Times Notable Children’s Book of 2011, and the forthcoming EYE OF THE STORM. A former middle school English teacher, Kate is a frequent conference presenter and loves visiting classrooms and libraries in person and via Skype to talk about reading and writing with kids.

Learn more at her website: www.katemessner.com.

Follow @KateMessner on Twitter.

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.

Turning Points: Guest Post by Jordyn Turney

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? I’m honored and excited to host their stories. Read on as Jordyn Turney reveals how she came to take her writing seriously, even if no one else did…

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. I really don’t. Stories have always been a part of my life and from the beginning I knew I wanted to make them. We were the rare family that had a home computer in the early ’90s and my dad teaching me to save documents when I was still in the single-digit ages is one of my most vivid memories. By the time I was sixteen I’d written two painfully short (and really, just painful) novels and countless other horrible poems and less-horrible short stories. I hadn’t begun querying, but I was reading Miss Snark, Nathan Bransford, and every other publishing-industry blog I could find. I took every bit of writing advice I could find, especially from published authors, and hadn’t quite figured out how to separate what works from what doesn’t. I didn’t fully realize that what worked for others wouldn’t work for me.

One thing that everything I was reading seemed to agree on was that you needed a critique partner or group. The closest I had to either of those things was a best friend who wrote primarily fan fiction and didn’t like YA. It was nice that she wrote, sort of, but not exactly helpful.

And then, mostly by accident, I found the number to a local writers’ group. A week later, armed with a pen, notebook, and my most recent short story, I met my group. Some of them had written memoirs and were self-published; others wrote short fiction and were either pursuing publication or writing purely for hobby. They were all a good thirty to fifty years older than me, which first intimidated me and then, when I realized it seemed I knew more about publishing than they did, confused me. None of them wrote in my genre, YA, but that was alright. Critique was critique and I desperately needed to improve.

Every week we met at the bookstore, bringing pieces to read if we had them. Any given week there was between five and ten of us, all with pens and notebooks to take whatever notes the others gave us. For a while I brought short stories, and then I started another novel. This one was different than the previous two. It was harder to write. It was more personal, closer to the type of novel I wanted to be writing. But I was struggling. The story, told from the alternating POVs of two sisters, wasn’t coming together how I wanted. The characters weren’t either. In trying to make them unique and give them distinct voices, I couldn’t quite get away from making the sisters horrible stereotypes: the older, smarter, sort of bitter sister and the younger, more fun, entirely superficial one. At the time I couldn’t pinpoint the problems quite so well; all I knew was that the words I was writing weren’t working, something indefinable was wrong with the story, and it needed help.

I took it to my writing group, nervous about what they might think. It was different from anything that the rest of them wrote, and even different from most of the stories I’d brought to them. So I read the first two chapters—one from each sister’s viewpoint—and waited, anxious.

And…

They liked it. No, that’s not quite right: they loved it. It was funny, they said. I’d really captured the teen voice, they said. They were amazed that I was writing a novel. Their critiques were small things, like dialogue tics. They were line edits, not rewrites or major revisions. They were similar to the notes I got on my short stories, which was a relief.

At home I looked over my novel and there was still something wrong. Cleaning up the characters’ dialogue didn’t fix the problem that I still couldn’t define, and I didn’t understand why my critique group couldn’t see it. Something was wrong.

I stopped looking forward to the writing group meetings. I went back to working on the novel on my own and brought short stories, some of them ones I’d written months earlier, to the group. Stories they liked, but didn’t have any concrete critiques about, only vague thoughts and more line edits. And over the weeks this thought grew in my mind, this annoyance with the whole process of printing things and reading them and waiting for critique that never really came. I didn’t see the point. It was nice to have people like my writing, but I didn’t feel like my writing was good enough for people to really like yet and besides, this was a critique group: they were supposed to tell me what was wrong with my words, not what was right with them.

It annoyed me and that annoyance grew into this nagging thing that never let me alone. If the ladies in my group were to be believed, I was a great writer. And I couldn’t be a great writer, because even I could see that my writing wasn’t that good. I didn’t understand plots. I couldn’t outline. My characters were brightly painted, but flat and cardboard-like. I was reaching, but not quite far enough. I was trying, but things weren’t coming together. I was climbing.

I continued going to the writing group months after that initial nagging annoyance, figuring that even a lackluster group was better than no group at all. I eventually brought more chapters of the novel, and hoped someone would know what was wrong with it, but it was as if nobody realized there was anything wrong with it. They all loved it, and everything else I wrote, which perplexed me until, finally, as one of the women told me how fortunate I was to have started writing so young, something clicked in my mind.

And that something was this: I was not a great writer. I was a young writer—a teenager in a room full of women who had lived a lifetime—and they were amazed at that. They were all very nice, well-meaning ladies, but they were too impressed by the fact that I was sixteen and writing a novel to be serious about it. They were handling me with kid gloves because, well, I was a kid.

But it wasn’t helpful. I’d wanted to get better and it wasn’t happening. The fact that they were so impressed made it difficult to get honest feedback instead of being patted on the head for my efforts. What I wanted—what I needed—was that honesty. I finally decided, one of those days standing outside of the bookstore as I waited for my mom to pick me up, that I wouldn’t go back. I wasn’t getting anything out of it. The only way I was going to get better was by looking at my writing and being really, brutally honest about it. I decided that I was going to take my writing seriously even if nobody else did. I could be a great young writer or I could, maybe, someday, be a good writer. Period. No age limit. And I wanted to be a good writer.

So I stopped going to the writing group that wasn’t helping and I started to get serious. I learned how to edit. I learned how to plan, even if I still couldn’t outline. I forced myself to write plots and figured out how to give my characters dimension. I rewrote. I rewrote again. I learned how to make it through writer’s block and then, on the other side, how to give up on something that wasn’t working. I found out what advice worked for me and what didn’t. And though I never found another writing group, I found other writers who took me and my writing seriously, whose critiques and suggestions were so harsh they made me want to scream, but so honest and true that I couldn’t ignore them.

I got better.

I’m 22 now and after a handful of novels in-between, I’ve brought back the original idea of that writing-group novel as an entirely new book. I didn’t know how to write it then; I wasn’t good enough to write a dual-POV story or create characters within that story who were believable and realistic. It took years to get here and I’m still climbing, still reaching, but I think probably I always will be. And I don’t have a book published, or a book deal, or even an agent, though I want those things so much. But I look at my work and I’m proud of it, and I think that those things I want so desperately will come. Because I am a good writer. Period. No age limit.

—Jordyn Turney

Jordyn Turney is a book blogger and aspiring YA author who tweets constantly, drinks too much iced tea, and loves television. Since the age of 16 she’s been published in the essay anthology Red: Teenage Girls Write on What Fires Up Their Lives, as well as the Huffington Post.

Visit Jordyn’s blog “Ten Cent Notes” at tencentnotes.blogspot.com.

Follow @jordynface on Twitter.

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.

“The Turning Point, or I Never Saw a Playwright Make Out with a Girl in a Parking Lot” by Timothy Braun

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? I’m honored and excited to host their stories. Read on as Timothy Braun reveals how he found a “good enough” reason to write…

A turning point in my writing came before I started taking my writing seriously. I was a freshman at Ball State University, the only school that would take me, and for my first semester I only wanted to take deathly cool classes, because I assumed I would never make it to the end of college, or if I did it would take a decade, so I decided to have a cool time. The classes I took that semester were Mythology, 20th Century American History (was always a history buff), Acting, Biology (I got to chop things up and see how they work), and Fencing. No, not “stealing,” sword fighting. At the age of eighteen, appearance was important to me and I wanted to make certain people see me as a smart and cool rapscallion, even if I was a loser.

In high school I had “acted” in a few plays, and when I say “acted” I’m talking about yelling across a music pit at overprotective parents. This was fun, something I could do with my friends. We smoked a lot, drank a little, and made out with girls in a high school parking lot behind the auditorium. I thought that was a good enough reason to be an artist and I figured college “acting” would be similar. I was wrong. My acting teacher was an old, gay man from Detroit, who lost his teeth from drinking too much sugar. He gave me a book during my second week of classes called An Actor Prepares. It had a pink cover, the most uncool cover there could be, and was written by a Russian guy. My teacher told me not to read the whole book, knowing that I wouldn’t. He directed me to a few chapters where the author was playing a black man on stage. The author smeared his face with chocolate cake to become something he wasn’t, at least on the surface, and could never grasp the character. That is until he tripped on stage and stopped trying to be something else and started saying his lines and playing his character in a moment of panic from his guts, his heart, from himself. My teacher thought I would like the story. He said I was a bad actor, but I was good at telling stories and I should consider writing plays. At that time I could never think of a good enough reason to be a writer. I never saw a playwright make out with a girl in a parking lot.

Years later I was dating a girl and I did start writing plays, really bad ones, plays where I tried my damndest to be someone I wasn’t, plays about cool and dangerous characters. I wrote plays about boxers (I can’t take a punch), and ghosts (I’m not dead, yet), and all my titles I stole from albums by The Pixies, but nothing I wrote was sincere. It was all hollow and cosmetic and skin-deep. I used to wear a black motorcycle jacket when I wrote that was a size too big and I looked like a fraud. Then, my girl of two years broke up with me. It hurt. It hurt for three days. The kind of hurt where you sit in bed and shake. On the third night I wrote a play about our relationship and when I wrote I didn’t wear the leather jacket. The dialogue wasn’t hip, and it wasn’t cool. The play was simple and how I saw things in that moment. In it a young man boarded a train for nowhere, leaving a girl behind who never loved him. With no sleep I printed the script and I showed it to my old toothless theatre teacher. I sat in his office as he read, and he told me this was my best play yet, and asked me if I thought about being a playwright.

“For a living?” I asked.

“No. You don’t write plays for a living. Just ‘being’ a playwright.”

“Weird,” I thought. “But I’ll think about it.”

I got up, went home, lay down without shaking, and went to sleep for a few hours. When I woke up I started contacting graduate schools. I wasn’t certain how to write, I had no technique, and knew I had to talk with more people, more professors, about all this writing business. I think back to that time when my teacher gave me Stanislavski to read and understand that acting, art, writing, is about being truthful with yourself and being vulnerable to your audience. I wear a gray cotton-blend jacket now. I got it at The Gap. On sale. And it fits nicely. I often tell my students that writing comes from between the lungs, not the ears.

And that is a good enough reason to write.

—Timothy Braun

Timothy Braun is a writer from Austin, Texas. You can follow him on Twitter at @timothybraun42 or on Facebook.

To learn more visit timothybraun.com.

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.

Turning Points: The Laughter of Sanity by Camille DeAngelis (+Giveaway)

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? I’m honored and excited to host their stories. Read on as Camille DeAngelis reveals how she gave up on the publishing conflicts and ambitions she used to think were so important… and found sanity…

I believe in bibliomancy. It means something because I believe it means something. At 2AM on New Year’s Day I took down a dusty hardback copy of Meditations—by Marcus Aurelius, that wisest of emperors—closed my eyes, and flipped to a page.

Keep yourself simple, good, pure, serious, free from affectation, a friend of justice, a worshiper of the gods, kind, affectionate, strenuous in all right acts. Strive to advance toward what philosophy tried to make you. Reverence the gods, and help men. Life is short.

Sound advice (excepting those bits about revering the gods), is it not? The emperor goes on to suggest his readers disregard the lure of “empty fame.” Aha! This is precisely what I wanted to talk to you about. This is why I believe in bibliomancy.

Mary Modern

There are, of course, many turning points in the life of a writer. I could tell you how I talked endlessly about writing a novel before September 11th, and how I watched the towers burning from my friend Angela’s dorm room; and how I sat sobbing on the floor of a south-bound Amtrak train that night, wondering how many people who’d died had been working on novels during their lunch breaks. That was the day I stopped talking.

I could also tell you about my practice novel, and how, well into a second interminable round of reject-o-rama, my dad pointed out a USA Today interview with Big Fish author Daniel Wallace, who spoke frankly of his drawerful of unpublished novels. That article gave me the heart to try again. But I’ve already written about these turning points on my blog, and in the case of my 9/11 epiphany, well—you’ve just heard it.

This turning point has to do with a different sort of book magic. Back in April I met a girl in India who gave me a ride on the back of her motorbike. Long TMI story short, I was feeling frustrated about something, and told her about it. My new friend advised me to relax, to stop seeing petty inconveniences as capital-P problems. She told me that Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now was changing her life.

Now, I can guess what some of you are thinking. What are you doing, Camille, peddling some new-age hooey on Nova’s blog instead of giving us some useful writerly tidbits?!

All right. We’ll start here: ruminate for a moment on the phrase “struggling writer.”

At first you think: well, DUH, of course it’s been a struggle! There have only ever been two choices, to struggle or to give up, and giving up is unthinkable. Therefore you struggle: to glue your tookus to the chair, to come up with stories worth telling; to see the story through, to perform round after round of red-pen surgery, to find someone to believe in you, and then to find a team of bookworms tucked away in some Midtown skyscraper who’ll believe in you too. Struggle and struggle and struggle some more. You can call it perseverance, but that’s just struggle in a suit and tie.

And just when you think the struggle is over: blurbs, not enough blurbs, no blurbs, nightmares of a gaping black hole on the back cover. Pre-pub reviews. Spoilers. Snark. Marketing yourself. Social media blah blah blah. Sales figures. All the important newspapers that could have reviewed you, and didn’t. A small handful of faithful friends at your reading, asking you questions as if they don’t know you just to make it look like you have a real audience. One- or two-star Amazon reviews (marked “helpful”—!) in which the reviewer can’t even spell your name correctly. Envelopes you can’t bring yourself to open because you know there’s a royalty statement inside. Losing your editor. Losing your publisher. Remainders.

I used to think all this “struggle” was inevitable. Every day I got to live in worlds I’d furnished myself, and I paid for that blessing with intermittent bouts of doubt and loathing (maybe I’m a two-trick pony. Maybe I should pack it in and apply for a job at Trader Joe’s), not to mention some hilariously irrational jealousy (why, why, WHY is EVERYBODY ON THE PLANET reading those COMPLETELY INANE VAMPIRE NOVELS?!?!).

Until I read Eckhart Tolle, I didn’t know I didn’t have to live like this. Many years ago, when Tolle was a graduate student in London, he found himself on the Tube on his way to school one morning sitting opposite a woman who was talking to herself. The train was crowded, but of course nobody wanted to sit anywhere near her. “And I said to her, who do you think you are? How could you treat me this way? How could you betray my trust?…” Tolle became interested. She was obviously mentally ill, but where was she headed? How could she be an ordinary commuter? Surely no one would hire somebody in her condition. When the train reached his stop and the woman got off too (still talking), he resolved to follow her as long as she was headed in his general direction. Block after block he followed her—and, curiously enough, she was taking the same route he would ordinarily walk to get to his school.

You see where this is going. Still ranting to herself, she approached the very building where Tolle was doing his graduate work, and went inside. Tolle lost her in a crowd. He walked into the men’s room and sidled up to the urinal, still pondering. I hope I don’t end up like her, he thought. Except he didn’t only think it. Another man at the urinal glanced up at him, hurriedly zipped up, and quit the restroom. Oh no! he thought. I’m already like her!

That’s when he realized that we are ALL talking to ourselves. The only difference between we “sane” people and that “crazy” woman is that she’s doing it aloud. Tolle looked at himself in the mirror, and began to laugh. To anyone else, he wrote, it would have seemed like the laughter of a madman—but it was truly the laughter of sanity.

This, Tolle points out, is the great self-inflicted tragedy of our existence: we are imprisoned in our minds. We enumerate our failures, sulking inside our heads like the awful brats those VHS home movies prove we once were. We take ourselves and our “problems” SO SERIOUSLY. The ego is an ugly, fragile little demon that gorges itself on our eternal discontent. Again and again we relive old traumas, bolster grudges, rehearse what we should have said, revel in our rightness. Nobody cares. Everyone treats us so unfairly. We measure ourselves against the achievements and the smiling, shiny exteriors of others, and we always, always fall short. Basically, life is shit.

Except that it isn’t. Like a ritual that works because you believe it will, a problem is only a problem when you label it as such. A struggle, by definition, perpetuates itself. This isn’t just semantics, people. When that quiet, unflappable part of you—the you outside of ego—detaches itself from the endless stream of mental bullshit and listens to it as it flows by (not judging, just listening), suddenly something begins to shift. Now you’re observing it; therefore you are not it.

I’ll give you a concrete example. I was still in the middle of A New Earth (the sequel to The Power of Now) on audiobook when, one morning, I picked up the arts section of the Philadelphia Inquirer and found a front-page, above-the-fold feature on a debut novelist. Here is pretty much exactly what ran through my head:

What the f**k? I’m way more local than this guy, and the Inquirer book editors completely ignored both my novels. Uh huh, a bildungsroman. Whoop dee doodle. And they’re sending this guy on a twenty-city book tour? WHAT THE F**K?

Ordinarily this sort of thing would have thrown me into a funk for the rest of the day. This time was different. So that’s what it means to be stuck inside my head! A marvelous calm fell over me as I refolded the newspaper and laid it on the table. This isn’t me. It may be baggage, but I can let go of it any time. And I did. I went to the library and got back to my world building.

Yeah, I do still have those internal tantrums sometimes, but these days there’s that part of me that’s able to wade out from that stream of mental sludge and watch it as it passes, smiling at the madness. Let me emphasize that anyone can make this shift. (Yes, even you.)

Life is so much easier than it used to be. It’s easier because I have given up. Oh, not my dear little coterie of imaginary friends, not my world building—no, I’ve only given up caring about the stuff that’s pretending to be important. Now, when I reflect on old conflicts and old ambitions, I think: When did this matter? Why did this ever matter?

None of my books have earned out. So what? That’s no gauge of literary merit.

But what if I never get another book deal? Oh well, I guess I’ll self publish. And I hear Trader Joe’s is a really nice place to work.

Somebody didn’t like my novel. So what?

In fact, somebody thought it sucked ass, and said so ALL OVER THE INTERNET. This reminds me of that now-classic cartoon in which a frantic husband sits hunched over his keyboard, his worried wife hovering in the doorway. “I can’t come to bed, honey. Somebody on the internet is WRONG!”

I’m not making any money right now. It’ll be fine. I’ll get by because I believe I’ll get by.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t about putting on a pair of Pollyanna blinders. I’m not saying that if I wind up living out of the back of a minivan that life will be all dandy and perfect. But there are plenty of artists who lived (and live) quite humbly, and keep on working through it all. What you don’t have doesn’t have to become a barrier to your creative work. After all, what more do I need besides a few sheets of paper, a pencil, and a sandwich?

* * *

Petty Magic

There’s something else Eckhart Tolle says that has stuck with me, and it might do you good to hear it too.

“Greatness” is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego.

I find this notion so liberating that I sometimes want to lock the bathroom door behind me and wedge myself behind the toilet. “Greatness”—as we typically interpret it in this twisted, vapid culture of ours—is an illusion. We’re forever confusing recognition with inherent value. Heck, if Leonardo had been preoccupied with painting a Last Supper scene that would “last through the ages,” he wouldn’t have used that weird mixture of oil tempera on dry plaster. He took that risk, got on it, and made something of profound value to the monks of Santa Maria delle Grazie every time they sat down to eat.

So try this the next time you find yourself thinking I want to be a great writer, or envying another author who has been “hailed as the voice of [your] generation” (or some rot), or daydreaming about being an extra in your sumptuous big-budget film adaptation. Remember: when Kim Kardashian “writes” her next “konfidential,” it will immediately, IMMEDIATELY hit the bestseller list. It’s true. Even if you write the best damn novel in the history of the universe (pretending for a moment that any such consensus is possible), Kim Kardashian is still way more famous than you (or Marcus Aurelius, or even, sadly, Leonardo) will ever be.

Now you want to laugh, right? So laugh. Laugh as the endless carnival of bullshit whirls by. Throw back your head and laugh the loud and cackling laughter of sanity.

—Camille DeAngelis

Camille DeAngelis is the author of two adult fantasy novels—Mary Modern (2007) and Petty Magic: Being the Memoirs and Confessions of Miss Evelyn Harbinger, Temptress and Troublemaker (2010)—as well as a first-edition guidebook, Moon Ireland (2007). She is currently writing a novel for young adults.

Visit Camille online at camilledeangelis.com.

Follow @pettymagic on Twitter.

EDITED MARCH 9: GIVEAWAY WINNER ANNOUNCED!

Mary Modern

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway via the entry form—and thank you to the author for donating the prize! I’m happy to announce the winner:

Aik won a signed copy of Mary Modern! Congrats! I’ll email the winner to ask for a mailing address. Thank you again to everyone who entered!

Want more in this blog series?

The Turning Points series will continue with new guest posts three times a week. Subscribe to distraction no. 99 to keep up with the series, or read all the posts with this tag.

Here are the posts in the series so far:

You can keep up with all the open giveaways on the giveaways page!

Series images by Robert Roxby.