Writing

Build back mediocre

Amanda Gibson

Until today, the most recent photo on my instagram account was of a book hanging out near some jazzy tulips in my yard. As it’s February in Chicago… it’s clearly been a while since I posted that. Bookstagramming, reading, writing, and any other form of creativity (let’s also lump “feeling joy at all that didn’t come from a pint of Jeni’s Brambleberry Crisp” in there as well) all disappeared for me this winter. Or at least they hibernated somewhere very deep and inaccessible.

I know I’m not alone in this. So many people, creatives and non-creatives alike, have suffered from languishing, malaise, depression—whatever we feel like calling it—throughout the pandemic, but especially during this second winter of isolation and amplified anxiety. When we write or read, we feel what characters are feeling; it’s what makes the experience so thrilling. But I’m spent, emotionally, like so many others, so the thought of consuming or transmitting more emotions… does not appeal. It’s why I’ve re-binged every episode of Great British Bake-Off this winter. No feelings. Just CAKE.

With spring (ostensibly) around the corner, there’s the promise of pandemic restrictions and fears easing up again, and possibly a lifting of emotional burdens, opening us up to be those lightning rods for creativity again. But after two years of near-emptiness, how do we come back from that? How do we return to the activities we once loved, when our dusty insides have been closed off from them for so long?

Paralysis has been my response to that question. To-be-read piles towering ever closer to the ceiling, unvisited Word documents, cobwebbed social media feeds. Can’t do it. Won’t do it.

But I recently read Mike Schur’s new book, How to Be Perfect, which is a highly accessible guide to basic moral philosophy, brought to you by the creator of The Good Place. One of my favorite messages from this book is the idea that we will constantly fail at being morally “perfect,” but we have to try because even though no one will ever get there, that the point of perfection does not exist, trying gets us closer. Closer to the idea of the person we want to be in society, closer to the other humans ambling around beside us, closer to ourselves.

Try, and fail, and try again, and fail better.

So I am writing this post to try, to actively do, and to fail myself a little closer toward creativity again.

Motherhood

Raising princesses

Amanda Gibson

My 4-year-old daughter is going to be Belle for Halloween tomorrow. I’m not surprised, even if every barbed-wire feminist bone in my body scraped the inside of my skin as she tried on the yellow satin dress, as she wore it to bed that first night, as she looked down at herself in wonder and whispered, “I look beautiful.”

“You’re always beautiful,” I barked. Then, “Looks aren’t all that matters, you know.” I swing back and forth, insisting on two different messages that are meant to nudge her off this sickly sweet, gender-normative path, but are ultimately probably reinforcing the same idea that looks do matter, somehow, somewhere beyond this living room.

Either way, I’m tuned out by a little girl who’s already seen too much. The Disney+ streaming service is the real parent in our house, explaining the facts of life in clear terms: be a princess, marry a prince, wear all the dresses. Belle herself has an entire song devoted to her beauty and how weird it is that she reads books. I give Beauty and the Beast the benefit of the doubt in that I think it’s satire, but I suspect that’s lost on a 4-year-old.

I had every intention of guarding my daughter from these things for as long as possible. She hid herself well during the 20-week ultrasound, so we didn’t know what we were having, and most of her clothing for her first year of life was white and gray. I decided this little gender-neutral baby was going to stay that way. I’d buy her Legos and dinosaurs and STEM toys and soft, basic t-shirts without writing on the front.

Any then, somewhere along the way, princesses arrived, as they always do. They were everywhere—not just on Disney, but in little animated YouTube videos, dolls and books she received as gifts, coloring book pages brought home from daycare. Even if I’d been more proactive and banned Disney from our home, I don’t think I could have stacked sandbags high enough to save us from this flood.

And a small part of me, perhaps the lazy and apathetic part, wonders if it even matters. These are movies I adored as a child, after all. I popped those VHS tapes in and sat cross-legged in front of a singing candelabra, a red-haired mermaid, and a magic carpet ride. To this day, I can recall the exact shades of Aurora’s dress as the fairies argued and shot blue and pink sparkles at it. This was my becoming, and I still managed to find myself enraptured by women’s studies courses and feminist publications and Ruth Bader Ginsburg coffee mugs. Granted I did go through an embarrassingly drawn-out love affair with Orlando Bloom after seeing Lord of the Rings in seventh grade and charted a path for myself to meet him, perhaps not as a co-star, but as a makeup artist, costume designer, or screenwriter. I was still plotting in college, but by then I realized it would be more fun to simply become an elven princess and meet-cute the blonde version of him than have to work in the toxic film industry. So as a woman in my twenties, I still carried some unfulfilled, impossible desires that revolved around finding a certain prince.

Is that bad? Truthfully, I don’t know. There are a lot of things in my life I’d like to rewrite. Greasy bangs, ill-fitting jobs, friendships that went sour. This is not one of those things. I don’t mind that I had princess dreams, so why does it bother me that my daughter does?

I had to think about which particular aspect of it bothered me. And it hit me that I didn’t care if she ended up spending too much time dreaming of her prince (or fellow princess). I didn’t care if her real estate preferences leaned toward castles. But god, I didn’t want her to compare herself to these dainty animations, to look in the mirror and hate what she saw. That face that I gave her, that my mother gave me, that we can’t change because let’s be honest, we don’t have nose job money. I think she’s gorgeous now (possibly I’m biased) but I know how this goes. I know that when she’s about twelve or thirteen, she’ll have braces and glasses and patchy goose down that hasn’t transitioned to adult feathers yet. And if she’s anything like me, like most young women, she will obsess over something, or many things, in that reflection that don’t add up to the kind of beauty that gets you adoration from townsfolk and talking housewares alike.

Talk about floods we can’t stop. This will all feel like a misting fan compared to that deluge. I’m having pre-anxiety about a phase that is 8 years away. Perhaps it feels so important because I know from experience that it stays with you well into adulthood. My insecurities haven’t changed much since middle school; I’ve just gotten better at ignoring them.

I don’t have the answers for how I will equip her with a positive body image. I guess I could read a parenting book or do something else equally exhausting. But I do know that neither of us will gain anything from me digging my heals in about Belle and her gang. Denigrating these girls, or bright young women, as Ariel calls herself, only feeds the cycle of women condemning other women.

Especially during this time when every single issue has become so polarized, I want to remember that everyone, including a four-year-old in a yellow dress, has a million little things inside them—bright, tiny starbursts in different colors and shapes. My daughter is changing so quickly I can hardly catch sight of all of them, much less control their manifestations.

So for now I breathe, and watch, and laugh as she twirls.

Motherhood, Reading, Writing

Some thoughts about forgiving our mothers and ourselves

Amanda Gibson

I unintentionally read two books last month that were both, at their core, about toxicity in mother-daughter relationships. Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game are very different types of stories. TVH is a novel about two light-skinned Black twin sisters who choose different paths in life—Desiree living life as a Black woman, and Stella choosing to pass as white. It moves forward through time until we see how their choices impact the lives of their daughters. Wild Game is a memoir by a woman who, when she was 14, got wrangled into being a co-conspirator in her mother Malabar’s affair with a family friend. The affair goes on for more than a decade, fully absorbing Adrienne in the drama and lies throughout her adolescence.

I might not have dwelled too long on either of these stories if I hadn’t read them back-to-back. But both Stella and Malabar tell extraordinary lies to keep their secrets safe, and it comes at great cost to their daughters.

It’s sort of a given by now that our mothers will hurt us in some way at various points in our lives. Little comments about our appearance, the choices we make, and the people we love can all add up to big, swollen pain. Times when they paid too little attention, times when they clamped down too hard. As we age we begin to see them as human, capable of both vast love and error. Even so, we swear to do better by our own children.

For me personally, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. My biggest regret so far in my daughter’s short life has been calling her shy in front of another adult when she was about two or three years old. I can’t remember a time during my childhood when my outgoing mother didn’t apologize to others for my shyness, causing me to intuit that shyness was a bad thing, meant to be overcome, compounding layer after layer of anxiety about my anxiety. Even though I now carry with me the knowledge that introverts are important and necessary members of society, I still experience that gut-twisting fear in large groups that I’m not talking enough, not contributing enough.

My daughter has run up to me on a few occasions and asserted that the cats hiding from her in the closet are “a little shy, like me!” I don’t really think she comprehends that she has grown out of her shy phase and is now just a cyclone of wild, talkative energy. But when she claims to be shy, I don’t correct her. Instead I tell her, “And that’s ok. I am too.”

I will surely misstep in a myriad of other ways as she grows. I hope I can find the strength to apologize. So many of my friends have commented on the apologies we rarely, if ever, received from our mothers. An acknowledgment of our suffering, even if it was petty and small. Maybe that was a standard of parenting toward the end of the last century—like a car accident—never admit fault. Or maybe that’s just part of being human, a natural resistance to being in the wrong.

In The Vanishing Half and Wild Game, neither Stella nor Malabar ever offer their daughters the apology or the reckoning they yearn for. But still their daughters love them and chase their approval and try to know them. In some ways this seems sad. As a daughter, I mourn the lack of righteous comeuppance for these women. In other ways, I think thank god. As a mother, I will have room to make missteps and, most importantly, room to atone.

Reading

Review of Glennon Doyle’s feminist memoir “Untamed”

Amanda Gibson

Glennon Doyle’s Untamed was my Book of the Month Club pick for May, and I’ve been delaying writing a review for it because I have mixed feelings about it, but those are the important ones, so here it is:

I loved the beginning. She drew me right in with her short essay-like chapters about feminism, marriage, and motherhood. I could relate to so much. Then there were parts in the middle where she sort of lost me for a bit. She spent a lot of time repeating the same tidbits of self-exploration. And I love me some self-exploration, but eventually, I need out of my head and your head and back into an actual scene.

There are several chapters that focus on religion and spirituality, and as a sometimes-agnostic/sometimes-atheist, I resisted those at first. But she also presents religion in the most accessible way I’ve ever seen it presented—comparing God/spirituality to a liquid and religion to the glass that holds and confines it. This stirred something in me since most of us who have bad tastes in our mouths over these subjects are opposed to the rules and prejudices inherent in the institutions of religion, rather than spirituality itself.

There are some preachy this-is-what-you-should-say-to-your-children-and-to-everyone-else moments, which occasionally rubbed me the wrong way, but there’s also SO much good advice in here. My favorite takeaway from this book is the concept of “sinking into your Knowing,” which is the place where we find truth inside ourselves to do the next right thing (cue the Frozen 2 song).

She also delves into the concept of the perfect woman, who is beautiful, smart, funny, the perfect size, perfect wife, perfect mother, perfect friend, and who has all of her perfect shit together. But this woman doesn’t exist, Doyle points out. We’re all scared and lonely and suffering and sweaty and misshapen and longing. So when we aspire to be this mysterious perfect woman, we’re all just chasing ghosts.

Finally, Doyle explores racism in a way that is especially appropriate right now, pointing out that’s it’s not enough to simply say you’re not a racist—you must recognize the poison in your own blood that was put there by living in a racist society, and then actively root it out.

This book felt important. The kind of book you realize you should have read with a highlighter. So I may return to reread it some day and do just that.

Motherhood, Writing

New essay on Motherwell

Amanda Gibson

I wrote a thing. It’s about the wacky emotions I’ve been experiencing as a one-and-done mother during this pandemic. Are you lonely? Because I’m lonely and my kid is lonely, and I start thinking maybe I should have another baby because my brain is broken and THAT’S WHAT MAKES SENSE TO ME RIGHT NOW.

It’s all insanity, and you can read about it over on Motherwell, which is one of my favorite online mags for thoughtful parenting writing.

unnamed-1

 

Writing

Writing over fear

Amanda Gibson

It goes without saying that this has been a really, REALLY hard time for basically everyone on earth. We’re all stuck, literally and figuratively—moored in our homes, the progress of our lives halted. I recently wrote about losing my job due to the pandemic, and the relief I felt from the simple act of putting words on the page made it clear that writing was the only thing that would keep me sane through all of this.

But I knew I needed to work on something new—something completely different from the multiple manuscripts on my laptop that have racked up dozens of rejections over the years. Those, in my mind, were symbols of the same sort of thing I was currently experiencing: stasis and failure.

I knew what I wanted to work on. Romance novels had been calling to me for a long time. The first book I ever read with explicit sex in it was Judy Blume’s Wifey, which I stole from my mom’s little library when I was about fifteen and read with the door closed, hiding it under my bed whenever I left my room. There was a lot I didn’t understand about that book at the time. But one thing that hasn’t changed between then and now is the instinct to read such books in private. Ebooks have made it a lot easier to read these lascivious tales when and where we want, no closed door or stuffing-under-the-pillow required. But if anyone were to ask me (pre-pandemic) what I was reading on the train, I still would have had a smooth lie ready to go.

I don’t think I’m alone in my puritanical upbringing, my childhood devoid of any discussions about sex or sexuality. It’s a fairly standard American thing—being raised on abstinence, carrying this odd shame with us into adulthood, discovering various forms of sexual entertainment, enjoying them, but never uttering a word to anyone about it. I’m not sure what the actual fear consists of. Am I afraid people will think I’m less intelligent or less morally upright if I admit to enjoying reading erotic literature? Or is it just a lifetime of shapeless anxiety tsk-tsking me inside my head?

Regardless, I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about what I want to do next, and how I’m afraid to do it. But then, last month, the incomparable Janelle Hanchett hosted a virtual writing workshop in which she was asked about how she overcomes her fear. Her response was simple: I’m still afraid. But I have lost faith in fear as a reliable guide for my life.

It was everything I needed to hear.

So, because my fears are often so unreliable, I’m writing romance. And there is sex. And I will be afraid of what people think. And I will do it anyway.

Because the greater fear I have right now is what will I do if I don’t write it? What will I do while I wait to see what’s next? And how long will I be waiting?

I want light, and fun, and no way to back out of it if I panic (which I will). So I’m serializing my first adult romance novel on Wattpad and will—hopefully—be updating it with a new chapter each week.

Read. Enjoy. Share, or keep it to yourself. No shame either way.

A Terrifying and Beautiful Place:

http://www.wattpad.com/story/219627349

Motherhood

On “You Don’t Understand” and Other Things We Say to Childless Women

Amanda Gibson

jenna-norman-292397-unsplash

Mother’s Day was this past weekend… in case you didn’t notice. I did happen to notice because it meant I got to escape for a few hours to do some writing in a cafe with a mom friend also on the run from her toddler. It was glorious. In true me fashion, however, I’m posting some motherhood-related musings about 3 days late.

But much like feeding my child — better late than never?

I’ve been thinking about a recent Twitter conversation that I, for better or worse, stuck my foot into.

A childless woman tweeted that she was tired of being told by parents that her opinions regarding child-rearing didn’t matter. The comments surged with support from other non-moms, though there were still a predictable number of parents chiming in with the old standby, “I didn’t understand before I had kids. Now I do.” This statement was precisely what the original poster was complaining about — the simple fact that being told you know nothing, that you’re not in this special club of understanding, is demoralizing and hurtful.

I responded with an attempt at support. I’ve been knocked on my ass by motherhood, by every growth and regression, by bittersweet love, by depression, by the soft viciousness of other mothers, and I would never try to tell a woman she is missing out on great knowledge or vital membership by being childless. I admire women who speak up to say, “My life is good without kids.” I believe them. Some days, when I’m scraping poop off the walls or when I’m feeling particularly isolated and unmoored, I want to be them. So I offered encouragement instead of the typical slandering we often apply to each other as women on different sides of the child aisle.

But I also thought to myself… well, you don’t understand.

No one wants to hear those words. Ever. About anything. Because what do we mean when we say that? We mean you haven’t experienced my pain. We mean your own pain and suffering are of less importance.

As mothers, we specifically mean you don’t know what it’s like to have a red-faced infant screaming hour after hour, night after night, when you haven’t slept more than three hours at a time since you were still pregnant (or, let’s face it — probably since before you were pregnant). You don’t know what it’s like to feel your resentment toward the man sleeping in the next room flare up so savagely you wonder why you married him in the first place, to barely notice as one of your tears drips onto that sweet monster baby’s chapped forehead, to choke a little as your chest floods with guilt because why can’t you just ENJOY THIS SPECIAL TIME? The hopelessness of those moments before the sun rises again. The confinement, the fear of leaving the house, the fear of what will happen if you don’t.

You don’t what it’s like to feel powerless while your toddler melts down in public, to know everyone in that restaurant hates you and could surely do your job better than you. You don’t know what it’s like to hand your child a phone or a tablet, just to have ten minutes of peace, and be judged just as harshly for that as for doing nothing at all.

You don’t know what it’s like to wonder if your sense of self is so far in the rearview that there’s no possibility of ever getting back to it, if that’s just part of the bargain you didn’t know you were agreeing to.

You don’t know what it’s like to have to wonder every day if you made the right choices, taught the right lessons, provided the right role models, offered the right foods. If you had kids too early. If you had them too late. If you should have focused on your career. If you should have stayed at home to watch them grow.

There is so much childless women don’t understand of moms.

There is so much moms don’t understand of childless women.

Did they choose it because they knew themselves? They knew, like a reverberation of a bowstring through their bodies, that they wanted a life without the weight of children? Or are they living with a different weight — that of infertility? Are they trying and failing in a cycle of hope and grief so upending they can focus on nothing else on a daily basis? Is there more they want to do first? Are they just not ready, and why does everyone push so much so fast?

The original poster said, “Our opinions matter.” And she’s right. They should matter to her partner, to her close friends and family. Regardless of your status as a parent or non-parent, life provides a bog of opinions you have no choice but to wade through. Some are harmless while others feel like feces flung right into your eyes and mouth, even when they began simply as a casual skittering of fingers on a keyboard. I believe that, most often, people aren’t intending to hurt us, even when we feel most wounded. They simply want their opinions heard, want them to matter.

Our job is to pick and choose which pieces of advice ring most true to us, and let the other pieces float past us. Perhaps we KonMari them, thank them, and let them go. Our job is not to go to war over them, to belittle and hit back in the way we felt we were hit.

From reading several of the original poster’s tweets, I gathered that she was working on a memoir about growing up in a family of cocaine addicts. As far as I know, no one in my immediate family was sneaking hard drugs when I was a child. We had a completely normal level of dysfunction at home. So I will never totally comprehend this woman’s trauma and pain, though I will try to by reading her story someday.

Everyone is suffering, a little or a lot. As humans, we try to empathize. Sometimes we can’t, not fully. But our lack of understanding doesn’t earn them our disdain. We can only offer our respect. Respect may mean silence when we want to shout, civil debate when we just want to drop an eye-roll gif. Or it may mean a firm but gentle reminder that we ask for respect in return.

There’s too much sadness, bitterness, ugliness in this world that we can’t control. We have opportunities every day to create more, to remind each other of further divisions — the different types of moms, the different types of women. But we also have opportunities to pass over them, smooth them out, and say, “This is hard, for everyone, in different ways.” To say, “You matter as much as I do.”

Even if you just don’t understand.

Reading

First Impressions Book Review: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Amanda Gibson

I never thought there would come a day when I wouldn’t make time for reading. It seemed like it would always be part of my daily maintenance, like showering, eating meals, or snacking on gummy vitamins because they’re delicious and good for you and there’s no such thing as too many… right? RIGHT?

The thing is, once you have a baby you sort of forget to do all of those things. Your attention funnels into keeping this one, demanding little blob alive, and everything else blurs away.

I have had to claw my way back to reading (and showering, and eating, etc.) over the past couple of years, which renders this type of me-time even more valuable. It also makes it more difficult to decide what to read because I want it to count. I want it to be something that is equal parts thought-provoking, escapist, funny, romantic, exciting, and lovely.

I realize I’m asking a lot.

Oh, and it needs to prove it will be all of these things within the first chapter. When you’re short on time, you can’t wait around for a book to “get good.”

And I’m not the only one who needs to be wowed quickly — agents and editors rarely read beyond the first page of a manuscript if it’s not immediately snagging them in some way.

With that in mind, I present my First Impressions series: book reviews based on that pivotal first chapter — what it does well, what might be slowing it down, and whether it does enough to keep this busy mom reading into chapter two.

The first installment will be N.K. Jemison’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, an epic fantasy novel that, as an NPR article promised me, contains one of the best romances in modern literature.

The book starts:

“I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore. I must try to remember.”

These lines set the scene for the type of narration we’re going to see throughout the book; a character looking back and narrating her life after a series of monumental events. I don’t typically mind this style, but it bothered me that it kept inserting itself into the narrative.

On page two, she writes, “But I forget myself. Who was I, again? Ah, yes.”

It takes me out of the story and makes me wonder where in time this person is. And who this person is. We still haven’t learned her name (Yeine) at this point.

Yeine proceeds to explain her background and engage in a lot of world-building through our good old friend “telling rather than showing.” There are people who love this sort of thing. Give them all the details up front about the kingdoms and the maneuvering lords and ladies, and they’re set. I prefer a scene, particularly one that displays what the main character wants, and what’s keeping her from getting it. Stakes are so important, and they need to be clear up front.

The scene we’re eventually ushered into is the declaration by Yeine’s grandfather, high lord of Arameri, that she will battle her cousins — to the death — for the title of heir. To be fair, these are very high stakes. Still, I don’t get the sense I know anything about what Yeine really wants or cares about, apart from not dying. Is there something else she wanted to do with her life, is there someone at home she loved and now may never see again?

We get lots of background about her mother, who is now dead and who fled this kingdom to be with a man she loved (Yeine’s father). And this, to me, is the most interesting aspect of chapter one:

“My people tell stories of the night I was born. They say my mother crossed her legs in the middle of labor and fought with all her strength not to release me into the world. I was born anyhow, of course; nature cannot be denied. Yet it does not surprise me that she tried.”

This is a gorgeous paragraph. There is so much history and emotion packed into these few sentences, and it shows off Jemisin’s skill as a writer. These little moments pop up every so often in the course of the first chapter and they do the story many favors.

But I’m still left feeling at the end of chapter one that I don’t really know Yeine, and by know, I simply mean grasping what motivates her. She’s a bit of a mystery, and I do want to know more, but also… I’m starting to struggle to care about her.

My conclusion? I did read beyond chapter one. But not beyond chapter three. The pace picks up and an exciting event transpires (Yeine must run for her life from a god/monster/unclear). But I still don’t get a sense of Yeine’s personality. Perhaps she’s meant to be an everywoman character. Perhaps I’m missing some truly stunning character development by not continuing. But like I said above, that time investment is a gamble I don’t wish to make anymore.

I get the sense that someday I might like to return to this series and give it another shot, maybe when Project Toddler is grown enough to stay out of my hair on the weekends, or at least when she’s old enough to wipe her own tush. I think I’d probably like Yeine a lot once she fights for herself and for any new friends she’ll make in her new home, or once she gets sassy towards grandpa. And the promise of a good love story is always the right hook for me.

For now, THTK stays on the shelf, but if any readers can convince me I simply must pick it back up, I’m open to revisiting it sooner rather than later.

Writing

Writing By Hand in Wisconsin

Amanda Gibson

Last week slipped away from me in a frustrating fashion. There were so many great presentations from the Women in Publishing Summit that I wanted to blog about, but then I found myself approaching the weekend and needing to prepare for my ladies’ retreat to The-Middle-of-Nowhere, Wisconsin. I say that in the most loving way possible because it was beautiful and quiet and open and just what I needed.

I mean, LOOK at this little farmhouse.

And the view:

And this DESK:

Everything about it screamed sit down and write. (It helps my productivity if a setting bosses me around a bit.) And that little ladder on the right? It leads to a tiny nook that satisfies my inner 8-year-old.

I didn’t grow up with a treehouse, so this seems as close as I’m likely to get to the magic of private, aerial spaces. Also, it was pretty hard to haul my thirty-year-old carcass up there, so I see now why you sort of age out of this particular magic.

This lovely rental home is just outside of New Glarus, Wisconsin, which is a surprisingly adorable town with Swiss charm, a top-notch brewery, and all the requisite cheese curds for a proper visit to America’s Dairyland.

Living in Chicago, I’m accustomed to the ordered houses and apartment buildings pressed close together like boxes on a pantry shelf. My eyes expect to see bodies moving up and down the street regardless of what time I look out the window. So there was something refreshing, then alarming, then almost thrilling about turning around in a complete circle and seeing no one — just flat, white fields broken up by plumes of dried grasses and wispy winter trees. Rather than looking or feeling dead, it seemed calm, waiting, knowing even better than us that spring always cycles back again.

It was the perfect place to pause, take a breath, and write a bit. My job and my daughter demand so many pieces of me, and the writer piece falls behind the shelf too often. But for one weekend, it took priority.

I didn’t feel like taking my laptop, which is my standard writing implement, so I dug an old notebook out of my closet and toted that instead. I often forget how tricky hand writing can be; it takes longer (for me), and you’re left with a bit of a mess on the page.

Lines are scratched out, carets stick my afterthoughts in, and question marks litter my areas of doubt.

But at the end of an hour, when I had perhaps written one decent sentence, quilted together from the salvaged remnants of the cuts, I thought about what that would look like on my computer.

It would have been a line and a half, and I would have released the long-suffering sigh of someone doomed to always see time move faster than progress.

Yet there’s something about getting to view every curvy line signifying a nope, and each convoluted arrow leading to a wait, this! It shows me the very real work I’ve done. The silent task of sliding the puzzle pieces to the front of my mind and snapping them into their ideal fit. The unseen effort of self-editing, finding the balance between word vomit and refinement.

It’s a mess, but so is the inside of my head.

Sometimes a physical representation of a mental struggle is all you need to feel validated.

So thank you, New Glarus, for the mac ‘n’ cheese pizza, the cracked pepper cheese curds, and the space to think on the page.

Writing

Picking Your Publishing Route

Amanda Gibson

One of today’s presentations from the Women in Publishing Summit featured a panel of women who run their own publishing businesses, be it a traditional press, hybrid press, or a self-publishing service.

These ladies all emphasized how important it is to figure out which type of publishing route is best for you as a writer, and how that decision has a lot to do with your intended audience.

If you’re looking to write something with mass market appeal and sell a million copies, then traditional publishing is probably already on your radar, and for good reason. The Big 5, or even smaller, independent presses have the resources to develop and market your book to mass audiences. The drawback is that you lose some creative authority in the process, and it often takes over a year from the time a book deal is made to the time it stands upon a bookstore shelf.

Self-publishing can look like a lot of different things, but it generally involves a massive DIY project on your part. Many companies exist to help with the steps though – editing, cover design, marketing, etc. It all comes down to how much you’re willing to do yourself. The benefit is that, upfront costs aside, this route has the highest royalty payout.

Hybrid publishing is exactly what it sounds like: a mix of aspects from traditional and self-publishing. You may be expected to provide upfront funding for things like editing or cover design, but you have access to the publisher’s platform, providing you with support and extra perks, which may or may not include a distribution agreement.

If your book is niche, like a Polish cookbook or a guide to knitting clothes for cats, it will likely only appeal to a small demographic, and you’re better off seeking a small press or a hybrid publisher. These businesses will guide you through every step of the process, but you will maintain more creative control, which is important when the subject is so specific. You are likely an expert on your topic, and you should be as involved as possible in the development process.

Another factor is how willing and able you are to build your own platform. These days, all publishers want you to do some of your own marketing, whether that’s blogging, tweeting, attending conferences, or hand-selling your own book at events. If you’re unprepared for this, a hybrid publisher may recommend you self-publish and build your platform before you attempt hybrid publishing. Since they’re making an investment in you (albeit not as large an investment as a traditional publisher), they need to know you’re savvy enough to sell your own books.

When going the hybrid or self-publishing route, beware of scams or shady practices. Always do your research before submitting to a publisher to make sure they seem legit. Some red flags include an urgent request for you to sign a contract right away, or a one-size-fits-all model. A publisher should always be willing to create a plan tailored to your specific needs.

The presentation ended with each panelist providing her top few tips for writers looking to explore their publishing options, and I’ve outlined them below.

Gail Woodward of Dudley Court Press:

1. Be clear about why you are writing your book (i.e. define your purpose).

2. Be clear about who you are writing for.

3. Be clear about whether amateur or professional publishing is right for you.

4. Start marketing now and keep marketing as long as you want to sell your book.

Elizabeth Turnbull of Light Messages Publishing:

1. It’s never too early to start building your platform.

2. Craft a good pitch for your book.

3. Do your research to determine whether the presses you’re submitting to are a good fit for you and your work.

Teri Rider of Top Reads:

Have a great cover that fits your market and genre. You want it to look like it could sit on a shelf with other books in your genre. To this end: hire a book designer, not just a regular graphic designer. A book designer knows exactly how every cover and flap should be laid out.

Kate Stead of Old Mate Media:

Decide if you want to make a money investment or a time investment. Hybrid publishing will require more of a money commitment, while self-publishing will require a large investment of your own time.

Annalisa Parent of Date with a Muse:

You’re not alone in this. There are a ton of people who help writers through every step of the process. Reach out for the help you need.