There are a lot of times as a writer where you shake your head and say, “Why me?” Like the time my publisher declared bankruptcy three weeks before my book was supposed to be on bookshelves, or the time I submitted several books to a publisher and received encouraging revision letters only to have my revisions on those books ultimately rejected. Or the recent snarfunkle with Harlequin and RWA over Harlequin Horizons that’s left me with no chance to enter my books in the RITAs unless things change.

But I’ve found that dwelling on the negative doesn’t help your career. Far more positive and powerful is a thankful heart.

It comes from the idea of what you focus on is what you draw to you.

So I’m thankful for my contracts with Harlequin, that my writing is going to be in books in the hands of readers in 2011 (I know it seems like a long time but in the publishing world it’s not.)

I’m thankful for both my writing and non-writing friends who keep me sane in different ways – the writers because they understand how crazy a business publishing really is, and the non-writers because they don’t care about the business at all.

I’m thankful for the chance to be able to write the stories out of my head – because really, my therapy bills would be astronomical if I had to pay to talk them all out.

I’m thankful that there are readers out there who love romance. Thank you for reading what we write!

I’m thankful that my computer has kept up this far with me and continues to chug along.
I’m thankful for my husband and my kids who encourage me and make me want to be a better writer.

I’m thankful for RWA and the published members who’ve offered support and education over the years that helped me get to where I am.

And of course I’m thankful for you. Because I may not know exactly who you are at this moment, but you are still reading this. And that makes me smile.

May your holidays be full of love, light, and joy.

Cheers,
Theresa

How do you know if you’re meant to be a writer? It’s really a valid question. Lord knows I’ve asked of myself enough times.

But really, how do you know? For me there have been points of clarity mixed with occasional thwacks upside the head to remind me. The first big point of clarity came in high school when I knew writing for the newspaper and getting nonfiction published in a national magazine wasn’t enough. I didn’t want just a byline, I wanted to create stories that were something no one else could do, that were out of my own creativity rather than reporting.

The second point of clarity came when I started a Writer’s Digest course and got my first smackdown from a wise teacher who told me my first novel had way too many plots going at once and I needed to pare it down to one single story to focus on. I was crushed, but she was right.

The third point of clarity came when my mother passed away at 52 from breast cancer. She was an inspiration, a person who really made everyone around her strive to live their dreams, and a natural storyteller. But she also taught be something I’ll never forget – if you don’t tell the stories, they stayed locked inside. No one can share them but you. If you leave this world without sharing those stories, those stories leave with you, never to be read. I can’t go there. Frankly there’s barely enough room in my head for what has to be there day in and day out, let alone to store a bunch of stories that’ll never be told. I’ve got to clean it out by getting those stories down on paper.

My fourth point of clarity came with the American Title contest, when I was cut after making it through a few rounds. Boy did I think about quitting. I already had a successful public relations agency, why did I need the grief? I was going to purge my office of writing. Yeah, right. That lasted half an hour. Then I realized I was still going to have stories in my head. I was still going to have to find some way of releasing them to keep myself sane and happy. Writing was cheaper than therapy, and it also meant I got to keep my non-writer friends who wouldn’t be bombarded by yet another untold tale of mine.

The latest thwack upside the head to remind me what I am came just last school year in a high school chemistry class. I know you’re likely wondering what the heck I was doing there. I was substituting. I do that too. I realized that as much as like teaching, I really, really am a writer. It’s telling the story that gets me going, especially when you can see how the story is unfolding for each individual. It’s that chemistry between writer and reader that makes writing addictive. Writers crave readers. We’re not shy about that.

So how do you know if you are meant to be a writer? Really the litmus test is easier than you think (and pardon me if it begins to sound a bit like you might be a redneck . . .)

If you occasionally hear voices in your head, that aren’t your own. And they’re arguing over something, you might be a writer.

If bits of paper seem to find there way into everything you own, because you’ve got ideas you’ll jot down on any old scrap you can find when it hits, you might be a writer.

If your bookshelves are nearly busting out and have overflowed on to various surfaces in your home because you are easily fascinated by all manner of ideas and have to know more, you might be a writer. (maybe you just don’t know it yet.)

If the smell of books is kind of addictive to you, you might be a writer.

If you’d rather sit on your butt and type for three hours a day or more, because you have to, rather than because you want to, even though there are dust rhinos cavorting in your dining room and under your furniture, you might be a writer.

If you look at a billboard, magazine ad or other such thing, and immediately think what that person might be like, and starting spinning ideas around of who they are, what they want and what might happen if they…., well, you know I’m going to tell you, you might be a writer.

If you’ve got pages already written, on a book that will never be seen by human eyes, you my friend, might be a writer.

And, if the idea of not writing another day in your life leaves you thinking, what the heck would I do, then you might be a writer.

Now if you’re a writer, and you’ve only just discovered this amazing fact, let me share with you three bits of advice that I’ve consistently heard from every New York Times Bestseller I’ve ever had the fortune to strike up a conversation with (which is quite a few).

1. Finish the book. No one will buy a book until you’ve written it. So starting a book is important, yes, but finishing it is a necessity.

2. Perseverance makes the difference between published and unpublished.

3. Start writing the next book. Careers in publishing are usually built on one book after another, after another. If you’ve got one book it you, chances are you’ve got another too. So keep writing!

Normally I don’t talk about pr stuff on my author website. But something has crossed a huge line. And that something is RWA.

So pardon me as I put on my publicist’s hat for a moment and climb up on to the soapbox. Speaking from professional experience in corporate environments, it doesn’t matter what your company or organization are doing behind the scenes. That’s not how you are perceived. What people see out front, what your “image” is in public, is how people in the general public think of you.

 Right now RWA has an image problem. They are perceived by a big chunk of their publics (one being their membership, another being editors in the industry) that they are not supportive of e-publishing and falling behind current tech trends in the industry. Doesn’t matter if they are or aren’t as a matter of course, or if they are working on it. The perception is still there and actively becoming worse, which in turn lowers the perceived value of membership in the organization. This is a huge problem. This is how companies and organizations slide down hill and start to dissolve.

I’ve been a member of RWA since 1993, worked as a chapter president and board member for many years, worked on task forces for the national board and generally been around long enough to see a lot of hoo-haw come and go in the organization from year to year. The difference is, this is serious. This could cleave the organization in half and leave it a shadow of its former self.  I’ve seen it happen often enough in chapters to know the signs, only this is a tsunami compared to the waves I’ve experienced.

 If RWA wants to pull out of this perception model, then they need to address this in a major way, publicly. I’m talking have the president write an article in RT Bookreviews or Publisher’s Weekly or Writer’s Digest, or even all three! A blog tour, twitter posts, a multitude of things that reaches out to a vast majority of their publics and reforms their perception.

 RWA’s mission is education and advocation, not regulation. You can say it all you want, but you need to have the actions, the perception, to back it up to make your members and the industry believe it.

 How do you turn it around? The same way Tylenol did when people died from cyanide in their products and had to rebuild consumer trust.

Stop being defensive is step one – that’s reactive instead of proactive and gets you no where in reforming your perception.

Step two, start telling exactly what you are doing to remedy the situation – actions behind the scenes mean nothing to your perception. Be public about how you are approaching the issue and update your publics often. 

Step three, involve your publics so they see and feel part of the change – start an official survey, do an open call for a task force involving major players like Angela James, Deidre Knight and others who are experienced in the e-publishing portion of the industry and can get well-informed opinions and insights into what the big issues are and how to address them.

Create an e-column in the RWR that on a monthly basis addresses something of concern to educate members on what to look for in clauses, contracts, promotion, marketing, publisher support, etc. for this segment of their book sales.

If you happen to be on twitter, start posting at #RWAchange so we know you’re actually alive and concerned rather than hiding under a rock fuming about all those authors who don’t see all the hard work you’ve done.

We know you work hard. We want to trust you. We want to feel like the organization we love is going to survive surgery to fix this problem. Give your membership some hope and information and they will rally to you.

That’s all I’m saying.

Climbing off the soapbox now to return to my keyboard and work-in-process. If you want to leave a comment, please, feel free. If you want to become part of the process go to RWAChange

 Let’s face it. We all want something. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But why is it that some people are this amazing bust out phenomenon and other people, are well, just plugging along?

I may not know everything, but what I have learned is this: becoming great is a marriage of many levels. It’s a marriage of mind meets efforts. It’s a marriage of desire meets inspiration. And it’s a marriage of determination meets dreams.

The Right Dream
Part of the reason people fail to become great is because they’re chasing the wrong dream. It’s not that their dream isn’t worthy. It is. But it maybe that the person is chasing something that really isn’t in his or her own personal best interest. It’s not what he or she was specifically made for. In other words, it’s not their life work calling. They want that dream because they want the money. But maybe the real reason they want the money is because they want other people to appreciate or look up to them. Or maybe they want security. They may want the dream because they’ve been told by the parents, or friends, or society that they should want it. They may be holing on to a misplaced dream because they are scared to try their real life’s work and fail.

Finding out what the REAL thing you want is the start to finding out what your life’s work is meant to be. Want to know the shortcut? Ask yourself what you’d be doing if you had all the money, time and resources at hand to do anything you wished. What did you dream of being when you were between nine and twelve years old? What would you get up every morning and do just for the sheer love of doing it?

That’s the direction of your true life’s work.

And don’t give me, but I don’t have the education/experience/contacts/financing/whatever. If you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way. “It’s not what you have but what you do with what you have that will determine your success or failure. Abraham Maslow, the great psychologist said that the story of the human race is the story of people selling themselves short. He said people have a tendency to settle for far less from life than they are truly capable of.” ~ Brian Tracy

The Right Model
Once you discover your true life’s work, find the people who are the best at it in the world. Look at what they do. Analyze how they do it. Copy them instead of reinventing the wheel. Because, your wheel will look different anyway once it’s complete, but you might as well take the short cut in understanding the physics and mechanics of it by looking at something that works.

The Right Ethic
Now you work. I mean seriously work.

“I will NOT be outworked. Period… You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things. You got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things:  Either you’re getting off first, or I’m gonna die. It’s really that simple.”

~Will Smith, on his work ethic

“If you want to reach the stars in your career, you have to become excellent at what you do. You have to pay any price, go any distance, spend any amount of time necessary to “be the best.” Extraordinary rewards only go for extraordinary performance; average rewards for average performance; below average rewards, insecurity and failure for below average performance. And here’s a vital key, you are being paid today exactly what you’re worth – no more, no less. If you want to earn more, you must increase your worth, your value to others.” ~ Brian Tracy

The Right Attitude
Which, from the platitudes of Dr. Phil, we all now know that if you don’t first value yourself, then you can’t expect others to value you. You have to believe that you are worth investing the time, energy and money into yourself to chase that dream.

So what’s that all mean? It means that today, right now, you can choose to become great. Even the biggest star in Hollywood, the richest man on earth, the best surgeon in the world, the smartest scientist alive, the most-well-known writer in the world started at the beginning. They did it, which means it can be done. There are no limits, except those you impose on yourself.

Start simply: First, set high standards for yourself. Don’t just accept that what you are currently doing is your best. You can do more. You can be more. You can be great.

Second, select one key skill area that is important in your job or personal life and resolve to become the best in that area. Just one thing. Maybe your the person who’s most on time. Maybe you spell everything correctly. Maybe you’re the most creative person at your job. Whatever it is, determine that you are going to focus and become the best at that one thing. Then, when you are pick another thing. I guarantee you’ll be better off than you are now.

What it takes to become great are two simple ingredients: You and your determination to succeed.

There are really so many misconceptions about writers, what they make, how they do what they do, that it’s laughable.

Not all writers parade around in bunny slippers, dashing off a book in a weekend between watching reruns of Supernatural. And writers usually don’t make an astounding amount of money. Not even those that hit the golden hallowed ground of New York Times Bestseller.

See what I mean – a first-hand account with actual royalty statement, compliments of Lynn Viehl at GenReality. Out of a $50k advance (only two-thirds you get before the book comes out, 15% percent of which goes to pay the agent) she netted less than half. Of the $40k+ royalty for a top 20 NYT bestselling book. She got zero in her paycheck (because she has to pay back the advance).

Writers don’t write for the money. Most of us write to keep our sanity, because we really do have other people’s voices (our characters) talking incessantly in our heads.

So how long, exactly do you need to work at this before you start making anything at all? It depends. That’s the straight up truth.

Read this and you’ll understand: How do You Know When to Quit over at Murderati.  You stop when you can’t go anymore, and for most writers, the process is far more invovled that the end result you see on a bookstore shelf.  We spend months, sometimes years, of our lives on stuff you read in a week or less. 

The truth about writing is this, and I’m only telling you because I know a lot of people want to write the Great American Novel someday: Writing is a lot of work. Hard work. The majority of time you are rejected. Persistence is key. Talent is important. Learning and improving your craft a constant given. But timing, opportunity, just like the singer Susan Boyle in the link you’ll find in the Murderati link, that is the critical element that makes it all come together.